I suppose I’m behind the news as I started the skeleton of this post some days ago but was too lazy to do any writing until now. At any rate, Andrew Sullivan decided to highlight a particularly annoying email from a reader insulting them dumb Christianists in order to explain the appeal of Sarah Palin. As readers know, I’m a godless infidel. I have never thought highly of Palin either. I regard McCain’s choice of her in petulant response to his advisors putting the kibosh on his first choice (Lieberman) as emblematic of his reckless disregard for his party or country, which is the same trait that exhibited throughout his career won him admiration as a “maverick” among the pundit class. So I’m writing this just because it was among the more egregious examples of politics-as-mind-killer.
The example of the molesting minister doesn’t even succeed on its own merits as stereotype. It is Catholic priests who have gotten the attention, not fundamentalists. Having been a former ultracalvinist I remember having great disdain for Catholics due to their lax attention to the Bible in favor of the tradition & dogma handed down by experts from the Church. Presumably the reader just has a low opinion of religion in general and had little problem tarring one variety with the sins of another. How do Protestant clergy compare to Catholics in rates of abuse? Hard to say, there isn’t much data to go on. It’s quite possible that the abuse rate is higher among public school teachers, so sending your kid to a private religious school would actually be safer. Finally, the thesis of the reader isn’t that fundamentalists are merely ignorant and impervious to evidence, but that they are actually seeking out the most audacious liars so that the self-deceiving double-think essential for them will be safe from reveal. The idea that parents of molested children are actually aware of what’s going on is new to me and rather sick.
Maybe the ministers aren’t molesting kids. Maybe they’ve internalized the frigid puritanism that prevents fundamentalists from having even a healthy sex-life, resulting in “foundering” marriages among the faithful. Another beautiful stereotype murdered by a gang of ugly facts. Conservative protestant women have the most orgasms, Catholics & mainline Protestants in between and those with no religious affiliation the least. Married women with feminist ideals are also less happy than their traditionalist counterparts. Arthur Brooks wrote a book on the relationship between happiness and (among other things) religiosity. Perhaps it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig in blissful ignorance. As a wise drunk once remarked, the only one who is truly happy is the village idiot. Feel free to be against happiness, but it’s hard to use it as a stick against fundamentalists.
Why did Andrew hold this email up to the world? He has a problem with “Christianists” generally and Palin in particular. That’s why he’s been promoting Palin conspiracy theories, though I suppose in a rather Cal Thomas sort of why. John Schwenkler put Sullivan and the “birfers” in their place here (and some other places). Chip Smith is invited to defend birferism, which is totally unlike being a “truther” but like being a holocaust revisionist (in a good way!) as he sees it.
On a final (hopefully for the rest of my life) Palin-related note, I engaged in some Szaszian mocking of the DSM and the armchair psychoanalysts of the former vice-presidental hopeful here.
Entitled to an Opinion 
July 6, 2009 at 8:40 pm
You mean hypercalvinist right? Is there a difference?
July 6, 2009 at 10:31 pm
I hadn’t heard the term “hypercalvinist” before. Sounds like either sci-fi or too much sugar.
July 7, 2009 at 1:22 am
What of kind of ultracalvinist were you? I’m just curious because I went to an OPC church when I was a kid that eventually became affiliated with Rushdooney’s Reconstructionism. So I used to be an ultracalvinist as well, though I was done with all that by the time I was about fifteen.
July 7, 2009 at 6:02 pm
I was actually raised a mainline protestant. Because nerds are nuts, I independently arrived at something much like Fred Phelps, with a conception of God that resembled H. P. Lovecraft’s Azathoth.
Isn’t Gary North a follower of Rushdooney?
July 8, 2009 at 1:32 am
Gary North’s wife is Rushdooney’s daughter, though the two had a big falling out at one point. Don’t know if they ever reconciled before Rushdooney’s death.
Gary North was a big celebrity in the church I grew up in back in the 70s. His early books were on sale every week at a table in the back of the church.
Fred Phelps? I knew a number of those kind at one point, lunatics who shared his obsessive hatred of gays.
July 8, 2009 at 9:45 pm
I didn’t share Phelps’ enthusiasm for particular obsessions, but the theology I adopted was basically the same as what he promotes. One of my favorite Phelps quotes is “God doesn’t hate them because they’re fags. They’re fags because God hates them”. Now THAT’S some extreme calvinism!
July 6, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Out of curiosity, do you happen to know why anyone gives a fuck what Sullivan has to say? Has he said anything in the last, say, 5 years or so that hasn’t been completely retarded?
July 6, 2009 at 10:33 pm
I wasn’t reading him back when he made an ass of himself boosting the Iraq war, but he still seems today to display the same lack of critical thinking towards whatever topic he gets fixated on (and isn’t he supposed to be a booster of the “conservatism of doubt”?). I only started reading him recently due to Iran. I shared Larison’s opinion of his editorializing, but I’m still impressed by his output.
July 7, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Steve Sailer used to half-seriously attribute Sullivan’s “excitability” to the influence of prescription testosterone. Might be something to it. You follow his spot with half an eye, and there does appear to be a manic trajectory to his obsessions. You can tell when he hits the wall, because that’s when the guest-bloggers step in.
All I know is that when Sully gets key-happy, odds are good we’re in the midst of a political fad.
July 7, 2009 at 6:03 pm
I thought Sailer was more than half serious and find that plausible. I don’t know what Sully sounded like before he started his injections though.
July 7, 2009 at 12:59 am
I always thought Sullivan was stupid and boring but his crappy blog seems to have slipped several notches – he calls the “Ace of Spades” blog “neo-fascist”, which is a flat-out lie.
July 7, 2009 at 6:04 pm
I’m not too familiar with Ace of Spades, but considering how dated fascism is and how popular it has been to use it as a label against all politics people dislike going back to Orwell, I find what you say plausible.
July 7, 2009 at 11:14 am
I enjoyed the comment you left Szasz.
However, my personal favorite of yours is the comment you left in response to a troll on n/a’s blog. The troll didn’t seem to appreciate the topics on the blog and wondered whether interested readers “had a life”. I about fell out of the chair laughing when you implied in your response that it was, of course, a waste of time for those readers (trolls) who were not even interested in the content of the blog.
Your answer was priceless.
July 7, 2009 at 6:11 pm
It was actually
Adam MarxKarl Smith. It would be pretty cool if Szasz himself maintained a blog. Also, the sausage-making behind the DSM I alluded to there has yet to end.The relevant thread at race/history/evolution notes is here. Somebody had been trolling in a similar matter for a while before then, but I can’t recall if there was more after that.
July 7, 2009 at 11:46 am
Great post. I hope to comment on the substance later. BUT…
Since you mentioned it, I’m not really inclined to go too far in defending “birferism.” I think the situation where a mother raises a young unmarried daughter’s child as her own is common enough in our culture,* and to my mind, Audrey’s coverage at PD makes a strong and sober case that that’s probably what happened here. Ho-hum and we shall see. My suspicion could be handily disabused by just a few points of evidence.
I hope I’m not wrong to take your comment re revisionism/birferism/trutherism as as tongue-in-cheek or mildly sarcastic. But for what it’s worth, here’s how I would break it down:
Troof is classic CT. In the book, “Voodoo Histories,” David Aaronovitch usefully explains the paranoid style as being characterized by the “attribution of deliberate agency to something that is more likely to be accidental or unintended.” The shoe fits. Capital “C” Conspiracy Theory thrives on forces that remain cozily hidden; when machinations trace to some never-to-be-revealed Lovecraftian goblinbeast, true believers just widen the lens to account for contrary evidence. Just ask a typical Truther: what order of evidence would convince you that you are mistaken? Then watch when the challenge is met. For the most part, 9/11 conspiracists are simply stalking a new version of an old nighmare.
It really is different with the “Birferist” thing. If Audrey’s speculation should be vindicated (and I’m willing to bet that it will — probably this year), it would simply be another example of how small-scale conspiracies and cover-ups can sometimes be true, especially when journalists neglect to ask relevant questions out of some careerist fear of being associated with the political fringe. If the Palin-maternity skeptics are refuted — and they could easily be refuted — then I’ll have a laugh and change channels.
As for HR, I think the commonplace association with CT is profoundly ironic since the received history (concerning mass gassings and a program of systematic extermination) is itself presented by historians as a tale of far-reaching conspiracy replete with code words, secret orders, selectively destroyed evidence and the like. Stepping back from Dawidowicz’s decodings, Hilberg’s “gestalt,” and Pressac’s “traces,” I would even argue that the “canonical” Holocaust meets Aaronovitch’s above criteria as an instance of “attribution of deliberate agency to something that is more likely to be accidental or unintended.” Cultural repitition lends the dominant narrative an air of seldom-examined credibility, but in my view the serious revisionist critique (stress on “serious” — I know there are a lot of idiots in the swamp) more accurately offers a counter-narrative against popular — and conspiratorial — assumptions. Again, I could give you specific examples of the kind of evidence that would convince me that a gas-exterminations really were carried out as part of a genocidal program. But ask a typical gas-chamber believer: what order of evidence would convince you that you are mistaken?
*My wife is nearly convinced that my estranged sister is actually my biological mother. There is circumstantial evidence, and I have to admit it is possible.
July 7, 2009 at 6:25 pm
You’re right that the “sister”-is-really-mother scenario isn’t too outlandish. That was the case for Bobby Darin. However, not only did we find that Bristol was pregnant, but she gave birth to an entirely different kid. That Sarah’s kid has Downs is an extra bit of confirming evidence that the mother is relatively long in the tooth.
Did you read Schwenkler’s post? What do you think of the Obama birfers?
You are so right about the standard Holocaust story that there’s even a movie about the Wannsee conference titled “Conspiracy”. I forget if you’ve written about it before, but what is you’re view of that conference? In defense of mainstream Holocaustory, there is a spectrum of conspiracy along the intentionalist-functionalist axis.
Usually the word “estranged” is applied to couples. Given the frequency with which adopted children and their parents try to find each other again, if your sister is content with estrangement it should be evidence she’s not actually your mother. Have you thought about getting a DNA test to settle matters?
July 27, 2009 at 12:35 am
>>”Since you mentioned it, I’m not really inclined to go too far in defending “birferism.””
He said, before writing two long rambling posts defending birferism and citing birferist sites. I’d hate to see what you regard as going “too far”.
July 7, 2009 at 9:24 pm
However, not only did we find that Bristol was pregnant, but she gave birth to an entirely different kid.
Yeah, you follow the story closely enough (and it’s sort of sad that I do) and you understand that this doesn’t mean much. The timeline just isn’t as tight as people assume.
Besides, the only thing I would bet on is that SP isn’t Trigg’s natural mommy. I think it’s most likely that he’s Bristol’s kid, but there are other possibilities.
Several lines of evidence inform my general skepticism. There are photographic inconsistencies that are all but impossible to explain; there is the complete lack of hospital and medical records coupled with that truly bizarre non-statement issued by SP’s Ob-gyn; there is Bristol’s conspicuous absence from school during key periods; and there is SP’s insane account of taking a long transited flight from Texas to Alaska after her amniotic fluid began leaking during a speech. No responsible mother would have taken such a risk (not to mention the possibility of grave public embarrassment — without an enema, you’re likely to shit while giving birth). I think the only reason she even owned that story publicly was that her father innocently passed it on to the media, so she was stuck. At least that’s my hunch. You call ’em as you see ’em. Keeps life interesting.
That Sarah’s kid has Downs is an extra bit of confirming evidence that the mother is relatively long in the tooth.
This is the assumption people make but the numbers tell a different story. I recommend Audrey’s latest post, which goes over it in some detail.
To crib from my comment there,
according to 2006 CDC data linked in the Wikipedia article on DS, there are around 5429 DS births in a given year and 80% of such births are to mothers under the age of 35. That leaves roughly 1100 DS births for the 35-up group, but raw stats would decline with each successive year due to decreased fertility (with yet half a decade till 40). Once you get past the bias of focusing on individual age-relative risk (which you are not alone in seeing — incorrectly — as confirming evidence for Palin’s maternity), the actual incidence of DS births for the over-40 group might well be on par with the under 20 figure, which is around 300 per year. I don’t know for sure, but it might actually be lower.
I did read Schwenkler’s post. Thought it was flippant and ill-informed. The usual.
I haven’t looked into the Obama birfer stuff. Like most casual observers, I thought it was settled when I saw what appeared to be a birth certificate on Snopes. Now I understand that people are saying that’s not an original document. Maybe they know something. I couldn’t say. I suppose it never much interested me because John McCain definitely wasn’t born in the U.S. and there was always good reason to conclude that he was not a naturalized citizen as required by the Constitution. Not that it matters, but I wonder what percentage of Obama birfers would also agree with Chin’s argument re McCain’s disqualification for the office?
I’ve read the Wansee minutes and I think it’s all very ambiguous and certainly not a smoking gun. Here’s the CODOH “Answer Man” on the subject, if you’re interested.
It’s weird, but I’m not very interested in knowing whether my mother was really my biological mother. I never really doubted it until my wife started pointing out some odd facts that don’t add up neatly. Boring, personal stuff. I guess it would be neat to know, but I don’t lose sleep over it. Every family has its share of weird baggage, I suppose.
July 8, 2009 at 9:48 pm
I’d definitely want to know who my real parents were if I had any doubts. I don’t know of meeting them and trying to make up for lost time would be a big priority, but I’d definitely want the knowledge.
July 12, 2009 at 12:19 pm
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