This writer is exercised over the Euro-cutesying of vampires, especially in fiction aimed at young girls (via Instapundit):

At least Anne Rice’s vampires were still primarily bloodsuckers. The first sign that something was awry came with the introduction of Angel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A prime example of the brooding, crying-on-the-inside, leather-jacketed emo boy of the ’90s (see also: Dylan McKay, Beverly Hills, 90210; James Hurley, Twin Peaks), Angel was a vampire who had a soul. He fell in love with Buffy, teared up a lot, and believed in random acts of kindness. Angel, in short, sucked. Or, rather, he didn’t suck, which was the problem. When he did suck, he took limited amounts of blood from consenting human women, or sucked blood against his will, or sucked rat blood.

Rat blood.

Think about it. Faced with the impact of his diet on humans, Angel accepts a yucky, cruelty-free substitute, then endlessly lectures other vampires about their moral failings because they don’t do the same. He’s not a vampire—he’s a vegan.

I’m not nearly the Buffy fan a lot of my friends were, and David Boreanaz is a bit on the non-hairy side for me, but I have to say I think that’s unfair to the Angel character, at least at first. After all, he didn’t just randomly “have” a soul: it was restored to him by Gypsies as part of a curse after he’d practiced typical-vampire predation for hundreds of years. The message that being a good person is worth straining to overcome your most evil instincts and not giving into every craving never struck me as a namby-pamby one, despite the soft-focus teen-romance setting. And besides, there were plenty of other repellantly predatory vampires populating the series to convey to viewers that Angel was not the norm. Whether Grady Hendrix is right about the other stories mentioned, I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised.

This blogger is, like me, an atheist who was brought up in a fundamentalist Christian sect, and she makes several very good points in this post about arguments between believers and principled non-believers (via the Unreligious Right):

When I believed I did so because I’d been indoctrinated as a child, and then later on as a young adult, because I desperately wanted it to be true. There was no evidence, no proof, no real good logical defense for my belief. I just felt it; I felt such certainty I thought I knew it was true, although if you’d asked me why I’d have been pressed to defend my belief. I probably would’ve have said it was a matter of faith, if forced to have such a conversation at all. I certainly would not have presumed to understand atheism.

…

Seriously though, saying “I don’t know, but there’s no real evidence” doesn’t require faith. Saying, “I know there’s a God, and I know what he wants, and he wants me to worship him”? That requires faith. Undoubtedly. Can you see how those are not truly equivalent though? Stating a positive claim (“There is a god”) asserts that something is true. And, as Tracy often says on The Atheist Experience, “Things which exist manifest in reality.” Since there are NO manifestations of a supernatural all-powerful deity in our reality (zip, zero, zilch, nada, nein, none), disbelief seems only rational. It is not the same as asserting the positive claim “There is NO god”. Lack of evidence is not necessarily evidence of lack. But I have to say it seems more likely to me.

That said, although I blog about it regularly here and on Atheist Nexus, I’m not so invested in my atheism I’d be unwilling to chance my stance. If I was presented with sufficient evidence, I would discontinue my disbelief, and have to accept the existence of whatever deity was proven. (Whether or not I’d worship a god would be entirely dependent on the character, attributes, and actions of said deity.)

Those aren’t original points on Angie Jackson’s part, of course, but they’re the sorts of things that keep needing to be addressed. I’ve known some Christians who are very consistent about where they draw the line (or at least the grey zone) between the sphere that human beings can know empirically and the realm beyond posited by their faith. But far more frequently, believers push through faith into non-falsifiability. If good things happen to good people, God is blessing them. It’s obviously evidence that God rules the universe. If bad things happen to good people, God is testing them. His plan is beyond our understanding, after all. If good things happen to bad people, well, the wicked spread themselves like green bay trees, but that doesn’t mean they won’t get theirs. His plan is beyond our understanding, after all. If bad things happen to bad people, God is punishing them. It’s obviously evidence that God rules the universe.

Just to make things even more arbitrary, in my congregation growing up, our pastor would pull up every few months and deliver a sermon reminding us that God doesn’t micromanage everything. Sometimes while He’s letting the world run along, stuff just happens. It’s still part of His plan, but you’re not supposed to draw blockbuster inferences from it.

So not everything indicates something important about what God’s cooking up. Except when it does. Maybe you got that flat tire because God was trying to keep you from getting to the post office. Or maybe it was Satan afflicting you. Or maybe you just happened to run over a spike and it didn’t “mean” anything. I grew up around people who spent their entire lives mulling things over this way, and most of them did so because they genuinely believed it would help them serve God better. I remember what that was like, and it really was a source of solace in many ways. There was an answer for everything. You did your best, and if things still came out badly, you trusted God to make it right eventually in His own way.

As Jackson says, the existence of God was such a part of the reality principle that whether there was really, really, really enough evidence to support it tended not to come into the equation. You believed it, you liked believing it, and you wanted to keep believing it. Of course, you studied the Bible, but the approach was less like “Does this square with reality?” than like “Is there an interpretation of reality that makes it possible to keep believing this is a holy book?” Verses that contained good folk wisdom were evidence that the Bible was the word of God; the rest could be explained away as necessary—it’s a metaphor…God’s sense of the passage of time doesn’t match ours…when it was written this was actually socially progressive…when it was written this was the best available interpretation of the natural phenomenon in question…God’s plan is beyond beyond beyond our understanding.

Eventually, it occurred to me to wonder why, if we were supposed to be so tolerant of ambiguity and paradox, we didn’t go the whole way and just become Buddhists. The Bible started seeming to me like any other book. If, to the best of our human comprehension of the text, it had some wise parts, some dumb parts, some beautiful parts, some execrable parts, some lucid parts, and some obscure parts, then styling it God’s handbook for living and trying to gain understanding of it through close and closed readings might be comforting, but it probably wasn’t very useful. Human society still progressed by experimenting with new ways of doing things and continuing with what proved to work (capitalism, representative democracy, the scientific method). That Christians then circled back to look for ways the Bible could be seen as the underpinnings of what proved to work didn’t change the process of discovery. Our knowledge keeps growing because we keep pushing for more of it, but it remains flawed and provisional.

I don’t begrudge Christians their faith. We all get at most several decades on Earth to figure out how we believe we should live and then act on it, and that involves figuring out what meaning we think the spiritual part of experience has. No one is entirely rational, and few of us would really want to be. I also have no problem when it’s pointed out that people on all sides of the God question believe things for which they have no proof. What bothers me is when believers want to toggle back and forth between “God’s love and mercy are obvious” and “God’s plan is unknowable” depending on which line happens to help them argue for theism at a given point in the discussion. That simply isn’t the same as an atheist’s arguing that there’s not enough reason to think God exists.

The DPJ has released a policy document to allay fears that, to put it bluntly, if it scores a majority in the Diet in next month’s elections it will screw things up because it doesn’t really know what it’s doing:

The policy pamphlet will serve as the basis for Minshuto’s campaign manifesto for the election that many people expect will upset the balance of power.

…

For example, Minshuto will no longer insist on the immediate end of the Maritime Self-Defense Force’s refueling mission in the Indian Ocean to assist in the U.S.-led fight against terrorism in Afghanistan.

Minshuto has also backed down on its previous position concerning the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that Japan has with the United States concerning the U.S. presence in this country.

Minshuto had long opposed the MSDF’s refueling mission in the Indian Ocean.

…

The policy pamphlet also calls for the implementation of inspections of cargo ships under economic sanctions against North Korea called for by a U.N. Security Council resolution.

The move is aimed at deflecting criticism from Prime Minister Taro Aso who roundly attacked Minshuto for failing to deliberate a bill that would have allowed for such inspection of cargo ships. The lack of deliberation led to the bill being scrapped.

To alleviate concerns among officials of the U.S. government that a Minshuto administration would drastically alter relations with the United States, the policy pamphlet says the party will propose a revision to the SOFA with the United States.

In the draft document, Minshuto sought to start a comprehensive revision of the SOFA.

Hmmm…shifting away from pie-in-the-sky positions when the prospect of actually taking the reins of government forces pragmatism on you. A memory is stirring…something familiar-sounding…no, lost it. Won’t come. The DPJ is also planning to push up subsidies for farm-family income to 2011. I’m not sure whether that represents an attempt to combat the LDP’s traditional dominance outside urban areas or just the pro-bucolicism sentimentality that seems to stir hearts in every industrialized democracy.

Prime Minister Taro Aso has now dissolved the lower house of the Diet:

Official campaigning will kick off Aug. 18, but politicians were already behaving as if the race had begun to determine whether Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan) would gain control of government.

In an unusual move, Aso first felt compelled to apologize for his recent flip-flops on policy as well as internal discord within the party.

“My careless statements caused distrust among the public and hurt trust in the political sector,” Aso said at a news conference Tuesday. “I extend my deep apology.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Aso apologized at a meeting of Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers for his statements and the woeful performance of LDP-backed candidates in recent local elections.

Aso said at the news conference he would make three pledges to voters.

He promised to achieve recovery in the domestic economy. He also vowed to assuage growing concerns about jobs, old age and child-rearing and pledged to comprehensively reform the taxation system, reduce the number of Diet members and central government bureaucrats and eliminate the controversial practice of amakudari.

Bonus points to the Asahi translator for thinking to use assuage there. (“Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken” was always one of my favorite hymns growing up, though the post-piety me can’t help thinking that was more due to Haydn’s rousing melody than to the text. Still, assuage is a cool word.)

The newspaper of my Lehigh Valley hometown in Pennsylvania reports that PennDOT, the commonweath’s version of the DMV (as beloved as those of most other states, if not less; when it comes to service, New York’s is like TGI Friday’s by comparison), is spending $60,000 of its stimulus money on signs to advertise projects intended as stimuli:

PennDOT spokesman Steve Chizmar said Pennsylvania elected to take a ”middle-of-the-road” approach to the federal government’s strong encouragement that the signs be put at every project site around the state, choosing only those that were most visible to the public. The stimulus package is pumping $1 billion into the state for hundreds of road and bridge repairs.

PennDOT’s not alone in touting the stimulus package. The Pennsylvania Infrastructure Investment Authority requires all contractors to post the act’s logo on construction sites. ”The logo must be at least six inches in diameter and displayed in a prominent place,” reads a line in the agency’s Recovery Act requirements.

The state also is paying political strategist and media consultant Ken Snyder $9,090 a month to help with publicity relating to the stimulus package.

”Obviously it is important to educate the public about where the recovery dollars are working in the commonwealth,” PennDOT’s Chizmar said. ”The public deserves and has a right to know.”

I’m not entirely sure this is worth getting exercised over. Depending on the kind of installation, sign crews do dangerous work outdoors no matter how crappy the weather, and their industry’s been hit hard by the recession; so I find it hard to complain that some extra work’s been thrown their way. And PennDOT seems to have forgone the opportunity to put signs up at every last project site. Given Washington’s current spending practices, $60,000 hardly seems worth remarking on.

The part I find irritating is the flagrantly cynical spin put on the thing by PennDOT’s mouthpiece. The public does, indeed, have a right to know how the tax dollars that happen to wander back here after making their U-turn through sticky-fingered Washington are being apportioned out, but surely that right could be satisfied with a webpage or downloadable PDF file. (Surely not, my experience a few years ago with PennDOT’s online presence suggests, but I’m talking hypothetically.) The idea that the signs in question are about transparency—rather than about conveying a message along the lines of “See, citizens? We’re Getting Something Done!”—is balderdash.

Regarding the publicist, my main question is whether he’s being asked to work without pay like those on the regular old state payroll. (And yes, I know that the money paid to Snyder probably comes directly out of the stimulus fund and not from the general budget in Harrisburg. The contrast is still a droll one.)

…

My parents are hosting a family reunion on my mother’s side tomorrow. A few dozen relatives will descend on Shimerville, and there are now enough sausages cooked in beer, deviled eggs, potato salad, and beef barbecue for all. An uncle is bringing the (handmade) pierogies. My father ventured to ask what those who wanted a vegetable should do. My mother looked at him as if he’d just landed from Mars. “There are peppers in with the sausage. And I think someone’s bringing a vegetable tray.” Talk of a salad surfaced briefly a few weeks ago, then retreated to the dark-green, leafy depths* and has not, to my knowledge, been raised again.

My job…well, okay, I sort of volunteered…was to attend to the booze list. It would be disrespectful not to have enough whiskey on hand for Ciocia H’s highballs, after all. How frequently I’ll be offering to freshen her drink as a cover for topping my own will depend on how successfully the rest of the family keeps a lid on the passive-aggressive grudge-working. (My mother’s side of the family is Polish Catholic.)

* Actually, now that I think of it, that’s misleading, since salad in this family refers to a quarter-head of iceberg lettuce covered, Vesuvius-destroying-Pompeii-like, in hot bacon dressing.

Japan has a new organ transplant law, which recognizes brain death as death and could make younger donors possible:

The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry is set to begin discussing the criteria by which doctors would diagnose brain death in children under 15 under the revised Organ Transplant Law enacted Monday.

The ministry also will examine how to confirm whether potential donors did or did not intend to donate their organs.

The revised law has paved the way for children under 15 to become organ donors, which is prohibited under the current law enacted in 1997. A bill to revise the law passed at the Monday plenary session of the House of Councillors with 138 votes in favor of it and 82 opposed. Twenty lawmakers were absent or abstained.

The existing criteria for recognizing brain death apply to people aged 6 and older. A health ministry research team of medical experts prepared a draft of criteria for children under the age of 6 in 2000.

Not surprisingly, prominent supporters of the revised law include families of potential recipients:

On June 23, Koki Sampo, from Aoba Ward, Yokohama, and his wife, Yuki, lost their 1-year-old son, Ikki, who had been suffering from a severe heart disorder. He died in the United States after undergoing heart transplant surgery there.

Ikki was diagnosed as suffering idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy in April 2008, when he was just 6 weeks old.

“My mind went into a blur the moment the doctor told me the name of the disease,” Yuki, 29, said.

The couple decided to go to the United States after Ikki’s condition worsened at the end of the year and he suffered temporary heart and lung failure. The family arrived in the United States in April.

Sampo said he was told several times by medical staff at the U.S. hospital that they should have come to the hospital much earlier, when Ikki’s condition was not as serious.

Ikki was able to undergo transplant surgery in late May. However, his parents’ dream of being able to take their son back to Japan in a healthy condition did not materialize.

Ikki’s funeral was held on July 3 in Yokohama. When Sampo, who returned to his job last week, heard the news of the revised Organ Transplant Law being enacted he said, “I hope this means there will be fewer patients and families who have to go through the same kind of sad experience as we did.”

“I can’t understand why Japan, which has one of the world’s highest standards of medical care, is unable to make progress when it comes to organ transplants. Why did Diet deliberations on this bill take so long? My son wasn’t able to receive a transplant operation in this country, but I hope Japan will become a nation that can save the lives of as many people as possible–even just one life.”

Opponents include families that have gone through the agony of deciding whether a loved one is brain-dead:

Akemi Nakamura, 45, from Ota Ward, Tokyo, had a daughter who was declared brain dead by a doctor at the age of 2 years and 8 months. However, with the aid of an artificial respirator, she was able to live until her heart failed when she was 4. During that period, her hair and nails grew, and she grew more than 10 centimeters taller, Nakamura said.

“My daughter continued to live [after being declared brain-dead]. It was only the form in which she lived that changed. Just to feel the warmth of her body filled me with so much love,” Nakamura said.

The revised Organ Transplant Law allows people to become organ donors under the premise that people who are brain dead are legally deceased. To transplant organs from people who have been declared brain dead, in addition to a diagnosis of brain death from a doctor other criteria such as confirmation of respiratory cessation also have to be fulfilled.

Family members of people judged to be brain dead also have a right to refuse the transplantation of their organs.

However, Nakamura expressed concern. “The enactment of the revised Organ Transplant Law will make families like us who have been living happily feel anxious,” Nakamura said.

Another woman’s daughter was a teenager who survived a traffic accident in a coma:

Masako Ide, 60, serves on the board of an association of families of traffic accident victims. One of Ide’s daughters, a third-year high school student, was in a traffic accident on her way to school in 1990. She was immediately taken to a hospital but was declared brain dead 12 hours later. She died after her heart stopped four days later.

“Urging victims’ family members, who are in a state of confusion following unexpected accidents involving their loved ones, to decide [if they agree to have the victims] be diagnosed as brain dead or agree to organ donations will further confuse families and force them to shoulder even more burdens,” Ide said. “Measures should be taken to improve the emergency medical system and pediatric care system.”

It’s impossible to avoid pitting the concerns of those who will die without donated organs against those who could live longer if life support weren’t terminated in order to harvest their organs, but it can be (and has been) argued persuasively that the existing Organ Transplantation Law in Japan was extremely conservative and weighted against recipients:

The enactment of the Organ Transplant Law [in 1997] was greatly anticipated by patients with no other means for survival than obtaining a transplant as well as those involved in the transplanting process. This new law was expected to have a major impact on transplanting in Japan, but its regulations turned out to be extremely stringent. The donations of organs by a brain dead donor is permitted only if “…the donor expressed in writing prior to death his/her intent to agree to donate his/her organs and agree to be submitted to an authorized brain death declarations, and his/her family members (spouse, parents, siblings, children, grandparents, grandchildren, and live-in family members) did not object to the donation.” In addition, the law states that “only persons 15 years and above can express an intent to donate.” This stipulation has greatly reduced the possibility of transplants to small children; heart transplants to small children have become impossible.

There are other problems, of course. Japan is very rarely at the leading edge in medical treatments. It tends to let the U.S. and other countries with researchers willing to forge into unknown procedural and ethical territory make the gains (with the attendant instructive mistakes). And the caution means fewer transplants are performed, which encourages people to go elsewhere if they have the necessary resources. This article, to which I was first referred by a friend, is three years old, but I haven’t seen anything to indicate that the information doesn’t remain basically current:

A survey of Japan’s overseas organ transplants, published by Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare shows that from 1984 to 2005, at least 522 Japanese people underwent organ transplant operations. Among these operations, 151 cases were conducted in 50 foreign medical institutes, of which 34 were carried out in China—accounting for 75 percent of the total.

According to Japanese media, the number of Japanese patients accepting organ transplants in other Asian countries has notably increased in recent years. A Tokyo doctor who treated nine patients who came back from China with new kidneys complained, “The Chinese hospitals didn’t provide any donor information, nor did they provide the patients with usage of immunizing agents.” He pointed out that four out of the nine patients died within two years of the operation. “The survival rate after organ transplants in China is terrible compared to that in Japan.”

These incidents have triggered another round of debates in Japanese medical circles over the human rights and ethical issues related to organ transplants. Related medical associations have forbidden doctors from getting involved in the foreign organ transplant trade. Debate has also started in Japan over modifications to laws related to organ transplants first implemented in 1997.

So getting your transplant in Japan is ideal, assuming you can actually get an organ. It’s not hard to see why Japanese seem to have been flouting the PRC ban on selling organs to foreigners.

The Japanese patients spent an average of about 595,000 yuan (US$87,000) each for their operations at an unidentified hospital in Guangzhou, capital of southern China’s Guangdong Province, the report said. The patients received treatment in the hospital for up to 20 days, the report said.

The money covered fees to the hospital and doctors as well as traveling and accommodation costs in China, according to the news agency.

Some patients were admitted to hospital under Chinese names as requested by the hospital, Kyoto said. Most of the organs they received were probably from executed prisoners, the report said.

The Japanese official denied it was organ trade as none of the patients had paid their organ donors and no introduction charges were paid.

The report added that no Japanese had had such surgery since the Beijing Olympics last August because of “international pressure.”

China banned the trade in human organs in May 2007, and prescribed that foreigners were not allowed organ transplants in China to protect limited resources.

China is the world’s second-largest transplant nation after the United States, with about 5,000 operations performed in the country each year.

Even in the United States, waiting for organs is a big problem, of course, but donors might not be as scarce as they seem if the process were reformed. Virginia Postrel had a piece in The Atlantic last week specifically about kidneys:

For those who survive long enough to get transplants, the wait routinely lasts years. The odds are particularly bad in large cities. Take the nation’s largest transplant center, the University of California, San Francisco. In 2008, its surgeons did an impressive 347 kidney transplants, including 231 with organs from deceased donors. But 5,271 people are on UCSF’s waiting list—meaning that, relying entirely on deceased donors, they would expect to wait an average of almost 23 years. If, like Steve Jobs, who recently got a liver transplant in Memphis, you can travel great distances on short notice, you can register all over the country. But few kidney patients are that flexible. They wait, they get sicker, and, too often, they die.

…

Outlawing payments to donors is ostensibly a way to keep the system fair, giving rich and poor an equally lousy chance of getting a kidney. But wealthier people can already more easily register at distant centers with short lists. They’re also more likely to have friends and relatives who can afford the nonmedical expenses that living donation often entails, including time off from work, child care, hotel rooms, or cross-country travel. (It is legal for recipients or third parties to pay such expenses, but, unlike medical costs, they are not covered by insurance.)

Patients with enough money and the right networks have yet another option. They can go abroad, to countries where the authorities sanction or ignore payments to living donors. That’s how Henry David got his new kidney.

Virginia discusses donor pairing and chaining in ways that don’t require new legislation but do present practical challenges. The possibility of paying donors for organs may make the gesture seem less saintly, she writes, but it would provide real incentives in line with the transfer of value involved.

Great. The ore-ore scam is back, according to the Yomiuri:

The monthly average of all remittance-related fraud this year has been 92 cases. Should such frauds continue at the same rate this month, July’s figure would be about 150–about 60 percent higher than the monthly average so far this year.

Notable is the increase in the number of “It’s me calling” scams, in which criminals deceive elderly people by pretending to be a relative and asking them to remit money, with explanations such as “I’ve lost money on the stock exchange.”

Such methods are believed to be similar to those mainly used around 2003, techniques that criminals have used less frequently in recent years.

Members of criminal groups who were arrested around that time and had been serving prison terms have now been released. The MPD is strengthening its measures to tackle this kind of crime as it believes the same groups could be back in operation.

According to the MPD, 552 remittance frauds were committed in the first six months of this year–1,909 fewer cases than in the first half of 2008.

Criminals cheated victims out of about 869 million yen in the first half of 2009–again a sharp decline of about 2.91 billion yen from the same period last year, the MPD said.

That makes it hard to tell whether this is a new trend emerging, though the part about those convicted years ago being out of prison now isn’t exactly comforting.

The tsuyu rainy season is ending and high summer beginning in Japan, and Atsushi as always has sent me a few pictures of seasonal flowers to keep me attuned to the changes. We used to go see them together when I was in Tokyo. This is a lotus from Sankeien Park in Yokohama (which is near the setting of the opening scene of Ringu, for those who know it.)

Now that we’ve established an image of tranquility, we can move on to the restiveness at hand.

For those who haven’t noticed, electoral politics in Japan are in the middle of a shake-up. The LDP got spanked hard in the Tokyo Metro Assembly election a weekend ago, and Prime Minister Taro Aso is finally calling the snap election people have been trying to press on him.

They decided the election will be officially announced on Aug. 18.

The prime minister, who wanted to dissolve the lower house this week, held discussions with senior officials of the ruling bloc to that end.

However, the prime minister apparently was not able to push back strong demands from many ruling bloc members opposing an early dissolution.

…

At a government-ruling bloc meeting held at the Prime Minister’s Office later, Aso apologized for the poor coalition result in Sunday’s Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly election and expressed his wish to have important bills passed through the Diet.

“I’m very sorry [about the result of the metropolitan election],” he said. “I want important bills, such as the bill to revise the Organ Transplant Law and the bill for implementing North Korea-related cargo inspections [to be passed by the Diet].”

The prime minister said he would dissolve the lower house once he saw how the deliberations over these bills would go after the Democratic Party of Japan presented a no-confidence motion against the Cabinet.

Naoto Kan, who’s been back as acting leader of the DPJ, is trying to play Sunday’s results up as not only disaffection with the LDP/Shin-Komeito but also newfound confidence in the DPJ:

In the election Sunday, Minshuto added 20 seats to bring its total to 54 in the 127-seat assembly.

The LDP lost 10 seats and ended up with 38, the lowest since the party was formed and only tied in the 1965 election. New Komeito took 23 for the coalition’s combined total that fell short of the majority.

Minshuto’s victory also snapped the LDP’s 40-year streak of being the largest party in the Tokyo metropolitan assembly.

“It’s a result of higher trust in Minshuto, beyond the Tokyo administration,” Naoto Kan, Minshuto’s acting president, said on an NHK TV program Sunday night.

Maybe. The Japanese are certainly unhappy with much of the status quo, and they may see the DPJ (called in these articles by a transliteration of its Japanese name, 民主党 [minshutou]: “democratic party”) as genuinely having a better policy platform. I’m not really sure it goes quite that deep, though. That’s not because Japanese are especially ignorant about “the issues”; rather it’s because they accurately understand their system as one that requires equilibrium. The LDP just hasn’t had enough pushback, and with the post-Koizumi parade of milquetoast administrations, it itself no longer represents a force in the Diet that effectively pushes back against the bureaucrats. And the ever-accruing list of scandals—related to political contributions, bid-rigging, and consumer products—gives citizens much less reason to believe that tolerating wheeling and dealing as usual is worth it in exchange for stability.

That said, it’s disingenuous to talk about Diet elections as if they were United States congressional elections. The LDP and DPJ have differences in their declared policy platforms, sure, but the legislature and cabinet are limited in their ability to put them into practice. That’s not because the bureaucrats “actually run everything,” as is sometimes reductively claimed (I’ve possibly said so myself). It’s because the Diet is just one competing power center among several, which do include the unelected officials in the federal ministries. It’s helpful to keep that in mind when reading things like the last sentence below, from a Mainichi editorial:

Through the uncommon practice of making a pre-announcement of the House of Representatives’ dissolution, Aso probably wanted to claim his authority to dissolve the Lower House, with the aim of silencing calls within the LDP for him to step down. Surprisingly, however, such calls have not been tempered. Within the party, some are pressuring the prime minister to step down prior to the dissolution of the Lower House, while others who are not going as far as calling for the prime minister to be replaced are proposing a “separation of LDP president and prime minister.” Under this plan, the LDP president would be replaced so that the party can embark on the next general election with a new frontman, who can then be nominated for prime minister after the election if the ruling bloc wins.

It feels inappropriate for the prime minister — the very person who initiated the dissolution of the Lower House in order to directly ask the public if they support him — to be replaced right after the election. The public has become distrustful of the irresponsibility of a party that has repeatedly replaced its leaders, as if changing its facade could somehow fool the public. Party members convinced that the election cannot be won with Aso at the top of the party would more easily earn the understanding and acceptance of the public if they withdrew from the LDP and formed a new party.

The opposition bloc including the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) submitted a non-confidence motion against the Cabinet to the Lower House and a censure motion against the prime minister to the Upper House on Monday. For all practical purposes, the long election race has already begun. A benefit of having the general election in late August is the fact that voters will have the time to scrutinize the policies proposed by different parties.

The various political parties should hasten to compose and announce their manifestos. Prime Minister Aso and the ruling bloc, who have continued to evade voters’ choices, must avoid any tricks and fight this election fair and square with their policies. Hopefully, opposition parties will come up with concrete manifestos that detail what kind of changes we can hope to see in Japan with a change in government.

There’s certainly more up for grabs than there would have been twenty years ago, and I have no doubt that DPJ legislators would (will) come into power expecting to be able to make substantive changes. But as with the Obama administration here in the U.S., it’s easier to embrace the idea of change than to put it into practice when the constraints of reality have to be factored in. Even Koizumi, who had the ideal balance of insider networks within the LDP and maverick cachet among fed-up voters, had to compromise again and again on reforms. The snap election promises the most entertaining campaign season since 2005, but it remains to be seen how the throw-the-bums-out energy might translate into long-term systemic shifts.

At From the Maenianum Secundum, Herself (that’s not my being queeny; it’s her actual blogname) uses Heather Mac Donald’s most recent post about Sarah Palin’s resignation as a point of departure for a rumination about the role of learning in guiding the citizenry.

All Americans are not required to do the heavy lifting with regard to understanding all of history’s lessons (nor are all Americans capable of doing so), but because there has always existed a small, select group of intellectuals (synonymous with “Men of Letters”) who would warn us if we were walking too closely to the edge of the slippery slope, we were protected. Our culture used to recognize and respect them for the benefits they provided to all of us. But all intellectuals, even those of the right kind, are being tarnished by those of the wrong kind, and are being relegated to the American equivalent of Siberia: irrelevance.

Herself doesn’t mention her at all in the text of the post, but my interpretation is that she’s aiming her criticism at the Palin cult, if not necessarily at Palin herself. But the point she makes is more generally applicable, and it helps to illustrate why some of us are ready to go berserk if one more person starts in with the “But she has such great instincts!” routine. Instincts, like charisma, are of genuine value. But sometimes there’s no substitute for actually knowing what the hell you’re talking about.

And while I’m (for what even I myself hope is the last time) gretzing yet again about Palin-groupie-ism, can her defenders please stop expecting to score points in her favor by repeating that Biden is worse and Obama is screwing up the economy? We know. Most of us skeptics who are on the right voted for her and McCain despite our reservations and would not have voted Obama-Biden at gunpoint. Pick-ing ve-ry slow-ly o-ver the syl-la-bles while you ex-plain that Palin was not necessarily the worst ninny on the ballot last year contributes exactly zero new pieces of information to the discussion. And if we’re going to have to get used to hearing “Not at baffled as Joe Biden” as an endorsement from here on, kindly warn me up front so I can stock up on whiskey.

Is it my imagination, or is a lot of the support Sarah Palin is getting kind of patronizing?

What I mean by that is this: time was when conservatives loved you for your strengths and achievements. Conservatives said that every citizen should know our founding documents, not just love America in a general way. Conservatives said that whatever language you spoke at home, knowing clear, formal, standard American English was the key to advancement in the larger society. Conservatives said that there should be objective criteria for job performance that applied to every applicant. It was liberals who told you you were special just the way you were, that aspiration was a WASP-male construct designed to beat the self-esteem out of women and minorities, and that encouraging people to communicate in standard English was less important than honoring the multiplicity of “voices” in society. Liberals said that the “position” from which you “articulated” your identity within society was a factor in whether you deserved the job.

And now? Well, I suspect that still holds true—for everyone except Sarah Palin.

Palin doesn’t need eloquence or ideas—she’s got authenticity. Eloquence and ideas are for conservative women like Michelle Malkin and Kate O’Beirne. If Gertrude Himmelfarb had ever disgorged one of Palin’s unparseables on a history panel, listeners would quite properly have wondered what her BAL was. But coming from Sarah, while she’s trying to convince us she deserves the job of Vice-President of the United States, all this meandering sounds so very winningly earnest that it just adds to her charm. After Palin’s resignation, Roger Kimball—this would be the Roger Kimball who’s won many of us over as a scourge of mangled English and lack of familiarity with great thinkers—made a flippant comment about the “syntactical breakdown” of some liberal guy responding at The Daily Beast.* Interestingly, I don’t recall his taking one of the many opportunities to call on Palin herself to do better on that score last fall. Maybe he did and I missed it, but all I recollect is a curt “I acknowledge that she has performed poorly in some recent interviews.” And yes, I understand that it was important not to undermine the McCain-Palin ticket before the election, but on the other hand, perhaps Palin would have felt more of an impetus to start performing better if she’d gotten more reasoned criticism from avowed supporters. “I place myself firmly in the utterly besotted camp” does not signal a need for improvement. And while I’m picking specifically on Kimball here because of his track record, he was hardly alone.

With the election over, things don’t seem to have improved a great deal. Cathy Young made the following observation at Real Clear Politics this week:

Those who believe Palin held her own debating Joe Biden forget that the McCain camp had requested a less-challenging format for that debate, with follow-up questions limited.

…

Some of Palin’s followers see her as the second coming of Reagan. But Reagan, despised as a “dunce” by his liberal detractors, had extensively read, written, and talked about the key issues of his day. While not an intellectual, he was a man of ideas. Palin is not known to harbor those. Her appeal is described in terms of “speaking from heart” and exemplifying the virtues of faith and family – which is ironic, given the usual conservative derision of emotion-based liberal politics.

There are a lot of comments, but this one by Rick Garner (timestamped Jul 08, 05:29 PM) represents what a lot of others have said there and elsewhere:

I have to disagree that Sarah Palin is not the leader that conservatives are seeking for this reason…stumbling, rambling and incoherent as many elitist, snobbish and boorish critics labeled her announcement to resign… the everyday common, hardworking, God and family centered, middle America conservative citizen understood clearly what she was saying and the reasons behind her decision. She is in everyway…conservative middle America. We know her, understand her, believe what she believes, we too many times speak in a rambling and sometimes stumbling voice, trying to express our hearts honestly and truthfully. To criticize her unpolished manner is to criticize most Americans.

No, I’m sorry, it is not. Palin, unlike “most Americans,” is the governor of a state and accepted the VP nomination. She didn’t just find herself caught unawares in front of the camera. I’m not denying that the media are out to get her or that they’re doing what they have to to make her look stupid. I’m saying that she’s still to blame when she gives them good material to work with. Honestly, if the Democrats had nominated an unknown black woman politician who insisted on speaking in Ebonics and gave tortuous answers to straightforward questions about foreign policy, would there be a single conservative commentator or commenter who would be applauding her for speaking from the heart? Yeah, right. We’d be hearing all about how her evasive sentence structures demonstrated the bankruptcy of her ideas and how she wasn’t showing respect for the office for which she was campaigning.

Young linked to her article at her blog, and one of her commenters there illustrated another aspect of Palin love that’s disturbing: the reflexive dismissal of all criticism of his idol as rooted in class resentment or leftist/feminist dogma.

I think you need to come to terms with your own feelings about Sarah Palin. You don’t like her because she is a powerful woman who is a conservative. You can’t stand it. You feel it is a betrayal to women. You think she needs to be a pro-choice feminist.

That particular commenter, it must be noted, has been willing to read more about Young—the idea that she’s a feminist party-liner is risible—and is now having an interesting discussion with her. I’m hoping that when things calm down a bit, that will happen more. But right now, his initial reaction is more the norm. Conservatives may reject the leftist attacks on Palin, but they’ve been all too happy to accept the false dilemma on which they’re predicated: that you must either think she’s a genius or think she’s a moron. Victor Davis Hanson, whose blog is at PJM in central Palin-groupie territory, posted the other day about her critics:

But if, a big if, she decides to become a national political figure, Palin should use these next few years (in addition to making some money to support her family) to travel and read widely in the manner that a Reagan did in his wilderness period. She has natural intelligence and is curious. I think most would like to see her do another Couric interview five years from now after she had time to size up DC insiders, meet more politicians, lecture in front of hostile audiences-and just read and reflect.

Okay, that’s very reasonable, and it’s a relief to see that Hanson doesn’t think one of Palin’s chief charms is that she’s unsullied by too much book-learnin’. But I’m still not sure that I buy the “curious” part. I mean, look, if the complaints about her intelligence consisted of nothing but grousing that she said “disinterested” when she meant “uninterested,” or that she stressed the second syllable in patina and despicable, her defenders would be perfectly justified in countering that they were elitist. But Palin’s grasp of foreign policy never struck me as matching that which I’d expect from an everyday informed citizen of her age, let alone a politician who could make over Washington. It’s possible to love America and still not have a strong, systematic understanding of how to put its ideals into practice in a complex world, just as it’s possible to be a knee-jerk leftist.

If Palin were the only issue here, this might not matter much. She’s resigned, after all, and if she does decide to run for office again, we’ll see whether she can take the heat. If she can’t she’ll drop out, and stronger candidates will prevail, as Ann Althouse says. My big worry is that she may not bring it, because there will be too many people telling her that all those naysayers who think she needs to improve are just jealous of how pretty and happy she is.** And even if Palin only stays in politics from behind the scenes as a rainmaker or inspirational speaker, the signal has now been sent that conservatism not only knows how to play identity politics as well as liberalism when an election’s at stake but also knows how to follow through on it afterward. Like Hollywood, politics has a way of latching onto what works and trying to replicate it. I hope the Palin phenomenon doesn’t mean we can look forward to more politicians who score points simply by being on the just-folks side of the culture wars. Persons of ability excel when challenged, not coddled; and America deserves public servants who meet the most demanding standards. Conservatives used to know those things, and I hope they still do.

* Seriously, how is it possible for someone of Kimball’s redoubtable intelligence not to see the folly of playing the “syntactical breakdown” card in the process of defending Sarah Palin?

** That’s not to minimize the drubbing Palin took. Erin O’Connor at Critical Mass was right to call it a witch hunt—like all the abuse the Clintons took over two terms in the White House compressed into ten months. And Eric is right that the snobbery about Palin’s schooling was shockingly low and bald-faced.

Added after grabbing a long-sleeved shirt (it is July, isn’t it?): Wow. I wish I’d gone to Unreligious Right before posting this, because he links to this column by Peggy Noonan about Palin. I think Noonan goes too far in the cruelty toward Palin, but she gets at something important that I tried to convey above:

She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn’t say what she read because she didn’t read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn’t thoughtful enough to know she wasn’t thoughtful enough.

As I say, I think this goes too far. Palin can sound lucid on issues—energy policy is the big one—that she’s had to confront on a day-to-day basis while governing Alaska, so I think the contention that she can learn on the job still has potential merit. But she needs supporters who will hold her to the highest standards, not deflect all criticism as some kind of anti-American plot. Unreligious Right says, “[B]y attacking Palin and those who support her, Noonan is doing exactly what she attributes to Palin: sowing discord within the GOP ranks.” Yes, probably. She’s also wrong that the defenses she lists are mostly coming from right-wing intellectuals; Middle-American supporters of Palin seem to be embracing them, too. But I suspect that what’s really getting Noonan going (and maybe I’m just projecting here) is the 180 so many of her fellow travelers seem to have done since Palin arrived on the scene.

Added still later: Heather Mac Donald has (again) posted about Palin at Secular Right and is (again) getting a good beating-up for floating the gingerly suggestion that a contender for national office should be able to connect ideas dependably.