Bill Maher on Donald Trump

Maher says (click the link for video):

This says so much about the electorate. Even the evangelicals want to be called on their shit. They are desperate to have somebody lead them — somebody to say: "You know what? I just don't bend to your bullshit." And Donald Trump — I gotta say, I don't agree with him on a lot — but I kind of get him. We've kind of been doing the same thing.

That's a pretty insightful summary of why Trump has been appealing to so many Americans. But I think they're missing something.

Trump seems to love nothing more than to position himself in opposition to the mainstream.

Everyone knows you're supposed to say McCain's a war hero — so Trump says: No, he's not, he was just captured.

Everyone knows you're supposed to say illegal immigrants are good people who are trying to make a better life for their family — so Trump says: No, Mexico isn't sending its best people, Mexico is sending criminals.

If you consistently do the opposite of what everyone else is doing, you can't be accused of being a conformist, but in a way, you're equally suggestible; you just bend in the opposite direction.

Bill Maher on our national love affair with fake outrage

"When did we get it in our heads that we have the right to never hear anything we don’t like?"

Did the journalists who reported on the Koran burning threat understand what they were doing?

Matthew Yglesias offers some common sense about why Terry Jones, the pastor in Florida who threatened to burn the Koran, is (or isn't) such a big deal:

[I]t's kind of nuts, isn’t it, that we have the general in charge of an ongoing war commenting on some guy in Florida being a jerk. Even nuttier is that he might well be right that this episode will endanger the lives of Americans soldiers. But that really raises deeper issues about Afghan society and the wisdom and nature of America’s engagement with it. The essence of a digital, globalized world with billions of inhabitants is that there’s always going to be some jerk somewhere doing something ridiculous. “Guy in Florida deliberately trying to antagonize Muslims” can’t become a global news story every time it happens.

In the Bloggingheads clip below, Sarah Posner -- a reporter who specializes in religion -- asks why the mainstream media became so fixated on a pastor who has only about 50 congregants. She hypothesizes that the problem is that most of the reporters who covered the story aren't enough . . . like her! That is, they don't specialize in religion, so "they don't know how to evaluate the influence of a particular person."



While I share her incredulity that this became an international news story, I find her explanation hard to believe. Her own passing remark that Jones has only 50 congregants is not beyond the ken of any competent reporter. If anything, you'd expect a generalist reporter to have an especially high standard for when one pastor's statements are a real story.

For instance, Matthew Yglesias is not a reporter, let alone one with a religion beat. Like me, he's a 29-year-old opinion blogger. He and I can easily see these points, and I don't think this is because we're so extraordinarily perceptive or have any expertise about religion. I don't believe that the reporters at the New York Times and the Washington Post lacked the capacity to do what Yglesias and I and so many others (including Dave Weigel and my mom, Ann Althouse) did when we wondered: Wait a minute -- how is this a major news story?

What seems to have been going on for a long time is that the MSM feels that a story is automatically newsworthy as long as it involves religion at all -- completely aside from any normal metrics of newsworthiness. Their standard seems to be based entirely on subject matter, not whether the events are likely to have any broader consequences.

Of course, the Koran burning would have had international consequences if Jones had followed through with it -- but only because of the media's own coverage.

Like it or not, symbolic burnings are pretty commonplace. People burn effigies, flags, love letters, sacred texts. It happens. And usually, it's not very exciting. Think of any kind of object, and there's probably someone somewhere burning it or fecklessly threatening to burn it -- despite, or because of, whoever might be offended if they found out. Normally, major news outlets wouldn't even think of paying any attention to these shenanigans, even if the burned object symbolizes something important.

Here's my point: a symbolic burning doesn't, by its own unaided momentum, inexorably alter anything else in the outside world. This is as true of a pastor burning a Koran as it would be of anything else. The media coverage to date has surely inflamed the Islamic world far more than if the pastor had burned the Koran and the media had ignored it.

As is so often the case, the news coverage itself becomes the story, but the news media rarely admit it. Normally, this is a fairly benign quirk of journalese: Bill Maher has noted that journalists reflexively avoid the first person (singular or plural).

In this case, however, more self-awareness on the MSM's part might very well have saved lives. Now that the story is out there, even though Jones called off the burning, it can be used as a terrorist recruiting tool. We'll probably never be able to pinpoint a causal link from the Koran burning media circus to a specific victim of terrorism, but that doesn't mean there won't be any such causation.

I hope that MSM reporters are pausing to think about what this whole episode means about their own role and responsibility. Reporters don't just neutrally reflect the world; they're willful actors who affect the world. To assume that their effects are always for the better can be fatal.

Revelations about self-hating politicians

That seems to be a theme this week:

1. The big news today (though it's old news to many people) is that Ken Mehlman -- former Bush advisor and Republican National Committee chairman -- has come out as gay. The author of that piece, Marc Ambinder, notes: "Mehlman is the most powerful Republican in history to identify as gay." Soon he's going to participate in a fundraiser for the organization that hired the lawyers for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit challenging California's Proposition 8 (i.e., the pro same-sex marriage side).

Bill Maher outed him on TV back in 2006 in an interview with Larry King. (That part of the interview was later excised, but it lives on thanks to YouTube.) I generally don't approve of this kind of outing -- I think it's counterproductive and hypocritical. But I also find it hard not to take some glee in the spectacle.

Maher added a devastating insight:

It's so ironic: Republicans, the anti-abortion party, always trying to kill something inside of themselves.

2. Of course, this is the ultimate self-hating politician.

The paternalistic-liberal gender double standard

I'm still in the middle of blogging Robert Wright's book The Moral Animal, but meanwhile, I have something to say about something he said in his latest diavlog with Mickey Kaus.

You can watch it here, or scroll down for the transcript:

Wright: There's any number of sentences you can begin with, "The trouble with men is...," and it's a little dicier, at least certainly in liberal circles, to begin with, "The trouble with women is..." And that's fine, I mean —

Kaus: You mean that in your PC, academic world, it's OK to do that. I'm saying: do you endorse this double standard?

Wright: Actually, I think it has a certain logic: that historically aggrieved and disempowered groups get a little more protection on the taboo front than historically empowered and privileged groups. Yeah, I actually kind of see that. Yeah.

Wright has illustrated this principle in the past by talking about "male answer syndrome" — "the tendency of men to assert things with great conviction when they have no idea what they're talking about." (The reference is about 1 minute into this clip; I've excerpted the rest just for context and because it happens to be an interesting discussion about suspected-terrorist detainees that has nothing to do with this blog post.)

I agree that men do this ... but so do women. Last year I was in a restaurant in Ithaca, NY, and a waitress was talking with a male customer who asked about another restaurant across the street with a sign that said "WINE AND TAPAS BAR." He wanted to know what "tapas" meant. She confidently replied, "Oh, that means they have wine and also beer on tap."

But unfortunately, you can often get more traction for your ideas by framing them as "I hate when men do this," rather than, "I hate when people do this." At least in the liberal enclaves of America in which I've spent most of my life, there's this unwritten rule that you can score social points by broadly ridiculing men, but you'd better not make any negative generalizations about women or you'll be ostracized. Few things are more disingenuous than men who do this men-are-terrible routine. (I remember Michael Moore doing this vehemently on Bill Maher's old show Politically Incorrect, for instance. If I recall correctly, Maher didn't let him get away with it.)

Back to Wright's rationale that we need to be extra cautious in judging women but we're allowed to freely criticize men. This baffles me. First of all, the fact that he would go out of his way to state this principle implies that he actually does have a bunch of not-so-flattering generalizations of women in his head -- he's just not going to say them out loud. Now, what exactly is the point of this? To protect people's feelings? Or, more precisely, to protect women's feelings? Why is that? Because they're, what, "the weaker sex"? And that's supposed to be the enlightened, feminist view?

To be clear, I'm not saying we should have carte blanche to throw around blatant stereotypes. But if we need to be hyper-cautious when doing it about women, then we should be equally cautious with men. The "Which gender has been the most disadvantaged?" standard is just irrelevant. The fact that your group has been disadvantaged or advantaged doesn't automatically make generalizations about that group any more or less valid.

And another thing — I've been presupposing that Wright is right that women are the ones who are disadvantaged while men are the ones who are advantaged. But it's not obvious to me that that's true. Both genders face huge and distinct disadvantages. I'd be hard-pressed to say whether it's more unfortunate to be a man or a woman. [UPDATE: See this later post for much more on this question.]

As a thought-experiment, you could imagine -- apologies to John Rawls and his veil of ignorance -- that you haven't been born yet and you get to choose which gender you want to live your life as. You get to be fully informed about what the world is like, but all you know about your future life is that you'll be a human being growing up in the United States. (Significantly, you don't know your race or sexual orientation.) Which gender would you choose to be? I think some people would choose to be a man, and others would choose to be a woman, and it's far from obvious what the wiser choice would be.

One last problem with Wright's double standard is that he wrote an influential book arguing that you can take your intuitive, common-sense gender stereotypes and use those as a starting point for genuine insights about human nature based on evolutionary psychology.* He published this book in 1994 to great acclaim and is only now, in 2008, announcing that he favors a policy of deliberately skewing gender generalizations in one specific direction (pro-woman, anti-man). Now, normally I wouldn't particularly care that some author has a bias against stating generalizations about women -- everyone has their biases, and most people have a bunch of sexist views. But Wright decided to build up an extended argument for a scientific theory on these generalizations! Of all people, I would have thought he would be willing to sacrifice political correctness for the sake of empirical accuracy.


* I don't know if he says this quite so explicitly in the book. He certainly backs up the generalizations with empirical research. But there's no denying, based on his examples, that he thinks it's legitimate to go from (a) off-hand observations of men vs. women in everyday life to (b) scientific claims that are, as he might put it, asserted with great conviction.