Nick Gillespie confronts Donald Trump about the deficit. Trump absconds.

WATCH: Former President Donald Trump blames COVID for his deficit spending. But @nickgillespie delivers a live fact check—much of that spending occurred before the pandemic.pic.twitter.com/EA0064nGn5

— reason (@reason) September 28, 2024

Free rider.

As I spend a third hour in this coffee shop without buying anything (brought a sandwich with me, in fact) and listening to a killer playlist for free, I'm reminded that capitalism's genius is supporting so many free riders, not squeezing efficiency out of us all the time.

— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) April 1, 2019

"TPUSA Members Quit in Protest of ‘Exploiting’ Mollie Tibbetts’ Death/Iowans in the right-wing campus org resigned..."

"... after accusing Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk of seeking to ‘exploit’ a student’s murder to suit an anti-immigrant ‘political agenda'" (The Daily Beast).

In a letter penned by executive board members of the university’s chapter of Turning Point USA—a pro-Trump non-profit organization for campus conservatives—the University of Iowa chapter said that following the discovery of rising sophomore Mollie Tibbetts’ body in a cornfield on Tuesday, the chapter’s president purportedly received a message from a Turning Point field director that “insisted” that Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk and communications director Candace Owens visit the University of Iowa to host an immigration-related event.

“We respectfully decline this invitation,” the board members wrote, adding that they found the idea of using Tibbetts’ death “to suit a political agenda” distasteful....

The board members later updated their statement, writing on Twitter that the offer to host the event came from “students not affiliated University of Iowa Turning Point USA.” Owens condemned the chapter online, accusing the chapter of lying about having been contacted by a field director and “exploitation” of Mollie Tippetts’ death. (She also misspelled Tibbetts’ name.)...

ADDED: I have been declining to write about Candace Owens, but having at long last created a tag for her, I noticed "Candace Owens, con artist" at Spectator USA. Excerpt:

Candace launched Social Autopsy in 2016, after dropping out of college, a brief stint of working at Vogue magazine (yes, with those awful globalists!), a gig as an assistant at a private equity firm, and a failed founding of an editorial website which carried such high-minded and moral articles as ‘I Think Affairs Are Romantic’ and ‘I’m So Sorry Ladies, But We Can NEVER Stop Faking the Orgasm.’ The warring tribes of left and right both vehemently opposed Social Autopsy at the start.

Because I think the fake orgasm could be a good analogy to fake news, I read the "I'm So Sorry Ladies" piece. Excerpt:

You could lay there politely...

Lie there politely...

.... and allow him to continue, perhaps secretly hoping that he’s the marathon-type—saving his best tricks for the final laps. And if he’s not then you can suppose he’ll grow tired eventually. Eventually—while you mentally go through your grocery list (I think I have another bag of pine nuts in the cabinet somewhere) and he continues to do his absolute best to get you there. You can bet he’ll be using the same fool-proof moves that drove the last girl to a fake orgasm.

Yep that’s the your final alternative, and quite frankly, it’s just sad. Sad for you, sad for him, sad for the pine nuts even, which would really rather not be thought up into this pathetic situation at all.

Come on, it's a great analogy! Fake orgasm... fake news...

AND: Nick Gillespie in the NYT: "Republicans Are Exploiting the Murder of Mollie Tibbetts/Immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. But the party doesn’t want to talk about that."

The killing of Ms. Tibbetts, who went missing on July 18 but whose body was found only this week, is an unspeakable tragedy. Her killer should be prosecuted and punished to the fullest extent of the law. Yet many conservatives who have long assailed the government as incompetent at best are now so blinded by xenophobic rage over her murder that they’ve turned into the thing they claim to despise: vociferous boosters of big government....

Mollie Tibbetts’s murder is profoundly disturbing. But it is a very rare event in a country where the violent crime and homicide rates are near 40-year lows. It does her memory and the country no good to greatly increase the power of the state as if there are no costs to such plans.

Camille speaks.

ADDED: I see there's a transcript.

"Anybody think this sort of shit would pass muster in a school system in which students and parents chose which schools to attend?"

"And while we're at it, anyone think we'd still be wasting as much time and  resources on phys ed if the education of children (rather than catering to the needs of existing teachers and other interests) was the primary goal of K-12 schooling?"

Edward Snowden — who acted so drastically to affect millions of people in the real world — acquired his moral structure through the playing of video games.

I wasn't going to blog anymore about the GQ interview of Glenn Greenwald, but something I just read made me want to show you this:

You mention in your book that Snowden's moral universe was first informed by video games.

In Hong Kong, Snowden told me that at the heart of most video games is an ordinary individual who sees some serious injustice, right? Like some person who's been kidnapped and you've got to rescue them, or some evil force that has obtained this weapon and you've got to deactivate it or kill them or whatever. And it's all about figuring out ways to empower yourself as an ordinary person, to take on powerful forces in a way that allows you to undermine them in pursuit of some public good. Even if it's really risky or dangerous. That moral narrative at the heart of video games was part of his preadolescence and formed part of his moral understanding of the world and one's obligation as an individual.

The thing I just read that made me want to show you that is Nick Gillespie's article in Reason titled "Are Video Games Art?/Why games should be taken as seriously as novels, films, and other forms of creative expression." Gillespie quotes the film critic Roger Ebert: "Video games can never be art," because they "do not raise my hopes for a video game that will deserve my attention long enough to play it. They are, I regret to say, pathetic."

Gillespie and Ebert seem to be talking about what is good art, but what I'm concerned about here is the way art affects us, the way minds are formed by the experience of art as an alternative to the experience of living our own lives. Whether the art we consume is good or bad and whether it comes in the form of novels or films or paintings or comics or video games — or holy scripture! — it displaces life in the concrete world where what we do and say has consequences on human beings whose facial expressions we see and who talk back to us and take actions that can benefit or harm us.

Edward Snowden — who acted so drastically to affect millions of people in the real world — acquired his moral structure through the playing of video games. That's important! What is the morality learned from video games? I'm afraid of the new generations that will take on power in the real world based on this particular artificial experience. It's not that I feel good about all those other artificial experiences that inform an individual's morality. But it seems especially dangerous for young minds to develop within such a pervasive sensation of alternate reality.

And yet where are all these young male heroes, deeply imprinted with a grandiose sense of mission and an urgent call to go on a quest for survival or salvation? I'm guessing mostly they're trapped within their games, clamped into virtual reality, and never coming out. That's something else I'm afraid of!

"What's your favorite Woody Allen movie? Before you answer, you should know..."

Dylan Farrow puts her sad face between you and whatever Woody Allen movie you might have been hoping to enjoy.

Over at Reason, Nick Gillespie looks like he's working up to a response, a reasonable response, to the questions he frames — "Did Woody Allen Molest His Daughter, Dylan Farrow? And If So, Should You Disavow His Films?"

Gillespie reveals that he doesn't even like Woody Allen. He says Allen "ceased to produce consistently interesting movies decades ago," which either means that he hasn't noticed "Blue Jasmine" or that he really meant to write "ceased the consistent production of interesting movies decades ago." "Blue Jasmine" (2013) is certainly consistently interesting. So was "Midnight in Paris" (2011). Maybe "To Rome With Love" (2012) was only interesting in parts. But, good lord, Woody Allen has consistently made interesting movies. Look at the IMDB list. He has made at least one movie in every year since 1977, which is probably when Gillespie imagines that he stopped being interesting.

Gillespie shifts the topic to the more general question — "When — if ever — does the biography of a creator mean that you cannot or should not in good conscience patronize an artist?" — and he doesn't even answer that. He throws it over to the readers: "What do you think readers?"

But I want to get back to Woody Allen. Dylan Farrow writes: he "sexually assaulted" her. I'm putting that in quotes not to express disbelief, but to observe the generality of the term. We're told that she was playing with an electric train but not what body part of his came into what sort of contact with what body part of hers. We're told "what he did to me in the attic felt different" from other things he did that she also did not like. Those other things are specified: He had her under the covers in bed with him when he was "in his underwear." He put his thumb in her mouth. He put "his head in [her] naked lap."

After a custody hearing denied my father visitation rights, my mother declined to pursue criminal charges, despite findings of probable cause by the State of Connecticut – due to, in the words of the prosecutor, the fragility of the "child victim."

So there will always be a cloud on Woody Allen's reputation, but it's not as though he could have removed the cloud if only he'd been prosecuted and had his day in court. He'd have enjoyed the presumption of innocence, and that means suspicion would remain even if there were a not guilty verdict.

These charges are not new. I read the 1992 Vanity Fair article that had all of this material, and I've seen maybe 15 Woody Allen movies since then, some more than once. "Blue Jasmine" is, I think, the only movie I saw this year in the theater, and I returned to the theater to see it a second time. So, through my own actions, I've obviously answered Gillespie's question yes, in the case of Woody Allen movies. I can in good conscience go to see his movies. For one thing — unlike Gillespie — I like Woody Allen. It's fine to have your "good conscience" about avoiding things you don't even want to do. The morality test only applies when — to use Woody Allen's Emily Dickinson's expression — "The Heart wants what it wants."

I feel empathy for Dylan Farrow, but I think we are living in a fallen world, and we are surrounded by human beings all of whom have their sins, known and unknown. To purport to know what cannot be truly known is also a sin. To punish and shun one person out of preference for another when the truth is not known is surely not an exalted virtue, if it is a virtue at all. The works of art exist and are real and apart from the artist. And when someone chooses — as Woody Allen has — to remain silent all these years, to keep to himself, producing good work, incurring no further charges of harming anyone, I think we are not doing something morally wrong to receive that work for whatever value it has, independently, as art.

That said, it appears that the celebration of Woody Allen, the man, on the Golden Globes TV show is what provoked Dylan Farrow to come forward. But Woody Allen was thousands of miles away from that event. He was not soaking up the adulation. The art/artist separation remains, and yet we can reframe Gillespie's question to focus on a more particular consumer-end moral problem:  At what point do accusations of wrongdoing against an artist make it wrong to enjoy a staged celebration of the man?

Woody Allen himself seems to loathe all staged celebrations of artists. Has he ever appeared at any awards show? Perhaps he's got a personal awareness of guilt that shames him away. But we are all sinners, and it might be best if we all had an aversion to the celebration of celebrities.

To paraphrase Jesus: Let him who is without sin among you be the first to watch the Golden Globes.

UPDATE: "Mr. Allen has read the article and found it untrue and disgraceful. He will be responding very soon."

"As Anger at Eric Holder Grows, So Does His Value as Obama’s Lightning Rod."

"Holder is the latest in a long line of attorneys general who do the boss’s dirty work and absorb anger that would otherwise reach the president, writes Nick Gillespie."

Via Instapundit (where there are additional links on this topic).

Why are gun-death statistics inflated with gun-suicide numbers?

"I thought we had a right to die...."

Obviously, one reason is: to get bigger numbers. But I think the people that lump gun deaths together believe (or want others to believe) that guns are really dangerous. When it comes to suicide, there are 2 ways to think about the deadly effectiveness of guns: 1. For those who really want to kill themselves, guns are a sensible choice, or 2. The scary deadliness of a gun tempts weak/impulsive persons to go ahead and do something that wouldn't happen otherwise.

You can easily see that those 2 ways to think represent the mindsets that lead to libertarian or authoritarian answers to all sorts of questions. #1 would allow the individual to make his own decisions and to take care of himself, and #2 thinks the individual — call her Julia — needs to be helped and protected (even from herself).

Sorry to go all gender-y, but I'm interested in talking about suicide and attitudes about guns in the context of gender difference, because 4x as many men as women commit suicide and 56% of male suicides use firearms compared to only 30% of female suicides. Those statistics are skewed by the fact that guns are an effective method. It might be that the gender disproportion is because men choose the method that leaves fewer survivors of attempts at suicide. I note that 40% of female suicides use "poisoning" (presumably, that includes drug overdosing). What's the proportion of females attempting suicide by poisoning to females succeeding in killing themselves with poison?

If you have a fantasy of rescuing those who are in the process of committing suicide, you might think taking guns away will give you a better shot.

ADDED: It occurred to me, after the Sandy Hook murders, that blaming guns is a secular substitute for blaming the devil. People find it too challenging to figure out why a human being would do this terrible thing and they latch on to the idea that the gun made it happen. Suicide presents a similar challenge, and one way to fathom it is to say: It was the gun. Isn't it like saying the devil made him do it? The gun/the devil is a great go-to answer, freeing you from wracking your brain about the workings of the human mind.

"Should We Hire Even More Teachers, Cops, and Firemen?"

"Not if we want the economy to recover any time soon," says Nick Gillespie at Reason.com.

Unless you believe that the primary function of the public sector is to be a jobs program, there is no reason to sweat recent cuts to public-sector jobs, whose numbers, as Mickey Kaus has pointed out, have "been bloating since around 1980."...

As it happens, Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and many others (let's call them stimulatarians), seem to believe that a key function of government is precisely to employ lots of people who otherwise would look for work elsewhere....

And check out the caricature of Obama at the first link. All swirly hallucinogenic shapes and psychedelic colors. I showed it to Meade and said "That's the way I was always drawing when I was in high school," and he said he did too. (I'm class of 1969, and he's '72.)

Bogus bully brouhaha.

"Despite the rare and tragic cases that rightly command our attention and outrage, the data show that things are, in fact, getting better for kids."

Solve the birth control controversy by selling the pill over the counter.

Says Nick Gillespie, quoting Virginia Postrel. That's the libertarian analysis. But isn't there some need for a doctor's exam? Obviously, the doctors must think so, and they have so much to gain if Obamacare covers everything. Meanwhile, Instapundit notes that his "wife’s heart attack was probably caused by birth-control pills." You can say the doctor's visits she had didn't prevent that, but would there be even more heart attacks and other calamities if women could just grab these items off the shelf? I have no idea, but then I never liked the idea of taking pills for birth control. Pills change the structure of your body, including your brain, do they not? You become a different person. Not that I thought I was such a wonderful person — back in the pre-self-esteem days — but I wanted to know that whatever I was was really me and not a drug.

The Effigies of Madison, Wisconsin — 1906 version.

An emailer writes:

I just finished John J. Miller’s “The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football” which describes how intercollegiate football almost became banned 100 years ago. Reading in your blog about the double standard regarding effigies in the latest Madison demonstrations, I thought you might enjoy this excerpt from Miller’s book (p. 211). The year was 1906.

“At the University of Wisconsin, frontier historian Frederick Jackson Turner railed against football, calling for its prohibition or at least its suspension, and tried to mobilize administrators and professors against it. On the night of March 27, when a rumor hit campus that football would be banned, hundreds of students took to the streets, chanting “Death to the faculty!” They surrounded Turner’s home. The professor faced them on his porch. “When can we have football?” shouted a student. “When you can have a clean game,” he yelled back. Turner tried to engage the young men, but they replied with catcalls. Later in the evening, they built a bonfire. The fire department showed up as the mob tried to burn three professors in effigy. The firefighters managed to save the last one. It was labeled 'Prof. Turner.'”

Fascinating! Pro-football protests! These effigies were burned, not hung. We've been debating about whether the Prosser effigy was actually hung, since it is sitting down. Obviously, there are many ways to torment an effigy. There is hanging. Burning. And, as commenter EDH said:

The garrote, a specific form of execution, is often performed seated.

The garrote, unlike a proper hanging, kills by suffocation, so it is, in fact, much closer to the choking accusation leveled by Justice Prosser's character assassins.

But enough about effigies. Let's go back to the history of football. Here's Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine interviewing John J. Miller about "The Big Scrum." A very substantive interview with crisp, quick speaking, so... worth clicking.

Richard Epstein talks with great speed and substance about his former law school colleague, Barack Obama, and all sorts of details about the economy.

Andrew Cuomo vs. Carl Paladino = Fredo Corleone vs. Fredo Corleone.

... says Nick Gillespie, who's allowed to say things like that because his mother is Italian.

(Sloppily video'd from the Eliot Spitzer CNN show tonight.)

Nick Gillespie gets soooo intellectual about the basis for judging Reason Magazine's "Everybody Draw Mohammed" contest...

... that I was forced to look up his educational background. Turns out he has a PhD in English literature. Ah, it makes too much sense to me.

Now, they got 190 entries in the contest. (I disapprove of the "Draw Mohammed" day, you should know.) I would love to see what the whole pile of drawings looked like. How many were stick figures or crude scratchings on the level of the "Draw Me" pirate? How many were loaded with embarrassingly violent or racial fantasy? I wish someone had had the foresight to film a documentary of these Reason guys cooking up their contest and then opening the various envelopes? I wonder if there was a point — one particular drawing? — when they felt bad about what they were doing.  And then something pushed them in the direction of getting super-elitist intellectual about picking the winners.

In coming to a consensus, we discussed standard concerns such as originality of vision, playfulness, a sense of proportion (both in terms of craftmanship and message), and relevance to the goals of the contest.

See? Read between the lines! What were they looking at when they reached that consensus? How many pieces of paper went into the discard pile over "craftsmanship"? How much did they laugh as they did a first cut over craftsmanship, and what did they say as they tossed these things aside? I would love to have been a fly on the wall... or a vole in the corner. "Sense of proportion"... what were the drawings that made them frame that standard? "Originality"? What percent of the artists drew Muhammad as a dog or as a guy with a turban-bomb? "Playfulness"... throw all the gruesome, gory things over there. "Relevance to the goals of the contest"... ha ha... so many of you scribblers did not get it. You thought it was about telling Muslims their prophet is evil, and not that free expression is precious. You fools! Did you think Nick Gillespie went to grad school for this?! 

Okay, I'm picturing approximately 90% of the drawings eliminated over these standards.

So Gillespie reveals the true test of a proper "Draw Mohammed" drawing.

The single most important element...

It's one thing.

.... and the thing that ties these selections together–is that each image forces the viewer to do two things.

I mean... it's 2 things!

First, they consciously call into question the nature of representation, no small matter in fights over whether it is allowed under Islamic law to depict Mohammed (for the historical record, there is no question that the idea that is always wrong is only of recent vintage; there is a long history of sacred and superficial images of the Prophet). The homage to Rene Magritte below states "This is not a pipe. This is Muhammed"...

He's translating the French for us. (And respelling "Muhammad" as "Muhammed," splitting the difference between the contest-name spelling — "Mohammed"— and the artist's use of the presumably politically correct spelling — "Muhammad.")

... playing with the surrealist's famous statement about the necessary disjuncture between a picture and the thing it seeks to represent. 

An insight that somehow fascinated people who studied post-modernism circa 1990. (Gillespie received his English PhD in 1996. I'd love to know more about what he studied. Can we see his dissertation?)

Just as the drawing is not a pipe (it's a drawing of a pipe), it cannot be Mohammed even as it insists it is. Even more, it is plainly not even a drawing of Mohammed or of any human figure.

Similarly, the invocation of the popular Where's Waldo? series forces the viewer to ask Where's Mohammed?, and to begin a hunt for a figure in the midst of an overstuffed scene. One assumes the black-robed character in the upper right-hand quadrant of the image is our quarry, but then what does it mean to confer on a small dot any significance whatsoever?

Second, each of the images forces the viewer to actively participate not simply in the creation of meaning but of actually constructing the image itself. This is clearest in our grand prize winner, the image below, which pushes iman and infidel alike to do the work that would condemn them to death under the most extreme reading of injunctions against representing Mohammed.

I like the way the winner — with a connect-the-dots puzzle — avoided drawing Muhammad altogether. Man, if I entered a "draw Mohammed" contest and the winner didn't even draw Mohammed, I'd be kind of pissed... and reading Gillespie's revelation of the highly intellectual but previously secret standards would not calm me down. "Reason"?! Bah!

Save the incandescent bulb!

It's important!

"I inhaled. Frequently. That was the point."

Here's a folky political protest song (via Nick Gillespie, who's not amused by Obama's flippant response to the marijuana question the other day):

"Manhattan, Kansas can finally (finally!) coordinate the traffic lights on Fort Riley Boulevard for a measly $71,250..."

Nick Gillespie is horrified at "the infrastructure flim-flam."

Prop guns don't kill people. Theater kids pretend to kill people.

Another cross-posting from that blog that is dividing my bloggerly attention:

PUT DOWN THOSE STAGE PROP GUNS! Because you know if you want to avert campus shooting sprees, you want to start with the hard-working theater kids who rehearsed their hearts out to put on a big show. Yes, the show is about presidential assassins, but it's Sondheim. It's high class. The bright side of this is: Because it's high-class musical theater that's getting censored, even the usual prissy anti-gun types should get pissed off.

Via Nick Gillespie, who hates the musical "Assassins" ("godawful in its original conception and execution back in 1990 (and naturally, retardedly well-received in its 2004 Broadway revival)"). I've never seen the show, but I loved Sarah Vowell's description of it in her cool book "Assassination Vacation":

"It's the Stephen Sondheim musical in which a bunch of presidential assassins and would-be assassins sing songs about how much better their lives would be if they could gun down a president."

"Oh," remarks Mr. Connecticut. "How was it?"

"Oh my god," I gush. "Even though the actors were mostly college kids, I thought it was great! The orange-haired guy who played the man who wanted to fly a plane into Nixon was hilarious. And I found myself strangely smitten with John Wilkes Booth; every time he looked in my direction I could feel myself blush." Apparently, talking about going to the Museum of Television and Radio is "too personal," but I seem to have no problem revealing my crush on the man who murdered Lincoln.