The "This Is So Gay" Agenda

I was happy to see (via) that Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar is carrying on the late Jon Swift's tradition of inviting bloggers to nominate what they consider their post of the year, and then compiling a big post of same. I'd been thinking about trying to do that myself, but didn't think about it until too late in the year to begin the job, and now I can just let Battochio do it. I didn't find about it in time to offer mine, so I'll toot my own horn right here.

I don't know that any single post of mine stands out for me as one I'm especially proud of, though, partly because I wrote so many last year. Yes, some were mere one-liners, and others mainly pointed to or quoted the work of others, but even so I think I managed to be pretty productive. Rather than try to single out one best post, I'll just mention some of what look like highlights to me as I skim over what I wrote in 2010. This summary may be helpful to people who come to the blog, see the large backlog of material, and don't know where to start digging in.

Science and Philosophy. If I had to choose, though, I think I'm proudest of a couple of posts I wrote about the Science Wars, which still rage. One was a critique of a recent book by Theodore L. Brown on the authority of science; the other took on a less recent book by James Robert Brown on the Science Wars and "social constructivism." I wrote several posts about issues raised in Tamler Summer's A Very Bad Wizard, a book of interviews with social scientists and philosophers about issues of power, culture, and ethics. And I think this post on the perennial science vs. religion conflict is pretty good.

Politics. I'm pleased with two posts I wrote about excessive deference to the President of the US, and a few more on the state of debate between conservatives and non-conservatives in our country. I began writing about Wikileaks when the "Collateral Damage" video was released last spring, and I am still proud of that first post. My discussion of Michael J. Smith's gripefest about "studies" departments in academia apparently gave him food for thought, but he still seems to think I'm an academic instead of a kitchen worker. I took a couple of swipes at George Scialabba's disappointing defense of elitism. And I'm still fond of this post about the evangelical tone some secular progressives adopt toward the unsaved heathen to their right, as well as this one about the deification of the volcano Eyjafjallajökull, and the celebration of His wrath.

I went to South Korea again last summer, in time for the sinking of the Cheonan and the Korean off-year elections. Also World Cup. It also happened that I was there when Israeli forces hijacked a supply ship violating the embargo of Gaza, killing several of the civilians on board, so I attended a protest in Seoul.

It was an election year in the US too, which gave me a lot of material, especially about Obama and the Democrats' attacks on the progressive elements of their base. A couple of times I took on a True Pure Centrist who kept up the Dem apologetics right up until Election Day, then smoothly began criticizing Obama as though he'd been doing it all along.

GLBTQ Issues. I finally got around to writing about assimilation. Ricky Martin's coming-out led me to write again about post-colonial theory and international queers. I did a few posts on the same problem from Chinese and Japanese standpoints. I wrote here about queer undertones in mainstream movies. The New York Times gave me fodder for some good posts (remember, this is my opinion) on homosexual behavior in animals and its implications for human beings. I found occasion to correct more of Andrew Sullivan's distortions of gay history, and similar distortions of history and gay biology by a gay Floridian helping professional. (Speaking of helping professionals in academia, I think they do more harm than good.) I mourned the passing of a role model of my youth. I had to address yet again attempts to justify Fag Discourse in Hollywood product and in left political chatter. I didn't have much to say about Don't Ask Don't Tell (and haven't written about it since its repeal, since I didn't have much to add), but I had more to say about the recent spate of media attention to gay teen suicide.

Religion, especially Christianity. The horrific earthquake in Haiti last January gave rise to several posts, especially on the problem of suffering and Christians' response to it. (Some dealt more with the politics involved, but politics and religion are often difficult to separate.) I wrote a couple of posts about Frank Schaeffer, son of the late evangelical guru Francis Schaeffer, who has tried to reinvent himself as one of the moderate Christians, not those awful extremists. I think this post has some worthwhile things to say about people's willingness to believe the worst about their gods.

The War on Christmas seems to have subsided without completely going away, so I had nothing to write about it that was as good as my posts on the subject from last year. I'm still pleased with this post on liberal Christianity and fag discourse, and with the two scripts I wrote for Second City's Sassy Gay Friend. I started giving Terry Eagleton a going-over for his lectures on religion, and spent more time on Thomas Ferguson's. There's always more to be said about faith, of course.

Miscellaneous. In this post I wrote about a male film critic's enlightened sexism. I think I did a good job in this post on the sexualization of children (or "sluts in training," as a Facebook friend called them) in America, plus this followup. Several other people liked this post on not being a role model. I wrote here in response to a book lamenting the supposed decline of the public library and what the hell, the decline of just about everything. This post, which draws on a recent collection of responses to Noam Chomsky's ideas about politics and education, needs a followup, but I think it's a good one as it is.

If I go on, I'll end up linking to half of last year's posts. As you can see, this isn't a best-of, it's more of an overview of what I wrote about in 2010. It should come in handy when I'm trying to refer back to older posts, and I hope other people will find it useful too.

We Like to Watch

I've read Garry Wills's books erratically over the years, having first read some of his articles in The New York Review of Books. Never got around to Nixon Agonistes, but I think I read some of it in Esquire, where parts of it originally appeared. Though he's a conservative, of sorts, he mostly transcends that category, enough that I can usually read him without getting too annoyed. Most of the time, anyway: What Jesus Meant (Viking, 2006) was terrible, full of factual errors, almost as bad in that respect as John Shelby Spong's Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. I should probably back up that judgment at more length sometime...

Now he's published a short collection of autobiographical essays, Outside Looking In: Adventures of an Observer (Viking, 2010). He won me over right away with the introduction, "A Bookworm's Confession."

My father thought I was guaranteeing my inability to make a living when I got my doctorate in classical Greek. That, he thought, would make me a perpetual sideliner. He had always feared that my bookworm ways guaranteed that life would pass me by. It bothered him that, when caddying for him as a boy, I carried a book in the golf bag and pulled it out whenever his party was held up by those playing ahead. One summer when I was in grade school, he paid me money (I think five dollars) if I would go a whole week without reading anything. I took the offer, and used the money to buy a new book. Far from keeping me out from life, books opened door after door, not so much for me to go through the door as to look through. ... In my home as a child, I read books by flashlight under the bedcovers. This so worried my mother that she asked a doctor if I were not ruining my eyes by reading so much. In the Jesuit prep school I attended, I read in the john at night, the only place where lights were kept on. I was devouring Dostoevsky novels, which my friend Lew Ellingham had pressed on me. I saved weekends for books I especially hoped to savor, beginning them under a favorite tree. One reading feast I was able to indulge when a traveling statue of Our Lady of Fatima came to the school, as part of Catholic prayers for the conversion of Russia. For three days and nights, an around-the-clock vigil was held before the statue, each student kneeling for a half hour. The lights were on everywhere all night, so I plunged into War and Peace and read nonstop for three days and three nights, with only short catnaps, until I finished it. Lew told me it was the greatest novel ever written -- and he was right [3-4].

So that's why Russia was never converted! (Even today it remains Orthodox, not Catholic.) It was all Garry Wills's fault, for reading the schismatic Tolstoy when he should have been praying. Little Russian children who are burning in Hell now know whom to blame for the eternal torment they must suffer.

Seriously, though, I found myself bonding with Wills the Reader as I read this, and more -- he does run on. His self-characterization as an observer rather than a participant in life also is familiar, though luck and his capacity for hard work brought him into contact with people (William F. Buckley and other editors and publishers) who situated him to observe a lot of interesting things -- the Civil Rights Movement, the movement against the war in Vietnam, and others. I wish I had been the kind of observer Wills has been!

Nobody's perfect, of course, and Wills's ambivalences lead him to some odd and sometimes entertaining contradictions. Wills claims to be a conservative, which means bucking the judgment of his mentor William Buckley (see page 2, on Wills's Chestertonian "Distributism"), but in his portrait of Studs Terkel, whom he considers a "labor-union" liberal, he reports:

In 2000, remembering work with Ralph Nader in his earlier campaigns for car safety, Terkel spoke at a rally for Nader as President. We had knock-down-drag-out arguments over that, and Terkel told a shared friend that he was afraid I would never speak to him again if Nader caused Gore to lose (as he did). But Terkel did not in the end vote for Nader, and Illinois was unaffected by Nader's disastrous interventions [141].

Except that Nader did not cause Gore to lose; he was, at most, just one factor in Bush's seizure of power. (Along with Republican purges of eligible Democratic voters in Florida, the confusing ballot system there [Florida has a long history of racially-motivated election corruption], Republican packing of the Supreme Court, Gore's own uninspiring campaign performance, and much more.) Was Terkel's the deciding vote in the disposition of Illinois' electoral votes? And why would a self-styled conservative like Wills want a liberal like Gore to be President anyway?

The peer pressure worked both ways, though. Terkel

would never cross a picket line. When I crossed a teaching assistants' strike line to give a series of lectures at Yale, I was careful not to let Terkel know [141].

I read this in light of an earlier passage:

Terkel and such old friends as the medical reformer Quentin Young and the civil rights lawyer Leon Despres called themselves "old lefties." They fought the first Mayor Daley's Chicago regime with high spirits. Theirs was not the bitter or recriminating leftism of a Noam Chomsky. When they were together I heard mainly laughter, and the mutual teasing that prevents self-importance [140].

I suspect that if Terkel had found out about Wills's crossing that Yale picket line, Wills would have experienced some bitter and recriminating leftism, as well he should have. And Terkel experienced Wills's bitter and recriminating conservatism over Nader. Terkel also took a swipe at Christopher Hitchens, for example, for his ad hominem attacks on critics of Bush's terror war. Chomsky's temperament is of course quite different from Terkel's, but he shares with Terkel not only political views but a respect for, and a comfort with, "ordinary" people that on Wills's own account he lacks: Wills needs guides and go-betweens (including his wife Natalie, described in a lovely essay in Outside Looking In) when cast among the great unwashed. I'm probably more like Wills in this respect, so I'm not condemning him for it, but I do get tired of these gratuitous, ignorant, yet obligatory slams of Chomsky. (Jon Schwarz let loose with one last week at A Tiny Revolution; more on this topic soon, I hope.) Like too many people, Wills is confusing politics with personality here.

These are minor criticisms, though. I enjoyed Outside Looking In quite a lot. Writers are usually observers more than participants, and what matters is how well they observe. Wills mostly observes very well.

Actually, They Do Make Ignoramuses (Ignorami?) Like They Used To

My friend the ambivalent Obama supporter sent me a link to this article which linked to this blog post by one Larry Kramer -- not the bloated and inflamed asshole famed for his public temper tantrums, but a corporate-media guy with the same name.

The article, by one Alex Wexprin, declares

In a nutshell, Kramer argues that today’s busy media consumer, lacking the time to dig in to issues themselves, instead relies on cognitive shortcuts to familiarize themselves with what the “correct” opinions are, based on their preexisting ideology.

Wexprin quotes Kramer approvingly -- "We are creating a less-informed but more opinionated public" -- while disagreeing with him tangentially.

First: the problem of opinion fragmentation and people going to outlets that reinforce their existing beliefs is hardly a new phenomenon. If the problem has gotten worse over the last few years, it is more likely to be due to the Internet than an ideological shift in TV news. ...

[Second]: most people in this country do not watch cable news.

The trouble is, neither Wexprin nor Kramer provides any evidence that "the problem has gotten worse over the last few years." "In the past," Kramer declares, "many of those people would have spent the time with a more objective outlet, like CNN or the New York Times, done more research of the candidate, and made up their own minds. Now, it’s just faster to have someone do that for you." Calling CNN and the Times "objective" is funny enough, but when did most people do "more research" and "make up their own minds"?

Americans don't seem to me to be any less-informed than they were when I was in high school forty years ago, before the Internet or cable news, but they were very ill-informed then. Almost twenty years ago, just after the first Gulf War, a "study, conducted by the University of Massachusetts' Center for Studies in Communication, found that the more people watched TV during the Gulf crisis, the less they knew about the underlying issues, and the more likely they were to support the war." Fox News didn't exist then, but CNN did, and dutifully misled its audience.

Kramer writes that "In an effort to appear totally unbiased, CNN ridded itself of opinion or emotion." When was this, I wonder? Was it before or after Lou Dobbs quit? Before or after "new CNN chairman Walter Isaacson met with top Republican lawmakers in Washington, D.C. to discuss how to improve relations between the cable news network and conservative Republicans"?

I'm not sure where my peers and their parents went for their misinformation in the 60s, but there was the Reader's Digest, a reliable fount of right-wing propaganda with an enormous circulation, and there were plenty of right-wing radio commentators even before the Fairness Doctrine was abolished. It was as if there was a sewer in which their blatantly racist, hysterically anti-communist material marinated until it was ready to dump into receptive ears. Morris Kominsky's book The Hoaxers: Plain Liars, Fancy Liars, and Damned Liars (Branden Press, 1970) was a debunking of a lot of this stew. The three big broadcast networks varied slightly in their politics, with ABC notoriously the farthest right of the three in the late 60s, but if you wanted accurate information about US foreign policy, business and the economy, or social issues, you didn't rely on them, "objective" though they were supposed to be.

Rereading FAIR's account of the University of Massachusetts study of Gulf War Coverage, though, I find myself wondering.

While most respondents had difficulty answering questions about the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, 81 percent of the sample could identify the missile used to shoot down the Iraqi Scuds as the Patriot. That media consumers know facts relating to successful U.S. weapons but not about inconsistencies in U.S. foreign policy, the researchers argued, "suggests that the public are not generally ignorant—rather, they are selectively misinformed."

Were media consumers more knowledgeable about the names of US missiles than about the circumstances leading up to the war only because of skewed media coverage, or might it have been partly because such trivia, like the names of professional athletes, their records and their rankings, were what most media consumers considered important, interesting, and therefore memorable? The first Gulf War was notorious for the way it was covered as if it were the Superbowl, but that was also, probably, the best way to sell it, and I can't think of many people I know who were interested in knowing anything else about it.

We, We, We, All the Way Home

I've been meaning to write about this for some time. Then, just before the dorm closed for semester break, I noticed a student carrying around a copy of Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, edited by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV (New York: NYU Press, 2002). I asked him about it, and learned that he is a big fan of Cindy Patton (as am I), who contributed a paper to the collection. I hope to run into him again in January and ask him what he thought of it. I found it frustrating; like most such collections it was uneven. The tone was set by the editors' introduction, which began with the vacuous platitude "Queerness is now global." They then reported a small contretemps at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) conference on queer globalization at City University of New York in the spring of 1998 (pp. 3-4):

CLAGS's conference on queer globalization drew a wide array of queer activists and scholars specializing in Latin America, Africa, Asia, Europe, the United States, Canada, and queer diasporas. To a record-breaking audience, the speakers discussed the economic and cultural transformations brought on by global capital around the world and attempted to identify both opportunities and perils inherent in these transformations and their implications for queer cultures and lives. Yet nowhere were the perils of our present global condition more clearly signified than in a rather pregnant moment during the closing plenary of the conference. In the question and answer session, a well-meaning U.S. queer scholar of note stood up and narrated a vignette, a cautionary tale of sorts that urgently demanded a reply. He and a colleague had been strolling through the recently cleaned-up and renovated Bryant Park, across the street from what was then home to CUNY's Graduate Center, the site of the conference, when they were accosted by an ostensibly Latino man distributing literature about the liberating power of Jesus Christ. Self-possessed, the white scholar answered the Latino man that he and his friend were in fact gay and had no need for this literature. To the bafflement of the scholar, the Latino man replied that he had also been gay once until he had found the Lord. Now turning pointedly to the plenary speakers, the scholar demanded in earnest, How should I have spoken to this Latino man? How could I have made myself understood by him? How could "we" at this conference, well-meaning queer scholars like him, he seemed to imply, communicate effectively with this Latino (formerly gay) man?

There are a number of questions I wish I could pose to Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan, and even more to that "well-meaning U.S. queer scholar of note." Did the "ostensibly Latino" missionary's activity that day just possibly have anything to do with the hellmouth going on across the street, the conference center full of homosexuals full of need for the redeeming love of Christ? I'd be surprised if he was out there trolling for converts by sheer coincidence.

Aside from that, how does a homosexual grow up in the United States without having had to deal with religious nuts trying to save him? How does a homosexual academic achieve "note" without having spent some time teaching and having to deal with hostile students and fellow faculty, and having learned to answer them? The "well-meaning scholar" must also be aware of the existence of gay Christians and other religious believers, so his first riposte to the "ostensible" Latino's overtures was not especially clever. And what does the missionary's ethnicity have to do with anything, either for the scholar or for the conference, anyway?

Though I'm not an academic, living in a college town I've often had encounters with non-Latino (not even "ostensible" ones) Christian kids who go out witnessing as part of their involvement with campus Christian groups like Campus Crusade for Christ. (Every Wednesday night, after prayer meeting.) They aren't sent out unprepared, and it seems that part of the spiel they're taught includes the phrase "I used to be [insert condition here] like you, but then I was saved." I recall fondly one such kid who gulped nervously when he plugged "gay" into that sentence after learning I am gay. (On the other hand, such campus groups seem to get a disproportionate number of conflicted, frightened, queer young people, many of whom later come out.) I'd never take for granted that a missionary was telling the truth about anything, but again, what was the well-meaning queer scholar trying to prove by crying in the wilderness, "You see how These People are? What can I possibly say to Them?" (On the other hand, I'm stuck with the editors' account of this performance; to add to the fun, Manalansan told a slightly different version in his Global Divas [Duke, 2003], to which I'll return presently.)

At this point the three-day conference, which had progressed smoothly, came to a screeching halt. Our speakers had finally been stumped by one of the opportunities and perils of our present global condition: the complexity of contemporary cross-cultural interactions in our globalized world. They had finally been silenced by the white scholar's attempt to regain his sense of self-possession by wielding, in a destabilized, fluctuating world, what he thought of as a stable identificatory germ (gay) -- an attempt that faltered because the ostensibly Latino man (no longer the mythical "other" before the shining glass beads of European culture) could wield the same term (gay) with equal authority and impunity.

In other words, these fine anti-racist, anti-imperialist scholars had never, in their years of study in the US, ever encountered clueless or racist faculty, fellow students, or random citizens. As graduate student teaching assistants, they had never encountered stupid or provocative questions, and had never thought about how they might deal with them. So that a boring typical provocation like the one by Mr. White Guy could bring their conference to "a screeching halt"! If a senior faculty member makes a stupid racist remark in the hallway, a graduate student or junior faculty would probably not feel free to challenge it; but when you're on a panel at a conference, you have more freedom. Maybe the panelists were just too well socialized into American academic culture.

Or maybe not. As Manalansan tells the story in Global Divas, the panelists, who included "Geeta Patel, Norma Alarcon, Michael Warner, and Kobena Mercer," were "noncommittal." There's quite a difference between "noncommittal" and "stumped," let alone "brought to a screeching halt." Michael Warner looks pretty white to me; even if his colleagues were flummoxed, surely he could have taken on his fellow White Man. Perhaps their consternation was more of the "How do you keep walking around with nothing attached to your brain stem?" variety.

I think if I'd been on the panel for the closing plenary, I'd have asked the "well-meaning" (I think this word is meant to be sarcastic) queer scholar why he didn't just ask the ex-gay Jesus freak if he'd like to fool around a bit. (Ex-gays are notorious for not being very "ex" after all.) I don't follow the authors' claim that Mr. White Guy "faltered because the ostensibly Latino man ... could wield the same term (gay) with equal authority and impunity." It doesn't relate to what they say Mr. White Guy said, and it looks like projection to me. But if they're right after all, I can't help but wonder where Mr. White Guy has been for the past 30 years. The world I live in has plenty of ex-gays and Jesus freaks in it -- some of the Jesus freaks are gay, too! -- and they don't surprise me as they evidently surprise him.

In order to break the silence, the speakers could have redirected at this point the white scholar's question, forcing him (as Silviano Santiago, the Brazilian novelist, recommends queer scholars to do in his brief and incisive essay in the present volume) to engage with his own suppositions. In a room full of queers of color, we could have asked him not to presume that we were included in his well-meaning "we." We could have reminded him, that is, that the "other" was already in the room, and that the tendency to figure racial or ethnic difference as impermeable alterity was not so much a symptom of the other's radical difference as of its unsettling proximity.

Yes, "what do you mean 'we,' paleface?" strikes me as a useful response to Mr. White Guy, too. But they're wrong about Santiago's recommendation. His essay has some idiocies of its own (he seems to believe that the US gay movement does nothing but parade around in drag 365 days a year; see page 18), but he addresses the conference as "metropolitans" -- that is, he regards these well-meaning graduate students and faculty of color not as "we" with him, but as "you" or "them", part of the Imperialist Other. He graciously says that he won't invite them to engage with their own suppositions, because he's their guest. (Of course, that's a not-so-subtle way of telling them to do it anyway.) The authors (who are Latino and Filipino) take for granted they have no colonialist suppositions of their own -- upper-class in their home societies, students and later faculty at elite institutions in the US. When I read stuff like this, and I find a lot like it in the post-colonial things I've been reading the past several years, I always suspect that they have their own unresolved hangups to deal with. I sympathize, but their unexamined assumptions will distort the way they teach their students, and that is everybody's problem.

This anthology on queer globalizations is our insistent attempt not to answer the white scholar's query, deflecting thus his colonizing gaze. It is our ethical refusal to provide a grammar that could make the complexity and density of the cross-cultural interactions generated by our present global condition immediately transparent and universally legible. It is our refusal to fix the term "gay," and the powerful legacies of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movements, as a prerequisite for global interaction and coalition. For it is in the permutations of this term and its legacies, as they circulate around the globe, in queer organizations and gatherings, from Mexico City's Semana Cultural Lesbico-Gay to New Delhi's Campaign for Lesbian Rights and Beijing's International Women's Conference, from Buenos Aires's Marcha de Orgullo Gay to the diasporic South Asian and Latino Lesbian and Gay Pride Parade in Queens, New York, that the future of the human and civil rights of queers also lies.

Wow -- I am, like, totally deflected by the editors' courage in refusing "to fix the term 'gay'"! That refusal is of course standard operating procedure in white American queer theory, which means that they are adopting American models "as a prerequisite for global interaction and coalition." So does the claim that the "future of the human and civil rights of queers" also lies in a worldwide "gay" movement, a claim that attracts accusations of cultural imperialism when the wrong people make it. If anything, Manalansan and Cruz-Malavé are playing the same game as their well-meaning queer scholar of note: "What," they are asking rhetorically but with no detectable irony, "should we say to this ostensibly white queer scholar? You see how hopeless These People are?"

Of course, Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan don't have to say anything, to that scholar or to me; it's not their job to educate him or me. Some (many?) white American queer scholars aren't interested. I am interested, though, and I'll go on listening, trying to educate myself. But it seems to me that this sort of grandstanding is a waste of time, when there's so much to be done and learned.

You Know -- Them

Here's a fine representative example of the kind of American political discourse that makes me want to stop writing, stop reading, maybe bang my head against the wall for a few hours, and ... beyond that, I don't know. Anyway, it's a comment on a Glenn Greenwald post, and it reads:

I WANT TO SEE THEM LEAK

Reports of how the Zionists and Cheney's inside CIA organization planned and carried out 9/11 in order to begin this entire coup.

This would have to include details of the stolen 2000 election, who prepared and edited the Patriot Act, and the names of all those who enriched themselves with the insider information.

Now that'd be some juicy readin'.

Short and sweet. "Zionists" is sort of the cherry on top, but the whole thing is precious, or as my old friend Grant would say, "precocious." Leave aside the Truther tinfoil hat stuff, but as I've asked such people in the past, if We already know that They "planned and carried out 9/11", who needs Wikileaks? I love the ambiguity of "this entire coup," too: does the writer think that things only began going bad after September 11, 2001, or even with Dubya taking the oath of office? It would seem so, but of course things were far from aboveboard before Bush ambled onto the scene. Were Cheney and the Zionists also behind the 1993 attempt to blow up the World Trade Center? Were they behind the Vietnam War, which involved government lying on a grand scale that was exposed with the publication of the Pentagon Papers? There was a lot of double-dealing in the leadup to World War II, and World War I for that matter. And how about the sinking of the Maine? Lincoln was as cagey about the reasons for quashing the Confederate Rebellion as either Bush was about either Iraq War. And those are just the highlights of US government malfeasance; there must be corresponding conspiracies in the past of every country that has ever existed.

Who edited and prepared the Patriot Act? I thought that was more or less public knowledge -- much of the Patriot Act had been on the Clinton administration's wish list, and was part of a bipartisan tradition of expanding government powers of surveillance, control and punishment over the general population. The same goes for the "details of the stolen 2000 election", about which a great deal has never been particularly secret, and has been published and analyzed. I'm sure there are details that haven't been released, but enough is already known to shake things up if enough citizens cared. (That's another of my pet peeves about the Truthers and others like JFK Assassination Buffs who chortle knowingly about the secret documents and records that We need to know about. I'm sure that there are lots of goodies locked away from public view, but there's enough evidence in the public domain to [paraphrasing Noam Chomsky] send every American President since World War II to the gallows. We already know that our leaders are vicious gangsters, they don't really make a secret of it, and probably the only way to get at the buried evidence is to start indicting them for the crimes we already know they've committed. But the Truthers and JFKers are curiously uninterested in such matters.)

But as I said, leave that aside. It's easy to dismiss this writer as just another Conspiracy Theorist, but he also uses the rhetoric of the corporate mainstream media and our government officials. "Them" can't refer to Wikileaks, who didn't leak the material now exciting so much commentary and controversy: Wikileaks receives the leaked material and publishes it to the Web, or through its media partners. But if you didn't already know that and cling firmly to the knowledge, you'd hardly know it from respectable commentators, who think that Wikileaks or Julian Assange himself leaked everything, or hacks into government computers and plunders the riches thereof, and therefore can decide what to leak. As Greenwald keeps reminding his readers, Wikileaks can only release and publish what other people send to them. And until someone leaks it, we (as opposed to We) don't know what is being kept from us. But a surprising amount of discrediting and even incriminating information is already Out There.

To the Sweden Station

Damn, this guy is smart. Richard Seymour has written the single best piece I've seen on the Swedish sex allegations against Julian Assange, and the discussion in comments is worth looking over too: in addition to Seymour's debates with some of his readers, it contains a lot of useful links. (And for Cthulhu's sake, will people stop confusing Naomi Wolf with Naomi Klein?) Now I don't have to try to write about it; he's said what I would have, and done it better.

Though I want to mention also this post from the FAIR blog, in which the Washington Post's insufferable Obama flack Dana Milbank functions as metonym for every media fool who has assumed that Julian Assange is Wikileaks, and that his personality is the important thing -- that by calling him an egoist or an egomaniac, they've discredited all the material that Wikileaks has published. (I hope to spend more time later on a fatuous article by sf writer Bruce Sterling on Wikileaks, Assange, and accused leaker Bradley Manning, though it has been pretty well shredded just in its own comments.)

My Lack of Faith Disturbs You

This is not good. I just realized that I'd posted my second, longish comment in twenty-four hours on a Glenn Greenwald post, yet I hadn't been able to muster the energy to post here since Wednesday. Actually I've been fairly busy, doing more reading of actual print than I have in some time, but still, that doesn't stop me unless I'm procrastinating for other reasons. Which I guess I am. It's amazing how much you can get done as long as it's not what you are supposed to be doing.

Consider this, from The Telegraph last June.

Professor Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, said many more members of the "intellectual elite" considered themselves atheists than the national average.

A decline in religious observance over the last century was directly linked to a rise in average intelligence, he claimed.

But the conclusions - in a paper for the academic journal Intelligence - have been branded "simplistic" by critics.

Professor Lynn, who has provoked controversy in the past with research linking intelligence to race and sex, said university academics were less likely to believe in God than almost anyone else.

That last paragraph sets off all kinds of alarms about Professor Lynn's intelligence and the quality of his research, let alone his claims. So, let's see ... why, he has his own home page, on which he lists "Eugenics" among his interests, and

In 1991 I extended my work on race differences in intelligence to other races. I concluded that the average IQ of blacks in sub-Saharan Africa is approximately 70. It has long been known that the average IQ of blacks in the United States is approximately 85. The explanation for the higher IQ of American blacks is that they have about 25 per cent of Caucasian genes and a better environment.

He has also published defenses of eugenics and is a director of the proudly 'politically incorrect' Pioneer Fund. So this man, despite his stature in certain circles, is not the best source for today's atheists to cite.

Some of them have done just that, though. I found the first two paragraphs quoted at Atheism Soup, though any rational person would immediately recognize that correlation -- in this case between rising IQs and dwindling church attendance -- does not equal cause. Besides, any decently scientifically-literate person should know that there's reason to doubt the equation of IQ with intelligence. Atheism Soup got those two paragraphs, which constituted the entire post, from Deep Thought, which might be a subblog of Atheism Soup. No doubt Atheism Soup's readers, being rationalists, will be as critical as I was, rather than taking such transparent and malign nonsense simply on trust. Snort.

The atheist cult of personality seems to be growing, as shown by the image above. See why I'm feeling a bit down? Hemingway as a role model? Well, as with the corresponding Christian cult of personality, it allows the lazy and mediocre to uplift themselves by identifying with people of higher status.