This is just a (sort of) quick hit before returning to the Brooksalypse I’ve promised here more than once, but I thought today’s Douthat ejaculation deserved just a bit of slicing and dicing in its own right.
For those of you with the good sense to save your neurons and avoid baby Bobo’s deep thoughts, here’s a shorter:
“I don’t know anything about Ireland that John Wayne didn’t teach me, but this poor island sold it’s good Catholic soul for a mess of pottage served in MacMansions. Once Ireland got the pill and Irish women stopped being permanently pregnant, the country went sex-and-cash crazy, but then all that nasty fun had to come to a halt.
Why, precisely? Well, apparently the beast-with-two backs is kind of to blame for bankster thievery, not to mention that pride (wealth) goeth before a fall. Oh, and Europe is a bad idea too. Plus, modernity sucks.”
Not kidding. That’s really about it. Before I go to town on Douthat just a little bit, can I ask what on earth the Times was/is thinking when it hired this guy?
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I mean really – this is Brooks without the sophistication, and I say that, sadly, with a straight face. (I’ll admit, a competition between these two on most subjects, but especially economics, resembles a wine tasting featuring Ripple vs. Mad Dog).
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Douthat begins his piece by describing the insight he gets from driving from Dublin to Ireland’s west coast and discovering that there are new houses built next to traditional villages. He really does invoke The Quiet Man, and says, apparently sincerely, that,
…it’s as if there were only two eras in Irish history: the Middle Ages and the housing bubble.
Which suggests, I guess, he doesn’t think that several centuries of British colonial rule have anything to do with Ireland, early or late.
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Seriously, “my taxi driver explained it all to me” meme is simply pathetic. (And no, it doesn’t get better if you are the one behind the wheel. It’s worse, obviously, as you only have the echo chamber of your own head to ratify your sudden, deep insight into a country, history and culture not your own.)
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Whatever the Times paid for this column, Douthat stole.*
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But even though Douthat discredits himself from the first lines of this piece, what fascinates – and horrifies – here is the relentlessness with which Baby Bobo wills the Irish story into the same morality tale he always wants to tell, terrified as he is of coupling bodies and the exercise of human reason.
I’m not going to fisk the entire piece here – this is just too silly a piece to warrant such effort. But a couple of examples will show just how fraudulent are any Douthat claims to public intellection.
He writes:
Progressives and secularists suggested that Ireland was thriving because it had finally escaped the Catholic Church’s repressive grip, which kept horizons narrow and families large, and limited female economic opportunity. (An academic paper on this theme, “Contraception and the Celtic Tiger,” earned the Malcolm Gladwell treatment in the pages of The New Yorker.)
Well, that’s one lasting benefit of the last few decades of Irish cultural evolution.
But in fact, this is just a piece of careful misdirection. The “theme” that Gladwell discussed was not the cap on female opportunity that comes with large families – though certainly, child-rearing constrains access to the paid-work economy.
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Rather, the point made in both Gladwell’s treatment and the underlying paper is that the reduction in family size altered Ireland’s dependency ratio.
That is: when there is a reduction in the proportion of the population, old and young, that cannot work, the output of those who can must support fewer people, resulting in more wealth per person. As Gladwell’s sources, David Bloom and David Canning put it in another paper,
This boost in the growth rate coincides closely with the falling dependency rate in Ireland. Thus, the raw data are consistent with the view that demographic change contributed to Ireland’s economic surge in the 1990s.
Nothing there about what Douthat rails against as “a reminder that the waning of a powerful religious tradition can breed decadence as well as liberation.” It ain’t the sexy time that his dreaded secularists identified when they looked at actual data – it was just a quick look at who was supporting whom.
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Just to check the score here at halftime: Douthat argues that abandoning rigid fidelity to the Irish Catholic hierarchy and thus releasing Irish women into non-traditional roles is somehow to blame for Ireland’s current financial troubles.
Not only is this nonsense on its own terms — Ireland’s crisis has its roots in very specific banking and real-estate transactions, not in a somehow overly feminized work force — Douthat simply misconstrues the data he attempts to cite. You can argue that he was dumb and/or ignorant in doing so, or you can argue that he’s smart enough to recognize the sleight of hand he attempts here. Neither conclusion speaks well, either for him or his employer.
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The rest of Douthat’s blather is of much the same level of sophistication. Love of money is a sin, and, says Douthat “utopians of capitalism” need remember “that the biggest booms can produce the biggest busts, and that debt and ruin always shadow prosperity and growth.”
This means exactly what?
To begin with, it’s wrong on its face. Debt and ruin do not always shadow prosperity. Or rather, debt is not in and of itself a measure of nearness to ruin; it is rather, an essential tool in the construction of growth, which like any tool, can be turned to purposes well or ill.
But the larger implication here is what at once silly and malign. Is Douthat telling us that capitalism dooms us to suffer impoverishment in cyclical lockstep with encounters with wealth?
Tell that to this chart. Busts are enormously painful. They are also blips in the larger historical time-line. Economic growth due to iscientific and technological inquiry, industrialization and capitalism, is one of the single greatest generators of human well-being ever. Probably the greatest, full stop.
That the transformation of the material conditions of existence carries an abundance of costs and complications is a given. That there are losers and winners, ditto. That the epithet “free” market is a cartoon, an abstraction and a bludgeon wielded by the politically vicious, understood. But to wail pathetically about “debt and ruin” stalking prosperity and growth is both nonsense and, by implication, murderous. Dearth and misery are what you get when you don’t achieved prosperity.
And this is Douthat’s high point of analytical precision. He goes on to writes that
The Irish experience should be a reminder that the waning of a powerful religious tradition can breed decadence as well as liberation…
…by which I take him to argue that the very partial rejection of the Irish church hierarchy is to blame for failures of Ireland’s small banking and speculative elite.
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There are at least two fundamental errors here. One is the absolute and false dichotomy: Ireland must choose either unstable wealth (and sex-for-fun) or abject poverty and the consolation of religion.
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Is that really all there is? Just off the top of my head, I might suggest that the Irish try some modest banking regulation just to see if they could dodge the need to hand back all those contraceptives and tie Irish womanhood back to the kitchen and the crib. Just a thought….
And notice that Douthat slyly conflates “decadence” with klepto-captialism. But if he does that, he has to explain why godless Scandinavia isn’t being bailed out along with the still quite Catholic Irish Republic. Despite his wishing it to be so, there is little evidence, if any, for Douthat’s persistent belief that accepting the greater wisdom of Benedict and his hierarchs actually produces better outcomes of health, wealth and happiness than cheerful godlessness. He might wish it were so, but the experience of billions is against him.
Believe it or not, it gets worse. Douthat actually says that
….the Irish government’s hat-in-hand pilgrimages to Brussels have vindicated every nationalist who feared that economic union would eventually mean political subjugation. The yoke of the European Union is lighter than the yoke of the British Empire, but Ireland has returned to a kind of vassal status all the same.
Oh my FSM, what grotesquely self-confident ignorance lies there.
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To get just a glimpse of the morally bankrupt cynicism behind that statement, check out this chart. It documents the depopulation of Ireland in the wake of the Great Famine Hunger. (per Lysana) There is an ongoing argument whether the colonial power’s role in that disaster was one of active genocide or malign neglect, but anyone who conflates membership in an economic union and superstate-compact with the full and often murderously oppressive weight of imperial rule is laboring to deceive.
Which returns me to my original question. I know some folks at the Times. They aren’t stupid. They can read. They have to recognize that Douthat is not just a hack, but an ignorant and obvious one. The Quiet Man! for FSM’s sake!
So I guess I’m wondering if he’s at the Great Grey Lady (no longer) of 43rd St. because he’s legitimately the best right-wing pundit they could find – which says volumes one way…
…or if this isn’t some 11 dimensional chess on the part of the “liberal” New York Times to allow the right wing to self-immolate weekly on their pages.
I’m betting on door number one, myself.
*This is what I mean about Brooks being more sophisticated than Douthat. He disguises the utter paucity of his actual knowledge much more gracefully. In the column I promise I’ll get around to skewering – and soon – Bobo begins by writing of “the psychologists, artists and moral philosophers I know.” Now that’s a nice touch. Just as unverifiable as Douthat’s driving impressions, but so much more authoritative, invoking both access to and membership in an elite. This is what distinguishes the bumbling apprentice from the old pro.
Images: Judith Leytser, “The Proposition,” 1631.
and, inevitably,
Vincent van Gogh, “The Potato Eaters,” 1885.
(Cross posted at the Inverse Square Blog.)
Sly
If only Ireland had continued to worry about what the Pope thought they might be doing with their naughty bits, they would never have gotten into this mess.
It’s like the Times gave a column to the closeted grandson of Dana Carvey’s Church Lady.
Scott P.
A wonderful post. Thank you.
srv
Who knew the condom would emasculate the Celtic Tiger?
mierardi
Larison would have been an incomparably better choice. That the NYT didn’t or wouldn’t consider him tells you all you need to know about the priorities there. Not as ridiculous as the Kaplan Daily, but not good, either.
Lysana
Indeed, an excellent post. And frankly, the Irish getting anywhere is disgusting to a lot of people. The Irish are not called the blacks of Europe for nothing. Ireland is supposed to stay backward so other white people have someone to look down on that isn’t darker-skinned so they feel less racist. And back in the heyday of Irish oppression it was racism to denigrate the Irish, because they were called an inferior race.
Pedantry moment: Great Hunger, not Great Famine. There was no famine. It was enforced deprivation after a potato blight.
ChrisNYC
Daniel Larison should have gotten the “conservative” slot at the NYT. I don’t read any of these columns anymore — Rich, Brooks, Douthat, Dowd, Friedman. More than any disagreements I have with them, the lack of originality presented as searing insight is what bothers me. But, actual ideas are hard to come by.
freelancer
I’m stunned that Ross is as old as I am. I could swear he was 90 years old.
“Oh, why can’t Ireland go back to the halcyon days where the Church, with the blind neglect of the state, systematically abused and raped thousands of children. Those were the days.”
Tokyokie
I guess we can conclude, therefore, that as debauchery and subsequent ruin inevitably follow the rejection of a rigid paternalistic religious regimen, we should be supporting Iran’s ayatollahs for the sake of the Iranian people.
Nylund
Might I point out that the world actually has a number of nations filled with Catholic people who don’t use the pill and don’t have McMansions?
And might I also point out that Ross’s beloved conservative party is doing all they can to keep such mansion-less and pill-less Catholics from entering our country. And, ironically, the reason is often based on the fact that these pill-less and McMansion-less Catholics will destroy our economy.
The Grand Panjandrum
I salute you sir, that is absolutely the funniest thing I have read in days. I just hope Boone’s Farm doesn’t feel left out.
erlking
@freelancer: This. A thousand times this and Ross Douhat needs to fucking DIAF. I have friends in the Irish civil service and NGO sector whose lives have been completely fucked over in the last few months and, oddly enough, none of them have wailed, “Ochone, ochone, ’tis all the fault of them fecking rubbers!”
jwb
@mierardi: Larison has that whole crazy Confederate past, so that along with him having two intact neurons probably put him out of the running. In any case, Baby Bobo was obviously hired because they needed someone to make Papa Bobo continue to look smart and serious. That was the whole point of Kristol, until he became too much of a hack even for the Times.
burnspbesq
@Lysana:
More pedantry: English Genocide of 1847-49.
Sigh. Ross’ entire world-view is tainted by the fact that he isn’t getting any.
Suffern ACE
@erlking: And I bet they aren’t saying how much they’d prefer to be in this situation with 8 mouths to feed.
burnspbesq
@The Grand Panjandrum:
And what about T-Bird, and Manischewitz Cream White Concord?
My word, the shit we drank when we were young …
PurpleGirl
I usually do not read Douthat. This morning I did. My comment (written about 0880 but posted by the Times around 1441):
stormhit
@erlking:
That’s because Douthat really never said that or suggested it.
This whole breakdown is sloppy and purposely misses Douthat’s very meager points.
beckya57
Tbogg will be angry. He considers trashing Douthat one of his specialties. Check out his long-running series of “Oh No He Didn’t Douthat” posts.
WyldPirate
@Sly:
That’s some quality humor, sly. Thanks for the giggles.
erlking
@Suffern ACE: You’d win that bet.
Douhat’s neo-Boboism is embarrassing enough when it relates to this country–this is weapons-grade appalling.
Warren Terra
Everything Douthat writes always seems to boil down to the idea that if we were all Ward Cleaver and June Cleaver (but much more religious, preferably Catholic) the owlrd would be as it was meant to be. Which is why I never read him.
Douthat has managed to distill everything I dislike about Daniel Larison (which goes beyond mere godmongering to a resolute, even obstreperous, obtuseness whenever a topic remotely touches on God or institutional religion) without possessing any of Larison’s redeeming features – indeed, without possessing any apparent interest in any of the topics on which Larison displays his good features.
The question of why they hired him remains a good one.
WyldPirate
@freelancer:
Blind neglect my ass. The police and governmental authorities actively covered the Church and the molesting priest’s asses–for decades if not centuries.
Jay in Oregon
@Tokyokie:
You forgot the more essential principle: Sun god good, moon god bad.
JGabriel
Tom Levenson@Top:
It feels like their should be a third contestant in that metaphor: who would be Two, or is it now Three, Buck Chuck?
.
PurpleGirl
I read the comment thread and while there were a few people backing him up, I’d say that most people were not. He got called out for comparing a 16th century woman pirate (Gráinne Ní Mháille) and warrior with Sarah Palin. People didn’t like that AT ALL. And a few people called him out for saying the problem was that the Irish people had turned away from the Church, which is isn’t completely true but they did take on the Church for its abuses of children and women.
dhd
The real lesson here is that once you get out from under the Catholic Church’s thumb, it’s probably a good idea to go left rather than right economically. Québec and Brazil both seem to be doing just fine these days.
bobbyp
The true conservative detests modernity, capitalism, and the whole idea of “progress”. Obviously, this is not currently popular and since they must choose political sides……well, this is what you get: Assholery.
Sly
@WyldPirate:
I live to serve. At least until Nobama and the issue validators throw me in the veal pen thats under the bus with the bully pulpit and the Overton Window.
Yahtzee.
jp
**…a competition between these two on most subjects, but especially economics, resembles a wine tasting featuring Ripple vs. Mad Dog.**
Damn. There goes another keyboard.
Southern Beale
Wait – wait — WHAT?
Ireland’s financial troubles are because Irish women are sluts? Is that what he’s saying?
Gus
I’ll try reading this again, but I couldn’t get past “Douthat ejaculation.”
Downpuppy
@The Grand Panjandrum: The raw power & over sweetened undrinkability of MD20/20 vs Fred Sanford’s foolery?
No contest. No winner, but a definite looser.
We can only hope that Ross whose last name isn’t pronounced like that, however you were saying it, may someday be forced into honest work.
As if.
El Cid
I don’t need to know yer damn ‘faks’ about Ireland to know that their problem is too much spendin’, since all the deficits are destroyin’ the jobs.
ChrisNYC
If we’re linking it all back to religion, also interesting to note that “staying too long at the party” also seems to have created a bit of a problem for a majority Hindu nation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/world/asia/18micro.html
If only they had cleaved more closely to Ganesh. But, I’m not entirely sure that Douthat knows that Hindoos exist.
Martin
Ok. Maybe it’s the 80 hour work weeks I’m pulling (lazy government employees my fucking ass), but these guys are making less than the usual sense here.
From what I can tell, Irelands economic expansion came largely on the back of cheap expansion of credit. They adopted the Goldman Sachs/Reagan ‘Deficits aren’t a problem’ attitude in the mid-late 90s and ran that credit card up large. After centuries of being treated as Britain’s niggers (as my IRA donating family members would be quick to note) turning open the libertarian spigot might seem particularly stupid, but that’s my understanding of things.
Oh, and as for the whole TSA business, airports aren’t required to use the TSA services. They can provide their own. Small government/free market all that glibertarian bullshit. Don’t like it, uh, don’t use their airport, or take a charter (they bypass security) or whatever.
TSA should never have provided the screening – just the standards and verifying that the standards are being met.
scarshapedstar
I once jumped into bed with a chunky Irish Reese Witherspoon, and she turned out to be an absolute tramp, demanding that I perform all manner of repulsive acts with my tongue.
Therefore, their economic crisis comes as no surprise to me.
JGabriel
Tom Levenson:
But why? In America, we get to have it all!
Anne Laurie
Bite your tongue, Levenson! Our genteel young Chunky Bobo would never use a naughty colloquilism like “suck”! He can barely hear the word “suckle” without a blush!
Spot-on dissection of a particularly meritricious column. Ross Doubt-That would have been one of the contemporary critics who deplored the Reverend Swift’s modest proposal, not because it endorsed cannibalism, but because it suggested polygamy as an economic efficiency.
Suffern ACE
@Martin: Yeah, to be fair, he isn’t dwelling on sex as much as the commentators. In his story, the simple Irish farmers were seduced by dreams of capitalist and secularist utopias to shed their common sense, and look at where that got them? Unfinished McMansions. You couldn’t even get that right. You simpletons who so recently lived in hovels.
Simple rural folk. You get nothing and now without that Irish culture. Plus European Union Utopians are worse yet. You’ll see.
Oh why did you leave your ploughs in the field and take a job in the town?
Anne Laurie
@Southern Beale: __
No, no, in Doubt-that’s universe all women are sluts. Ireland’s financial troubles happened because Irish men gave up their God-given responsibility to keep them pregnant, dependent, and in the kitchen.
Not kidding.
Ross Douthat is one of those people who, in a better society, would have to carry an umbrella at all times because so many people would be spitting on him. Mostly spitting.
JGabriel
Huh. I never noticed until just now that all the dogs-playing-cards paintings are based on Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters.
They ripped off Vincent, those cheeky bastards!
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Anne Laurie
@ChrisNYC:
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I’m sure his good Catholic
butt-buddyfellow conservative Reihan Salam has told him all about those teeming masses who have yet to accept the Portugese missionaries’ attempts to bring them into the folds of the True Church.What I’m not sure is whether Doubthat realizes Salam is laughing at him behind his back.
beltane
@Southern Beale: Yes, by eschewing their duty to produce a baby every ten months, Irish women caused the failure of their banking system.
Ross Douthat reminds me of one of those old stay-at-home nuns who used to be a feature of Italian families.
Yutsano
@Anne Laurie:
EWWW!! Not enough brain bleach in existence to purge that horrible mental image!! GREEN BALLOONS!!
erlking
@Anne Laurie: As Dolores Keane’s song puts it–Isn’t It a Pity, When Irish Girls Grow Up
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pjkMheIm44
Benjamin Cisco (mobile)
Even for Douthat, this is extraordinarily bad.
Tom Levenson
@erlking: Sweet.
ChrisNYC
@Anne Laurie: Good point.
I do love that, from the account here, actual Irish people are like, “What the fuck is this fucking wanker fucking talking about?” Puckish my ass. They’re some of the most profane people on earth, to their credit.
I sat next to an Irishman on RyanAir who came out with, “Jesus fakkin’ Christ, it IS fakkin’ green!” as we left the airport in Co. Kerry, headed for the UK.
Cheryl from Maryland
How would Douhat like his fat ass in a Magdalene Laundry for that disgusting mess of a column? Christ on a cracker.
Xenos
Classic Sadlyno link from the Katrina days (‘Who Murdered the Irish’), notable for its excerpts from A.J.P. Taylor.
This is basic, undisputed history. It is pretty much suppressed – at some point in his education Douthat should have had to confront and analyze why such suffering and death had to occur in a country that was a net exporter of food. That wankers like Douthat finds Irish underdevelopement quaint is appalling, and that the NYTimes would publish such twaddle is scandalous.
mikefromArlington
Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal, 4 of the 5 large majority Catholic countries, are in the biggest financial trouble right now.
Have that dimwit try and explain that ’till he’s blue in the face.
erlking
Why did Douthat pick the anniversary of JFK’s assassination to write a shitty column about Ireland? Coincidence? or just an asshole at large?
Suffern ACE
@mikefromArlington: Nah. It will be the same explanation. Portugal will go something like “Oh, you thought when you got rid of that dictator that you could be happy, but look at what your attempt at utopian happiness got you. Nuttin. That’s right. Nuttin. You had nuttin before and nuttin is what you get for chasing after dreams. I bet you’re upset that you even tried. Cause now you got nuttin.” Heck. He could use that for Spain. Only he would reference shepherds and flamenco.
mikefromArlington
And Greece too.
Suffern ACE
@mikefromArlington: Italy will be a bit of a challenge. “So you thought when you stopped electing communists…” Doesn’t fit the narrative.
asiangrrlMN
Lovely deconstruction of Douthat, Tom. I applaud the quiet viciousness with which you destroy him. It’s all about the good old days that weren’t for Douthat. He’s such a shit-head. Smug, insufferable prick. Oh, and Alan Rickman played de Valera in Michael Collins. Yes, that might be important only to me, but it’s more insightful than anything Douthat has ever said on any subject.
Andy K
Fuck Douthat!
My great-grandfather was born and raised in Cong, County Mayo- that village in which The Quiet Man was filmed- and left for Boston in the late 1890’s precisely because there wasn’t enough land to farm sustainably, or jobs to go around, even though the country had been severely depopulated over the previous 50 years.
In 1980, my mom and her younger brother were the first of the American branch of the family to return to Cong for a visit, and their second-cousins- two brothers and their small families who still lived on the property, one in the tiny cottage in which my great-grandfather was born- were scared shitless that mom and Uncle John had returned to reclaim the land (it was mom’s grandfather’s by birthright, he being the eldest son). It took about three more trips back before the cousins finally opened up about their fears, and they all had a big laugh over it, finally, but it goes to show how tenuous their security was as late as the 1980’s, with a much smaller populace than when Ireland most definitely had an agrarian economy.
Mark
I was in Kuala Lumpur three weeks ago and my cabbie told me:
1) Jews run the world
2) Jews control Obama
3) Jews knew about 9-11 in advance and didn’t go to work that day
4) Jews blew up the World Trade Center
Oh, and a few other things about the middle east and afghanistan that involved Jews.
How come Tom Friedman never writes about that cabbie?
alix
I wonder if Ross ever read Angela’s Ashes. The author– who actually grew up in a very Catholic Ireland– made clear that the church held back Ireland and kept it plunged in poverty long after independence.
But Ross doesn’t actually need facts, does he? So the reality that Ireland had, while the Church was still in control, the youngest and POOREST populace in Europe won’t matter to him. Anyway, really, he’s so weird about sex. I guess he thinks that poverty is a small price to pay for getting to force women into marriage and constant childbirth.
PPOG Penguin
Slightly off topic, but the BBC has a column from a 30-year old Irish woman that heartbreakingly articulates a sense of abandonment and powerlessness.
Neither bodies to kick nor souls to damn.
asiangrrlMN
@PPOG Penguin: Damn. That is heartbreaking.
moe99
Please tell baby Bobo that “it’s” is not the possessive form of “it.” Dumbshit.
Comrade Kevin
I’d like to punch Ross Douthat in the neck, and then kick Kick Bishop Douthat up the Arse.
Fuck him.
Petorado
I found it amusing that Douthat would be saddened at the sight of “McMansions” in Ireland. If there’s a place where the Mc prefix is appropriate to oversized modern construction, it would be there.
Darkrose
@asiangrrlMN:
Hee! We’re brainsharing, I guess, because the first thing I thought when I saw de Valera’s name was “Alan Rickman is hot!”
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@Mark: Malaysia has Teahadists, too?
daveNYC
OK, I’m taking bets on Douthat’s death. The variables are:
1) The date.
2) The forgotten safeword.
3) The number of wetsuits.
Tiebreaker will be the number of dildos.
morzer
Ross Douthat has never recovered from discovering that women sometimes wear trousers.
Anne Laurie
@morzer:
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I’m not a Freudian, but men like Douthat inspire me with a strong urge to say, “Don’t worry, Ross — what you’re packing, not even the most desperate woman would bother cutting off for her collection.”
Belvoir
A wonderful takedown of an egregious piece of ignorance by Douthat.
The Church kept the Irish people enslaved in ignorance and superstition, fear and shame. The astonishing social and sexual changes in recent decades as the Church’s power has slipped away, melting like the Wicked Witch, has led to much-needed reckoning with the painful past, and the present. Ask women, ask gay Irish people how revolutionary this sea-change has been. It is an overwhelmingly positive thing.
He has no idea of the smothered and destroyed lives , the crushing of the human spirit that the Church fostered in Ireland- they saw it as their job to smother and kill peoples’ spirits, to punish , to abuse boys and girls, and enslave. That Ireland had for a long time Europe’s highest rates of mental illness is no coincidence.
So for Douthat to place this new freedom and honesty at the root of the economic crisis is not only stupid, it is contemptible.
Cheryl from Maryland
Oh, and the artist’s last name of the first painting is Leyster. And another version of the title is “Man offering money to a young woman” — so more obvious that the subject is sex for money. Nice choice since her life story fits with your analysis of Douthat’s column — her career stopped after she became a wife and mother.
rickstersherpa
@freelancer: Yes, that is the point. And it was primarily the revelations of the gross hypocrisy and cruelty of the Irish church learders during the 1950s through the present that finally got the Irish out of the pews and the collection plate the last 10 years.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/20/irish-catholic-schools-child-abuse-claims
That is the sad thing. Our boy Ross can’t be troubled to do even a Google search. I also suspect that if he could, he would have suppressed the story itself if he could, to protect the Church from “scandal” and that perhaps even sympathize with the abusers as they had the heavy duty of punishing “sinners,” particularly young girls, for their sins and so uphold “morality.”
I do dissent. One can remain a Catholic and a Chrisitian, even if removed and waiting, a light in the Vatican II reactionary darkness. A fitting contrast in depth, passion, and insight to Mr. Douthat, I refer you to Sinead O’Conner’s column last summer in the WaPo.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“Pedantry moment: Great Hunger, not Great Famine. There was no famine. It was enforced deprivation after a potato blight.”
Sorry, that’s just plain wrong. The famine was made worse by the shift in government from Tory (who imported maize as aid) to Whig (being more laissez-faire, reduced aid). The workhouse system spread disease (typhus). But the cause of the famine was the blight and the reliable on a single food crop that had high yield but which had little genetic diversity to protect against disease. The British response under Treveylan was inept, but it wasn’t causative. Not doing enough to respond to a crisis isn’t the same as causing that crisis.
Which I guess has relevance today.
Xenos
@Sock Puppet of the Great Satan:
NO, NO, don’t stop and question why a huge portion of the Irish population found themselves huddled on marginal and infertile land that was useless for anything but a certain food crop that had high yield and little genetic diversity…
Does the word ‘Cromwell’ fucking mean anything to you? Or are you just assuming that all these peasants chose to live in the muck and subsist on pretty much nothing but fucking taters?
thomas Levenson
@Sock Puppet of the Great Satan: Per Xenos, but more mildly, I think you understate the impact of British rule. (I.e. there is more to causation than what Aristotle called “efficient causes.”
That said, as Lysana made reference to, the Irish language term used to describe the famine translates as “the Great Hunger,” and I think it both appropriate to use the term that those who inherited that history use (why I blog–I learn stuff every day) and because it’s a damned accurate description of that bitter time.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“Does the word ‘Cromwell’ fucking mean anything to you?”
Actually, first time I ever heard the name Cromwell was at the age of five singing ‘the men behind the wire’. And if I’m in London walking past the Houses of Parliment, I make it a point to spit at the statue of Cromwell there.
I’ve a whole shelf of Irish history, with three books specificially devoted to the famine.
But I’d rather read Joel Mokyr or Cormac O’Grada on the causes of the famine than the standard “Most Oppressed People Ever” mythology about the famine.
Additionally, as 9/10 of deaths in the famine were from disease, not starvation, as opposed to other famines where the disease/starvation ratio is more like 50/50, that should tell you the high impact of the famine was more a function of the awfulness of the relief structure (crowding the destitute into workhouses, which led to outbreaks of typhus) than delibrate starvation, as you implied above.
But mostly, I am fucking tired of the famine being mythologized as genocide, because of the exploitation of that tragedy by Irish Republicans who use Irish deaths in the past to justify more Irish deaths in the future.
I know that’s not what you were doing, but that’s the button that got pushed in me.
Nutella
If only those Irish women were still barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen saying their rosaries, Ireland would be so much better off.
But only if the pregnancies come about by immaculate conception so poor Ross won’t get all nervous.
dj spellchecka
i would just like to point out to dross-hat that the u.s. is the most religious country in the western world and we had our giant bank bailouts and still have, scattered throughout the sunbelt, entire developments of unoccupied mcmansions up the wazoo…
asiangrrlMN
@Darkrose: No shit, right? Anything that leads me to Alan Rickman, I am so there.