The leftist thinker and essayist George Scialabba has some interesting things to say about modernity and the challenges of living within it. Excerpt:

TNI: What is the “philosophy of limits” and what do we have to learn from it? Where do liberals/radicals err in their disdain of conservativism? Conversely, where is there still too much piety among liberals? Any chance of concrete right-left alliances, or just fertile intellectual possibilities?

When the modern world was being born, the supposedly inescapable limitations of human nature was a conservative theme. Inherited traditional beliefs and forms of authority were held to be all that most people could understand or live by. To convince a wide public to reject these a priori limits and trust themselves morally and politically was the first, heroic task of Enlightenment intellectuals. Faith in progress was once a precondition of progress. It still is, to the extent that contemporary right-wing libertarianism insists that democratically controlled enterprises must always be less efficient than hierarchical ones like corporations.

But entwined with democratic self-confidence, there grew up a less reflective faith in unlimited material progress, based partly on a belief that human wants and needs would grow to match increases in productive capacity. This may have seemed plausible before the environmental limits to growth became obvious in the mid-twentieth century; but more important, it was also convenient for those who wished to deflect attention from the gradual and many-sided loss of autonomy that industrial mass production and bureaucratically organized medical/educational/psychotherapeutic expertise imposed on nearly everyone. As the state, the economy, and the institutions regulating everyday life all grew in scale, the only sphere of autonomy left to ordinary people was consumption. And so an entire ideology and technology of consumption arose, on the premise that happiness consisted primarily in consumption, which could apparently be increased without limit. And if that’s true, then our powerlessness doesn’t matter.

But it’s not true. Powerlessness and lack of autonomy do matter to our psychic health: they produce weak, immature selves and a culture of narcissism – the latter a psychoanalytic concept that has little to do with the popular notion of “narcissism” as mere self-absorption or self-importance. We can’t grow to psychic maturity through social relations on just any scale – they have to be on a scale that allows us at least a modest sense of mastery in work and community life and imposes personal, not purely impersonal, obligations. That scale may not be achievable in a mass society.

The people who understand this best at the moment seem to be conservatives of the “paleo” or religious variety, like those around The American Conservative, a very interesting (and quirky) magazine for which I’ve been writing occasionally in the past couple of years. But paleoconservatives often seem to think that the state is the primary agent of massification. Radicals know better (as Lasch did): the modern state is a creature of corporate capitalism, which can only be controlled through what Lasch called “completing the democratic revolution of the 18th century.”

Read the whole thing.  I don’t know how The Browser keeps finding gems like this, but they do, every day.

Doug LeBlanc sent me this. It makes me hot:

If you find yourself in Greensboro, NC, on Wednesday night and feeling a little randy, you are invited to visit a local titty bar to show your respect and love for Trayvon, and to proclaim your demand for justice. Just FYI.

So, now we learn from police and witnesses that Trayvon Martin broke George Zimmerman’s nose in the altercation that led to his shooting death. More from the Orlando Sentinel:

Zimmerman told [police]  he lost sight of Trayvon and was walking back to his SUV when Trayvon approached him from the left rear, and they exchanged words.

Trayvon asked Zimmerman if he had a problem. Zimmerman said no and reached for his cell phone, he told police. Trayvon then said, “Well, you do now” or something similar and punched Zimmerman in the nose, according to the account he gave police.

Zimmerman fell to the ground and Trayvon got on top of him and began slamming his head into the sidewalk, he told police.

Zimmerman began yelling for help.

Several witnesses heard those cries, and there has been a dispute about whether they came from Zimmerman or Trayvon.

Lawyers for Trayvon’s family say it was Trayvon, but police say their evidence indicates it was Zimmerman.

One witness, who has since talked to local television news reporters, told police he saw Zimmerman on the ground with Trayvon on top, pounding him — and was unequivocal that it was Zimmerman who was crying for help.

Zimmerman then shot Trayvon once in the chest at very close range, according to authorities.

When police arrived less than two minutes later, Zimmerman was bleeding from the nose, had a swollen lip and had bloody lacerations to the back of his head.

This information certainly futzes up the narrative. If things happened this way, given Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, it’s easy to see why police didn’t arrest Zimmerman. If you were Zimmerman, and a guy had pinned you down and was whaling away on your face, breaking your nose, wouldn’t you shoot him if you had a gun? I would. I don’t blame Trayvon Martin for feeling threatened by this creepy guy following him, and it seems to me that Zimmerman ought not to have been following him. This was a needless tragedy, with mistakes on both sides. My early assumption that there could be no explanation but racism for why cops didn’t charge Zimmerman appears to have been wrong.

Not that any of that matters now. The media narrative is set. We don’t even know for sure what happened yet, but Trayvon’s parents are headed to Capitol Hill today to appear at a Democratic event. Jesse Jackson says “the whole world is watching.” More news from yesterday’s Florida rally:

Anjail Madyun of Orlando wore a pink T-shirt that read, “It’s not a black or white thing. It’s a right or wrong thing.”

Madyun, 40, said that “until we get beyond black and white, we’ll have to come to events like this. Mothers will always be crying. Fathers will always be burying their sons.”

Re: the post “Race and the ‘Important Conversation’,” I just saw this report on the local Baton Rouge news:

Another video featuring the street life in Baton Rouge surfaced on the internet over the weekend. It claims to portray life in “Gardere.”

“This is a Glock,” a man in the video said. “I got 30 in this (expletive). I ain’t playing.”

The video shows several people flashing high-powered weapons.

“This here is a littly bitty (expletive). It’s a special-made Desert Eagle for (expletives).”

People who live in Gardere called the video disturbing.

“It’s scary, really scary and very frightening,” a Gardere resident said.

The video is similar to “Thuggin it and Lovin it.” That video was released nearly three years ago and claimed to showcase the streets of Baton Rouge. It showed people flashing guns, waving what appeared to be drugs and showing off cash. Law enforcement tracked down people in the video, but no arrests were made for the creation of it.

Below, the original “Thuggin It and Lovin It” video. The new clip shown on the news tonight is the same thing. According to the residents of this area interviewed by the news tonight — all of them black — these thug life videos accurately represent the culture of violence and menace that prevails in their neighborhood. They were complaining about it. It’s not a fantasy.

This stuff has to be part of the Important Conversation about race in America. Why is this stuff so valorized in black popular culture? I know white suburban kids listen to this stuff too. I think that’s wrong, of course; whatever your race, it’s depraved to take pleasure in this garbage. This is not a suburban white-boy fantasy; this is real life for the black people of that neighborhood who have to endure this stuff. What is it about black culture that generates, embraces and encourages this, though? What is it about white culture that embraces it? It’s poison.

Mother exploits dead son:

The mother of Trayvon Martin has filed two applications to secure trademarks containing her late son’s name, records show.

Sabrina Fulton is seeking marks for the phrases “I Am Trayvon”and “Justice for Trayvon,”according to filings made last week with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. In both instances, Fulton is seeking the trademarks for use on “Digital materials, namely, CDs and DVDs featuring Trayvon Martin,” and other products.

The March 21 USPTO applications, each of which cost $325, were filed by an Orlando, Florida law firm representing Fulton.

Disgusting. The poor kid has been in the ground not even a month, and his mother is trademarking his name for commercial use. Enjoy your profits, ma’am, and your time with your new BFFs, professional race hustlers Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. You have just alienated a lot of sympathetic people.

UPDATE: What do you know, I’m watching ABC News, and masses of people marching in Sanford, Fla., many of them wearing t-shirts and carrying signs saying, “I Am Trayvon” and “Justice for Trayvon.” Hmm. Is she trying to protect her son’s reputation from hustlers, or exploit his name and the controversy? The trademark application indicates an intention to commercially use the name, but only in DVDs, audio, and video. Not apparel. What’s going on here?

UPDATE.2: This, of course, has nothing at all to do with whether or not Trayvon Martin was murdered by George Zimmerman. Just to make that clear.

UPDATE.3: A commenter says, so what, doesn’t Martin Luther King Jr.’s family do the same thing? Yeah, they do. How’s that look? From Black America Web:

Some children inherit global companies, real estate developments, or millions of dollars worth of stock when a parent dies. The children of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have inherited something that may prove to be more valuable: The rights to their father’s “intellectual property,” his speeches in written and audio form and the use of his image.

The King children are known as aggressive managers of their father’s intellectual property. In legal terms, “intellectual property” means basically, products of human intelligence and creativity. In the case of King, this includes the use of his words in written and audio format.

The Martin Luther King Memorial Foundation was forced to halt fundraising for the new monument because an organization operated by the Kings demanded a licensing fee to use Dr. King’s name and likeness in marketing campaigns. Eventually, the foundation paid the organization an $800,000 licensing fee. The King estate released a statement saying the licensing agreement benefited the King Center, not the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s heirs.

Although they have the legal right to their father’s intellectual property, some cultural analysts, historians and legal experts have criticized the King children for the choices they have made in selling the use of their father’s words and likeness.

Keep it classy, King family!

UPDATE.4: A reader points out that the King family just took a black Mississippi TV anchor to court to try to recover papers that the man’s mother, who had been a secretary to Dr. King, had in her possession. The judge threw the lawsuit against Howard Ballou out the other day. More:

“I’m very pleased that the judge saw how incredibly frivolous and ridiculous this lawsuit was. My mother and father and Dr. and Mrs. King were very, very close friends, and I resent how the estate tried to, for lack of a better term, besmirch my mother’s character,” Ballou said Friday. “She risked her life like so many others so we could have the rights we have today. It saddens me that one of America’s greatest heroes, my personal hero, Dr. Martin Luther King, is being tarnished by this type of behavior.”

UPDATE.5: Roberto writes:

With all due respect, Rod, you are on the verge of repeating your Aliyah mistake. I say “mistake” because you recently expressed regret for how you inserted yourself into someone else’s response to a loved one’s death.

You may want to consider the possibility that you are responding not-so-much to the family’s actions but to the presence of your old antagonists Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

Something to think about before you say something you may regret later.

A fair point, and I thank Roberto for making it. I was wrong to have written critically of the pop star’s funeral. It was disrespectful, cruel, and unnecessary. I apologized for it, and meant that apology. I think the difference here may be how quickly this Trayvon Martin thing is becoming a cultural event, and how people appear to be starting to benefit from the kid’s killing. I have said that it seems to me that George Zimmerman killed Martin without just cause, and the local authorities did a slipshod investigation. It seems likely that racism was involved here. I don’t know that for a fact, but the facts as we know them look bad. I am glad that the feds are now involved. You are right, Roberto, that I cannot stand seeing those race pimps Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton getting involved. They taint everything they touch. But their involvement does not change the fact that it looks like a great injustice was done to Trayvon Martin, and we need to get to the bottom of it. Still, it looks like the important and necessary cause of seeking justice for Martin — if indeed he was treated unjustly, as I believe he was — is already falling prey to low motives and exploitation. I reacted strongly to Trayvon’s mother trademarking her son’s name via that slogan because it appeared to me that she was trying to make a dime off his murder.

I could be wrong about this. If so, I will apologize for suspecting the worst from her. I am suspicious of the spectacle swirling around the Martin case, and how it makes it harder to get to the truth of what really happened, and what it means.

From an interesting interview with the British conservative commentator Charles Moore, in The European:

The European: You already mentioned the idea of shared assumptions. Could it be that neither the Left nor the Right know what assumptions to appeal to? Religion has lost its grip on public discourses, but the idea of social democracy has also been tarnished. If anything, there seems to be a broad consensus that political parties have disappointed the voters.
Moore: The success of a society depends on traditions that politicians can hardly change but easily harm. That has happened. The Right tended to win the economic arguments, and the Left tended to win the social arguments, even though they ran against established traditions. Indeed, there seems to be an unholy alliance between international greed and Leftist ideas about personal fulfillment and liberation. And here is the problem balancing tradition and change: As soon as you start to consider things as alright, you become negligent until they are not alright any longer. When people began to speak out against marital oppression, the reaction was a certain indifference to marriage. It turns out today that when fifty percent of the population are not married, a large majority will actually be married to the welfare state. Yet fifty years ago, it was assumed that the state did not have to advocate marriage, that churches and friends would help to raise children, et cetera.

The European: It seems to me that during the last decade, conservatives were particularly out of touch with public opinion on social and cultural issues. American conservatives now question the validity of science and evolution – as if the Republican party had been commandeered by the reckless and the clinically insane.

Moore: One thing that happens when things go wrong is that some people become too extreme in their reactions. On some issues that are discussed in the US, I take the conservative view. But I am surprised by how extreme the debates seem. I am opposed to gay marriage, but that issue will not dominate all my thinking. It is a pity that the question of abortion has become a shibboleth that decides everything. That kind of discussion is too polarizing. The trick of conservatism as a disposition is that it should have pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the world.

The European: A sentence that comes from a Marxist…

Moore: Right, Gramsci. Most ideas for human improvement are very laughable. But that does not mean that you should be filled with anger and despair; rather, you should work quietly to make things better. Conservatism can be tempted into rage, but that is a useless emotion. President Obama is doing pretty badly, but the criticism he faces is misplaced in tone. Republicans who portray him as the devil are doing him a favor, because that simply does not make sense. But our problems here in Britain are a bit different, aren’t they? British conservatives are not driven into a corner from where they shout. They don’t quite know where they stand at all.

Read the whole thing. 

In his latest piece, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, who is liberal and gay, wrote about an anonymous former college classmate who was an observant conservative Catholic back then, but who has since changed his mind. Excerpt:

He had researched and reflected on much of this by the time he graduated from medical school, and so he decided to devote a bit of each week to helping out in an abortion clinic. Over years to come, in various settings, he continued this work, often braving protesters, sometimes wearing a bulletproof vest.

He knew George Tiller, the Kansas abortion provider shot dead in 2009 by an abortion foe.

THAT happened in a church, he noted. He hasn’t belonged to one since college. “Religion too often demands belief in physical absurdities and anachronistic traditions despite all scientific evidence and moral progress,” he said.

That sort of thing. Bruni ends with his anonymous friend, now a doctor, performing an abortion on one of the loudest pro-life protesters, who came to him on the sly because he was a familiar face. She supposedly told him that she wasn’t like those other loose women who sought abortions. A week later, we are told, she was back in front of the clinic, protesting.

It is not usually my Sunday habit (or Monday habit, or Tuesday habit…) to read Frank Bruni, but I was motivated to do so by an e-mail one of this blog’s readers sent. He said that he and someone else in his house had read that column, and concluded that Bruni was making this up. What did I think? Could that happen? Does the Times fact-check op-ed columnists? I told him I didn’t know, but I’d take a look at the column. I cautioned him that I often conceal the names and identifying information from people I write about, which causes some readers to accuse me of making these people up to serve an ideological point. I never do make anybody up, but I can’t prove that, because to give their names would defeat the whole purpose of having made them anonymous in the first place. People usually accuse me of making these anonymous figures up when they strongly object to the political, cultural, or ideological point the anonymous figure illustrates. But I really don’t make these people up; however, I can’t blame people for being skeptical when I do not attach checkable information to the quote. The point being that before reading the column, I wanted to give Frank Bruni the benefit of the doubt.

I had to agree that Bruni’s Anonymous Friend sounds completely bogus. He is just too perfect an illustration of what a gay secular liberal would want to see from the “conversion” of a conservative Catholic. He becomes a pro-gay, agnostic abortionist. Really? That happened? I suppose it could have happened, but boy, is that hard to believe. For me, the part of Bruni’s column that raised the most suspicion were his quotes attributed to Anonymous Friend. For example:

“In all centuries, through all history, women have ended pregnancies somehow,” he said. “They feel so strongly about this that they will attempt abortion even when it’s illegal, unsafe and often lethal.”

And:

“If doctors and nurses do not step up and provide these services or if so many obstacles and restrictions are put into place that women cannot access the services, then the stream of women seeking abortions tends to flow toward the illegal and dangerous methods,” he said.

I sincerely hope somebody seriously tries to vet this. And I’ll lay odds that nobody properly vetted it before it ran. Why should they? Sacred religious dogmas require no evidence.

By the way, light blogging today. Overnight, some evil gremlin came into my room and decided to use my sinuses as a storage facility for wet concrete. I have been poleaxed. If you need me, I’ll be in bed, consuming enough Sudafed to supply the trailer-park meth labs of Livingston Parish for a week.

UPDATE: Even if every word of Frank Bruni’s column is true, it should not have been published, as a matter of journalistic good practice — and wouldn’t have been if it didn’t hit all the confirmation-bias sweet spots of the Times’ op-ed staff. Ask yourself: would Ross Douthat be able to get away with publishing a column based on an anonymous source claiming to have been a pro-gay, godless abortionist who had a Catholic religious conversion and came to believe that homosexuality and abortion was immoral, and dedicated himself to working against gay rights and abortion rights? Of course he couldn’t! Not in The New York Times. I agree with the Catholic viewpoint on all these issues, but if I were his editor, I wouldn’t have published it either.

Anyway, do that thought experiment: imagine that Ross Douthat, a pro-life Catholic NYT columnist, had turned in a column just like Bruni’s, except one using an anonymous source to make the opposite points. Would it have been published? The question itself is laughable. Which tells you something about the Times‘s bias re: Bruni’s absurd column.

In Erie, Pa., employers are desperate to find qualified technicians to fill jobs:

Erie newcomer Dawn Miller says two months of job-hunting have put her optimism on ice.

Rob Smith has a different problem. The Crawford County business owner has openings for 15 qualified machinists he can’t find.

In a region where thousands are unemployed and the jobless rate remains well above historic levels, both of these scenarios — lots of job seekers and an abundance of unfilled jobs — still manage to be commonplace.

Erie County has 10,400 people on the state’s official unemployment roll. That’s according to the state Department of Labor & Industry, but many experts believe the real number is substantially higher.

In Crawford County, another 3,000 people say they want work but can’t find it.

Yet economic development leaders in both counties say employers are struggling more than they have in years to find qualified workers.

How to explain this discrepancy? Turns out that companies need skilled labor. There still aren’t many jobs for unskilled labor.

Well, where are the graduates of technical schools that provide needed skills to laborers? They’re not there. In fact, enrollment is so low in the Erie County technical school that they’re going to have to cut faculty. 

Why is this happening? Is it a class thing? Are parents and/or students unwilling to consider blue-collar work? Are students unwilling to go to school? What could be causing this? Shouldn’t the market be correcting this? Thoughts?

(H/T: Sam M.)

Ross Douthat has an amusing column about Tim Tebow’s mission to heathenous Gotham, but he has a serious point here:

Why is Tim Tebow such a fascinating and polarizing figure? Not just because he claims to be religious; that claim is commonplace among football stars and ordinary Americans alike. Rather, it’s because his conduct — kind, charitable, chaste, guileless — seems to actually vindicate his claim to be in possession of a life-altering truth.

Nothing discredits religion quite like the gap that often yawns between what believers profess and how they live. With Tebow, that gap seems so narrow as to be invisible. (“There’s not an ounce of artifice or phoniness or Hollywood in this kid Tebow,” ESPN’s Rick Reilly wrote last year of the quarterback’s charitable works, “and I’ve looked everywhere for it.”) He fascinates, in part, because he behaves — at least in public, and at least for now — the way one would expect more Christians to behave if their faith were really true.