COMBAT!

Combat! blog is buried in work today, but that’s no reason to ignore our fundamental obligations. Chief among them? Presenting a convincing simulacrum of humanity, something Mitt Romney has done with only intermittent success during his political career. It’s just like the plot of A Christmas Carol: all the money in the world can’t buy him a working heart. While I toil in obscurity my apartment, how about you enjoy this video in which James Lipton gives Candidate Rombot some acting tips. Lipton has one hell of a deadpan. It’s possible he’s been doing it for like twenty years.

Richmond prosecutor and almost-judge Tracy Thorne-Begland

The nomination of Tracy Thorne-Begland to the Virginia judiciary had bipartisan support in the Virginia House of Delegates right up until it didn’t. The Richmond prosecutor was backed by the Courts of Justice Committee, but in a 1am vote—conducted after several state legislators had gone home—the House voted 33 to 31 in his favor, short of the 50 votes he needed for confirmation. The opposition and late vote were attributed to The Family Foundation and conservative lawmakers, who worried that he would be a “homosexual activist.” And like that, Tracy Thorne-Begland’s career came to a screeching halt.

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First of all, the premise of the Mystery Date board game is awesome. Someone knocks on your door; you don’t know who it is, and you go on a date with them. How did they know where you live? It doesn’t matter—you’re just relieved that you did not draw the nerd card. As any semi-adolescent girl will tell you, drawing the nerd card is a catastrophic event. It is positively newsworthy, in fact. Proof: this Gawker piece series of screenshots about passive-aggressive text messages from a lawyer who showed up to the first date wearing a fedora. The fedora is key.* It establishes that the man whose text messages have now been viewed 77,000 times is an unsympathetic character, and we do not need to consider the implications of using the most sophisticated communications medium in human history to be catty about a bad date. It’s the same rhetorical device we see in this first date story and this one.

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Weekends are for speculation at the New York Times, and the paper’s Magazine section speculated it out of the park with this feature about whether young children can be diagnosed as psychopaths. For the purposes of our discussion, we’re going to put aside the question of what “psychopathy” actually is. That’s what reporter Jennifer Kahn has done, parenthetically noting that “the terms ‘sociopath’ and ‘psychopath’ are essentially identical,” connecting adult psychopathy to “cold, predatory conduct” and leaving it at that. Psycho-/sociopaths do bad things and don’t feel bad about them. They obey external rules of right and wrong, but they don’t internalize them in emotionally meaningful ways; they don’t want to be good. If it sounds to you like I am describing every child that has ever lived, you begin to understand the problem. If it doesn’t sound that way to you, it’s probably because there is something wrong with your brain, and society has no choice but to write you off.

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It’s a dazzling Friday morning in Missoula, and I want to finish my work as quickly as possible so that I can take Stringer to the dog park. Stringer agrees with me on the importance of this issue. It’s one of the few initiatives around here that gets bipartisan support; by contrast, he sees no reason why I waste time taking a shower or putting prepared food in the refrigerator, and I don’t understand why that brown spot in the yard is so important. Everybody has his own agenda, and it is of paramount importance to exactly one person, or possibly one dog. This week’s link roundup is about the pressing issues that define our age, and also the issues treated-as-pressing that remind us what a pain in the ass consistent singular perspective can be. Then we’re going to the dog park. Soon, buddy. Just lie down or something.

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