Morality, like art, consists in drawing the line somewhere

Fascinating article from UVA researchers on the nature of moral reasoning:

We present theoretical and empirical reasons for believing that there are five psychological systems that provide the foundations for the world's many moralities.

The five foundations are psychological preparations for detecting and reacting emotionally to issues related to:

1) harm/care,
2) fairness/reciprocity,
3) ingroup/loyalty,
4) authority/respect, and
5) purity/sanctity.

Political liberals have moral intuitions primarily based upon the first two foundations, and therefore misunderstand the moral motivations of political conservatives, who generally rely upon all five foundations.

The essence of the argument is that it is often hard to convince another person, via moral reasoning, what is the "right" thing to do, since there isn't always common agreement on the nature of "moral" conduct. By way of contemporary example, they basically go on to argue that much of the modern political culture war can be illustrated through the lens of differing moral philosophies.

Conservatives generally believe, as did Durkheim (1951/1897), that human beings need structure and constraint to flourish, and that social institutions provide these benefits. As Muller (1997, p. 7) explains:

For the conservative, the historical survival of an institution or practice—be it marriage, monarchy, or the market—creates a prima facie case that it has served some human need. That need may be the institution's explicit purpose, but just as often it will be a need other than that to which the institution is explicitly devoted.

Muller then quotes the modern conservative Irving Kristol:

Institutions which have existed over a long period of time have a reason and purpose inherent in them, a collective wisdom incarnate in them, and the fact that we don’t perfectly understand or cannot perfectly explain why they “work” is no defect in them but merely a limitation in us. (Muller, 1997, p.7; taken from Kristol, 1978, p.161)

These are not crazy ideas. They are practical and ultimately utilitarian justifications for some of the intuitions related to the authority/respect foundation. Traditions and institutions which have been vested with authority over the ages should be given the benefit of the doubt; they should not be torn down and rebuilt each time one group has a complaint against them. (Liberals might perhaps examine their instinctive distrust of institutions and authorities, and the ways that this distrust “motivates” their own social cognition.)

Viewed from this perspective, the conservative fear that gay marriage will “destroy marriage as we know it” is no longer incomprehensible—it is correct.

You can take your own quiz here to see where you fall on the 5 vectors (and contribute to the research at the same time!!).

Although, I have to say that the knowledge of how the questions were going to be evaluated affected the way I thought about the questions. But, so what if it's not a double-blind experiment, it is still fun (if you are similarly geek-oriented).

Here’s my results from the first test.
Green = Me
Blue = Liberal
Red = Conservative



(Harm, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Purity)


Given my antipathy to George Bush, not only at a policy-level, but even more distinctly to his political persona, these results resonate my comments in a previous post.

On the one hand, I struggle at times to condemn those who gravitate to Bush or Palin on cultural affinity issues. Since, one can dismiss the attachment to cultural signals as things that "don't matter" and should be superfluous to hard policy positions formulated by experts beavering away in political think-tanks and debated with great earnestness throughout the campaign season.

But, my own gravitation to Obama is simply the inverse of that which I might otherwise denigrate. I am simply seeking different markers of affinity of thought and perspective.

Obama appeals because he demonstrates that he thinks like me and thus I hope he will make judicious decisions about the correct course of action in my stead. Because, as we are now finding with the financial crisis and with 9/11 in the case of Bush, the actual course of a Presidency is only tangentially related to specific campaign promises or party platform statements.

I may not be from Kenya, but I am of Obama's tribe.

Wait till they get a few credit cards

NYU graduate student prepares crows for the first stage of world avian domination...

The New York University graduate student offered the birds coins and peanuts from a dish attached to a vending machine he’d created, then took the peanuts away. Klein designed the machine so that when the crows searched for the missing peanuts, they pushed the coins out of a dish into a slot, causing more peanuts to be released into the dish. The Binghamton crows quickly learned that dropping nickels and dimes into the slot produced peanuts, and the most resourceful members of the flock began looking for more coins. Within a month, Klein had a flock of crows scouring the ground for loose change.

Something about the creativeness of animals is always very reassuring to me. Seeing such inventiveness (and in other contexts kindness) expressed, even beyond the boundaries of humanity, seems to speak to the great possibilities and openness that the future affords to us all.

Prager Counsels Wives of the World

I don't understand people who read the blogosphere, or any media, seeking only the safe harbor of opinions they already hold, such that their own perspectives are constantly and seamlessly validated.

However, sometimes efforts I make to "enlighten" myself as to the perceptions of others leave me truly dumbstruck. As in, I feel less enlightened and less hopeful about the nature of our common humanity than I did before.

Witness the marital "advice" of one Dennis Prager on the issue of wives who withhold sex when they are not "in the mood":

Incredulity is certainly the reaction most women have when first being told that a man knows he is loved when his wife gives him her body. The idea that the man she is married to, let alone a man whose intelligence she respects, will to any serious extent measure her love of him by such a carnal yardstick strikes many women as absurd and even objectionable.

But the question that should matter to a woman who loves her man is not whether this proposition speaks poorly or well of male nature. It is whether it is true. And it is true beyond anything she can imagine. [em: mine]

Prager constructs these paper-thin, cartoon-like Ken and Barbie-doll images of "men" and "women" in a manner that is deeply de-humanizing. And, from my point of view, even more offensive to men than to women.

The essence of his argument is that I, as a man, can barely contain my carnal urges and, if not placated unremittingly by my wife, will end up humping furniture at holiday gatherings and the like. So, she just better learn to live with it.

Telling your husband to control it is a fine idea. But he already does. Every man who is sexually faithful to his wife already engages in daily heroic self-control. He has married knowing he will have to deny his sexual nature's desire for variety for the rest of his life. To ask that he also regularly deny himself sex with the one woman in the world with whom he is permitted sex is asking far too much. Deny him enough times and he may try to fill this need with another woman. If he is too moral to ever do that, he will match your sexual withdrawal with emotional and other forms of withdrawal. [em: mine]

Didn't bang the secretary at work today? Well you, my friend, are now a certified hero!! Are they giving out Purple Hearts for this kind of thing yet?

It may not surprise to note that Prager is twice divorced. I really can't imagine why.

But maybe the Daily Kos post titled "Dennis Prager Woos His Imaginary Wife" can shed some hypothetical light on the matter.

"My, your marital obligation looks lovely tonight. And, in the light of these florescent tubes (candles are for sissies), may I tell you that I treasure your choice to submit to the duties of your vows MORE today than on the day you signed your name to a contract dooming you to a life of faking it for sake of my self-image!"

Can I get an Amen on that?

Merry Christmas!! Dog Reindeer edition

Credit to Andrew Sullivan for this link, but I couldn't help stealing it for my blog as well.

Merry Christmas to everyone and I hope you are having half as much fun as this dog.

The Unfortunate Case of Camille Paglia

I wrote yesterday in admiration of the insights and judicious analysis of James Fallows with respect to the Sarah Palin VP candidacy. But, as in any random sample, for every positive statistical outlier there are corresponding negative ones as well. Thus, we arrive at the unfortunate case of Camille Paglia.

Here is her initial reaction to Palin’s selection and convention speech:

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

In the U.S., the ultimate glass ceiling has been fiendishly complicated for women by the unique peculiarity that our president must also serve as commander in chief of the armed forces. Women have risen to the top in other countries by securing the leadership of their parties and then being routinely promoted to prime minister when that party won at the polls. But a woman candidate for president of the U.S. must show a potential capacity for military affairs and decision-making. Our president also symbolically represents the entire history of the nation -- a half-mystical role often filled elsewhere by a revered if politically powerless monarch.

Generally speaking, so far so good. In spite of the overwrought invective (“prissy, victim-mondering, philistine feminist establishment”), she makes a solid point about the difficulty that female politicians have had historically in straddling the line between conflicting perceptions of femininity, especially motherhood, and perceptions of strong leadership, especially in the military realm.

Palin’s capacity to serve, but more significantly the American public’s willingness to accept her (at least at a first-glance), as both a potential leader and a mother is a significant step forward in terms of synthesizing traditional female gender roles with the feminist movement’s goals of full social and political equality.

But, having strapped herself to the Palin mythology bandwagon things start to take a funny turn:

The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin's brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don't we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor?

[snip]

One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is "dumb." Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can't see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism -- the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.

Really? The only problem with Palin’s otherwise glittering performances on the public stage was some sort of elitist East Coast rejection of her accent?

Yes, and but of course the “best bits ended up on the cutting room floor!” Paglia’s powers of insight are on full display here. It is now clear that only the dastardly liberal bias of Couric and her mustache-twirling henchmen at CBS could have motivated them to air those interview segments that cast Palin in a poor light.

Now that I have been able to tear myself away from my dog-eared copy of the Feminine Mystique, maybe I can appreciate Palin more fully through Paglia’s eyes:

As someone whose first seven years were spent among Italian-American immigrants (I never met an elderly person who spoke English until we moved from Endicott to rural Oxford, New York, when I was in first grade), I am very used to understanding meaning through what might seem to others to be outlandish or fractured variations on standard English. Furthermore, I have spent virtually my entire teaching career (nearly four decades) in arts colleges, where the expressiveness of highly talented students in dance, music and the visual arts takes a hundred different forms. Finally, as a lover of poetry (my last book was about that), I savor every kind of experimentation with standard English -- beginning with Shakespeare, who was the greatest improviser of them all at a time when there were no grammar rules.

So first we go from tsk-tsking the snobbery of those who groundlessly criticize her syntax, to defending it through comparisons to immigrants for whom English is not their native tongue, to rounding it all out by drawing parallelisms between her locution and that of the Bard himself. I mean, Shakespeare?!? WTF?!?!

Let’s just reflect for a moment on the following Couric interview excerpt:

Palin:

That’s why I say I, like every American I’m speaking with, we’re ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it’s got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade – we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation.

So, what is really going on here? I mean besides the creation of the next great sonnet series.

It seems that Paglia, as a self-described “dissident feminist,” styles herself as intellectual antagonist to establishment feminism. From this well-entrenched ideological perch, she then adopts a knee-jerk enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend viewpoint.

Since Palin raised the hackles of much of the feminist political establishment, especially on the heels of Hillary’s primary defeat, then definitionally Palin must be defended, even at the cost of any semblance of rational thought.

Back to Paglia for the coup de grace:

One reason I live in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia and have never moved to New York or Washington is that, as a cultural analyst, I want to remain in touch with the mainstream of American life. I frequent fast-food restaurants, shop at the mall, and periodically visit Wal-Mart (its bird-seed section is nonpareil).

Like Los Angeles and San Francisco, Manhattan and Washington occupy their own mental zones -- nice to visit but not a place to stay if you value independent thought these days. Ambitious professionals in those cities, if they want to preserve their social networks, are very vulnerable to received opinion. At receptions and parties (which I hate), they're sitting ducks. They have to go along to get along -- poor dears!

Yes, thankfully we have Camille Paglia sacrificing herself in the hinterlands of Philadelphia. Almost in the image of a modern-day Jane Goodall, painstakingly documenting all of the aboriginal folkways and now translating the unique patios of the Pennsylvania outback.

Because, without her selfless efforts, we would be left to suffer ignorantly the condescending ramblings of the liberal media elite. I mean, what could be worse than that?

I Rise in Praise of James Fallows

What is the value of opinion journalism, especially in the age of Internet blogging when it is so easy publish one’s own?

To me, there are two benefits to the time I spend reading blogs about current events:

1. Leveraging the experience and insight of others to be able to peer through the hazy mist of the future with some accuracy. Having the ability to reliably judge the pros/cons of alternate courses of action is the most critical aspect of decision making, because any decision of consequence is going to be taken in cases where the outcome is not definitively knowable in advance. And, one can use the insights of others as proxies for one's own if the journalist proves reliable.
2. To help hone one’s own thoughts on a given topic by writing about it in a clarifying and edifying manner. I can often better understand my own thinking once I recognize it written in the hand of another more clearly than it would be in my own muddled prose.

On both fronts I come in praise of James Fallows, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly.

Here is what he wrote 1 hour (Nostradamus, eat my dust!!) after the announcement of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate:

Let's assume that Sarah Palin is exactly as smart and disciplined as Barack Obama. But instead of the year and a half of nonstop campaigning he has behind him, and Joe Biden's even longer toughening-up process, she comes into the most intense period of the highest stakes campaign with absolutely zero warmup or preparation.

If she has ever addressed an international issue, there's no evidence of it in internet-land. The smartest person in the world could not prepare quickly enough to know the pitfalls, and to sound confident while doing so, on all the issues she will be forced to address.

So the prediction is: unavoidable gaffes. The challenge for the McCain-Palin campaign is to find some way to defuse them ahead of time, since Socrates, Machiavelli, and Clausewitz reincarnated would themselves make errors in her situation. [em: mine]

Then, once Palin falls flat in her Gibson/Couric interviews, he captures the nature of the problem that Palin's performance exposed in a manner that rises well-beyond simply heckling her as a know-nothing red-neck.

Each of us has areas we care about, and areas we don't. If we are interested in a topic, we follow its development over the years. And because we have followed its development, we're able to talk and think about it in a "rounded" way. We can say: Most people think X, but I really think Y. Or: most people used to think P, but now they think Q. Or: the point most people miss is Z. Or: the question I'd really like to hear answered is A.

Here's the most obvious example in daily life: Sports Talk radio.

Mention a name or theme -- Brett Favre, the Patriots under Belichick, Lance Armstrong's comeback, Venus and Serena -- and anyone who cares about sports can have a very sophisticated discussion about the ins and outs and myth and realities and arguments and rebuttals.

People who don't like sports can't do that. It's not so much that they can't identify the names -- they've heard of Armstrong -- but they've never bothered to follow the flow of debate. I like sports -- and politics and tech and other topics -- so I like joining these debates. On a wide range of other topics -- fashion, antique furniture, the world of restaurants and fine dining, or (blush) opera -- I have not been interested enough to learn anything I can add to the discussion. So I embarrass myself if I have to express a view.

Or, to put a finer and less charitable point on it (though I don't think gratuitously so):

After thirty years of meeting and interviewing politicians, I can think of exactly three people who sounded as uninformed and vacant as this. All are now out of office. One was a chronic drunk.

[snip]

More than that, it suggests a person whose previous two decades of adult life have not equipped her to absorb the briefings she is no doubt receiving about the big, obvious issues in the campaign: the market crash, health care proposals, tax plans. [em: mine]

And, that was really the point for me about Palin. It is not about flubbed syntax or clumsy regurgitation of campaign talking points or even her raw intelligence per se, it is about having an existing mental framework and philosophical grounding for evaluating public and international policy problems such that one can actually think in a clear and reasoned manner about them.

In the end, this is the greatest source of my own attraction to Obama. It is his obvious intelligence and capacity to deal with complex issues with a degree of suppleness of thought that let's us know there is actually a competent mind at work behind the curtain.

On the one hand, I struggle at times to condemn those who gravitate to Bush or Palin on cultural affinity issues. Since, one can dismiss the attachment to cultural signals as things that "don't matter" and should be superfluous to hard policy positions formulated by experts beavering away in political think-tanks and debated with great earnestness throughout the campaign season.

But, my own gravitation to Obama is simply the inverse of that which I might otherwise denigrate. I am simply seeking different markers of affinity of thought and perspective.

Obama appeals because he demonstrates that he thinks like me and thus I hope he will make judicious decisions about the correct course of action in my stead. Because, as we are now finding with the financial crisis and with 9/11 in the case of Bush, the actual course of a Presidency is only tangentially related to specific campaign promises or party platform statements.

And, for my money, the most troubling aspects about McCain had little (directly speaking) to do with his stated domestic or foreign policy concerns and was instead what I judged to be characteristics of his decision-making process:

1. Impulsiveness - As quintessentially summarized by the Palin selection, but also by his well-reputed outbursts of temper.
2. Reliance on black/white formulations - With McCain taking on the role of sanctimonious crusader with a willingness to hold political grudges.

And, I have had more than enough exposure to those two leadership traits over the past eight years to last me quite a loooooong while.

And, so while there is little conceivable chance I would have ended up in any different place, I can thank James Fallows for helping me understand why I believe what I do.

Mad props to a journalism OG, as the kids say.

Sarah Palin: Political Rorschach Test

In retrospect, it seems to me that Sarah Palin, as a media and political phenomenon, functioned most dynamically as an ink blot test for the left/right culture wars.

It is true that she was ill-prepared for the position and this reflected poorly on John McCain’s judgment, but there is no way to square the heat (both vitriol and adoration) that she spawned solely within the context of her as merely an inexperienced vice-presidential candidate. It isn’t as if selecting a running mate for primarily electoral motivations is an unheard of phenomenon.

It was the symbolism of her as a candidate, rather than her specific policy stances (to the extent she could even articulate them), that lead to nonsense such as the following from the left:

Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party's cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women. [em: mine]

And as for religion, I'd love to know precisely how the Good Lord conveyed to her so clearly his intention to destroy the environment (global warming, she thinks, is not the work of human hands, so it must be the work of You Know Who), the lives of untold thousands of soldiers and innocent bystanders (He is apparently rooting for this, too, she says), and, incidentally, a lot of polar bears and wolves, not to mention all the people who will be shot with the guns that she thinks other people ought to have. An even wider and more sinister will to impose her religious views on other people surfaced in her determination to legislate against abortion even in cases of rape and in her attempts to ban books, including books on evolution, and to fire the librarian who stood against her.

The outrage here is that her gender identity is being used in support of political ends that are perceived to be in conflict with “real” womanhood. As if there is something logically incompatible with being both female as well as pro-life, pro-gun, and a supporter of the Iraq war. Isn’t this the ultimate in sexism? That one’s gender should ergo define one’s thoughts?

Look, you can argue against any of those political positions, but it doesn’t seem to me that there is an inherently “female” position to be taken. It is only when one passes through the portal of gender identity politics that the heresies become obvious.

By similar token, the symbolism of Palin to the right was equally nauseating:

At 44, Governor Palin is a bit young and relatively new to the political scene yet. These are no small considerations when electing someone who could assume the role of president (Democrats: Check out your nominee with that reservation . . . ). But if the youngest life she and her husband care for can wake up a nation that’s blind to the eugenics in its midst, a routine part of medicine today, she and John McCain would be offering human rights and dignity a great, honorable service. In contrast to Barack Obama, who would let the survivors of botched abortion attempts be killed, the Palins could serve as a great clarifier for voters this fall — and an education.

As much as she obviously struggled in her interviews, it mattered much less what she said, than who she was and what she represented symbolically to most partisans involved.

I got a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell

More Cowbell - The best bloopers are here

Michael Goldfarb confirms my omnicient demigod status

Close followers of this blog (ha ha) will note the following interview with Goldfarb was posted 1 day after my spirited defense of John McCain's honor with respect to the issue of Jeremiah Wright.

Goldfarb:

We were prevented from mentioning it and that was very frustrating to a lot of people on the campaign.

[snip]

Everybody wanted to go in that direction, besides John McCain, I think.

Now obviously, there is a potential argument to be made that the decision was less about McCain's personal honor and was simply good political tactics, if one takes the belief that the blowback would have been worse than any potential benefit of whacking Wright around like a pinata all campaign season long.

Chris Bodenner takes this tack on a guest-post titled "Pragmatism, Not Honor" on Sullivan's site:

John McCain's top pollster, Bill McInturff, said this evening that attacking Barack Obama over his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright would not have helped McCain's campaign and could have destroyed his presidency, had he been elected.

Some Republicans were angry during the campaign that McCain had -- reportedly for reasons of principle, and out of concern that he'd be viewed as racist -- refused to air ads with Wright's inflammatory sermons.... "I said 'Look, if we do win we’ll win with about 273 electoral votes and we’ll lose the popular vote by 3 million,'" recalled McInturff of the internal discussions about cutting attack ads with Wright. "If [McCain] had used that issue that way, you’d already be delegitimized as a president. You couldn’t function as government."

Ultimately, for me, I think there is too much evidence in McCain's own life and political career that highlights his deep sense of honor, his war-service chief among them, to think that he is nothing more than the most cynical self-serving politician (see Blagojevich, Rod). One of the most humanizing things about him is the various confessional moments he has had where he publically regrets and recants things he has said or done in pursuit of political goals. Every politician is forced to compromise his/her principles to a degree, but McCain seems to struggle with it much more than most.

Yet, somewhat oddly, it was his seeming commitment to national honor (a national greatness conservative in the Teddy Roosevelt strain) that made me even less disposed to him than I may have been otherwise. His frequent appeals to "bring our troops home with honor" from Iraq (while I acknowledge this was simply a campaign talking point) reflected in my mind McCain's belief that this was an objective that was worth fighting for, literally.

From some of his statements, I get the sense that he would have been willing to sacrifice another 58,000+ American lives in Vietnam if that would have guaranteed an "honorable" victory. But, for me, I think there is a muddy line between adherence to principles and blind dogmatism.

The "domino theory" that underpinned the strategic necessity for the Vietnam war turned out to be incorrect. Vietnam fell and all of Southeast Asia, and shortly thereafter the world, did not fall under the grip of Communism. And, those in power that clung blindly to the belief that we could not afford to show any weakness protracted the conflict at great cost.

In short, I don't think countries have honor. People do. Soldiers do. But, countries only have interests. And it is the firm commitment to the maintenance of abstractions such as "national honor" that leads to hubristic over-reaching, especially in the area of military affairs.

Thus, fast forward to our case in Iraq. I am most concerned that we get as many of our soldiers out alive as possible and that we leave the place in as peaceable a state as possible given the severe trauma that society has experienced both before and after our invasion. And, I don't much care (rhetorically speaking, of course) whether we do it by honorable or dishonorable means.

It is the ends (and lives it takes to reach them) that we should be worried about.

Does this mean I should add Snoop Dogg to my nativity scene?!?

You have to stick around until the 4:30 mark, but prepare to be disturbed.

Cat Elevator Ride

On Obama and Women

See comment below from Daily Kos regarding President-Elect Obama's morning weekly address:

Aside from the commitment to what sounds like a great progressive stimulus plan, one sentence struck me: Will your job or your husband’s job or your daughter’s job be the next one cut?.

Read that closely.

In a speech about universal fears and hardship, he is addressing his primary listeners as women. Never have I heard sentence construction like that from a president -- women addressed directly in a non-"women's issues" setting as legitimate, fully fledged and very concerned and invested breadwinners. The effect is stunning.

On the one hand, it means nothing. It's just rhetoric. On the other hand, it means everything since it isn't something he needed to do. But, it shifts the ground for future Presidents by doing it. Wow.

I always dreamed of driving my Match Box cars

Australian artist Keith Loutit uses tilt-shift photographic effects combined with time-lapse to create videos of real-life events which makes them appear to be miniature re-creations.

It's Lilliput brought to life.

Revenge is a dish best served cold

I never felt that the McCain campaign was intentionally playing the race-card in its attacks against Barack Obama during the election season.

It was simply running the same tired Republican playbook of characterizing him as a snobbish, limp-wristed, liberal, proto-socialist boogeyman who doesn't share or appreciate the values of "real Americans." This was exactly the same way they sought to frame John Kerry, though obviously to much greater effect.

However, in the attempt to "other" Obama, it made it seem as if they were subtly trying to point out (wink wink nudge nudge) that, well, he's a black guy. And, so the typical campaign playbook routine had a boomerang effect by implicating the campaign itself for stirring up some of the racial epithets that were heard at the rallies and made such big national news.

But, I don't think this was the intent. If they had wanted to play pure racial politics, there would have been a 24x7 Jermeiah Wright channel on my cable network. From what I understand, it was McCain himself who said that Wright was essentially off-limits as a campaign topic.

Witness this priceless display by Michael Goldfarb, McCain Campaign Spokesman, who simply won't bring himself to say Wright's name even when practically ordered to do so by the CNN interviewer.

CNN: "Well, say it!!"
Goldfarb: "We all know who we are talking about here."




Now, it's not to say that there wasn't some ugly reactions by a few McCain supporters towards Obama that were clearly racially motivated. It's just that those people weren't going to vote for Obama anyway.

And, the massive news storm that followed some of the incidents could have only hurt the Republicans with the swing voters they would have needed to win. How many sub-urban soccer moms find the prospect of lynch mobs to be appealing?

So, while I don't blame McCain personally (and in some ways I laud him for trying to take the issue off the table), obviously one can't have any sympathy for those of his supporters who eagerly DID attempt to trade in racial or religious prejudice as a way ginning up fears of Obama and votes for McCain.

And, it is to those reprobates that I gleefully dedicate the following:

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, President-elect Obama said that "when he takes the oath of office Jan. 20, he plans to be sworn in like other presidents, using his full name: Barack Hussein Obama."

While most presidents use their full names, there have been recent exceptions: In 1977, James Earl Carter was sworn in as president as Jimmy Carter. And in 1981, Ronald Wilson Reagan simply went by Ronald Reagan.

While awaiting the inauguration, I myself am going to be reading up on my Sharia-law statutes, just to ensure I've got all my bases covered.

Search Engines - New and Improved

There are different developments going on with alternate types of search engines. Some are concerned with the algorithm that generates the results, some on the visual interface for the display of results, etc.

Here's an intriguing time-line based result interface.

Here's a clustering concept that shows results as a 2-D map for music and movies.

But, it you want to blow your mind, click View the Demo on this site. It's a search engine that works using the camera on your phone!!

Dude, Where's My Bailout?

There seems to be somewhat of a desire to look at the auto bailout as a tool to give the government leverage to force the Big 3 to to "finally do the right thing" with respect to hybrid cars or green technology more broadly. Now, we've got them where we want them!

But, these are private companies, not sub-divisions of the Department of Energy. So, if the legislature wants to see more hybrid car development, the quickest way to foster this outcome would be to dispense with the jaw-boning of the company executives and pass a hefty gas tax.

For example (Cost per Gallon)
$7.13 - Amsterdam
$2.61 - America

This is why cars are so much smaller and fuel-efficient in Europe, because they tax the hell out of gasoline. So, I'll be looking forward to all those "Vote $7 Gas Now!!" bumper stickers in the fall of 2010 campaign.

In the meantime, back on planet Earth, there are very legitimate concerns with having government dictating the behavior of the Big3 in a fine-grained manner, as Yglesias rightly notes:

A lot of this talk has an air of socialistic hubris about it. If this line of thinking were correct and the primary impediment to the production of technological miracles was a lack of government leverage, then state-owned enterprises would have been a smashing success.

In reality, outside of a relatively narrow range of utility-type activities, they’ve been flops. If the negative externalities associated with carbon emissions were correctly priced, I’m quite sure that would lead people in various places to develop lower emissions cars. But is just sort of pointing at GM’s engineers and telling them “make low-emissions cars!” really going to lead to the intended result?

[snip]

Let me further add that the risk here, as I see it, isn’t that we’re going to waste too much money on a Detroit bailout. Rather, the risk is that we’re going to slide into a situation where big swathes of the economy are dominated by zombie firms. If firms with unviable business models are prevented from failing, then other more successful firms can’t arise or expand to fill the niche and the whole sector goes dysfunctional employing tons of labor and resources but not creating real value.

And then you have other sectors that are being productive but that are burdened with taxes that are being used to prop up sectors that aren’t creating value. Then, even if we manage to halt the slide into recession we’ll have created a situation in which it’s difficult to return again to growth.

But, from everything I read, it thankfully doesn't appear that this is what will be happening.

The firms are going to be "rescued" in the near-term, mainly because there is no way in the current credit environment that they could possibly secure additional financing if they went into Chapter 11 re-organization. Thus, they would proceed into full-blown liquidation and in the current economic environment that would be a "catastrophic" outcome, according to Moody's economist, Mark Zandi, in his testimony to Congress. In short, he basically said that the current solution is undesirable, but the alternative is even worse.

On a related note, after 8 years of listening to George Bush sound like a man who is still waiting for his anesthesia to wear off, it is almost disorienting to hear a Republican politician sound as competent and well-informed as Bob Corker does in his direct and insightful questioning of the auto execs before his Senate committee.

NOTE: the audio and video tracks are out of sync, but Corker's performance is genuinely impressive and surprising short on grandstanding.

In Praise of Vulgarity

This is far and away one of the most interesting things I have read on the web in a long time. “In Praise of Vulgarity” is a defense of popular consumerist culture and art.

The essential argument is that participating in culture is a form of self-experimentation and self-fashioning that is inherently anti-authoritarian and essentially human. The degrees to which people will go to seek out these modes of expression even in brutal, repressive political circumstances are truly amazing.

It’s over 9000 words long, so there is no way to effectively summarize it. But, I promise if you read it, you won’t be disappointed:

Capitalism's critics in the West blame what they call "the culture industry," which makes itself rich by aggressively manipulating consumerist idiots. The latter part with their money because they have been persuaded that some truly useless but expensive object will make them hip, youthful, or desirable, or raise their status. This manipulative scheme is now a global enterprise, filling the world with what Benjamin Barber and his ilk castigate as "junk." Worse, say the Daniel Bells and Hillary Clintons, it's a threat to Western prosperity, because it instills self-absorption at the expense of the work ethic.

This critique completely misses the point of cultural commerce. The citizens of the post-subsistence world have a historically remarkable luxury: They can experiment with who they are. They can fashion and refashion their identities, and through much of their lives that is just what they do. They can go about this in a lot of ways, but one of the most important methods is what is known and reviled as "consumerism." They experiment with different modes of self-presentation, assert or mask aspects of their individuality, join or leave a series of subcultures, or oppose and adhere to centers of power. It is from this complex mix that the things of the material world become the furnishings of both a social and a personal identity. That's what meaning is.

There are plenty of cultural products that I denigrate. But even when I am on my high horse, my ire is mostly aimed at the artists, not the consumers. There are many artists who simply go through the motions mimicking well-established literary or musical forms, but adding nothing of incremental value to the cultural stew.

In a sense, it is like selling bubble-gum flavored popcorn to the public and calling it a full meal. It is a facsimile of food the same way that Britney Spears is a facsimile of music. But, without Britney Spears, there is no Mick Jagger. And, it is from the low barriers to entry of pop culture participation combined with its experimental and free-flowing feedback loop between artists and consumers that true genius is revealed and that cultural change is fostered.

Love and Little Wing

Little Wing (though it was the Sting cover version) was the song we played as our first dance at my wedding reception.

The lyrics always touch me, both due to my personal connection to the song, and because it seems to capture the essence of what it means to love:

When I'm sad, she comes to me
With a thousand smiles, she gives to me free
It's alright she says it's alright
Take anything you want from me, anything
Anything.

Projectile Vomit: Always funny if you are upstream

For those not familiar with the site Overheard in New York, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is a collection of things that people overhear on subways, street corners, etc. in the NYC.

Now, there are many times when I am not at all certain that all postings therein are, in fact, actually overheard. But, it doesn't decrease the humorous value from my POV, as below:

We Expected Nothing Less from the Birthplace of the Long Island Iced Tea
Conductor: Crime does not pay. I repeat, crime does not pay. There will be no crime on this train. Littering is a crime. Throwing up on the train is a crime. If you feel the need to relieve yourself, there is one place you can throw up on the train...on yourself. Or if you have a girlfriend, you can have her join in on the situation and you can throw up on her. I'm sure that punishment would be far worse. (at the next stop) I'd like to thank the gentleman in the second car. That was the most amazing display of projectile vomit outside the car doors that I have ever seen! A new record!

--LIRR

Overheard by: Rob Mo
via Overheard in New York, Dec 7, 2008

Steel Cage Death Match: Culture Club vs. Rolling Stones

In 40-50 years time, how much of the music of my youth (1980's) will still be listened to and appreciated?

Some, one would hope, but the 80's seem, in retrospect, to be a somewhat frivolous age, musically speaking. There was a terrible lot of New Wave pop-synth (A Flock of Seagulls, Pet Shop Boys, etc.) as well as big hair metal (Ratt, White Snake, etc.).

Probably the biggest development, musically speaking, would be the birth of rap and hip-hop into a mainstream musical form. But, I am not into it enough to discriminate Tone Loc from Run DMC (ok that's an exaggeration, but you get the point).

Now there is no question that Father Time separates the wheat from the chaff and what I am exposed to from the 60's era is the the cream of its crops, so to speak. Still, if I was trapped on a desert island and had to choose an oldies station that would play 80's hits vs. 60's hits, the 60's wins hands down.

Have a listen... I ain't lying :)

http://www.last.fm/music/The+Rolling+Stones/_/Gimme+Shelter

The lyrics of the song speak of seeking shelter from a coming storm, painting a picture of devastation and social apocalypse while also talking of the power of love:

Oh, a storm is threat'ning,
My very life today;
If I don't get some shelter,
Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away

War, children, it's just a shot away, It's just a shot away;
War, children, it's just a shot away, It's just a shot away

A much higher-pitched second vocal track is sung by guest vocalist Merry Clayton. Of her inclusion, Jagger said in the 2003 book According to... The Rolling Stones: "The use of the female voice was the producer's idea. It would be one of those moments along the lines of 'I hear a girl on this track - get one on the phone.' "

Clayton gives her solo performance, and one of the song's most famous pieces, after a solo performed by Richards, repeatedly singing "Rape, murder; It's just a shot away, It's just a shot away," and finally screaming the final stanza.

At about 2:59 into the song, Clayton's voice cracks twice from the strain of her powerful singing; once during the second refrain, on the word "shot" from the last line, and then again during the first line of the third and final refrain, on the word "murder".

She and Jagger finish the song with the line, "Love, sister, it's just a kiss away." To date it remains one of the most prominent contributions to a Rolling Stones track by a female vocalist.

Topic: Wombs, talk amongst yourselves

Kerry Howley writes cogently on the fertility panic meme and touches the nerve of what, to my mind, drives much of the cultural conservative angst about this topic:

Modern fertility panic stems from a desire to reshape polyglot cultures, to regain control over women’s reproductive choices, and to locate a single, easy-to-understand culprit for disparate social problems. As they have for hundreds of years, societies are projecting their deepest anxieties onto empty wombs.

The "fertility fears" are a manifestation of the cultural anxiety by those holding traditional social and strong religious views in a society where such values no longer maintain the unquestioned primacy that they once did. And, where many feel (justifiably) that their traditional values are being actively undermined by others, both in word and in deed.

The sense is that we are committing cultural suicide, both philosophically in turning away from tradition and God, and literally in terms of declining birth rates.

Dreher exposes the root of such concern here in a post that is not specifically about the decline in population per se, but rather the decline in Christianity across England:

Church attendance in Britain is declining so fast that the number of regular churchgoers will be fewer than those attending mosques within a generation, research published today suggests.

The fall - from the four million people who attend church at least once a month today - means that the Church of England, Catholicism and other denominations will become financially unviable. A lack of funds from the collection plate to support the Christian infrastructure, including church upkeep and ministers’ pay and pensions, will force church closures as ageing congregations die.

In contrast, the number of actively religious Muslims will have increased from about one million today to 1.96 million in 2035.

[snip]

The report predicts that by 2030, when Dr Rowan Williams’s successor as Archbishop of Cantebury will be approaching retirement, there could be just 350,000 people attending just 10,000 Anglican churches, with an average of 35 worshippers each. The next Archbishop after that could find his position “totally nonviable”, the report says, with just 180,000 worshippers in 6,000 churches by 2040.

[snip]

I believe this is an utter catastrophe, for reasons that go far beyond caring about the fate of individual souls. The nation and the culture that gave the world so much Christian art, Christian philosophy, Christian prayer and above all, Christian witness in word and deed, is dying. People will still live in the British Isles, obviously, but they won't be the people of the Book. They will be some other people. And our children and their children's children will all be much poorer for it. [em: mine]

As Dreher would readily admit, the fertility panic is as much about the identity of the people who remain as it is about total population size, a point that Howley summarizes well:

At the heart of any fertility incentive lies an attempt to encourage a particular group of women to orient their bodies in a traditional way. Every pro-fertility policy is an effort to slow cultural transformation, to stabilize a society’s ethnic composition, to ossify a current conception of a national culture by freezing the genetic makeup of a nation. From Poland to Singapore, swollen wombs are a bulwark against change. [em: mine]

There is a reason we speak of “Mother Russia” and “Mother India.” Feminist sociologists such as Nira Yuval-Davis refer to women as the “boundary markers” of a state or society. While men may leave, fight, and be compromised, women represent purity and continuity. Yuval-Davis points out in her book Gender and Nation that the Hitler Youth Movement had different mottos for girls and boys. The boys’ motto was: “Live faithfully; fight bravely; die laughing.” For girls: “Be faithful; be pure; be German.” Girls simply had to be. They were the collective.

We are not running out of people. The world's population is still growing. But, we may be running a little short of the right "type" of people, depending upon your perspective.

All of which is not to be dismissive of the real issues associated with population declines in certain countries, or in certain demographics within countries. There are serious economic implications to the aging of society. Further, we are tribal creatures and questions of identity strike a very deep chord.

Things will be much easier (though by no means easy, see recent let's kick out all the Mexicans tropes) in the US, where we are relatively open to immigration and the Statue of Liberty ethos (give us your poor, huddled masses yearning to be free, etc...) forms a core of our national mythology.

In European countries, or others which emerged from ethnically homogeneous foundations, and are less immigrant friendly policy-wise, navigating issues of national identity will create sharper edges. Swedish people live in Sweden and speak the Swedish language. Can a second generation immigrant from northern Africa be fully "Swedish" even if their legal rights are identical to those who are ethnically Swedish? The "otherness" of immigrants in such an environment is more difficult to erase and will always be available for various stripes of demagoguery.

Mathematical Musings on Unemployment Figures

I really hate crap like this typical article from MSNBC:

Skittish employers slashed 533,000 jobs in November, the most in 34 years, catapulting the unemployment rate to 6.7 percent, dramatic proof the country is careening deeper into recession.

Look, if you are going to make broad comparisons across such a wide range of time (2008 back to 1974), then you need to make some nominal effort to create an apples-to-apples scenario.

Total US workforce (approx.)
2008 - 136,167,000
1974 - 77,657,000

Now, it is clear that a decline of 533,000 jobs is a far greater impact when the workforce is almost half what is is today. So, what exactly is the point of the comparison to 34 years ago? Does it say anything meaningful?

To me, it is a mathematical version of Orwell's Politics and the English Language (unemployment today is double-plus bad). Lazy usage of math impedes clear thinking in the same manner as lazy use of language.

Chicken or the Egg: Family Size vs. Secularism

Interesting article from the Hoover Institute (so must be taken with grain of salt) that posits that the decline in family size may be a driver towards lower levels of religiosity in society, rather than the prevailing assumption that rising secularism in the modern age results in lower rates of child bearing.

[But look carefully at that common formulation, because it contains the same hidden assumption as that of secularization theory — i.e., it assumes that because people are more religious, therefore they have larger families. But where is the evidence for putting things in that order? It is at least as plausible — in fact, given the evidence, it is more plausible — to assume the opposite: that something about having larger families is making people more religious, at least some of the time.]

The article goes on to note that rates of child-bearing in Europe went down prior to declines in church attendance.

Not sure that this totally coheres for me. While acknowledging that the article is intentionally speculative in nature (note the rather weak claim of "at least some of the time" in the quote above -- could this be falsified??), the facts, such as they are, that are marshaled in defense of the claim are far from comprehensive or convincing.

The article cites the American experience as the exception for Western societies (i.e. we are more religious, therefore more children than Europe -- or alternately, that we marry and have children at higher rates therefore we are more religious, as the author would have it). But, I have seen other statistics before which claim that if one controls for immigration (i.e. Latino immigrants have higher birthrates than native-born in the US) that we are not significantly different than Europe.

Additionally, within Europe, one finds higher birthrates in relatively secular Scandinavian countries than in more socially traditional and religiously observant ones, such as Italy. It has thus been speculated that a society needs either a) a more open labor market, such as in the US, that makes it less onerous for women to leave/re-enter the workforce or b) a more generous social welfare policy, such as in Northern European countries, to ease the financial burden of child-bearing in a modern industrial economy.

In the sense that the author is simply calling to attention the general presumption that, "after all, religious people tend to have larger families; so what?" and suggesting that the lazy causality assumed therein is tenuous, then I can agree. But, the overall thrust of the article clearly aims for much broader claims and implications.

I think that one of the footnotes feels a little closer to the truth:

[Wilcox also suggests three reasons for “why churchgoing is so tightly bound to being married with children”: because they find other couples like themselves in churches — i.e., those navigating family life; because children “drive parents to church” in the sense of encouraging them to transmit a moral/religious compass; and because men are much more likely than women to fall away from church on their own.]

In short, for people with children, churches can form a natural community within which the burdens of childbearing can be shared and from which desired socialization of their children can be obtained.

Many statistics cite, in spite of the frequent claims of US religiosity, that many "religious" Americans are deeply ignorant about some of the most elemental facts of Christian doctrine. Thus, I am left to wonder if one can fully explain their church-going behavior as specifically "religious" in nature. It seems that the benefits one may get from church cover a far broader set of social needs, not simply spiritual ones.

Mostly, I don't think that the causality is clean in either direction. Clearly Mormons have a much higher birthrate that Americans as a whole. But, the author would imply that childbearing comes first, then religious faith follows (or "at least some of the time" -- snark). But, why would Mormons consistently have more children to begin with, before faith has taken hold? Something in the water in Utah?

More plausibly, it would seem that many Mormons are raised in relatively cohesive communities where church-attendance is the norm. And, a host of social expectations (both those imposed from without, as well as that one internalizes from growing up in such an environment) guide both the decision to have children and to attend church within the community.

In short, banning the pill isn't going to bring masses back to the Mass.