I thought Dan Larison was a sheep rancher!

Eh. Is it hypocritical that Deneen isn't a gentleman farmer of outer County Bergen, forking hay bales in a green waistcoat? Or that Larison isn't running a grass-fed sheep ranch up on Detrás Rota Montaña in New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo? Maybe. But no more hypocritical than chickenhawk neocons who can't even be bothered to sign up for the National Guard, or white boy liberals like Yglesias thinking that NBA fanaticism endears them to the black lumpenproletariat. As Michael Corleone told Senator Geary, "we're all part of the same hypocrisy".

Who knows? Maybe in a year or so, or less, after Belo has a fourth-straight disaster of a quarter, and his boss at the DMN has called him into the office while saying "close the door behind you", we'll hear that Rod is now freelancing, and has also started up a neat little craft brewery in St. Francisville with some seed money. Will it change his brand of opinion? Probably not. Will it change our measured attitude to it? Again, likely not. Whether or not it is written from a big-city newsroom or his own version of Weyanoke, his opinion pieces either stand up or they don't.

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More on Affirmative Action

Laughably idiotic comment: "In the private sector, affirmative action is strictly voluntary and not imposed by government but instead by the market. It rarely involves mandates."

Perhaps you'd like to learn about this little externality called "threat of litigation"...

Yeah, private AA is driven by market concerns. Sure. That's why foreign firms in Asia are falling over themselves trying to recruit American minorities to their senior management echelons.

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K Street on the Obama Youth and the "Power of Change"

Larry Parker writes: "And, with classic irony, while talk of boxcars to Mexico rages on talk radio, the people who WILL get to see a truly multiracial America (those your and my age and younger, Rod) generally -- generally -- welcome it. Why do you think Barack Obama's campaign is so fueled by young voters?"

Um, because he is a blank slate onto which they (and you) can project your fantasies? African Americans can see an Obama win as a victory over whitey, while young whites like yourself (oh, sorry, forgot your grandmother, who I'm sure thought of herself as full-blooded Cherokee) can simultaneously think an Obama win will cause crime rates, and demands for quotas and set-asides, to plummet, as the entire black community becomes like the Cosby family on TV. Overnight! Just like how the Muslims will suddenly love us because Obama's grandmother lived in a mud shack. That's the power of Change!

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Cheering Rod Dreher's Decreasing Interest in Clerical Homosexuality

Like the others I have to offer Rod sincere congratulations on a successful blog. I agree that Rod seems mellower these days, less angry--I think we've only had two or three posts on gay priests out of hundreds so far in the still-young 2008, whereas if you went back to the archives about this time in 2006 or last year, clerical homosexuality was to this blog what Hitler is to the History Channel.

I hope the election, as it unfolds today and till November, doesn't unhinge him--but I have my fears. In a way the failure of the Huckabee campaign to put up numbers has sort of called Rod's bluff: that he as a pundit can identify (if not claim to actually speak for) this vast electoral longing for socially conservative economic interventionism that is just aching for a leader to come claim the prize. If I had a dime for every time Rod used the phrase "sweet spot" to describe the Huckster's voting demographic, I'd owe millions to the IRS in additional taxes to pay for new middle-class subsidies. But fortunately that electorate is mostly in Rod's head. Even then, as a inner myth it pales next to other pundits' delusions, like Daniel "Americans crave to be more regimented into social hierarchies" Larison, or Frank "the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands if we only elect Obama" Schaeffer.

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Larison Converted to Islam?

[Ed. note: This is a fascinating post to me because The Man from K Street had either read this or had put the pieces together regading Larison and Islam. The earlier comment he made to Dreher's blog was deleted, but Silicon Valley Steve preserved it and re-posted it in my blog on June 6, 2007. MfKS's comment was dated April 16, 2007:

I make no secret of my opinion of Larison. I think he's one of many C-list academic paleocons I've known: angry, pedantic, as terrified of female sexuality as any Wahabbi imam, self-important, and waiting for a societal collapse that will never happen. In five years he'll be an untenured hanger-on at some jerkwater college, a perpetual bachelor, and no one will give two seconds to his ramblings online or off.

His blog helps me see neo-Agrarianism/"Cruchiness" as the ideology of the loser. But your posts of the past couple days make it look like the creed of the coward as well. I'd love to be moved away from that sense, but the fact that I fully expect you to delete this post only underscores that.]

First Comment

If you are ~18, hopelessly nerdy, internally conflicted about yourself, looking for history's "strong horse", and terrified by female sexuality (or at least by even the subtle expression of it), Islam offers a welcome prospect of certainty and reassurance, and a worldview that nicely dovetails with your inner angst. In western nations, this means conversion to a 'restrained' sort of Sunni (or better yet, Sufi) profession of the kind that we *want* most born Muslims in the West to adhere to. See Larison and Stephen Schwartz for examples of this. The problem of course is that in societies that are already Muslim, only radical Islam offers the kind of counter-cultural refuge that certain uncertain young men seek.

Posted by: The Man From K Street January 24, 2008 6:21 PM

Second Comment

I admire them, very much. I could never embrace their way, being a staunch Trinitarian. But I prefer their company and conversation to that of any denizen of Wall or K street, any day. Austerity's forever preferable to vapidity, after all.

This reminds me of another more-papal-than-the-pope paleocon, Lawrence Auster, who was scandalized at the anti-Syrian demonstrations in Lebanon in 2005...because sexy! Arab women! with boobs! were so prominent in them. Such decadence that he could come to sympathize with the Hezbollah POV against our western depravity.

But it's an old meme. There is a persistent topos in Islamic writing about the West regarding the babeliciousness of our self-reliant devil-whores, dating back to at least Crusader times.

Posted by: The Man From K Street January 24, 2008 10:01 PM

Third Comment

Sometimes I really wonder if Rod and other comboxers here have actually read Qutb, rather than read second-hand what others say he wrote. There's a nice excerpt of The America Which I Saw (Amrika Min Al Dakhil) in From the Outer World, Harvard University Press.

There is a lot about materialism, violence, attitudes towards death, lack of the spiritual in American churches, lack of art, lack of taste in food and clothing...say, does this sound at all familiar? Half the time he reads like a chapter from Crunchy Cons (the book, not the blog)!

But not really a whole lot about sex--that vice was far down his list. Some obvious misreadings -- you really have to wonder how anyone living in small town Colorado in 1950 could deduce that homosexuality was about to subvert the Western world -- and there is one sentence where it's obvious that he spent a little too much time studying the female student body: "in the glances of their eyes, their thirsty lips and bodies, the swelling breast, the plump thigh, the fat posterior, the smooth leg left entirely unconcealed." Although it should be pointed out that Qutb never married, and there is a school of thought that believes he was homosexual in orientation if not in practice (not that Islam is all that persnickety about the distinction).

But mainly, Qutb's work on us is about how materialistic and shallow and uncultured Americans are. I have no trouble believing that Larison and other, ahem, genius/freaks, could find in it, and much else besides in Islamic literature, ideas to confirm their inner convictions.

Posted by: The Man From K Street January 25, 2008 7:58 AM

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On Ron Paul Paleo Support

Cry not for Larison. Behind many a paleo's affected Tory elevated sentiments, there are a lot of dark, pug-ugly psychoses lurking about. Sooner or later they slip up, like Sam Francis or Joe Sobran, and let them break through to the surface. The greater frequency of blogging as opposed to print journalism means this can be expected to happen earlier in a career rather than hidden for decades, since there are more opportunities for 'inadvertent honesty'...

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The first chill wind interrupting the fun

Rod Dreher: "Bottom line: the Louisiana vote was about Louisiana, not national politics."

Perhaps. And that is certainly the way things might look from the DMN newsroom. Among professional Democrats around K Street, though, the Jindal win, combined with Niki Tsongas barely squeaking by in the special election for a supposedly "safe" House seat in Massachusetts and the fact that, damn it, things are going better in Iraq, are creating the first chill wind interrupting the fun. There is no panic yet, but certainly there is a growing realization that 2008 is by no means going to be the slam-dunk that they thought it would be as late as a month ago.

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As with everything, caveat emptor.

Neither the MSNBC piece's author, nor any of the commenters so far, has been able to mention the 800 lb. gorilla in the room: a sizable number of those workmen who provided the labor army to construct the McMansions now falling apart were illegal aliens. Ask a contractor you trust to be honest about it and you'll hear about how, in the rush to cut costs and get these new developments up and running in double-quick time, they resorted to hiring Guatemalan and Mexican peasants who knew as much going into the job about putting up drywall or laying down floors as Lindsay Lohan. Some of them perhaps got enough on the job experience to have eventually learned, so if you are considering buying one of these places in "Chesterfield Oaks" or somesuch, snap up one of the last ones completed, not the initial models. But the contractors who've spoken have said in most cases, the seasonal labor employed to build the various Tollbrothersburgs were finally paid off only marginally more skilled than when they started. As with everything, caveat emptor.

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Isn't it obvious?

Isn't it obvious? Ross has carefully crafted his comments on l'affaire Beauchamps because he's gunning for the TNR editorship after they can Foer. He can't afford to bash that rag too much, and yet can't very well look to be leaping to Foer's defense if he has any hope of being brought in to be the housecleaning white knight in the wake of the scandal.

Ross would be perfect: he's young (the average age of a new TNR editor-in-chief has been around 29 or 30 for some time now), he's been very adeptly playing the role of The Thoughtful Conservative Who Badly Wants To Be Liked By Liberals (a schtick pioneered by David Brooks and Christopher Caldwell), and he's ready for a promotion.

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Changes to the American Language

Let me put the question to the room: How do you think the Iraq War experience will change the American language?

"Redeploy" has already become a euphemism for "retreat"

"I support the troops" now is code for "I don't support the mission"

"Meatgrinder" now refers to four-year campaigns with under 10% of the Allied casualty total of one Western Front battle (Passchendaele), with consequent adjustment in western resolve levels.

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