Madeleine L’Engle wrote
A Wrinkle in Time in 1962, but this week we got a glimpse at pages that weren't included in the published work.
In it, Meg has just made a narrow escape from Camazotz. As Meg’s father massages her limbs, which are frozen from a jarring trip through space and time, she asks: “But Father, how did the Black Thing—how did it capture Camazotz?” Her father proceeds to lay out the political philosophy behind the book in much starker terms than are apparent in the final version.
He says that yes, totalitarianism can lead to this kind of evil. (The author calls out examples by name, including Hitler, Mussolini and Khrushchev.) But it can also happen in a democracy that places too much value on security, Mr. Murry says. “Security is a most seductive thing,” he tells his daughter. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the greatest evil there is.”
Amen, Mr. Murry. The most dangerous idea that has surfaced in America is that the government's primary purpose is to protect the public. It's not. It never was. One small bit more from L’Engle.
Our country has been greatest, when it has been most insecure.
The purpose of government is to secure
our rights and anyone who starts down the "you don't have any rights if you're dead" road, is announcing quite clearly that they are using fear to take your rights away.
Okay, so I've wandered a bit off the pundit trail this morning, but don't worry. Real live pundits await your astonished gaze, just step right inside this squiggly thing...
Zeynep Tufekci reminds us of something that we better address Real Damn Fast.
Yes, the machines are getting smarter, and they’re coming for more and more jobs.
Not just low-wage jobs, either. ...
Machines are getting better than humans at figuring out who to hire, who’s in a mood to pay a little more for that sweater, and who needs a coupon to nudge them toward a sale. In applications around the world, software is being used to predict whether people are lying, how they feel and whom they’ll vote for.
... computers do not just replace humans in the workplace. They shift the balance of power even more in favor of employers. Our normal response to technological innovation that threatens jobs is to encourage workers to acquire more skills, or to trust that the nuances of the human mind or human attention will always be superior in crucial ways. But when machines of this capacity enter the equation, employers have even more leverage, and our standard response is not sufficient for the looming crisis.
At the same time we've been building a set of tax laws and corporate rules that allow those on top to lap the rest of us again and again, they've also acquired technological tools that have steadily degraded the value of workers in maintaining their high castles. Neither capitalism, or democracy, or our concept of Western Civilization can long survive a continuation of these trends.
Dana Milbank looks at the greatest divide in America.
Up until the mid-1980s, the typical American held the view that partisans on the other side operated with good intentions. But that has changed in dramatic fashion, as a study published last year by Stanford and Princeton researchers demonstrates.
It has long been agreed that race is the deepest divide in American society. But that is no longer true, say Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, the academics who led the study. Using a variety of social science methods (for example, having study participants review résumés of people that make both their race and party affiliation clear), they document that “the level of partisan animus in the American public exceeds racial hostility.”
Americans now discriminate more on the basis of party than on race, gender or any of the other divides we typically think of — and that discrimination extends beyond politics into personal relationships and non-political behaviors. Americans increasingly live in neighborhoods with like-minded partisans, marry fellow partisans and disapprove of their children marrying mates from the other party, and they are more likely to choose partners based on partisanship than physical or personality attributes.
Not coincidentally, the 1980s was when one of the parties began a multi-cycle program of demonizing the other—literally positioning itself as the party of God and country while suggesting that opponents were not opponents of their policy, but traitors and heretics. Give that a few decades, and it's hard to treat your opponents as if politics is an intramural sport.
Ruth Marcus views the last week as a sign that Congress is getting... better.
The past week has witnessed several developments — on the Iran nuclear agreement, Medicare reimbursement rates and fast-track trade authority — that offer grounds for, if not irrational exuberance, then tempered optimism.
Bite down on something. She's going to tell you about these good things.
The Iran measure, culminating in a unanimous vote by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on a framework for reviewing the nuclear deal, reflected the confluence of two forces: the bipartisan congressional interest in asserting its authority against the executive branch, combined with the impact of individual lawmakers committed to negotiating over grandstanding.
Good thing #1: Congress is united in believing that they are smarter than the president and that they enjoy listening to themselves talk.
Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee, working with House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, agreed on a mechanism to provide President Obama with fast-track authority to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Another good thing, Congress is still in a rush when it comes to believing free trade fairy tales no matter how many examples of past disaster drop on their desks. And that's the good news.
Kathleen Parker calls for a national "Powder Room Initiative" so women can hash out what's important. By which she means...
Last year, while appearing on a panel with two men and speaking to a Republican audience of mostly men, I suggested that the GOP divest itself of its pro-life platform — not to sacrifice principle but to broaden its appeal to women and perhaps as part of reimagining the issue. As far as I could tell, every woman in the room applauded; virtually none of the men did.
The truth is, the “war on women” has become an internecine battle among women, which I’ll concede takes testicles to say. But there’s another way, and women have to find it together. Maybe Clinton can take the lead? We could call it “The Powder Room Initiative: Women with Women for All Women.”
See, Republicans don't need to stop wanting control over women's reproduction, they just need to
stop talking about it, and if Democratic women would agree to ignore the fact that Republicans still want to pass laws that shape their lives, then Democratic women and Republican women can all sit down together and... powder?
Rosa Brooks provides a reminder I wish was in the news every day.
It is dangerous to underestimate your enemies — or overestimate them. The United States has an uncanny knack for doing both, often at the same time.
Take the self-proclaimed Islamic State. ... former defense secretary Chuck Hagel insists that the Islamic State is an “imminent threat to every interest we have,” Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) says the group is “a clear and present danger” and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) urges the president to deploy U.S. ground troops to fight the extremists in Iraq and Syria “before we all get killed here at home.”
... while the group’s “military successes are formidable,” it is not “an existential threat to any Western country.”
ISIS has no air force. No navy. It has a handful of armored vehicles, scavenged from those left behind by other groups. It has about as 1/5 the number of fighters that the Marines have at Camp Lejune alone, only the ISIS fighters are much, much more poorly trained and equipped. They have no manufacturing base, very limited prospects for growth, and are not a threat to the United States, dammit.
Richard Morgan on future food. Or rather, not future food.
For all its cross-cultural and technological prescience, “Star Trek”... was absolutely awful when it came to food. Captain Jean-Luc Picard had the galaxy’s cookbook at his fingertips, and what was his favorite order? “Tea, Earl Grey, hot.” No disrespect to the earl, but none of those “strange new worlds” with “new life and new civilizations” made a better drink? “Voyager,” the Star Trek franchise set on a ship stranded 70,000 light-years from Earth, was also the television series set furthest in the future — in the 2370s. But nearly every year of the show’s run, the crew burned (or vaporized) a pot roast in their mission to boldly eat what everyone has eaten before. I don’t know what humans or Vulcans or Klingons will be eating on starships in 350 years, but I’d wager against pot roast. ...
Ask a chef or a foodie about cuisine in 2050 or 2100, and they might delight you with weird tales of molecular gastronomy in the manner of Wylie Dufresne’s WD~50 or René Redzepi’s Noma; dystopian warnings about Soylent, a food-replacement smoothie now in vogue in Silicon Valley; or jokes about Brawndo, the sports drink used to irrigate crops in the 2006 film “Idiocracy.”
I have to confess that I read this one expressly because for the last two weeks I
have been eating Soylent. Though truthfully, you don't eat the stuff. You drink it. It kind of has the texture (and taste) of thin pancake batter. Bland. Very slightly sweet. No strong flavor of anything in particular. So it's strange that I now find myself kind of missing the stuff when I sit down to eat a normal meal.
Leonard Pitts on the NRA and the "new normal."
Maybe, conservatives are done with dog-whistle politics.
After all, NRA chief Wayne LaPierre traded his dog whistle for an air horn at a recent gathering of the gun faithful in Washington, D.C. “I have to tell you,” he said, “eight years of one demographically symbolic president is enough.”
Subtle, it was not.
Still, as insults go, it was a rather neatly crafted two-fer. On the one hand, it demeaned the nation’s first African-American president and welcomed the day the White House is, well...de-Negro-fied. On the other hand, it also demeaned the candidate seeking to become the nation’s first female-American president and promised to save the White House from, well...woman-ification. Evidently, LaPierre wants America to get back to normal, “normal” being defined as when the president is white and male.
There may be some character I'd like to see shuffle off the national stage more than Wayne LaPierre, but I'd have to think hard to figure out who it would be.