More infodump.

* Tentherism goes even more mainstream.
* Republicans vs. America's changing demographics.
* There's another excerpt from Žižek's First as Tragedy, Then as Farce online, this time at the London Review of Books.
* Why I Am Not A Catholic: "Catholic Church Says It Will Stop Charity Work If D.C. Passes Gay Marriage Law." Steve Benen isn't above quoting the Book of Matthew over this.
* In Obama's America, people wear hats on their feet, hamburgers eat people, and criminals are tried in courts of law. I should note that Glenn Greenwald says this isn't quite the big step forward it appears to be.
* What happened after Kelo vs. City of New London?
* Fantastic Mr. Fox reviews. Oh, to live in New York.

Closing some tabs.

* Terrible news, everyone: International Science Fiction Reshelving Day has been canceled.

* Still mad at SIGG for lying about the BPA content in its canteens? Don't worry; there's BPA in everything.

* Having solved all the world's ills, the Catholic Church paid $500,000 to see marriage equality go down in Maine.

* I was hoping Ned Lamont would make another run against Joe Lieberman. Too bad.

* And Neil sends in a fun Flash application about scale.

Watching the video of Sean Hannity's interview with Michael Moore makes me rethink a bit my criticism of the appeals to Catholicism in Capitalism: A Love Story. At both the beginning and end of the interview Hannity is put on his back foot by Moore's citation of Christian teachings, and by the end Hannity is essentially forced to admit his politics are anti-Christian. I don't find appeals to religion to be generally useful or advisable from the left—aside from the central political importance I attach to (methodological) atheism, I tend to think religion is territory the right just owns and there's nothing we can do about it—but that's not to say they don't sometimes have their uses.

We saw Capitalism: A Love Story last night and had some heated discussion in the car afterward. While all the parties involved operate from a shared position that "Yes, capitalism is very bad," I found myself significantly disappointed in Moore's take on the problem. This is a topic that needs to be approached systematically, from a structural perspective, or you wind up doing more harm than good; it doesn't really lend itself to the anecdotal style of more reform-minded documentaries like Roger & Me and Sicko. In short Moore bit off much more than he could chew.

Politically I found the film both ahistorical and largely incoherent. To begin, the film opens with completely uncritical nostalgia for the 1950s before pretending that the economic collapses of the 1970s never happened, blaming Reagan alone for both post-Fordism and the financialization of capital. (Reagan and Reaganonomics certainly did a lot of harm to the country, and accelerated the crisis dramatically, but the dismantling of the country's manufacturing base and the explosion in private debt began about a decade before he took office.) Likewise, aside from a few scenes late in the film, Clinton is essentially let off the hook entirely, while Obama's participation in the ongoing transfer of wealth to Wall Street is also barely acknowledged. Neither the Global South nor generational American poverty nor systemic racism nor ecological crisis warrant any mention; in short the film is wrapped up so entirely in nostalgia for a particular version of middle-class American life that, despite its name, it's barely about "capitalism" at all.

Moore also weirdly conflates left and right populism in a way that, I think, is extremely pernicious. To take the example he focuses his climax on: most of the opposition to bailouts as such last year was coming from the right, and was located less in long-held principle than in a rhetorical attempt to regain control of the electoral debate—but Moore pretends that populism, like all populism, was somehow of the left. In fact, the progressive critique of the bailout was generally about its size—Krugman, remember, wanted it to be bigger—and the sorts of strings that should be attached to the funds—not whether or not it should happen at all.

Obama's election is likewise recast as the culmination of a "people's revolt" that somehow began with the bailouts, a revisionist history of the last year which just doesn't make any sense. The two things, in fact, had little to do with one another, and to the extent that they were related it was Obama's strong support for the bailouts that drove his poll numbers upward against McCain's. Indeed, that Obama supported the bailouts, and McCain quasi-opposed them, is never explicitly acknowledged by the film at all.

And don't get me started on the repeated reference to the Catholic Church as Moore's (sole) exemplar for anti-capitalist morality. There are a lot of things that might be said about the Church, and undoubtedly a lot of good people working through it, but its corporate structure and massive financial holdings don't exactly map for us a vision of a world beyond capital.

Moore's argumentive style in Capitalism, more so than even his other films, is almost always emotive and anecdotal. A long section on so-called "dead peasant insurance"—the practice of companies taking out insurance policies on rank-and-file workers—never connects the practice to larger injustices, and tragedies like Hurricane Katrina or the death of a young mother are evoked for cheap pathos that stands in for actual critique. Small, isolated victories against boilerplate villains like foreclosing banks are taken as exemplary of a mass movement that, I'm sorry to report, doesn't seem to actually exist. And as is increasingly the case with Moore, the film's primary mode is unrepentant self-congratulation, incoherently casting failures as victories in much the same way as Slacker Uprising; Moore figures more and more in his films as the hero of a revolution that never came, that only happened in his dreams.

Even the visual style of the film is significantly inferior to recent offerings like Bowling, Fahrenheit, and Sicko; the film feels thrown together, even phoned in.

It should be said that Jaimee, Tim, Alex, and Julie all seemed to like the film rather more than I did, and their replies to these arguments generally fell along two lines:

1) It's a Michael Moore movie. What did you expect?
2) Okay, but [Sequence X] was actually quite good.

Taking these in reverse order: it's true that the film does have some rather nice individual sequences. One that springs to mind is an investigation into corruption surrounding a privatized juvenile-detention prison in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in which two judges were recently indicted on racketeering charges for funneling children into the prison in exchange for kickbacks. But as terrible as this story is, like most of the film's examples this is still local and anecdotal, suggestive of reform and "bad apples" and not total system failure. It is too rarely that the film rises above the level of mere anecdote to the level of system, though it does here and there, as in its discussion of an unexpectedly forthright internal Citibank memo that declares America a "plutonomy" (for my money the film's best sequence).

(EDIT: Just a quick after-the-post interjection that while talking to Jaimee I was reminded about the striking footage of FDR and his proposed "Second Bill of Rights," which is actually the film's best sequence, as well as an approach to reform/revolution that could have structured a better version of this film.)

And yes, it's just a Michael Moore film and not Capital, and yes, rigor must sometimes be compromised in exchange for mass appeal. But we shouldn't mistake spectacle for revolution, either; Paramount's release of this film is much less the capitalist selling you a rope with which to hang him than the capitalist selling you a picture of a rope. At times the film can barely keep up the pretense of being about anything more than fluffing Michael Moore's ego, with scene after scene of him shouting impotently in front of buildings in precisely the same way he has for the last 20 years. (The film depicts these moments not as futile but as, of course, heroic, including impotently-shouting-outside-buildings footage from Roger & Me without any apparent sense of irony.) The film ends with Michael Moore threatening not to make any more movies for us at all unless we get off our asses and revolt—but the film, primarily a love song to his own career, provides absolutely no roadmap for collective action. Even An Inconvenient Truth, flawed as its call for action was, at least told us to change our lightbulbs; beyond a visit to michaelmoore.com Moore has no apparent thoughts whatsoever as to how a successful anti-capitalist political coalition might be forged in America today.

I'll go out on a limb and bet it doesn't begin with a film like Capitalism. If I'm wrong, I owe Michael Moore a Coke.

Our bad: The Pope declares atheists responsible for the environmental crisis.

Is it not true that inconsiderate use of creation begins where God is marginalized or also where his existence is denied?

Yeah, no, that is not true—but welcome to the team. Via Pharyngula.

Happy Canada Day. Let's celebrate with links.

* SEK considers Infinite Summer's weird morbidity (yes, it is weird), as well as the murky fluidity that constitutes literary "generations." Despite the many other projects that already threaten to consume July I've decided to halfheartedly participate in this, and may even post about once I've caught up to where I'm supposed to already be in the book.

* "Pseudo-Liveblogging Tenure Denial": just reading the headline is enough to fill me with dread.

* Richard Dawkins helps fund the world's least-fun summer camp.

* Following up on my post about Ricci and originalism from earlier in the week, in which as usual the comments are better than the post, here's Chuck Todd on MSNBC calling out the judicial activism to a speechless Joe Scarborough.

* Wal-Mart on the side of the angels? The monolith has endorsed an employer mandate in health care.

* Video games as murder simulators? The same claim can be made about just about any immersive media experience (and has been), with the existence of negative effects always taken as obvious but never actually demonstrated. (via /.)

* I have only vague memories of the original Alien Nation, though it's been in my Netflix queue for a while—so I'm glad to see rumors of a sequel series helmed by Angel's Tim Minear. More at Sci-Fi Wire.

* Sainthood in America: the Archdiocese of Baltimore may soon recommend a local 19th-century priest to the Vatican for canonization. I found it an interesting look at the balancing act that must now be played when looking for miracles in an age of science:

"Something worked very well," said Dr. Larry Fitzpatrick, chief of surgery at Mercy Medical Center, who will serve as medical expert on the archiocesan committee.

Preparing for his committee role, Fitzpatrick spoke to specialists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

"They've all got a few stories like this," he said. "Is this woman really any different from these, what I would call 'statistically improbable' cases? The outcome is very unusual, but it's not the only one."

Fitzpatrick said his role on the panel is to be the scientist, to "be the Doubting Thomas," but as a Catholic, he says, he must entertain the possibility of a supernatural cause.

What method could one possibly use to divide what is merely "statistically improbable" from what is "genuinely miraculous"?

More!

* Summer book reviews from both me and Jaimee in the Independent.

* As ubiquitous as pollution has become in the industrialized West, it remains largely invisible. That is not the case elsewhere in the world.

* Mitt Romney is a tool. A huge tool.

* "ICE does not keep records on cases in which detainees claim to be US citizens." Via MeFi.

* Everyone is reading Infinite Jest this summer. Are you? I really didn't like it the first time through, but DFW died and made me sad, so maybe I'll give it another shot.

* And, as always, morality is impossible without God.

Adjunct faculty members and their advocates put forth lots of arguments for improving the benefits paid to those off the tenure track. But Marquette University's theology faculty has come up with an unusual argument that involves a power higher than a college president.

After discussion of a memo questioning how Marquette could stay true to moral and Biblical values while not paying for health insurance for part-time instructors, the theology department voted to call on the administration to start paying for health insurance for those who teach at least two courses at a time at the university. While it is unclear whether the theology department can sway administrators, Marquette is a Jesuit university, so the views of its theologians might carry weight -- and at the very least can be embarrassing if ignored.

Given the Catholic Church's well-known reluctance to participate in immoral activities for its own benefit, I'm sure this argument will easily carry the day.

Missed another day this week. We apologize for the inconvenience.

* Major gay-rights victory in Iowa (!) today as the state's Supreme Court unanimously rules in favor of marriage equality. Some commentary from Daily Kos, Matt Yglesias, and Washington Monthly. It'll be interesting to see how this affects presidential politics in 2012—given Iowa's importance in the primary process Republican candidates may feel significant pressure to move to the left on this issue. Iowa is now the third state where gay marriage (as opposed to some version of civil union) is legal, joining Massachusetts and Connecticut.

* Wild new technology demoed at TED. It's a projector that turns basically any surface into a touchscreen, including your own body.

* National Catholic Reporter has a report out this week demonstrating the decades-old origins of the Catholic Church's priest scandal. My sense is that this continues to badly hurt the reputation of Catholicism, though perhaps I just run with a bad crowd. Via Cogitamus.

* Because Bush's DOJ bungled the prosecution of Ted Stevens, the Alaska GOP wants a do-over election. That sounds reasonable. That's usually how these things are handled, right?

* Also on the Sarah Palin beat the poetry of Sarah Palin and the poetry of Glenn Beck. Via MetaFilter.

"Challenge to a Cynic"

You are a cynic.
Because show me where
I have ever said
That there's absolute proof
That nothing that man
Has ever conducted
Or engaged in,
Has had any effect,
Or no effect,
On climate change.

Monday links, mostly political.

* Thirty years of political misrule have eviscerated the social safety net in this country. These stories from Georgia are unbelievable, and they are not unique.

What Clark didn't know was that Georgia, like many other states, was in the midst of an aggressive push to get thousands of eligible mothers like her off TANF, often by duplicitous means, to use the savings elsewhere in the state budget. Fewer than 2,500 Georgia adults now receive benefits, down from 28,000 in 2004—a 90 percent decline. Louisiana, Texas, and Illinois have each dropped 80 percent of adult recipients since January 2001. Nationally, the number of TANF recipients fell more than 40 percent between then and June 2008, the most recent month for which data are available. In Georgia last year, only 18 percent of children living below 50 percent of the poverty line—that is, on less than $733 a month for a family of three—were receiving TANF.

* British academics telling us what we already know to be true: social problems stem from economic inequality. More at MeFi.

* 3% of DC is HIV positive. I know the disease remains a serious epidemic, especially in poorer communities, but I would have never put the number that high. That's astounding, and horrible.

* The nonreligious are now the third biggest grouping in the US, after Catholics and Baptists, according to the just-released American Religious Identification Survey. According to the article, the molestation scandal has hit the Catholic Church especially hard.

Given his background, I thought this from Sullivan was striking:

It is impossible to know where this is heading, but the latest survey is a reminder to exercise a little scepticism when you hear of America’s religious exceptionalism. Yes, America is far more devout than most of western Europe; but it is not immune to the broader crises facing established religion in the West. The days when America’s leading intellectuals contained a strong cadre of serious Christians are over. There is no Thomas Merton in our day; no Reinhold Niebuhr, Walker Percy or Flannery O’Connor. In the arguments spawned by the new atheist wave, the Christian respondents have been underwhelming. As one evangelical noted in The Christian Science Monitor last week, “being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of evangelicals can’t articulate the Gospel with any coherence”.

* Language Log on the perverse career incentive not to write. I wonder often whether the blogging I began two years before entering graduate school killed me dead before I started.

* Science and public policy: a lecture on climate change, public misinformation, and actually existing media bias from Stanford's Stephen Schneider. Via MeFi.

Let's close some tabs.

* Stanley Fish says academic freedom is dangerous. I'm beginning to think Stanley Fish is dangerous.

* Forced arbitration is one of our most unrecogized societal injustices. And the courts are complicit.

After nearly three years of harassment, abuse and long hours for little or no pay, Dantz finally decided that she’d had enough. She filed suit against her employer—and the court kicked her to the curb. Even though Dantz refused to sign the binding arbitration agreement, the court said that merely by continuing to work for Applebees, she was bound by its terms. Debbie Dantz’ employer illegally abused her for almost three years, and Dantz was powerless to hold it accountable.

What a horrifying story. Via MeFi.

* Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where Saved By The Bell, Rather Than Law And Order, Became The Dominant Television Franchise For A Generation.

* The Singularity is a myth. Pharyngula explains.

* Catholicism is a myth. Cynical-C explains.

* America loves Obama and hates the GOP.

* It looks like the stimulus package (tee hee) passes today. That's because we're all socialists now.

Various sorts of collectivities.

* 902 U.S. mayors have signed a pledge to "reduce carbon emissions by 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012; strive to meet or beat the Kyoto Protocol targets in their own communities; and to urge Congress to pass the bipartisan GHG reduction legislation."

* Experts continue to call for a global network to prevent an asteroid disaster, and everyone continues to ignore them.

* The U.S. 6th Circuit has ruled that the Vatican's crypto-corporate structure does not insulate it from lawsuits.

* Five hundred years of board games. Via Cynical-C.

Science-religion-politics Sunday!

* The Vatican has officially forgiven the late John Lennon for a off-the-cuff joke he made forty-two years ago. Let no one doubt the magnanimity of the Catholic Church.

* The "broken windows" theory has apparently been experimentally verified. Giuliani '12? Via MeFi.

* Science confirms the Livia Soprano Theory of the Universe: it's all just a big nothing. Also via MeFi.

* Science confirms that religion strongly correlates with unhappy lives.

In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

* Science confirms that America miraculously became "a center-right nation" the day after Barack Obama won the presidency.

* The Cato Institute confirms "Blocking Obama’s health plan is key to the GOP’s survival." Not because it won't work, of course, but because it'll work so well as to discredit their kneejerk anti-governmentism forever. More at DKos.

* Who will pray to Bush for clemency? And how many corrupt presidencies do we need in a row before we abolish the damn pardon power?

* Finally, prepare yourself to go deep inside the ant hivemind.

Eco Friday.

* Ben Bova is agitating in The Washington Post for a massive orbiting solar array that would beam energy down to earth in microwaves. More at Treehugger and Wikipedia.

* The Vatican, too, has gone solar.

* Barack Obama would regulate carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant under the Clean Air Act, the U.S. presidential candidate’s top energy adviser said.

* And a new alt-energy economy may be blooming in the U.S., with big infrastructure investments in California, Texas, and elsewhere.

A debate McCain can win? Both presidential candidates attended the Al Smith dinner this year, a rare occasion for elites to drop the pretense of real antagonism between pro-corporate plutocrats of different parties, much less the media millionaires who happily transcribe their every lie.

Both candidates were funny, but McCain was really in his element, and won more good will from me in this fifteen-minute segment than anything else he's done in eight years.

Saturday Night Fever.

* Games of the day: Fantastic Contraption, Totem Destroyer, and Hedgehog Launch.

* Josh Marshall, Matt Yglesias, and Marc Ambinder all agree that Maliki's endorsement of the Obama plan for withdraw from Iraq today is the nail in the coffin for the sole remaining justification for the John McCain candidacy.

* Notorious freedom-hater the Pope is at it again, reminding us the West needs to change its wasteful way of life.

* Children's-Film Sequels as Imagined by Famous Directors.

* And what's Alan Moore's favorite TV show? The Wire, of course.

Polygraph 22—Call for Papers
http://www.duke.edu/web/polygraph/cfp22.html

Special Issue: Ecology and Ideology

The contemporary moment abounds with speculation concerning our ecological future. Specialists in a variety of fields forecast immanent catastrophe, stemming from a combination of climate change, fossil-fuel depletion, and consumer waste. The recent bestowal of the Nobel Peace Prize on a group of scientists studying climate change indicates the degree to which "peace" has come to signify ecological balance; even the declaration by the Vatican of a new set of "7 Deadly Sins for the modern age" includes pollution in an attempt to grapple with the potential of individuals to inflict ecological damage on a global scale.

In the name of an impending crisis felt to be collectively shared, new political, cultural, and intellectual alignments are being forged, just as seismic shifts in the flow of global capital once again threaten to "redistribute" the world's resources and people. Ecological crisis has become a 24/7 media event, canvassing the planet in the imagery and rhetoric of disaster. From the halls of research and policy to activist documentary and apocalyptic fantasy, at the news desk, podium, pulpit, classroom, and computer monitor alike, all channels are united by a single underlying conviction: the present ecological catastrophe has humanity as its cause.

Precisely because the answer seems so obvious, we want to know: why now? Where are the points of antagonism in the midst of such apparent consensus, and what is at stake in their difference?

The Polygraph Editorial Collective invites papers concerning any aspect of ecology's relationship to ideology, both interrogating ecology as a location for critique of global capitalism and analyzing the ways in which ecology functions as an ideology in its own right.

Potential areas of interest include:

Political Ecology
Globalization and ecology
Marxism and ecology
"Environmental accounting" as a challenge to the free market
Ecology and capital / consumerism
Ecology as growth market

Eco-Disaster
Peak oil and climate change
Biofuels and the food crisis
Overpopulation and Neo-Malthusianism
Ecology as a rhetoric of control
Figurations of eco-disaster in popular culture

Religion and Ecology
Green apocalypticism and green evangelism
Ecology and world religion

Ecology and gender
Recent articulations of eco-feminism
Eco- & transnational feminisms
Women's work and the global chain of production
Agricultural work and reproduction

Ecologies against ecologies
"Light" vs. "dark green" environmentalism (i.e. deep ecology)
Primitivism and technofuturism
The status of international Green movements

Polygraph welcomes work from a variety of different disciplines, including critical geography, cultural anthropology, political economy, political theology, science studies, and systems theory. We also encourage the submission of a variety of formats and genres: i.e. field reports, surveys, interviews, photography, essays, etc.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE
December 31, 2008

ISSUE EDITORS
Gerry Canavan
Lisa Klarr
Ryan Vu

CONTACT
polygraph22cfp@gmail.com

The Vatican's chief astronomer has said that belief in the existence of aliens would not contradict either the Bible or faith in God.

"How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?" Funes said. "Just as we consider earthly creatures as 'a brother,' and 'sister,' why should we not talk about an 'extraterrestrial brother'? It would still be part of creation."

In the interview by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, Funes said that such a notion "doesn't contradict our faith" because aliens would still be God's creatures. Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like "putting limits" on God's creative freedom, he said.

Via MeFi.

indexed is making sense:



(caught by Cyn-C)

indexed takes a crack at the "new sins" story from yesterday. Click to enlarge: