I Am GingerMan

The South Shall Rise Again?

2009-06-18T09:16:00.000-07:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates is increasingly one of the more interesting reads I find on the blogosphere. The thing I enjoy about his postings is the way he isn't afraid to "work-out" his thoughts online, and to expose the flaws of his own thinking without exuding any false confidence that he has now reached a place of untarnished enlightenment. At present, he is where he is on his intellectual and personal journey, no apologies needed.

By contrast most bloggers, particularly those who advocate strongly for a given political or philosophical position, do not (or cannot) admit any such tentativeness. For example, I enjoy Will Wilkinson a lot and am frequently convinced by the arguments that he forwards on various topics (though I would be philosophically disposed to do so in advance), but there is also a sense at times that any given subject need only be run through an electronic libertarian sausage-making machine and out pops the blogged result. In other words, his intellectual position (hard won I do not doubt) rarely surprises me or seems to wrestle with its own internal contradictions (if they exist).

Ta-Nehisi, by contrast, once responded to someone who called him out on a supposed intellectual inconsistency between two separate posts with something to the effect of: "What can I say? I am a mass of contradictions." No apologies needed.

To wit, see his recent post linking himself to Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the KKK:

Of the many reckonings that black people of honest political consciousness must endure, the appointment with black slavery is the most agonizing. I don't mean the appointment with the notion of white people as the enslavers of our ancestors, but the appointment with our African ancestors as brokers.

I think, when you're in your intellectual infancy, myth keeps your sane. When I was young I believed, like a lot of us at that time, that my people had been kidnapped out of Africa by malicious racist whites. Said whites then turned and subjugated and colonized the cradle of all men. It was a comforting thought which placed me and mine at the center of a grand heroic odyssey. We were deposed kings and queens robbed of our rightful throne by acquisitive merchants of human flesh. By that measures we were not victims, but deposed nobles--in fact and in spirit.

[snip]

By the time I came to Howard University, I was beginning the painful process of breaking away from the "oppression as nobility" formula. But the clincher was sitting in my Black Diaspora I class and learning that the theory of white kidnappers was not merely myth--but, on the whole, impossible because disease (Tse-Tse fly maybe?) kept most whites from penetrating beyond the coasts until the 19th century.

A few years later I read (like many of you, no doubt) Guns, Germs and Steel and was, again, heartbroken. Here was a book with no use for nobility, but concerned with two categories--winners and losers. And I was the progeny of the losing team. I was not cheated of anything. I had simply lost.

This was heart-breaking, in the existential sense. What was I, if not noble? What was the cosmic justice at work that put me here, that made me second? Slowly, by that line of questioning, I came to understand that there really was no cosmic justice, that I should just be happy to be alive. Moreover the truth--Harriet Tubman and Ida Wells--was sustenance enough. Finally I learned to actually like that old pain, that feeling of something inside me, deeply-held, falling away. It was not the end of me, just the burn of good, refining, moral and intellectual, work-out.

As I've said, I finished McPherson's Battle Cry Of Freedom today. It deserves its own post, but I want to focus on one aspect the book handles particularly well--the South's psychological need to turn defeat into nobility. I don't mean defeat in the war, so much as I meanlagging behind the North, economically, and due to slavery, lagging behind virtually the entire world, morally.

[snip]

It is one thing to be judged immoral. But to be judged immoral and backward, at the same time, to be both debauched, and yet in your debauchery, still be a loser, is deeply painful. It was not bad enough that my people had been enslaved, but the fact that we were first enslaved by people who looked like me robbed us of any moral high ground.

The South long evaded that painful reality, and when confronted with it, simply lied. Thus pre-War Jefferson Davis is arguing that the fight is over slavery and white Supremacy. Post-war he's claiming it was about the sovereignty of states. To this day, 150 years later, you find people parroting this lie.

[snip]

[Nathan Bedford Forrest’s] story is American--the dirt poor son of a blacksmith who becomes a millionaire. But he's noble too, and volunteers to fight for his home state of glorious Tennessee. With no military training, he rises to the rank of Lieutenant General, giving the Union hell the whole time.

Forrest is the model of Southern chivalry--too much so. He made his money buying and selling people like me, and when the war started he dutifully enforced the Confederate policy of giving no quarter to black soldiers. At Fort Pillow he massacred black soldiers trying to surrender, and afterward went on to found the Ku Klux Klan. Tennessee is dotted with monuments, not simply to the generals of the Confederacy, but to the first Grand Wizard of the KKK (Forrest). To this day, you can find people who deny his role in Fort Pillow and in the KKK.

[snip]

I imagine for a kid coming up in these times, in certain sectors of the South, it's painful to face up to Nathan Forrest, to the notion that the pomp and glamour, all the talk of honor and independence was, at the end of the day, dependent on slavery. The Lost Cause isn't just "lost," it's barely a cause.

The Study of Love

2009-06-05T13:21:00.000-07:00

From NPR:

On a bright spring day, Schlitz is leading Teena and J.D. Miller down a path to the laboratory at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, north of San Francisco. Schlitz is the president of the institute, which conducts research on consciousness and spirituality. The Millers have been married a decade and their affection is palpable — making them perfect for the so-called Love Study.

Schlitz takes Teena into an isolated room, where no sound can come in or go out. Teena settles into a deep armchair as Schlitz attaches electrodes to her right hand.

"This is measuring blood flow in your thumb, and this is your skin conductance activity," the researcher explains. "So basically both of these are measures of your unconscious nervous system."

Schlitz locks Teena into the electromagnetically shielded chamber, then ushers J.D. into another isolated room with a closed-circuit television. She explains that the screen will go on and off. And at random intervals, Teena's image will appear on the screen for 10 seconds.

"And so during the times when you see her," she instructs, "it's your opportunity to think about sending loving, compassionate intention."

As the session begins, Dean Radin, a senior scientist here, watches as a computer shows changes in J.D.'s blood pressure and perspiration. When J.D. sees the image of his wife, the steady lines suddenly jump and become ragged. The question is: Will Teena's nervous system follow suit?

"Notice how here … see, there's a change in the blood volume," says Radin, pointing to a screen charting Teena's measurements. "A sudden change like that is sometimes associated with an orienting response. If you suddenly hear somebody whispering in your ear, and there's nobody around, you have this sense of what? What was that? That's more or less what we're seeing in the physiology."

An hour later, Radin displays Teena's graph, which shows a flat line during the times her husband was not staring at her image, but when her husband began to stare at her, she stopped relaxing and became "aroused" within about two seconds.

After running 36 couples through this test, the researchers found that when one person focused his thoughts on his partner, the partner's blood flow and perspiration dramatically changed within two seconds. The odds of this happening by chance were 1 in 11,000. Three dozen double blind, randomized studies by such institutions as the University of Washington and the University of Edinburgh have reported similar results.

If you've got a spare $2.3M lying around

2009-05-27T10:42:00.000-07:00

Ferris: [describing Cameron's house] The place is like a museum. It's very beautiful and very cold, and you're not allowed to touch anything.

OMG, Baby Anteater Alert!!

2009-05-22T10:21:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Don't Worry, Be Happy

2009-05-21T13:49:00.001-07:00

In The Atlantic, Joshua Shenk writes of his experience as the first journalist ever to have been given access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history...

Case No. 218

How’s this for the good life? You’re rich, and you made the dough yourself. You’re well into your 80s, and have spent hardly a day in the hospital. Your wife had a cancer scare, but she’s recovered and by your side, just as she’s been for more than 60 years. Asked to rate the marriage on a scale of 1 to 9, where 1 is perfectly miserable and 9 is perfectly happy, you circle the highest number. You’ve got two good kids, grandkids too.

A survey asks you: “If you had your life to live over again, what problem, if any, would you have sought help for and to whom would you have gone?” “Probably I am fooling myself,” you write, “but I don’t think I would want to change anything.” If only we could take what you’ve done, reduce it to a set of rules, and apply it systematically.

Case No. 47

You literally fell down drunk and died. Not quite what the study had in mind.

Last fall, I spent about a month in the file room of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, hoping to learn the secrets of the good life. The project is one of the longest-running—and probably the most exhaustive—longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history. Begun in 1937 as a study of healthy, well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), it has followed its subjects for more than 70 years.

From their days of bull sessions in Cambridge to their active duty in World War II, through marriages and divorces, professional advancement and collapse—and now well into retirement—the men have submitted to regular medical exams, taken psychological tests, returned questionnaires, and sat for interviews. The files holding the data are as thick as unabridged dictionaries.

[snip]

Bock assembled a team that spanned medicine, physiology, anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, and social work, and was advised by such luminaries as the psychiatrist Adolf Meyer and the psychologist Henry Murray. Combing through health data, academic records, and recommendations from the Harvard dean, they chose 268 students—mostly from the classes of 1942, ’43, and ’44—and measured them from every conceivable angle and with every available scientific tool.

[snip]

But as Vaillant points out, longitudinal studies, like wines, improve with age. And as the Grant Study men entered middle age—they spent their 40s in the 1960s—many achieved dramatic success. Four members of the sample ran for the U.S. Senate. One served in a presidential Cabinet, and one was president. There was a best-selling novelist (not, Vaillant has revealed, Norman Mailer, Harvard class of ’43).

But hidden amid the shimmering successes were darker hues. As early as 1948, 20 members of the group displayed severe psychiatric difficulties. By age 50, almost a third of the men had at one time or another met Vaillant’s criteria for mental illness. Underneath the tweed jackets of these Harvard elites beat troubled hearts. Arlie Bock didn’t get it. “They were normal when I picked them,” he told Vaillant in the 1960s. “It must have been the psychiatrists who screwed them up.”

[snip]

The study began in the spirit of laying lives out on a microscope slide. But it turned out that the lives were too big, too weird, too full of subtleties and contradictions to fit any easy conception of “successful living.” Arlie Bock had gone looking for binary conclusions—yeses and nos, dos and don’ts. But the enduring lessons would be paradoxical, not only on the substance of the men’s lives (the most inspiring triumphs were often studies in hardship) but also with respect to method: if it was to come to life, this cleaver-sharp science project would need the rounding influence of storytelling.

[snip]

His main interpretive lens has been the psychoanalytic metaphor of “adaptations,” or unconscious responses to pain, conflict, or uncertainty. Formalized by Anna Freud on the basis of her father’s work, adaptations (also called “defense mechanisms”) are unconscious thoughts and behaviors that you could say either shape or distort—depending on whether you approve or disapprove—a person’s reality.

Vaillant explains defenses as the mental equivalent of a basic biological process. When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis. Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a mother’s death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption or ruin.

[snip]

Most psychology preoccupies itself with mapping the heavens of health in sharp contrast to the underworld of illness. “Social anxiety disorder” is distinguished from shyness. Depression is defined as errors in cognition. Vaillant’s work, in contrast, creates a refreshing conversation about health and illness as weather patterns in a common space. “Much of what is labeled mental illness,” Vaillant writes, “simply reflects our ‘unwise’ deployment of defense mechanisms. If we use defenses well, we are deemed mentally healthy, conscientious, funny, creative, and altruistic. If we use them badly, the psychiatrist diagnoses us ill, our neighbors label us unpleasant, and society brands us immoral.”

[snip]

Vaillant’s other main interest is the power of relationships. “It is social aptitude,” he writes, “not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.” Warm connections are necessary—and if not found in a mother or father, they can come from siblings, uncles, friends, mentors. The men’s relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable, except defenses. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger. In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

[snip]

In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”

[snip]

Can the good life be accounted for with a set of rules? Can we even say who has a “good life” in any broad way? At times, Vaillant wears his lab coat and lays out his findings matter-of-factly. (“As a means of uncovering truth,” he wrote in Adaptation to Life, “the experimental method is superior to intuition.”)

More often, he speaks from a literary and philosophical perspective. (In the same chapter, he wrote of the men, “Their lives were too human for science, too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals.) In one of my early conversations with him, he described the study files as hundreds of Brothers Karamazovs.

[snip]

Indeed, the lives themselves—dramatic, pathetic, inspiring, exhausting—resonate on a frequency that no data set could tune to. The physical material—wispy sheets from carbon copies; ink from fountain pens—has a texture. You can hear the men’s voices, not only in their answers, but in their silences, as they stride through time both personal […] and historical. […] With this level of intimacy and depth, the lives do become worthy of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.

I like the way the article captures the ultimate uncontainability of human experience, especially with respect to qualitative outcomes like a "good life." Narrative is obviously inadequate as a mode of scientific inquiry, but the roundedness of life cannot be captured through raw data analysis either. This is the purpose of art and myth to me. To communicate things that cannot be expressed in any other way.

Is that a pepperoni in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

2009-05-19T12:38:00.000-07:00

Quote of the Day: "Waterboarding may make the prisoner talk, but it ain't going to make him talk English."

2009-05-15T11:59:00.000-07:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

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Moral Kombat

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The Past as a Fairy Tale (now with pictures)

2009-05-14T14:50:00.000-07:00

"How the Other Half Lives" was pioneering work of photojournalism by Jacob Riis focused on the plight of the poor in the Lower East Side, and greatly influenced future "muckraking" journalism. Due to the recent invention of magnesium flash, Riis was able to venture into the dimly lit areas of tenements and document the wretched conditions in which the "other half" lived and worked.

Reflecting back on these photos, it's easy to see why so many think modern American society is a dystopian nightmare sprung to life...

Street children in night quarters

Other Selected Photos below:

Room in a tenement, 1910
Jersey Street tenements
Tenement-house yard
Lodgers in a crowded Bayard Street tenement
In a seven-cent lodging-house
In a Chinese joint
Twelve-year-old boy pulling threads in a sweat shop, about 1889
Girl and a baby on a doorstep
The man slept in this cellar for four years, about 1890
Under the dump, Rivington Street, about 1890

This is the link to the full photo index from the book at The Authentic History Center.

Sugar Daddy Dating

2009-05-14T13:05:00.001-07:00

Alice & I were talking about the dating scene last night (since we both try to keep our eyes out for a potential upgrade, forming a kind of mutually assured destruction detente that keeps the proper equilibrium between fear and jealousy that every successful marriage needs). One of her Twitter pals was complaining about the very mercenary nature of the dating scene in New York City and how (as a relatively less prosperous male) that he was severely handicapped in the romantic marketplace.

We were discussing how in any relationship where there is a severe imbalance between the two people at the outset (whether via age, money, physical appearance, etc...) that this imbalance would necessarily impact the formation of the relationship, even if the motivations of either party weren't declaratively mercenary. However, for those for whom true love is a secondary interest to a new Gucci handbag, the Internet abides...

Reading the Zeitgeist via Molly Ringwold

2009-05-13T15:13:00.000-07:00

Jeremy Beer writes about the economic impact of the "clustering" of creative and intellectual talent in urban environments...

Richard Florida reports that over the last thirty-odd years we have witnessed an ever-increasing concentration of college graduates around “superstar cities” or “means metros”-San Francisco, Washington, Denver, New York, Seattle, and the like. Thus, while 20 percent of the adult population holds an advanced degree in cities like San Fran and DC, the numbers are 5 percent in Cleveland and 4 percent in Detroit.

Florida’s maps show in graphic imagery the hiving of college grads around certain metropolitan areas, a hiving that has emerged most clearly since 1970. Save for a few isolated exceptions, those hives are not located in Middle America, including our many mid-sized middle American cities.

Florida describes this trend as “the mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated, and highly paid Americans to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions, and a corresponding exodus of the traditional lower and middle classes from these same places,” primarily because of the high cost of living that results from the Migration of the Talented.

The reasons behind this phenomenon, he says, are economic; if you’re very smart, educated, and talented, it pays to live near others like you. “The most talented and ambitious people need to live in a means metro in order to realize their full economic value,” he writes. Florida foresees a future in which the most talented and creative live among themselves in select city cores, and in which they are “catered to by an underclass of service workers living in far-off suburbs.” “Accommodating” this new geographically based cognitive sorting, he maintains, “will be one of the great political and cultural challenges of the next generation.”

Susan McWilliams has pointed out how this geographic sorting takes place at a micro level, as well, with adjacent suburbs increasingly divided cleanly among income and class lines.

This monetary divide entails geographical division as well. Inequality among geographical regions in the United States has risen steadily since the 1980s. It’s not only that the richest people are getting richer; it’s the richest places, too. And even within regions — southern California, say — rich suburbs have become wealthier and other suburbs’ fortunes have declined. “Just as the gap between rich and poor widened at the individual level,” Dreier and company note, “it widened tremendously between suburban places.”

You can see this trend reflected, among other places, in that great bellwether of American life: teen cinema.

Start in the 1980s. Like most of my friends, I grew up sympathizing with Andie Walsh, Molly Ringwald’s character in what was for a long time the standard-bearer of teen cinema: John Hughes’s Pretty in Pink. In that movie, Andie is from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks, bent on captivating Blaine McDonnagh (played adorably by Andrew McCarthy). You remember how this goes: Blaine is rich and therefore popular, always hosting and attending keggers. Andie is not rich and therefore consigned to hanging out with other less-fortunate types. These types do not have parties, and they are never invited to partake of the lifestyles of the rich and popular.

Thus, absent a cataclysmic revolution in the high-school order, Andie stands no chance with Blaine. Of course, it is just such a revolution that this film provides. The poor girl and the rich boy end up in each other’s arms at their prom, Andie proudly wearing her hand-sewn dress in a sea of designer labels. We learn in that film, so emblematic of storylines of that era, that classroom politics entail class politics. But in the end, everyone attends the same public school.

More recent teen popular culture has also focused on class, but with an important distinction: They are premised on the notion that rich kids and poor kids do not live in the same school districts, even if they live in the same region.

The hit show of the early 2000s, “The OC,” was in fact premised on the notion that poor kids and rich kids do not grow up in the same place. Ryan is poor and from Chino; the others are rich and from Newport Beach. By accident, Ryan ends up living with a Newport Beach family. Drama ensues, with lots of talk about where Ryan is from, and what that means.

[snip]

They are not merely different; the show suggests they are mutually exclusive. Many of the show’s most powerful scenes involve these worlds colliding: Chino kids, slack-jawed and uncomprehending, in Newport; Newport kids, tentative and uncomprehending, in Chino. And a recurrent theme is the near-impossibility of a Chino kid “surviving” in Newport, or vice versa.

Only a remarkable set of events brings Ryan to Newport (A tough-but-caring public defender sees potential in the young juvenile offender and takes him home to his mansion on the sea) and the only adult characters who weren’t born into money married into it (the deceitful, gold digging Julie gets knocked up to get in, and once in she keeps marrying up). But nobody earns their way into Newport. This city, where no manual laborers need apply for residence, is a far cry from the small-town, apple-pie-bound streets of Pretty in Pink. “The OC” is both much leaner and much meaner.

In other words, as “The OC” (and other recent teen fare such as Bring It On, Gossip Girl, or Save the Last Dance) reflects, Americans are increasingly likely to live class-bound lives, in class-bound places.

[snip]

The show’s not-so-implicit support for class segregation culminates at the end of Season Three, when Marissa is killed in a car accident caused by the drunk-driving of one Kevin Volchok.

Now, in the episodes prior to the fatal car accident, Volchok’s favorite pastime, besides drinking, is extorting and stealing money from the Newpsies. Needless to say, he is not a native. Marissa had been briefly involved with Volchok — “going slumming,” as a number of “The OC” fan sites put it. And Volchok had in fact been Marissa’s date to the Harbor prom. But rather than melting in her arms there a la a 1980s John Hughes movie, Volchok steals all the post-prom party money, drinks a flask’s worth of booze, and makes out with another girl.

With that storyline in the background, it’s hard not to watch Marissa’s death throes without thinking: Marissa never should have gotten involved with that Volchok. You knew he didn’t belong.

Maybe this is all you need to know: Throughout the run of “The OC,” no cross-class teenage romance survived.

Prepare to be assimilated

2009-05-13T13:08:00.000-07:00

Clive Thompson considers his "outboard brain" in Wired:

This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative's birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up. [em: mine]

[snip]

My point is that the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we've outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.

And frankly, I kind of like it. I feel much smarter when I'm using the Internet as a mental plug-in during my daily chitchat. Say you mention the movie Once: I've never seen it, but in 10 seconds I'll have reviewed a summary of the plot, the actors, and its cultural impact. Machine memory even changes the way I communicate, because I continually stud my IMs with links, essentially impregnating my very words with extra intelligence.

[snip]

Still, I have nagging worries. Sure, I'm a veritable genius when I'm on the grid, but am I mentally crippled when I'm not? Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways of understanding the world?

Where MLK dreamed of buying a new recliner...

2009-05-12T10:36:00.000-07:00

Via Ta-Nehisi.

The Potato Famine's Hidden Upside

2009-05-06T18:28:00.000-07:00

Alex Massie strikes the same point that got my back up regarding my recent post on Patrick Deneen's rural utopian fantasies, namely that it is very easy to mythologize the "folkways" of underdeveloped societies (whether present or past) when reading about them on a Kindle at Starbucks. And in doing so to gloss over, and thereby cheapen, the very real human suffering that accompanies the poverty of those societies:

There is, as you might expect, some good stuff in Christopher Caldwell's Weekly Standard piece on the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger. But it also contains some strange thinking, albeit of a kind that is often found when foreigners consider the Irish. Thus:

This [prosperity and immigration] is all very exciting for the Irish, but there is nothing particularly Irish about it. Irish identity has often been--explicitly and officially--a matter of protecting citizens from both the temptations of modernity and the vicissitudes of prosperity...

De Valera's Irish Republic was organized around the idea that money doesn't matter that much. This may have been a noble aspiration, it may have been sanctimony and foolishness, but there was at the very least something bold and, as Yeats would say, indomitable about it. Next to De Valera's uncompromising Christian renunciation, those two something-for-nothing ideologies, modern capitalism and modern socialism, are practically indistinguishable.

Over the last 20 years, Ireland found riches a good substitute for its traditional culture. But now the country has been harder hit by the financial downturn than any country in Western Europe. We may be about to discover what happens when a traditionally poor country returns to poverty without its culture.

This is rum, hyperbolic stuff. The Irish economy may contract by 10% this year and, on a per capita basis, the 26 Counties aren't likely to remain amongst the richest dozen countries in the world, but Ireland is not, despite its problems, going to return to its impoverished roots.

What's more perplexing is why anyone should want it to. Caldwell doesn't quite say it, but the implication to be drawn from his piece - and from others like it - was that Ireland was a better, more wholesome, happier place when it was poor and that it was foolish for the Irish to believe that they could ever aspire to something more than that. Didn't they realise their lot was to be backward and patronised?

Sure, maybe it was all too much to be entirely true and, sure, perhaps the good times couldn't last forever. But that's no reason to suggest that poverty was somehow ennobling and more authentic than prosperity.

[snip]

It's all very well for foreigners to bemoan the cost of the Celtic Tiger - especially its vulgarity - and wax lyrical about them Rare Ould Times, but they (we) didn't have to live there. [em: mine]

Hear hear.

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes

2009-05-06T17:46:00.000-07:00

An absolutely fascinating article in the New Yorker about Dan Everett, author of "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes" an account of his experience living in the Amazon jungle as a Christian missionary and eventually emerging as an atheist with a PhD in linguistics. His research documents what he believes are the unique structural elements of the Pirahã language, but more interestingly how the linguistic structure of the Pirahã conditions their patterns of thought and acquisition of knowledge, ultimately frustrating Everett's missionary objectives:

Unlike other hunter-gatherer tribes of the Amazon, the Pirahã have resisted efforts by missionaries and government agencies to teach them farming. They maintain tiny, weed-infested patches of ground a few steps into the forest, where they cultivate scraggly manioc plants. “The stuff that’s growing in this village was either planted by somebody else or it’s what grows when you spit the seed out,” Everett said to me one morning as we walked through the village. Subsisting almost entirely on fish and game, which they catch and hunt daily, the Pirahã have ignored lessons in preserving meats by salting or smoking, and they produce only enough manioc flour to last a few days.

[snip]

“For the first several years I was here, I was disappointed that I hadn’t gone to a ‘colorful’ group of people,” Everett told me. “I thought of the people in the Xingu, who paint themselves and use the lip plates and have the festivals. But then I realized that this is the most intense culture that I could ever have hoped to experience.

This is a culture that’s invisible to the naked eye, but that is incredibly powerful, the most powerful culture of the Amazon. Nobody has resisted change like this in the history of the Amazon, and maybe of the world.”

[snip]

In 1921, the anthropologist Curt Nimuendajú spent time among the Pirahã and noted that they showed “little interest in the advantages of civilization” and displayed “almost no signs of permanent contact with civilized people.”

[snip]

Everett had to bridge many such cultural gaps in order to gain more than a superficial grasp of the language. “I went into the jungle, helped them make fields, went fishing with them,” he said. “You cannot become one of them, but you’ve got to do as much as you can to feel and absorb the language.” The tribe, he maintains, has no collective memory that extends back more than one or two generations, and no original creation myths.

Marco Antonio Gonçalves, an anthropologist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, spent eighteen months with the Pirahã in the nineteen-eighties and wrote a dissertation on the tribe’s beliefs. Gonçalves, who spoke limited Pirahã, agrees that the tribe has no creation myths but argues that few Amazonian tribes do. When pressed about what existed before the Pirahã and the forest, Everett says, the tribespeople invariably answer, “It has always been this way.”

Everett also learned that the Pirahã have no fixed words for colors, and instead use descriptive phrases that change from one moment to the next. “So if you show them a red cup, they’re likely to say, ‘This looks like blood,’ ” Everett said. “Or they could say, ‘This is like vrvcum’—a local berry that they use to extract a red dye.”

[snip]

In the early nineties, Everett began to reread the work of linguists who had preceded Chomsky, including that of Edward Sapir, an influential Prussian-born scholar who died in 1939. [...] Sapir was fascinated by the role of culture in shaping languages, and although he anticipated Chomsky’s preoccupation with linguistic universals, he was more interested in the variations that made each language unique.

In his 1921 book, “Language,” Sapir stated that language is an acquired skill, which “varies as all creative effort varies—not as consciously, perhaps, but nonetheless as truly as do the religions, the beliefs, the customs, and the arts of different peoples.” Chomsky, however, believed that culture played little role in the study of language, and that going to far-flung places to record the arcane babel of near-extinct tongues was a pointless exercise. Chomsky’s view had prevailed. Everett began to wonder if this was an entirely good thing.

“When I went back and read the stuff Sapir wrote in the twenties, I just realized, hey, this really is a tradition that we lost,” Everett said. “People believe they’ve actually studied a language when they have given it a Chomskyan formalism. And you may have given us absolutely no insight whatsoever into that language as a separate language.”

[snip]

Everett did not deny the existence of a biological endowment for language—humans couldn’t talk if they did not possess the requisite neurological architecture to do so. But, convinced that culture plays a far greater role than Chomsky’s theory accounted for, he decided that he needed to “take a radical reexamination of my whole approach to the problem.”

[snip]

It is a matter of some vexation to Everett that the first article on the Pirahã to attract significant attention was written not by him but by his friend (and former colleague at the University of Pittsburgh) Peter Gordon, now at Columbia, who in 2004 published a paper in Science on the Pirahã’s understanding of numbers. Gordon had visited the tribe with Everett in the early nineties, after Everett told him about the Pirahã’s limited “one,” “two,” and “many” counting system.

Other tribes, in Australia, the South Sea Islands, Africa, and the Amazon, have a “one-two-many” numerical system, but with an important difference: they are able to learn to count in another language. The Pirahã have never been able to do this, despite concerted efforts by the Everetts to teach them to count to ten in Portuguese.

During a two-month stay with the Pirahã in 1992, Gordon ran several experiments with tribe members. In one, he sat across from a Pirahã subject and placed in front of himself an array of objects—nuts, AA batteries—and had the Pirahã match the array. The Pirahã could perform the task accurately when the array consisted of two or three items, but their performance with larger groupings was, Gordon later wrote, “remarkably poor.”

Gordon also showed subjects nuts, placed them in a can, and withdrew them one at a time. Each time he removed a nut, he asked the subject whether there were any left in the can. The Pirahã answered correctly only with quantities of three or fewer. Through these and other tests, Gordon concluded that Everett was right: the people could not perform tasks involving quantities greater than three.

[snip]

Gordon surmised that the Pirahã provided support for a controversial hypothesis advanced early in the last century by Benjamin Lee Whorf, a student of Sapir’s. Whorf argued that the words in our vocabulary determine how we think. Since the Pirahã do not have words for numbers above two, Gordon wrote, they have a limited ability to work with quantities greater than that. “It’s language affecting thought,” Gordon told me. [em: mine]

[snip]

Inspired by Sapir’s cultural approach to language, [Everett] hypothesized that the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the people’s lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions—and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths.

Everett pointed to the word xibipío as a clue to how the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience—which Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. “When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has not simply gone away but xibipío—‘gone out of experience,’ ” Everett said. “They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light ‘goes in and out of experience.’ ”

Via Dreher.

It depends on what the meaning of the word "yes-man" is

2009-05-04T09:57:00.000-07:00

Richard Haass writes about the dilemma of serving in the Bush administration when one is personally opposed to its signature foreign policy initiative, the Iraq war:

This is all well and good, but in my experience, dissent tends to be more honored in the abstract than in practice. Joseph Heller captures this reality all too well in his wicked 1979 political novel "Good as Gold," in which Ralph, a presidential aide, tells a job applicant, "This President doesn't want yes-men. What we want are independent men of integrity who will agree with all our decisions after we make them."

Many aspects of the Bush administration seem to bring the question Warhol famously posed readily to mind: "Does art imitate life or does life imitate art?"

The utility of synonyms is revealed

2009-04-23T19:16:00.000-07:00

Wasn't there a Love Boat episode about this?

2009-04-20T17:15:00.000-07:00

Creative Destruction - Atari Style

2009-04-20T15:12:00.000-07:00

For any not familiar, the phrase "creative destruction" is most often used in reference to its economic implications:

A term coined by Joseph Schumpeter in his work entitled "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" (1942) to denote a "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one."

Recessions are a form of creative destruction as companies that were surviving in stronger economic times are pushed over the brink, and new firms spring up to begin the cycle of wealth creation and improved productivity anew.

In that spirit, I think the following classified ad from Craigslist serves as a glimmer of light piercing through the dark night of our current economic times and foreshadowing a brighter future for us all:

In response to the economic downturn, I am offering personal Tetris training sessions on a limited, first-come first-serve basis. I am a patient and non-judgmental coach.

[snip]

Intermediate Tetris [includes]:

• This training program is slightly longer in duration, and incorporates all of the modules covered in Tetris Fundamentals but also includes beer, wine or liquor. You will challenge yourself by applying the skills you’ve learned while growing increasingly intoxicated and playing against someone who is similarly drunk.
• There may be a short primer on computational geometry and algorithmic complexity theory, unless we run out of time.

The kid has got some pipes

2009-04-20T09:06:00.001-07:00

Cat plays it cool

2009-04-19T15:00:00.000-07:00

The Dingo stole my Avatar

2009-04-19T13:17:00.000-07:00

From Rough Type back in 2006. Presumably Second Life has *solved* this problem to a degree by now, but as with the music industry, as more and more of the things we value in life become digital rather than physical objects, this type of problem will continue, with larger and larger economic consequences:

The commercialization of Second Life has hit a speed bump. A new software program, called CopyBot, allows residents of the virtual world to make exact copies of other residents' creations. The knockoffs threaten the livelihoods of the many entrepreneurs, as well as big companies, that have set up shop selling clothes, trinkets, and other goods in the popular fairy land.

As an irate Caliandras Pendragon writes at Second Life Insider, "Those people who are living the dream that is promoted in every article, of earning a RL [real life] income from SL creations, are now living a nightmare in which their source of income may soon be worthless. That's not to speak of big commercial companies who have paid anything up to 1,000,000 dollars to have their product reproduced in loving detail, who will discover that every Tom, Dick or Harriet may rip off their creation for nothing - and then sell it as their own ... If someone wanted to destroy the economy of SL I don't think they could have found a better way."

The furor took an ugly turn late last night when, according to the Second Life Herald, a "seething mob" surrounded a CopyBot operation run by Second Life resident GeForce Go. The mob shouted that Go was "ruining their Second Life." Fearing for her safety, Go closed down her shop and sold her land. In a subsequent "tumultous meeting with dozens of angry and fearful residents all talking at once," Second Life official Robin Linden "sought to allay fears of any further concern about mass copyright violations."

And as some of my posts recently have noted, economic consequences lead to social ones, as in this update to the story:

But the arrival in Second Life of the CopyBot replicator hasn't just produced a commercial and a political crisis. It's brought an existential crisis as well. Because CopyBot can clone entire avatars as well as their possessions, people fear losing their virtual selves. Their sense of what I've termed "avatar anxiety" is deepening. Writes resident Harle Armistice in a comment on the official Second Life blog:

I’m sorry, but this isn’t just about sales ... I have a unique av that I made for myself. It’s me, it’s my work, it’s part of my persona. I’ve been wearing it for ages and I will be wearing it likely until the day SL either goes down or I can’t log in anymore. Or I would be, under normal circumstances ... I am terrified to wear my own content because there’s a script out there that any random user can run to steal my stuff if I do.

The Bloggess vs. One-Eyed Steve (note: not a pirate)

2009-04-19T11:56:00.000-07:00

For any not familiar, The Bloggess is the alter-ego blog of a woman who writes an advice column for the Houston Chronicle. Not quite sure how she keeps her day job since her blog is extremely profane and nearly every post could be the source material for some form of public outrage.

However, it can also be extremely hysterical, as with this recent post where she torments a direct marketer trying to get her to promote his skin lotion on her blog site.

(Note that the big "info-mercial" style marketing pitch that Pete made for the lotion was a demo that shows it protecting you from rock-dissolving acid.)

March 16, 2009 - Dear Jenny,

how are you? Have you had a chance to try Skin MD Natural lotion I sent you? What do you think?

Sincerely, Pete
March 16, 2009- Pete, the lotion was great. My skin is smooth and not greasy and I loved that there was SPF in it as well. Sadly, my lawn maintenance team obviously did not follow the directions well because two of them ended up getting rocks lodged in their faces in spite of the powerful rock-busting lotion abilities. One lost an eye and threatened to sue me for disability and I insisted that he just didn’t apply the lotion correctly.
Then I generously (his lawsuit says “forcibly”) rubbed the lotion in his eyes and he started screaming “IT BURNS! IT BURNS!” Which, in retrospect, makes sense because if the lotion is stronger than acid (and the acid is stronger than rocks) it’s probably stronger than eyeballs too. Either way, it did not go well and I’m being forced to sell The Lawn Rangers (that’s the name of my lawn team) in order to pay for legal bills and for a new glass eye for One-Eyed Steve. Also, I’m being sued for calling him “One-Eyed Steve”. Apparently you can’t give someone a kick-ass pirate name without being sued for making fun of a disability. AMERICA!
Also, before I gave One-Eyed Steve the glass eye I rubbed that lotion all over it to protect his eye socket from the sun and he started screaming again. It was actually pretty funny because I was all “Oh, wait. That’s totally not going to work” but it was too late because he was already putting it in when I said it and he started screaming and they took him to the hospital. I was all “Oh my God, I am an idiot” but if you can’t laugh at yourself who can you laugh at, right?

~Jenny

PS. Seriously, your lotion is awesome and my hands are as smooth as an eyeball, which (take it from me) is pretty fucking smooth. Until you get lotion in it. Then all bets are off.

Naturally this sensibility extends to her commenters as well:

Comment of the day: How fascinating that you have to sell the Rough Riders because Pirate Steve or whatever his name is rubbed it in his eyes. They sent me their stupid lotion and I opened it just as my husband started to get a little lippy with me and you know how women can get when they’re nine months pregnant so I slathered him with that shit and poured acid on him and it didn’t work at all. The Skin MD people are not going to like my review.

And by “it didn’t work at all” I mean the lotion didn’t work at all. The acid totally worked. ~ pamela

Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste

2009-04-17T11:18:00.000-07:00

Rod Dreher interviews with Matt Baglio whose journey into the world of contemporary exorcism is detailed in "The Rite," which has just been published.

You write in great detail about things your protagonist, Father Gary Thomas, saw in his training sessions with Father Carmine. Were you there to witness them? If so, what was that like for you?

I was able to see about 20 exorcisms, some of which Father Gary participated in. The thing that most surprised me was the relative normalcy of the people who had come to be prayed over. You could even have conversations with them. Of course once the exorcist began praying the Ritual then all that would change and the person would react, sometimes violently. Most of the cases I saw were of the milder sort where the person coughed, or just sat completely still. However I did see a few violent ones in which the person thrashed and their personality changed and they began speaking in a gruff and guttural voice that to me sounded very unnatural. In those instances I was really struck by the intense suffering that these people undergo.

[snip]

Many people today scoff at the idea of Satanic cults, but the exorcists you interviewed insist that they are a reality. Is the threat mostly real, or mostly imagined - and how, precisely, do cults threaten?

[snip]

The first thing to understand is that these groups can be very different as not everyone believes the same thing. Some consider the devil to be kind of a natural force that they see as being repressed by organized religion. Other groups apparently do believe in a personified devil, and they perform rituals, which are said to involve drugs, orgies and in extreme cases even human sacrifice. Another group could be classified as just young kids into the trappings of certain music and primarily looking for a way to rebel. In fact some experts feel that Satanism is more of a cultural phenomenon. Others, including exorcists, see Satanic cults as a real threat that can open a person up to demonic attack.

[snip]

Of course this doesn't mean that Satanic cults are harmless. In fact even skeptics point out the damage that these groups can cause to society because they preach a doctrine of hate and despair, and create narcissistic individuals who are incapable of feeling any kind of empathy for others. One police detective from Florence told me how hard it is for him to confront these groups because their members essentially take the shared values that we all have and flip them upside down. They take pleasure in lying and they celebrate death. He found it difficult to even talk to them because there was no common ground from which to start from.

Your exorcist contacts advise you, as mine - the late Father Mario Termini - did me, that people should absolutely stay away from the occult, even in its most apparently benign forms, because that is a gateway to the demonic. Yet occultism seems ever more present in popular culture. Does this concern you?

I think it is very troubling even just from the standpoint that it really reflects on how we have become a society of instant gratification. Nobody wants to struggle anymore, or accept the notion that there may be mystery, or things outside our control. I think there is also this notion that life should always be dramatic, and that we should be constantly pushing our senses to the limit or we're not really living. Seen in this context, for some people, just going to Church is pretty boring and so they go looking for answers elsewhere.

One of the things the course talked about was the concept that where faith decreases, superstition grows. And as more and more people turn away from traditional religions, other beliefs are rushing in to fill the void. What people don't realize is that there can be a consequence. Exorcists of course are adamant that this can lead to demonic attack. But even looking at this from a secular standpoint, you can have impressionable people becoming victims to "magicians" or "psychics" who defraud them out of thousands of dollars, destroying families and ruining people's lives.

Exorcists tend to have great concern, and even disdain, for contemporary priests and bishops who deny the reality of the demonic. In your opinion, how widespread is that denial in the ranks of the clergy, what are its roots, and what is its result? In my personal experience, once you've seen this sort of thing with your own eyes, it takes a superhuman act of will to deny the reality of malevolent spirits.

One of the first things I found fascinating at the course was this notion that some priests didn't believe in the devil. When I first met Father Gary he was quite candid about the fact that he'd never been taught anything about the devil or exorcism. He also told me of a few instances that had happened to him in Rome where he'd shared with some of the other priests he was living with that he was the exorcist and how some of them had dismissed him out of hand.

[snip]

The result was that many priests saw the devil as a metaphor for evil and didn't believe in things like demonic possession or exorcism, which is the biggest complaint that exorcists make. This meant that Christians who in some way felt their lives were being affected by evil spirits had to go outside the Church to get help. Interestingly, Father Gary told me that the newer generation of seminarians is more apt to believe in the reality of Satan.

This made me recall one of my previous posts on Grant McCracken and the significance of the loss of ritual within modern culture and life...

The original transformational power, once the property of gods, elders, and shamans, is now in civilian hands. Once collective, it is now individual, open to everyone. Once sacred, it is now profane. Once directed by the ceremonial calendar, it can now happen anywhere, anytime. Once strictly bound by tradition, it is now free, or at least freeform. When the power of transformation entered the profane world, it was exuberantly transformed. Once this culture learned to give itself "bodies of another kind," it did not cease until it was capable of endless range and variety.

The price, of course, was high. Driving ritual from the temple cost us dearly. The punishment was the loss of an enchanted world that submitted to, that resonated with human designs. The universe became a chilly alienated, dislocating place. Good thing everyone now had their own powers of self-invention. They were going to need them. [em: mine]

Which is to say that there was once a time when ritual had a truly transformative effect on ourselves and our world, and by that I don't just mean a ceremonial one. Anyone familiar with the intensity of the placebo effect is aware of the dramatic and measurable impacts that are possible from simply believing something to be true.

But while I don't believe in a disembodied intelligent evil (as Dreher and Baglio seem to), or to quote the inimitable Ulysses Everett McGill:

Well, there are all manner of lesser imps and demons, Pete, but the great Satan hisself is red and scaly with a bifurcated tail, and he carries a hay fork.

This is different than saying that I don't believe in evil itself, which is to say a darkness that is beyond seemingly rational comprehension or simplistic explanation.

From CNN:

Rosalio Reta sits at a table inside a Laredo Police Department interrogation room. A detective, sitting across the table, asks him how it all started.

Reta, in Spanish street slang, describes his initiation as an assassin, at the age of 13, for the Mexican Gulf Cartel, one of the country's two major drug gangs.

"I thought I was Superman. I loved doing it, killing that first person," Reta says on the videotape obtained by CNN. "They tried to take the gun away, but it was like taking candy from kid."

Rosalio Reta and his friend, Gabriel Cardona, were members of a three-person cell of American teenagers working as cartel hit men in the United States, according to prosecutors. The third was arrested by Mexican authorities and stabbed to death in prison there three days later.

[snip]

"One thing you wonder all the time: What made them this way?" Garcia told CNN. "They were just kids themselves, waiting around playing PlayStation or Xbox, waiting around for the order to be given."

[snip]

Prosecutor and investigators say Reta and Cardona were recruited into a group called "Los Zetas," a group made up of former members of the Mexican special military forces. They're considered ruthless in how they carry out attacks. "Los Zetas" liked what they saw in Cardona and Reta.

Both teenagers received six-month military-style training on a Mexican ranch. Investigators say Cardona and Reta were paid $500 a week each as a retainer, to sit and wait for the call to kill. Then they were paid up to $50,000 and 2 kilos of cocaine for carrying out a hit.

The teenagers lived in several safe houses around Laredo and drove around town in a $70,000 Mercedes-Benz.

As the teens became more immersed in the cartel lifestyle, their appearance changed. Cardona had eyeballs tattooed on his eyelids. Reta's face became covered in tattoo markings. And both sported tattoos of "Santa Muerte," the Grim Reaper-like pseudo-saint worshipped by drug traffickers.

[snip]

Just hours before they were arrested, federal authorities taped a phone conversation between them in which Cardona brags about killing 14-year-old Inez Villareal and his cousin, a Cardona rival.

Cardona laughs as he describes torturing the two boys and dumping their bodies in large metal drums filled with diesel fuel. He says he made "guiso," or stew, with their bodies.

As the call ends, Cardona says, "There are three left to kill, there are three left."

Rosalio Reta

Gabriel Cardona

Dreher would be tempted to look at these faces and pick up on the story of Santa Muerte and see the devil infiltrating their hearts. I'm not sure it is quite that simple. I doubt their "faith" in Santa Muerte can be considered a philosophy or belief in any coherent sense, but there is a reversal of ethics in such a life where the good becomes bad, and evil is celebrated. It's an ex post facto way of explaining to yourself why you are doing the things you are doing.

But once you accept that, anything is possible. To kill is to succeed, to gain power, to exalt oneself. To decline to do so in the context of their world would be to be weak, robbed of one's masculinity, powerless and defeated.

It is the story of Tolkein's ring, is it not? The allure of absolute power and the darkness that lurks one step beyond it. I won't call it the devil, but I don't know that I have a better explanation either.

Kid Koala rocks the house

2009-04-16T13:50:00.000-07:00

Utopia, the new and improved rural flavor

2009-04-16T12:32:00.000-07:00

Patrick Deneen writes on a speech Obama gave recently on the economic crisis at Georgetown:

And so, we are told, our current economic crisis is due to a few bad loans made by a few bad eggs who work on Wall Street. What is neglected in this explanation is a broader and deeper perspective: our current crisis is due to the fact that we have, as a civilization, refused to live within our means - and the means afforded us by the natural world - over roughly the past 50 years.

Mistaking a temporary glut of post-war wealth and resource plenty as a permanent condition, we are told by our leaders - indeed, we demand of them that they tell us - that we can continue to have it all, costless plenitude. Yet these past thirty-odd years of our “economy” have been one in which we have maintained our wealth simultaneously by transferring the accumulated national wealth abroad, importing oil and debt, while refusing to face the mounting costs of this exercise - including its costs in the form of a massive military presence that was the only real guarantor and bargaining chip on our bankrupt side of the bargain. Meanwhile we continue to dismantle those cultural institutions that once taught restraint and limits - many of them religious, since they are an offense, above all, to our sense of sexual entitlement - in an effort to achieve ever more perfect individual autonomy.

Meantime, the American citizenry - scratch that, consumerdom, or consumerdumb - has all the while been willing to trade away any actual political and civic liberty for the sake of a guarantee of two cars, a plywood and aluminum siding house in the burbs, a college education (a.k.a. four year binge) for their children, and 401Ks that grew at a healthy 10% a year, no matter how an economy that grew only 2-3% a year was producing such outsize stock market returns. Enjoying our returns in the various markets in which we participated - stocks, bonds, real estate - we didn’t ask too many questions, not even when the national savings rate dipped to -2% in the late 90s. Everything seemed to be going along just fine.

Yes, 9/11 was disturbing to everyone, but the President told us to go shopping, and we were good at that. We were really good at that.

Yesterday the President told us that we were going to have to become again a nation that worked - and my ears perked up - until he described precisely what he meant. By work, more of us are to become scientists and engineers. That is, more of us are to become the kinds of workers who make it possible for the rest of us not to work, to engage in the sort of work that lies at the heart of the modern project, namely of extracting from a recalcitrant nature its secrets so that we can enjoy the “relief of the human estate.”

More of us are to engage in that project that is being taken up readily by our Chinese and Indian competitors, to transform our world ever more into a useful commodity for our pleasure and enjoyment. Americans must cease trying to make easy money at the casinos of Wall Street and instead seek to extend the mastery and dominion of nature so that the rest of us will not have to work or think too hard about what makes living possible or even worthwhile. Fewer traders, more lab coats.

Above all, no jobs that actually demand work. Top scientists are working to eliminate any possible drudgery from our lives, especially the need to do things with our hands, make or repair our own stuff, understand for ourselves how the world works and how we can best live in it. [em: mine]

This kind of tripe is typical of threads running through some conservative blogs lately that center on 2 recurrent themes:

1) The sneering disgust (e.g. "consumerdumb") with how people choose to spend their time and money when given the freedom (both in the political and economic sense) to do so.
2) The belief that this world would be a much better place if we were all living in a global Little House on the Prairie remake where everyone worked with their hands or farmed to earn a livelihood.

The former impulse is a form of petulant name-calling since what Deneen is really objecting to is the failure of others to adopt (and thereby ratify) the philosophical choices he advocates. Deneen confidently projects the utter assurance that he *knows* what is best for everyone else, they are just too dumb to see it for themselves. Strange that he hasn't attracted more adherents to date.

The latter is a pastoral fantasy born startlingly frequently it would seem amongst the right-wing academic and political class. In other words, by people who are far more familiar with the philosophy of Wendell Berry and the mythology of small-town America than with what it means to actually hitch a plow to an animal and till the Earth.

I recall reading about Lyndon Johnson's advocacy of the Rural Electrification Act and how he wanted to do something for the "bended" people. What he meant was the people whose bodies were stooped and misshapen from lives of long hard farm work.

Get back to me when you've walked a mile in their shoes. Of course, Deneen would have to give up his endowed chair at Georgetown first. No time to xerox your syllabus when the hogs need to be slopped. I'll start holding my breath now.

Or, as Caleb Stegall put it:

You want to farm. Great, so farm. Start small. What you lack isn't knowledge, but skill. Go talk to some locals. I recommend the feed store as a near infinite source of local knowledge and wisdom (which, by the way, is exactly where the old timers told me what I'm telling you now). Financially, stay out of debt, don't buy stuff you don't need, and learn how to work hard.

I have no patience for those who blame the world or the age we live in or the flood of Progress for their failure to have the life they supposedly want. This victim mentality is even uglier in conservative nostalgics (and I say that as one who is intimately familiar with the emotion). It needs to be ruthlessly dealt with. The worst thing that can happen to gatherings like Front Porch Republic is that they have a tendency to become a place for parlor dress-up mind games for spoiled misfits each nursing their own grievances. A kind of virtual second life for conservatives who get to imagine the world they want without engaging in any of the real work, sacrifice, pain, and suffering that is required to attain the real thing.

If preventing that hurts a few feelings, so be it. You have bootstraps. So use 'em.

Which one of these 2 guys sounds like a farm hand to you?

Dogma Aversion Syndrome

2009-04-15T20:54:00.000-07:00

On the one hand, the higher levels of religiosity present in America (compared to Europe) are often attributed to the lack of an established state-sponsored church in the US. Religions compete in an open marketplace for followers and this competition improves the products and services available, or so the capitalist thinking goes.

However, as with my recent post on economic dynamism driving us towards cultural individualism, there seems to be an inherent conflict of interest at work here. If religions are competing for *customers* then the power of the moral injunctions (thou shall nots) religions are supposed to be instilling in believers runs counter to the customer-is-always-right ethos that pervades all other kinds of *consumer* interaction we participate in.

Burger King doesn't tell me what to do, they let me have it my way. It's hard to see the Pope embracing quite the same attitude on things. But maybe he just needs to hire some better PR staff.

From USA Today:

For the past two years, I have asked students in my introductory religion courses at Boston University to get together in groups and invent their own religions. They present their religious creations to their classmates, and then everyone votes (with fake money in a makeshift offering plate) for the new religions they like best.

This assignment encourages students to reflect on what separates "winners" and "losers" in America's freewheeling spiritual marketplace. It also yields intriguing data regarding what sort of religious beliefs and practices young people love and hate.

[snip]

What strikes me most about my students' religions, however, is how similar they are. Almost invariably, they mix fun with faith. (Facebookismianity anyone?) But they do not mix faith with dogma. My students are careful — exceedingly careful — not to tell one another what to believe, or even what to do. Above all, they want to be tolerant and non-judgmental.

[snip]

During the 1930s, the neoorthodox theologian H. Richard Niebuhr skewered liberal Protestants for preaching "a God without wrath (who) brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

But my students' "dogma aversion" (as one put it) goes liberal Protestantism one further. These young people aren't just allergic to dogma. They are allergic to divinity and even heaven. In the religions of their imagining, God is an afterthought at best. And the afterlife is, as one of my students told me, "on the back burner."

[snip]

In their final exam this past semester, I asked my students to reflect on whether young Americans are the canaries in the mines of more traditional religions. Study after study has shown that American college students are fleeing from organized religion to mix-and-match spirituality.

So what will happen to what one of my students referred to as the "religions of discipline" when this millennial generation (born in the late 1970s through the 1990s) grows up? What will today's youth do with religions whose ethical injunctions arrive as strict commandments rather than friendly suggestions? Will they be able to abide religions that divide the human family into the saved and the damned, that present as absolute truth what they suspect is mere speculation?

My students' projects suggest that traditional religions are in trouble.

[snip]

One of my students, Carrie-Anne Solana, told me that the religions her colleagues presented in class amounted to nothing more than "organized atheism." "They took normal human impulses," such as eating, drinking, sleeping, having sex and socializing, she said, "and justified them under the title of religion while not offering any form of explanation into why we are here, where we came from or where we go when we die."

I am not saying this is a good thing. Clearly any faith so thoroughly vacated of its moral strictures isn't much of one. But it seems that the cultivation of moral virtue needs to be presented as having more value to young people in the here and now. Adhering to doctrine needs to lead to a *good life* in this life.

Now *good* can be defined in many different ways, not merely as simple hedonistic happiness. But if all the benefit to following dogma accrues only in the after-life, well that's a recipe for declining market share.

And I'm not quite sure this type of thing is going to make up for that:

On the nature of the GingerBrain

2009-04-15T20:33:00.000-07:00

I don't know that I am cut out for blogging per se. Often I find things on the Internet that I think I might like to blog about and I bookmark them (rather than post them) because I need to figure out what I would like to say about the subject and don't want to "waste" the content until my thoughts on the matter congeal.

As one might expect, it can take a considerable amount of effort in order to shape one's thoughts into a moderately long post of at least minimal cogency. Therefore, the pace of my blog posting can slow to a crawl when I don't have time to dedicate myself to content generation.

Obviously, this writing process is the anti-thesis of the way blogs work naturally as a publishing form, which is to favor short, rapid-fire, off-the-cuff reactions with excerpts and links to the associated content if readers want the whole story.

To that end, I am going to try to release the reins a bit moving forward, while still dropping in from time to time with my "big think" commentary that I know you are all waiting on pins and needles for each day. In the land of the blind...

Quote of the Day: "How do you feel? Bloody fantastic."

2009-04-14T17:25:00.000-07:00

The Age of Abundance

2009-04-13T14:30:00.000-07:00

Brink Lindsay's new book, The Age of Abundance, captures some themes I have touched on previously here, here and here. Namely that a lot of the cultural upheaval we are dealing with in our politics today is a by-product of the economic upheaval that has radically transformed our society and the world over the past 100 years.

Lindsay summarizes the point in a podcast overview of his book [paraphrased]:

It was in the post-war boom in the 1950’s that America represented something fundamentally new under the sun. By the 50's, this was a country where the vast majority of people were well insulated from the edge of subsistence where most human beings had lived for all of history.

Most people lived with a fair degree of material comfort, in fact an extravagant degree of material comfort by historical standards. Only a minority of people were considered in poverty. This is something without precedent.

Not only were they insulated from want, but they were insulated from nature. America had always been a prosperous country by world standards, but it was one where most people made a living as farmers, directly exposed to vagaries of nature for their well being.

Whereas by the 50s, most people lived in cities and began working in offices. Most people lived in a human created world, a world of human institutions and inventions, and didn’t face nature except for recreation. This is a fundamental change in the human condition. [em: mine]

I believe it is hard for us to imagine how radical this change is, since the society we live in is the one we have always known. But it seems that the change in our everyday conditions from one that is highly limited by the natural world (constraints on our existence are imposed from without) to one that is removed from nature and self-consciously constructed for our use (where limits are not imposed, but are overcome) has sweeping implications for our perceptions on human agency and freedom.

And given this far-reaching material change to the very nature of human existence, Lindsay argues that cultural change almost inevitably had to follow...

The end of scarcity pushes us towards cultural individualism. When people are poor, they don’t have a lot of choices. They don’t have a lot of stuff, they don’t have a lot of choice about what to consume, and they don’t have a lot of choice about where to live. So things are very simple: you do this or you die.

Likewise everybody is more or less alike. When people are poor, it means the division of labor is very underdeveloped. 90% of all people are subsistence farmers and so there isn’t a lot of variety in human experience.

And then finally, everything is the same from generation to generation. Without economic growth, one generation is just like the next. If your dad is a farmer you’ll be a farmer. If your dad is a cobbler, then more than likely you’ll be a cobbler too.

In this world of uniformity and changelessness and lack of choice, it makes sense that the kinds of cultural values that held sway were one-size-fits-all. People belonged to a group, they owed loyalty to that group, they had to do what that group says or else, because when there is no margin for error you can’t have a lot of freelancing.

Our traditional moralities that evolved during the agrarian era tended to be absolutist and didn’t give great scope for people to go their own way simply because the material conditions for them to go their own way weren’t there. But when those conditions changed, I think you see the inevitability of the culture opening up to accommodate that change.

And so by nature, when we change things, especially things that have been guiding society, relationships and human behavior over a long period of time, we don't quite know what we are going to get. And it is this uncertainty that seems to underlie much of the cultural angst that emanates from the socially conservative segments of our society.

I can understand the angst. There is a tension in facing the unknown. The thing that I can never fully appreciate is why cultural conservatives are so CERTAIN that any such change is by definition disastrous for humanity.

By contrast, I share much of Lindsay's tempered but hopeful optimism about the possibilities for our collective cultural future:

The rule is: 90% of everything is crap. A lot of [our culture today] is vulgar and base and stupid and trivial and shallow. And in moderation doing vulgar, shallow, stupid things is fine. It’s fun. It’s great to have a couple glasses of wine with dinner, it’s terrible to be wino. It’s great to be able to see world events live on TV, it’s terrible to be a couch potato. You have all these options and there are all kinds of ways to exercise them poorly.

But we have more of everything now. We have more trash and we have more superlative greatness than ever before. The opportunities to live a phenomenally well-lived life have never been more in our grasp. Whether everyone uses freedom wisely is a different matter.

But this is a fundamental faith that libertarians have: The very predictable ways people in which people misuse their freedom are more than compensated by the unpredictable miracles that occur when people are free to be creative. [em: mine]

There is a spark of our humanity that is lost if we snuff out this creativity for the sake of cultural continuity. We gain security but lose part of our essence as well.

Quote of the Day: "What this boy talking 'bout on the telephone?"

2009-04-06T14:46:00.000-07:00

Beyonce's unforeseen influence on IT departments

2009-04-06T06:33:00.000-07:00

Quote of the Day: "I'm so glad I have this diaper on right now."

2009-04-03T14:08:00.000-07:00

The Colbert Report

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Political Humor

NASA Name Contest

White boys spitting hot fire

2009-03-23T20:41:00.000-07:00

See below the beginning of a recent diavlog (as it is known) between national security reporters Spencer Ackerman (The Washington Independent) and Eli Lake (The Washington Times). I have seen these guys before and normally they would spend time discussing the ins and outs of foreign policy issues from Iran to Afghanistan to Pakistan. They are full blown reporters (not just talking head pundits) with deep sources on all these national security issues.

Yet, they spend the opening of their recent discussion on hip-hop, specifically a new conservative rapper called Hi-Caliber. The ease with which the throw around references to Jeezy, Nas, 50 and Rick Ross shows their deep familiarity with the topic...

Now, what I find interesting about this is just how this crosses up so many stereotypical lines and how modern culture facilitates this sort of cultural sampling and cross-pollination such that it allows these 2 guys (of all people) to be both foreign policy wonks AND hip-hop heads without there being any real contradiction between the two identities.

Moreover, as they reference in the discussion above, they collaborated on their own rap regarding the Rod Blagojevich saga. See link below.

The thing is, I think it is really good. The production value is obviously low and their "flow," if you will, leaves something to be desired. But the rhymes are inventive and definitely "ill," as Eli would say.

My favorite:

I'm Axelrodding, be finishing this by Hanukkah
I'm jacking jews for they lists and their yarmulkas
You cut a check or I squeal like a Monica
Obama's collar getting hotter than Andromeda

Check it out, yo.... (Warning: NSFW)

Long Time, No Blog

2009-03-23T11:42:00.000-07:00

What can I say? At least I didn't increase the subscription rate.

However, I did just come across this 1967 video which forecasts the coming of the Internet Age. It's almost spooky in its accuracy.

News of the weird (and the clumsy)

2009-03-06T12:06:00.000-08:00

Man falls down same cliff twice:

George Stastny tripped on a narrow footpath and fell down a 20ft cliff as he was enjoying a stroll in the Teesdale Valley, close to his home in Whorlton, near Barnard Castle in County Durham.

His fall was broken by rocks and trees, but the 66-year-old broke his nose and injured his back.

He was still conscious, so his wife, Mary, managed to drag him back to the top of the cliff, where he eventually passed out.

Without a mobile phone, Mrs Stastny, 53, decided to run for help, leaving her husband safely away from the cliff.

But as she turned away, he stood up, fainted again, and fell back down the cliff.

[snip]

"I turned around to see him stand up and to my horror, he fell down again. He fell right down the cliff to where he was before.

"There were these awful noises coming from him, there were all sorts of moans and groans," the landscape gardener said.

[snip]

"He felt fine," Mrs Stastny said. "He said he woke up and thought: 'I've seen this branch before'.

Via The Daily What.

Then why are they called pigs, Mommy?

2009-03-06T12:02:00.000-08:00

COPS for Kids! from Sunset Television on Vimeo.

Wilkinson casts Cloak Of Chaos spell

2009-03-05T17:47:00.000-08:00

Front Porch Republic (FPR) is a new conservative blog with the following mission statement:

The economic crisis that emerged in late 2008 and the predictable responses it elicited from those in power has served to highlight the extent to which concepts such as human scale, the distribution of power, and our responsibility to the future have been eliminated from the public conversation. It also threatens to worsen the political and economic centralization and atomization that have accompanied the century-long unholy marriage between consumer capitalism and the modern bureaucratic state.

We live in a world characterized by a flattened culture and increasingly meaningless freedoms. Little regard is paid to the necessity for those overlapping local and regional groups, communities, and associations that provide a matrix for human flourishing. We’re in a bad way, and the spokesmen and spokeswomen of both our Left and our Right are, for the most part, seriously misguided in their attempts to provide diagnoses, let alone solutions.

So, now that we've established that we are living in a veritable hell on earth, let the wailing and cries for mercy commence!

Will Wilkinson posts this response to an early post on FPR by Daniel Larison titled Patrimony and Autonomy. It may not surprise to note that Larison is all in favor of venerating the former, but as to the latter? Not so much.

Here's Wilkinson:

I think I am going to really enjoy Front Porch Republic (motto: “Place. Limits. Liberty.”), which as far as I can tell is an enterprise devoted to the idea that a world filled with little islands of intense moral chauvinism is a better world. Anyway, I was drawn in by this amusing passage by Daniel Larison:

Let us reflect on the fallen state of man. How did it happen, and what was the cause of the Fall?

Our ancestors chose to try to be as gods and willed the one thing that God had forbidden them. Individual autonomy is at the heart of the Fall, and so it is part of our fallen nature, the part that St. Maximos described as the gnomic (deliberative) will. This is how we are now, but this is not how we were created.

As fallen creatures we can embrace this autonomy, celebrate it and make it one of our highest goods, as most modern traditions would have us do, or we can turn back to God and change our mind.

I read this to Kerry who submits that “it sounds like he’s talking about Dungeons and Dragons or something,” which I think is about right. I know it’s rude for unbelievers to step into conversations between people who take wizards seriously, but I imagine Larison has a point we can all appreciate, and I’d like to know what it is.

My secular reconstruction, which I’m sure leaves out the ineffable essence of the thought, is that the ideal of individual autonomy is alien to human nature and we would be better off surrendering ourselves to our little platoons to be made as they see fit. Is that it?

Q.E.D.

Oh, snap! Michael Steele goes off da hook

2009-03-05T11:26:00.000-08:00

Initial efforts to court more minority voters to the GOP go a bit awry:

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates

Donkeys and elephants living together... Mass hysteria!

2009-03-04T20:23:00.000-08:00

Will Wilkinson and Jonah Goldberg debate below the value and efficacy of liberaltarianism: the possibility of a fusionist political philosophy that marries liberal social concerns with libertarian economic ones.

The term was coined by Cato's Brink Lindsey in an article wherein he lays out the logic of the political pairing:

The conservative movement--and, with it, the GOP--is in disarray. Specifically, the movement's "fusionist" alliance between traditionalists and libertarians appears, at long last, to be falling apart.

[snip]

Libertarian disaffection should come as no surprise. Despite the GOP's rhetorical commitment to limited government, the actual record of unified Republican rule in Washington has been an unmitigated disaster from a libertarian perspective: runaway federal spending at a clip unmatched since Lyndon Johnson; the creation of a massive new prescription-drug entitlement with hardly any thought as to how to pay for it; expansion of federal control over education through the No Child Left Behind Act; a big run-up in farm subsidies; extremist assertions of executive power under cover of fighting terrorism; and, to top it all off, an atrociously bungled war in Iraq.

This woeful record cannot simply be blamed on politicians failing to live up to their conservative principles. Conservatism itself has changed markedly in recent years, forsaking the old fusionist synthesis in favor of a new and altogether unattractive species of populism. The old formulation defined conservatism as the desire to protect traditional values from the intrusion of big government; the new one seeks to promote traditional values through the intrusion of big government. Just look at the causes that have been generating the real energy in the conservative movement of late: building walls to keep out immigrants, amending the Constitution to keep gays from marrying, and imposing sectarian beliefs on medical researchers and families struggling with end-of-life decisions.

[snip]

Today's ideological turmoil, however, has created an opening for ideological renewal--specifically, liberalism's renewal as a vital governing philosophy. A refashioned liberalism that incorporated key libertarian concerns and insights could make possible a truly progressive politics once again--not progressive in the sense of hewing to a particular set of preexisting left-wing commitments, but rather in the sense of attuning itself to the objective dynamics of U.S. social development. In other words, a politics that joins together under one banner the causes of both cultural and economic progress.

[snip]

Furthermore, it has become increasingly clear that capitalism's relentless dynamism and wealth-creation--the institutional safeguarding of which lies at the heart of libertarian concerns--have been pushing U.S. society in a decidedly progressive direction. The civil rights movement was made possible by the mechanization of agriculture, which pushed blacks off the farm and out of the South with immense consequences. Likewise, feminism was encouraged by the mechanization of housework. Greater sexual openness, as well as heightened interest in the natural environment, are among the luxury goods that mass affluence has purchased. So, too, are secularization and the general decline in reverence for authority, as rising education levels (prompted by the economy's growing demand for knowledge workers) have promoted increasing independence of mind.

Yet progressives remain stubbornly resistant to embracing capitalism, their great natural ally.

[snip]

Hence today's reactionary politics. Here, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the rival ideologies of left and right are both pining for the '50s. The only difference is that liberals want to work there, while conservatives want to go home there.

The Wilkinson/Goldberg repartee in response to Lindsey's thesis touches on several of the memes that have surfaced on this blog recently with respect to morality, traditionalism, economics and political philosophy.

Goldberg lays out the straight-up Burkean conservative thesis for opposing change, liberaltarian or otherwise:

Goldberg:

"When you listen to libertarians there is sometimes, not always, a sense that we can throw all this stuff [conservative cultural traditions] into the dustbin of history [...] and a pox on these silly opiates of the masses when it may be that those opiates of the masses have the remarkable preventative effect of keeping us free."

The basic conservative view is that our freedom and society are very fragile and that we shouldn't cavalierly make changes to our social order because we don't know where we are going to find ourselves as a result.

Wilkinson responds by drawing out a comparison between liberals and conservatives as distinguished by their moral sensibilities, rather by political philosophy or party affiliation (though clearly there is a logical overlap).

As noted in a prior GingerPost, Jonathon Haidt's research into moral psychology posits 5 vectors of moral sensibilities:

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.

Wilkinson argues, essentially, that liberals and libertarians are "liberal" by moral disposition, as denoted by Haidt's moral reasoning research, rather than because they agree with commonly described "liberal" political policy positions on economics. The challenge then for libertarians, like Wilkinson, is to convince Democratic Party liberals that their moral intuitions would be better served through an alliance with libertarians on economic issues rather than by turning to big-government European-style progressivism to address issues of social justice.

Wilkinson:

Political institutions and economic institutions rest on a cultural underpining that in turn rests on a certain calibration of people's moral sentiments. So, at an abstract level, we're probably in agreement.

But looking at the data, the more liberal a place is in terms of its moral intuitions, the better it is on a lot of metrics. And that's the thing that is hard for a lot of conservatives to swallow.

[snip]

What I want to do is say: If you care about welfare and justice, then I am going to tell you how to do that. You need a high level of economic growth, you need a government limited to a certain set of functions that it can perform competently, and that the things you care about as a dispositional liberal are going to be best served by the moderate liberal-libertarian political identity. Don't be seduced by the statist Democrats because they aren't going to achieve the liberal ends that you care about.

I have to say that I agree with much of this.

On the one hand, Goldberg/Kalb/Dreher and other traditional conservatives have to account for the Scandinavian phenomenon, which is the fact that culturally liberal environments, as defined by Haidt, tend to be more highly functioning, prosperous and civilized societies. Would you rather live in Sweden or Saudi Arabia?

On the other hand, given that we are proceeding through such an unusual environment economically-speaking at present, there is a great danger that Obama (even assuming he is philosophically disposed to do so) will be unable to reign in Democratic impulses to lay a much greater claim by government on our collective economic life as the end-game of the present emergency-driven legislative process rather than simply as a temporary crisis mitigation strategy. And, if this is the ultimate political outcome, then I don't have terribly high hopes for its successful conclusion. Hell, even as a crisis mitigation strategy, it isn't like there isn't already a terrible lot of risk on the table.

But, on the more significant question, what does the animal look like on the liberaltarian bumper sticker of Wilkinson's new political party? A donkey-head with an elephant-butt or the other way around?

The Price of Love

2009-03-04T17:17:00.001-08:00

I have often remarked that, if I could do it all over again, I should have been an economics major. I was the curve-setter in my micro-econ class and ended up with over 100% for the semester. And my interest in the topic has continued far beyond my college years. In fact, I may be one of the few living Americans (human beings??) who has watched an entire session of (former CBO Director) Douglas Holtz-Eakin's testimony to a session of Congress live on C-SPAN.

Talk about your riveting drama. I mean who could take their eyes off this guy when he's discussing the deadweight cost of proposed tax legislation? (Notice the gritty stubble mildly evoking the Don Johnson-Miami Vice look, but sans the pastel-hued linen sportcoat to maintain an aura of gravitas.)

(Douglas Holtz-Eakin)

In any case, had I followed this potential lifepath, not only might I have had the chance to hang out with Doug (or Holtzie-E as he's known on "the street"), but it is possible that I could have more efficiently won the affections of my lovely wife through the use of love ballads such as the one noted below.

I mean, what woman could withhold her heart when courted with the likes of this:

"Girl Your Marginal Benefits" (listen here)

Now girl being with you has always been so tough
With each passing minute your marginal cost goes up
But my love is inelastic and it all belongs to you
I'm the only love producer and my good is for you to consume

Cause girl your marginal benefits far outweigh your marginal costs
Without our equilibrium baby well you know I'd be lost
Trapped inside this market I need you to buy my love
Girl without your complementing goods well I'm just not enough

Now you say that I'm producing below my ATC
But I'm optimizing quantity baby, why can't you see?
We could share this surplus each and every day
If you would just buy my love I'd make my fixed costs go away

Baby I want to keep you for the long run (Oh yeah)
I think our supply and demand will become one

Cause girl your marginal benefits far outweigh your marginal costs
Without our equilibrium baby well you know I'd be lost
Long run equilibrium is no place for me
I need the profits of our love to grow exponentially

Courtesy of Greg Mankiw.

Quote of the Day: "What did the Nazis do that was so bad?"

2009-03-03T14:28:00.000-08:00

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Mass. Hysteria

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It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

2009-03-01T09:10:00.000-08:00

Via Andrew Sullivan, a photographic series called Root Ginger:

Redheads are a pretty big deal. From naughty Eve in the Garden of Eden, without whom some might argue none of us would be here at all, to Britain's most renowned monarchs - Henry-the-serial-wife-killer and his daughter Elizabeth-the-virgin (perhaps some connection there), not to mention the recent Prince Harry-the-rascist. People have been singing ballads to readheads since time immemorial (especially the Irish).

More recently there was Valerie, so lamented by The Zutons and Amy Winehouse in the song of the same name. Would the song worked if Valerie had been a brunette? It’s impossible to say. Yet despite their abundant tenacity, gingers receive a very bad press and have often found themselves the objects of ridicule and the victims of what remains in our society, apparently, the last acceptable discrimination.

And on the 29th day, GingerMan rested

2009-02-28T17:50:00.000-08:00

Yeah, no leap year this time around! So, this post (my 29th of the month) is just gravy.

But, pretty cute still...

Secular Right vs. Jim Kalb

2009-02-28T17:12:00.001-08:00

The blog Secular Right has the following mission statement:

We believe that conservative principles and policies need not be grounded in a specific set of supernatural claims. Rather, conservatism serves the ends of “Human Flourishing,” what the Greeks termed Eudaimonia. Secular conservatism takes the empirical world for what it is, and accepts that the making of it the best that it can be is only possible through our faculties of reason.

In a serve-and-volley mildly reminiscent of two recent GingerMan posts here and here, Jim Kalb takes his sword to the air-quotes of Human Flourishing in the above:

My own view, which my book goes into at length, is that by itself rational empiricism gives you desire and technique as (radically anti-conservative) guides to life. Satisfaction of desire doesn’t seem to constitute human flourishing. To get beyond it though you need a moral tradition that’s understood to connect to something that transcends desire and thus the empirical.

So far as I can tell, an adequate theory of such a thing is going to have to explain why life objectively has a purpose, and that’s going to involve attribution of purpose and intention to the world at large. In other words, the theory is going to be religious. And it’s going to say something definite, otherwise it will be useless. So it’s going to make specific religious and non-empirical (”supernatural”) claims. [em: original]

Razib Khan, a.k.a. "David Hume," responds here:

As for the idea that a transcendent reality is necessary, I will venture to offer that I have always found the models and theories posited by religious people about their gods less than awe inspiring. There certainly beauty and glory in this universe which is simply outside the purview of human animal comprehension; anyone who has grappled with the formalisms of Quantum Mechanics can claim that they seen the face of the incomprehensible & awesome abyss.

But I believe that its relation to a human political and social order are tenuous at best. Rather, the primary entity which transcends is the community and society, because I do believe a strong case can be made that individualistic hedonism which is the final form of classical liberalism offers diminishing returns precisely because of the nature of the human beast. We are a social animal, and individual happiness is contingent upon communal amity.

Note: These sorts of philosophical discussions are of course only relevant for a very small, if influential, minority. Most human animals operate in a world of custom and innate reflex, not analytic reflection.

The final note resonates, I think, with my prior post re: Scandinavia. Which is to say that even lacking a seamless philosophical consistency, so long as a society is providing an ethical framework within which human flourishing remains possible, to the extent we can measure it (i.e. life expectancy, child welfare, literacy, schooling, economic equality, standard of living and competitiveness), then I think we have to conclude that the society is *working* successfully at some fundamental level.

People do not consult their philosophy texts in the course of their daily existence, and even if they do, we seem to be able to live quite comfortably in states of severe cognitive dissonance on many such topics through effective rationalization of our own behavior such that it aligns with our "beliefs."

In a surprising turn of events, the blog response by Khan has failed to change Jim Kalb's entire metaphysical view of the universe:

The authors at Secular Right apparently believe that their choice of godless conservatism is justified, and that they're avoiding errors made by John Rawls, radical Islamists, and Sarah Palin. For them to say their beliefs reflect their natural human desire to survive and stay on good terms with their fellows may be true, but it doesn't explain their grounds for saying they're right and others are wrong. The beliefs of those other people reflect such things as well. Also, it seems that whichever groups, arguments and goals actually win best represent the natural tendencies of man and the world. Is actual success then the standard for rationality, justification, the summum bonum and all the rest of it?

In fact, of course, the Secular Right slogan is "Reality & Reason" and not "Hail Victory." It doesn't do though for them to claim their views are better because in addition to following natural human tendencies they are in accord with reality and reason. Is the claim of truth and rational superiority just an expression of inborn drives and social conditioning, or does it have to do with reality and reason in a sense that transcends naturalistic behavioral explanations and makes their views truly the more worthy choice?

Whole lotta smiting going on

2009-02-28T15:06:00.000-08:00

Rod Dreher, in a post that responds to Andrew Sullivan, makes a statement that I am still having trouble getting my mind around:

Andrew brings up an important point, one that serves to highlight a critical difference between the two basic strains of American conservatism -- libertarian, and traditionalist.

Libertarianism is anti-statist liberalism. It is also the dominant school of American conservatism.

[snip]

For the libertarian, human happiness is the highest goal, and that happiness is something that the individual is free, within broad limits, to decide for himself.

Traditionalism is a harder sell, obviously, as any philosophy that imposes limits on human choice and liberty will be in America. Its telos is not happiness, but virtue. In fact, the traditionalist does not recognize human happiness apart from virtue. A bad man who is content with himself cannot truly be said to be happy, in this view.

If it's a matter of agreeing with Andrew that the Sixties (which is to say, the social revolution that broke open in the Sixties, but which has been ongoing since then) made possible a greater increase in personal satisfaction, and even legitimate happiness, then I do agree with him.

Certainly there can be no greater example of the gains made in virtue via the repudiation of immoral and unjust legal barriers to full black citizenship. Similarly, women are treated more fairly now, and though some of you will doubt me, I agree that the world is a better place for gay folks than it once was. It would be foolish to view the Sixties as nothing but darkness, in the same way that it's hard to deny that many good things came out of the Enlightenment.

The question, though, is not whether the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad, but whether on balance the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad.

I answer in the negative. [em: mine]

In the above, Dreher recognizes broadly (and embraces) the benefit of the Sixties for blacks, women and gays (i.e. that is to say approx. 60+% of the US population), but concludes that on balance the total impact was negative.

Now, it would be unfair to Rod (having read him regularly) to say that this indicates that he would willingly trade those gains to restore the benefits he sees as lost. It would more likely be that he would have preferred to find a manner to achieve most of the same benefits without the associated costs that he finds objectionable. But still, even when taken at that charitable level, this is an absolutely fantastical statement from my point of view. The losses have outweighed the gains?!?!

He doesn't elucidate what exactly he judges these losses to be, but from my reading of him over time, I would conclude that they typically fall into 3 categories:

1) Decline in religiosity - resulting in unspecified, but extremely perilous, moral decay with a nihilistic emphasis on personal fulfillment
2) Family breakdown / divorce - resulting in more single-parent homes and social problems emanating from same
3) Sexual freedom / abortion - related to item #2 and the decline in traditional marriage

Now, if I were Rod, and I saw the total volume of abortions performed since Roe vs. Wade as effectively a national holocaust, then maybe this would make some sense. After all, one cannot compare the increase in freedom for many individuals to the actual loss of innocent lives for others and judge the tradeoff as worthwhile.

But, I don't get any sense that the abortion question is the singular fulcrum upon which this determination pivots. In other words, I doubt he would answer the question alternately even if Roe v. Wade had never come to pass, but all other societal changes remained the same.

So, what to make of this? When I read traditionalists such as Dreher, there is an almost unremitting sense of impending doom in their writing (he actually has a blog post category tag called "decline and fall"). But, it is never entirely clear from whence the final cataclysm is going to erupt. However, what we do absolutely know, for sure and with certainty, is that there is a Judgement Day on the very near horizon where the world gets its collective comeuppance for having strayed from the path.

Then there's this from the New York Times:

Phil Zuckerman spent 14 months in Scandinavia, talking to hundreds of Danes and Swedes about religion. It wasn’t easy.

Anyone who has paid attention knows that Denmark and Sweden are among the least religious nations in the world. Polls asking about belief in God, the importance of religion in people’s lives, belief in life after death or church attendance consistently bear this out.

It is also well known that in various rankings of nations by life expectancy, child welfare, literacy, schooling, economic equality, standard of living and competitiveness, Denmark and Sweden stand in the first tier.

Well documented though they may be, these two sets of facts run up against the assumption of many Americans that a society where religion is minimal would be, in Mr. Zuckerman’s words, “rampant with immorality, full of evil and teeming with depravity.”

Which is why he insists at some length that what he and his wife and children experienced was quite the opposite: “a society — a markedly irreligious society — that was, above all, moral, stable, humane and deeply good.”

[snip]

At one point, he queries Jens, a 68-year-old nonbeliever, about the sources of Denmark’s very ethical culture. Jens replies: “We are Lutherans in our souls — I’m an atheist, but still have the Lutheran perceptions of many: to help your neighbor. Yeah. It’s an old, good, moral thought.”

To be clear, I myself am not anti-religious. For the most part, I was raised outside of a religious context, and so I don't really feel particularly strongly one way or the other about it. When pressed about the nature of the Almighty on one occassion, I replied, "What can I tell you? I don't have well-formed opinions on the matter."

Religious belief and community obviously has great meaning for an enormous number of people and for that I am thankful on their behalf. However, what I can never fully appreciate is the absolute certainty with which some (especially conservative religionists) claim that an unreligious environment leads, without possible exception, to complete and utter societal breakdown and chaos.

Which is just to say that it seems that there is demonstrable evidence that there are still ethics even without specific doctrinal religious belief. Even people who are full blown atheists do not intentionally raise their children to be sociopaths.

In other words, what exactly is the problem with Scandinavia? And, why isn't there more smiting in progress there anyway?

Quote of the Day: "Hey Howard, there's your Chinaman."

2009-02-26T10:35:00.000-08:00

On a related note, NPR's All Things Considered reviews the cultural legacy of The Donger:

"Every single Asian dude who went to high school or junior high during the era of John Hughes movies was called 'Donger,'" says Martin Wong.
Wong and Eric Nakamura co-founded the magazine Giant Robot, which covers Asian and Asian-American pop culture.
"If you're being called Long Duk Dong," Wong explains, "you're comic relief amongst a sea of people unlike you."
Worse, says Nakamura: "You're being portrayed as a guy who just came off a boat and who's out of control. It's like every bad stereotype possible, loaded into one character."
Nakamura and Wong say that before "The Donger" came along, they got called "Bruce Lee" at school. That wasn't so bad: At least Lee, the martial-arts star, could kick ass. Sixteen Candles stole even that limited pleasure — and Asian-American guys focused their frustration on the actor who played Long Duk Dong. After all, he was one of them: born in the U.S.A.

Can I speak to Little Miss Muffet in Accounts Receivable?

2009-02-25T08:29:00.000-08:00

Alice posted this link previously to her FB page, but to any who missed it at the time, this one had me ROFL as they say: Man tries to pay bill with spider drawing.

The part where he asks her if she is sure this is the same drawing just slays me.

[Blogger meta-note: Maybe this post seems a bit like filler (since it was previously linked to as I note above), but I am on a 1 -post-a-day pace for February, and so on the final kick down the homestretch, if I can't think of anything smart to say, you will just have to live with rehashed arachnid comedy.]

They don't call it the dismal science for nothing

2009-02-24T11:55:00.000-08:00

Robert Shiller, Yale economist, who predicted the housing bubble attempts to look into his crystal ball in this interview with analyst Henry Blodget.

Shiller: It's the biggest [housing bubble] in world history. We are entering a new era.

[snip]

Blodget: Just to clarify that, because I think that's probably shocking to a lot of people, you're saying that we're [only] halfway back down to effectively fair level.

Here's Shiller's quantitative analysis of long-term housing values (inflation-adjusted) from which he bases the above estimate.

What many people don't often realize is that housing per se isn't actually historically a great investment in terms of value appreciation. People tend to underestimate the cost of the home improvements that they make along the way and of course inflation boosts the nominal perceived value upon resale.

But, home ownership mostly creates a backdoor savings plan via the payments made on the mortgage principle, and thus has served as an important vehicle for middle class wealth accumulation as a side effect of the slow increase in equity over time. That was, of course, when people were actively looking forward to paying off their mortgages (i.e. neighbors used to hold "mortgage burning parties" once they had paid in full) instead of pulling out the increased paper equity value via home equity loans and lines of credit.

Now, obviously, housing is a highly locale-specific product. So, even if Shiller is correct in aggregate, there will be some areas that are not as bad, but that also means there will be others that will be even worse.

Via Bloomberg:

It has taken Susan Erb just three years to see the value of her Merced, California, home plunge by more than half to $350,000. Next month, her mortgage payment jumps 20 percent to $3,321 and she knows she can’t afford it. Her bank won’t rework the loan unless she stops paying altogether.

[snip]

Merced, the epicenter of the U.S. foreclosure crisis, demonstrates the steep challenges President Barack Obama will face in trying to stem defaults. One in 59 housing units in the Merced metropolitan area received a foreclosure filing in January, the highest rate in the U.S., according to RealtyTrac Inc., an Irvine, California-based seller of default data. For- sale signs are everywhere and a building boom fueled by subprime mortgages has been brought to a standstill. Just 16 construction permits were issued last year. In 2005, there were 1,427.

“We’re ground zero,” said Merced Mayor Ellie Wooten, 75. The city, population 81,000, had an unemployment rate of 15.5 percent in December, “and it’s going to get worse,” she said.

One of the key metrics that is always useful to look at is rent comparison. At a basic microeconomic level the "value" of the house has to be correlated to the monetary stream of payments that someone is willing to pay to live in it (or similar accomodations). So, if house rents in the area are far below the average mortgage payments, there is an economic incentive to rent rather than buy. And, this economic reality will continue to place downward pressure on prices until they come into balance.

Rents (and therefore housing prices) get bid up either when a) the area population increases or b) the average wealth of the citizens increase, since both place upward pressure on prices.

By contrast, in a separate article I have read that there are welfare recipients living in some of the above-noted Merced McMansions because the rental market there has fallen so fast with so much foreclosed housing on the market. And, anybody that owns a home there, even if they weren't personally irresponsible, is going to get hurt badly by all this.

Hey brother, can you spare a balance transfer?

2009-02-24T10:34:00.000-08:00

Megan McArdle on how the financial crisis is changing the state-of-play in the credit card industry:

It used to be that credit-card companies lured customers with cash rewards. Now American Express Co. is paying to get rid of them. The card issuer is offering selected customers a $300 AmEx prepaid gift card if they pay off their balances and close their accounts.

The unusual move underscores how quickly conditions have deteriorated in the credit-card market. The current economic morass was provoked by spiking mortgage defaults. But as the economic crisis widens and unemployment climbs, there is growing concern that credit-card defaults will soar into the stratosphere as well.

"This is a huge paradigm shift," says Curtis Arnold, founder of CardRatings.com, a credit-card review Web site. He says he expects other large companies to follow suit with offers to entice consumers to pay off their balances, as card issuers cope with increasing defaults.

[snip]

I'm hearing a lot of discussion among friends and on finance shows about a new dilemma cash-strapped consumers are facing: pay down credit card debt, or save cash? The answer used to be a slam dunk: with interest rates at 20%, you pay off the cards, and run them up again if you hit some desperate emergency.

But with credit lines being slashed, that's no longer a safe bet; you could pay off your cards, get laid off, and find yourself with no safety net. Then again, if you don't pay off the cards, you're more likely to get your credit line cut.

No one I've talked to has a clear answer other than: cut your spending to the bone and put half what you save thereby into a bank account, the other half into paying down your cards. Which is why all the restaurants in DC seem unusually spacious these days--when I walk by them. Even with no crushing credit card debt, we, too, are eating at home.

The volume of credit card offers filling my mail box has declined markedly and we have been having similar family budget conversations in my home, which is to say that we have never really known any severe financial adversity in our lives in large part due to the easy availability of cheap credit. When Alice & I were both in school, we could simply charge things we needed but didn't have the money to pay for right then. Further, we could get much of it at 0% interest through utilizing revolving balance transfer offers, so there wasn't even a financial penalty for making such a choice.

Thus, we have no charming stories, like my own parents, of eating popcorn for an entire week while awaiting your first paycheck from a new job. However, I'm pretty sure that kind of experience only tends to be considered *charming* when viewed through the long lens of past memory. At the time, I doubt charming was the first word that came to mind.

Muffin Tops of the World, Unite and Take Over

2009-02-24T06:55:00.000-08:00

Apropos of nothing, this advertisement headline just struck me as very amusing. Not quite the landing at Normandy, but can I buy war bonds to support this anyway?

I mean, I'm like kind of a big deal in Berlin

2009-02-23T18:35:00.000-08:00

Fellow blogger Chris Daley, of escapegrace fame, advised me of a tool that you can add to your blog which tracks the IP address of site visitors. One of the nifty reporting features of the tool is a map of the world showing the various locations my innumerable readers.

As you will note below, I am now spreading the globe like wildfire (or at least a pesky social disease), even to far off Berlin. If I were David Hasselhoff, I'd be feeling a bit nervous at this point.

On the list of things you don't see everyday

2009-02-23T11:57:00.000-08:00

I often spend part of my workday in coffee houses that have wireless connections. It is just too isolating to spend all day working in my home by myself.

There is a man who comes into my favorite haunt, Milkboy Coffee, from time to time. He is either a performance artist or is not quite fully mentally balanced because he typically acts in a manner that can be safely described as "not normal" by my suburban bourgeois standards of public behavior.

Today, for example, he arrived (singing) wearing a toy indian headdress and carrying a stuffed rooster in one hand and a giant silver star in the other. I am not sure if this signifies anything, but I'll be avoiding poultry for dinner this evening just to be on the safe side.

Quote of the Day: "Is Pat there? Just tell him it's me."

2009-02-23T11:56:00.001-08:00

via videosift.com

Can we get Pat Sajak as Commerce Secretary?

2009-02-23T11:46:00.000-08:00

Megan McArdle has some new ideas to deal with the banking crisis:

For the next round, I'm proposing a new instrument to be known as the "Squibble", which will have an unknown and unknowable face value based on a secret random numbers table, a payout schedule to be determined by spinning a big wheel installed in the company's headquarter lobby for that purpose, and a structure to be arbitrated under the financial laws of a country picked at random every quarter.

This will prevent anyone from definitely stating that the banks are undercapitalized. It will also provide financial journalists with some much-needed entertainment.

Quote of the Day: "I don't immediately think, 'There's another one snuffed it in the night.'"

2009-02-21T09:49:00.000-08:00

Jim Kalb replies...

2009-02-20T13:56:00.000-08:00

Who knew? I thought this was a closed conversation just between me and the other voices in my head :)

In any case, Jim Kalb has responded (graciously) to my post re: his talk on Reason and the Future of Conservatism.

[Gingerman concludes] that the talk opposes faith to reason and comes out on the side of faith.

I don't think that's quite right. Faith and reason are like substance and form: they're different but they can't get on without each other. You won't be able to make use of reason unless you take a lot on faith, while a belief that you can't understand in an orderly way isn't much of a belief.

[snip]

And then there's the old subjectivism issue: things and actions can be objectively good or bad, and that's not observable or measurable. If they couldn't then "irrational," which is an evaluative term, would be an empty term of abuse.

[snip]

As to God, it seems to me we can't make sense of our situation without Him. The world must be reasonable for us to know it rationally, and it must have an intrinsic connection to purpose for some purposes to be intrinsically good and others bad. How do we talk about such features of the world without religious categories?

Now, in my defense, I don't think I was quite so black-and-white on the point of declaring that Kalb sides with Faith and against Reason, as from my original post here:

[Kalb] doesn't pose the question as a direct comparison (Faith vs. Reason), but rather in the context of debating the future of philosophical conservatism, he argues that it must necessarily have a religious foundation, since only faith has the capacity to oppose reason in defense of conservative tradition.

Now, it could be argued, from a close reading of Kalb, that the real problem is the attempt to apply scientific materialism to aspects of modern culture and society which do not lend themselves to empirical measurement in the same manner as physics or biology for example.

In other words, the issue could be framed as reason getting too big for its britches and overstepping its boundaries in claims to intellectual authority. But, interestingly, Kalb reaches for faith as the necessary mode of defense rather than arguing with reason on its own terms (i.e. by contradicting the political conclusions of reason, through alternative reasoned argumentation).

There is some sloppy slippage of the term "reason" in my words above. And, it is no doubt true that when excerpting someone's words it is difficult to do so without doing some damage to the meaning when re-contextualizing it. But, given that Mr. Kalb has an entire book on the subject, I'm sure his arguments will hold up admirably :)

In any event, to re-visit my original post, the reason (if I may be so bold to use the word here) that I found Kalb's argument intriguing was on 2 points:

1) Kalb rejects (or at least deems as insufficient) the common conservative Burkean logic that traditions should be given the benefit of the doubt, since we humans have little capacity to foresee unpredicted consequences of sweeping social changes. From Kalb:

Edmund Burke suggests traditionalism as the way to take hold of things that can’t otherwise be pinned down and made clear. In addition to what we can demonstrate right now, we can rely on the experience and perceptions of all the ages, as crystallized in the settled outlook of our own community.

Unfortunately, Burke’s suggestion taken simply is not enough. That approach depends on things being settled, and political modernity unsettles things. Taken straight, traditionalism reduces to the stand-pat view: stick with however things happen to be here and now.

It was in the sense that Kalb sees the necessity of changing the terms of the debate (or at least pushing open their boundaries) in a manner I hadn't encountered before that intrigued me. I read him as arguing that there needs to be more of an affirmative stance in favor of holding certain traditions, and that it is insufficient (in practical terms) to rely solely on a "first do no harm" dictate of Burkean vintage in order to hold the line.

My own belief, however, is that modern political philosophy per se is not the principle driver of the "unsettling" which upends Burkean defenses of tradition, but rather economic dynamism. This is one of the internal fissures of the US Republican variant of conservatism, which is that the GOP melds the open-borders, free-trade interests of economic conservatives with the traditional social interests of cultural conservatives. And, in the long run, there is an inherent conflict with the two.

Now, obviously, there is a feedback loop between economics and culture. We fashion the tools that fashion ourselves, to paraphrase McLuhan. But, economic change tills the soil from which social and political change grows.

As an example, I went to visit my in-laws for X-mas holidays in Washington DC one year. As part of the trip, we went to a museum on the Washington Mall which, at the time, was featuring a retrospective on American life of 100 years ago. Wooden wheelbarrows, hand-wrapped straw brooms, obscure farm implements, and positively terrifying medical instruments abounded.

All of these items were in common usage at the time of the birth of my grandmother (who lived to 92). She was born into an agrarian society, lived through an industrial one, and died only recently, as we enter a new age that still seems to be finding its legs (i.e. information, bio-genetic, other...??).

The economic ground underneath modern life changes with such rapidity that it implicitly casts the wisdom of the ages into doubt. In pre-modern societies, the elders literally were the repositories of the Truth, accumulated in their own life experiences, as to how one should live successfully (read: they knew how to stay alive). And, the evident practical value of this wisdom gave them and the traditions of the society they governed a moral authority.

For example, here's Dreher quoting Patrick Deneen:

It has been during this short period of industrialization that most of our longstanding cultural forms have attenuated, faded, or gone wholly out of existence. Writing as a farmer, Berry has repeatedly lamented the decline of the family farm as a locus of human community and the embodiment of numberless forms of cultural knowledge and practices. But everywhere we see around us the ruins of once vibrant culture.

Most of us know little or nothing of how to produce food. More and more of us cannot build, cannot fix, cannot track, cannot tell time by looking at the sky, cannot locate the constellations, cannot hunt, cannot skin or butcher, cannot cook, cannot can, cannot make wine, cannot play instruments (and if we can, often do not know the songs of our culture by which to entertain a variety of generations), cannot dance (that is, actual dances), cannot remember long passages of poetry, don't know the Bible, cannot spin or knit, cannot sew or darn, cannot chop wood or forage for mushrooms, cannot make a rock wall, cannot tell the kinds of trees by leaves or the kinds of birds by shape of wing--on and on, in a growing catalogue of abandoned inheritance.

My grandmother could do most of the things on this list. And by many measures, our time would regard her as uneducated or look upon her as "simple" in spite of the variety and the complexity of things she knew how to do. But if the lights went out tomorrow, she would have been the smartest person we know; she (and not our college professors) would have seen us through. She's gone now, and much of that knowledge has been laid to rest with her because, by the time of my generation, we didn't need to know those things anymore.

Now, surely the utilitarian argument alone for tradition only carries so much weight, but still, when 8-year-olds are teaching their own grandparents how to program the VCR, the natural deference to elders, and their traditions more broadly, inevitably gets more critical interrogation.

Additionally, economic progress itself allows for the "leisure activity" of exploring non-traditional social arrangements and mores. It is only a very rich society that can afford the 1960's in the sense of being able to finance the freedom of many young people to hang out in college, smoke weed, and burn their draft cards and/or bras on alternate weekends. A few generations earlier, they all would have been farming and hoping for a harvest of sufficient size to live through the coming winter.

I haven't read enough of Kalb's work to comment, but it is a common conservative trope to blame all the ills of modern social life on the liberal cultural elite. By my lights, traditionalism has far more to fear from its bankers than its college professors.

2) More interestingly, though, is the defense of *irrational* traditionalism, which is to say that Kalb seeks a reasoned way of defending traditional loyalties and cultural norms against claims of irrationality that otherwise render such conservative sensibilities illegitimate within the current forms of accepted public discourse.

From a liberal standpoint, pre-rational loyalty is simply irrational, and a rational agent can’t choose irrationality as his habitual way of supporting his own system of action.

In other words, only by arguing forward, via reason, from objective first principles (i.e. God) can one reach defensible conclusions for such traditions. Thus, Kalb claims the future of conservatism will require faith to effectively justify itself.

The reason this claim interests me is due to the concept of what constitutes *irrational* belief. This is to say that there is much that I may hold dear, my moral sense if you will, that I cannot justify in any purely rational sense. However, I also cannot justify it via reference to an omniscient God that establishes universal objective standards. Thus, taken from this standpoint, which belief system is actually *irrational* here?

Quite obviously, Kalb has spent much more time thinking on these points than I have. And, it probably goes without saying that I am not going to convert to Catholicism (Kalb's faith) any time real soon. But, Kalb's intellectual claim, if you will, deserves to be addressed.

Kalb extends his thoughts to his initial response here:

The identification of reason with a scientism that rejects tradition, faith and the ability to recognize what things are--which involves belief in essential natures--as irrational, and therefore oppressive. As I note in the last entry, the result is that reason can no longer deal with the most basic and obvious features of our situation. When meaning becomes personal choice or assertion, and social thought is no longer able to deal with marriage and family, you know you've got a problem with how people are thinking about things.

But of course, don't take my word for it, read it all :)

Quote of the Day: "People try to make me sound a lot weird."

2009-02-13T14:59:00.000-08:00

Link bait for Alice. Indulge yourself, my dear.

2009-02-11T12:34:00.001-08:00

My sense, though I may find out this assumption is unwarranted, is that most GingerMan readers do not click through to read the full-length articles that I may excerpt within my own blog. Thus, I often have a tendency to excerpt larger sub-sections of external posts in order to ensure that the full import of the author's meaning is clear.

However, I am pretty sure that the following article in the New York Times is going to prove irresistable to my dear wife:

Getting Catholics back into confession, in fact, was one of the motivations for reintroducing the indulgence. In a 2001 speech, Pope John Paul described the newly reborn tradition as “a happy incentive” for confession.

[snip]

“Confessions have been down for years and the church is very worried about it,” said the Rev. Tom Reese, a Jesuit and former editor of the Catholic magazine America. In a secularized culture of pop psychology and self-help, he said, “the church wants the idea of personal sin back in the equation. Indulgences are a way of reminding people of the importance of penance.”

Billy Gillispie, total a**hat? We report, you decide

2009-02-10T18:58:00.000-08:00

Watching the Florida-Kentucky b-ball game this eve (after Villanova kicked Marquette to the curb, yeah!). ESPN has this thing the sideline reporters do all the time now, which is stop one coach for a quickie interview on the way into the locker room and the other on the way back out to start the second half.

They always ask 2 questions and the coaches know in advance that this is coming. It isn't something that the sideline reporter just dreamed up with on a spur-of-the-moment basis. Thus, it is somewhat hard to explain the following behavior by UK coach Billy Gillispie, other than to characterize it as the actions of a total a**hat.

The halftime buzzer sounds (score is tied, so it is not apparent that Gillispie would have been in an unusually foul mood owing to the game situation) and the teams flood off the floor. The camera cuts to the sideline reporter who starts in with her first question. She leads into the question by providing a little framing context to the game, with Gillispie looking straight at her the whole time.

She finally finishes up with the question and turns the microphone to Gillespie: "I'm sorry, I couldn't hear your question."

Yeah, right. So, I just stood here for 25-30 seconds watching your mouth move but giving no physical or verbal indication that I couldn't hear you, so that when you were done, I could make you repeat yourself in full.

Reporter leans into Gillispie and offers the first question again. He gives typical coach-speak non-answer answer.

Reporter follows up with question number 2: "One of your priorities was disrupting the vision of Nick Calethes (Florida point guard). How do you think you've done in that regard so far?"

Gillespie: "Well, you seem to know a lot more about this that I do. Some of these things I've never heard of before. Blah. Blah. Blah...."

Yeah, preventing a clear line of sight for the other team's primary ball handler is practically an unknown concept in the field of basketball. Stupid sideline reporter, must have thought she was watching a soccer game. Can't understand why they let women cover sports in the first place.

Look, I'm sure every coach hates this crap. But, answering banal press questions comes with the gig and there is no reason to show up the lowly sideline reporter who is simply trying to do her job.

You make millions of dollars a year and coach one of the premier teams in college basketball, Mr. Gillispie, so answering her questions is part of your J-O-B. Try showing a little respect next time instead of being a total a**hat.

(Note: The last time I saw Kentucky play a few weeks back, he did the exact same thing, which is show up the sideline reporter unnecessarily. I guess the only thing worse than consistent a**hattery would be the unpredictable variant.)

Who Let the Dogma Out?

2009-02-10T12:46:00.000-08:00

This post is subject to my prior disclaimer about conservative/liberal terminology, which is to say that it speaks more to the divide from a political philosophy standpoint than a partisan Red/Blue one.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here's Rick Warren in a published Newsweek debate with well-publicized atheist Sam Harris:

WARREN:

I believe [The Bible] is inerrant in what it claims to be. The Bible does not claim to be a scientific book in many areas.

[snip]

I believe in both faith and reason. The more we learn about God, the more we understand how magnificent this universe is. There is no contradiction to it.

This seems to me as a fairly banal set of statements in the broader context of our modern political and cultural life. The intellectual move is to posit that reason tells us things that we can know and observe about the physical workings of our world, but that everything beyond this (morality, spirituality and other issues of a transcendent nature) is the purview of faith since truth claims in this domain cannot be readily determined via scientific inquiry.

Essentially, Warren depicts reason and faith are two different models of epistemology, but ones that are complementary rather than contradictory. Intellectually, it is a modern form of truce in the Scopes-monkey-trial wars for cultural supremacy.

However, in a very thought-provoking article from James Kalb (Reason and the Future of Conservatism), he clearly sees these two philosophical viewpoints as more naturally oppositional in nature.

He doesn't pose the question as a direct comparison (Faith vs. Reason), but rather in the context of debating the future of philosophical conservatism, he argues that it must necessarily have a religious foundation, since only faith has the capacity to oppose reason in defense of conservative tradition.

Now, it could be argued, from a close reading of Kalb, that the real problem is the attempt to apply scientific materialism to aspects of modern culture and society which do not lend themselves to empirical measurement in the same manner as physics or biology for example.

In other words, the issue could be framed as reason getting too big for its britches and overstepping its boundaries in claims to intellectual authority. But, interestingly, Kalb reaches for faith as the necessary mode of defense rather than arguing with reason on its own terms (i.e. by contradicting the political conclusions of reason, through alternative reasoned argumentation).

He starts by defining the current playing field:

“Reason” is the way we come to reliable conclusions about what is real, what is admirable, and what we should do. That is to say, reason is the way in which we come to conclusions about the true, the beautiful, and the good.

Modern thought likes conclusions that are clear, demonstrable, and to-the-point. So it is drawn toward scientific materialism, which tells us that everything worth thinking about can be understood based on simple concepts and clear demonstrations, and which is closely bound to experience and action.

It’s hard to bring principles into public discussion that critically-minded participants are not willing to accept, so scientific materialism now functions as our public orthodoxy. [em: mine]

In other words, in today's "polite society" the only arguments that are allowed to matter are ones that you can demonstrate through applied reason.

How does this impact our current socio-political environment?

Contemporary liberalism is the political perspective that develops the ethical implications of scientific materialism. So, correspondingly, it tells us that the point of politics and morality, like the point of rational action generally, is to get what we want.

[snip]

Thus, the standard for morality and politics must be maximum and equal preference satisfaction. Give everyone what he wants, as much and as equally as possible.

[snip]

Such reasoning has three important consequences for contemporary liberal politics.

First, experts and markets rule. They give clear and rational answers, through clear and rational procedures. In concept, expertise should trump markets, because it is more clearly rational, but in practice it is a bit of each and the balance shifts.

Second, nothing is sacred, except the ego and its desires. If the goal is getting what we want, then everything is a resource to be used to maximize satisfactions. Physical objects, social arrangements, moral understandings, even human nature and the human body have no essence that must be respected.

Third, informal, nonrationalized arrangements like historical community, particular culture, and the family, that mostly run themselves in their own way and cannot be supervised by neutral experts, cannot be allowed to affect social life.

They’re irrational and at odds with the system of universal equal freedom to which liberalism aspires.

And, so where does this leave us?

The short answer is that it doesn’t work in the long run. You can’t formalize things to that degree.

Human life runs mostly by implicit knowledge (otherwise known as habit and prejudice). Similarly, social organization depends on informal ties that are irrational from the modern point of view.

If loyalty is treated as a personal taste, or as a means to an end, which is what now counts as rational motivation, it’s not loyalty anymore. Political modernity takes time to transform inherited ways, but as the process approaches completion society becomes less and less functional.

[snip]

From a liberal standpoint, pre-rational loyalty is simply irrational, and a rational agent can’t choose irrationality as his habitual way of supporting his own system of action.

What conservatism needs, then, is a non-modern understanding of reason—of what makes sense. Otherwise conservatives will always be playing defense, with no clear idea what the game is about.

In other words, attempts to defend conservative cultural traditions (gay marriage anyone?) cannot succeed if one confines oneself to merely arguing on a pure coldly rational basis, since the tradition itself did not come into existence on purely rational terms. It is a sort of category error in a sense.

But, it was his final move that struck me as interesting and possibly provocative:

Edmund Burke suggests traditionalism as the way to take hold of things that can’t otherwise be pinned down and made clear. In addition to what we can demonstrate right now, we can rely on the experience and perceptions of all the ages, as crystallized in the settled outlook of our own community.

Unfortunately, Burke’s suggestion taken simply is not enough. That approach depends on things being settled, and political modernity unsettles things. Taken straight, traditionalism reduces to the stand-pat view: stick with however things happen to be here and now.

We need a more definite reference point. So where do we get a reference point that’s sufficiently independent of the status quo and enables us to orient our actions toward transcendent goods, truths and essences that we can’t completely grasp?

Religion is the obvious source. You can pretty much define religion as a scheme of orientation toward goods and truths we can neither do without nor understand completely. The acceptance of such a scheme is called faith. The future of any conservatism worth bothering about must therefore have something to do with religion.

In essence, can one argue for the value of something that cannot be reduced to a quantitative cost/benefit trade-off without resorting to the God trump card? Kalb says no, or at least not successfully in our current cultural context.

Not being a philosophy student myself, I am not necessarily armed to contest his claim. In other words, I believe myself to be an ethical person (or at least strive to be so), but I am also certain that I could not rationally defend a withering attack on the value of all of the moral and political sentiments that I hold solely through appeals to logic and science alone either.

Maybe I just choose to call my own dogma by a different name.

Quote of the Day: "The plumage don't enter into it, it's stone dead."

2009-02-10T12:16:00.000-08:00

Of the 31 flavors of Conservative, Mint Choc Chip is my fav

2009-02-10T10:36:00.000-08:00

Since I have been posting a bit about "conservatives" (and plan more in the near future), I considered that the use of term may confer some sloppy connotations at times and thereby potentially betray my actual intent, given that conservative and liberal are often used as stand-in labels for Republicans and Democrats.

But, there are many different variations of "conservative" philosophical thought (certainly Dreher and Sullivan both claim the mantle, but have very different prescriptions for what that should mean socially and politically). And, there are obvious fissures within the Republican Party itself about what being a conservative actually means and where it should place its policy priorities. [See the online kerfuffle (a blogger word if there ever was one) over Kathleen Parker's infamous Oogedy Boogedy op-ed article.]

Thus, in an effort to demonstrate that conservative does NOT definitionally equal Religious Right (or even free-market economics), here's a voter segmentation breakdown of the GOP from Tony Fabrizio's polling agency. I have seen him interviewed on C-SPAN and he seems a very fair and judicious sort, not a partisan cartoon.

[Note: percentiles below do not sum to 100%, but I am not sure if this is due to rounding or simply a small % of Repubs that could not be readily classified in one group or another.]

MORALISTS - 24%
- Laser-like focus on moral issues
- Identify as “strong” GOP and “very” conservative,-
- Only group where majorities are Born Again/Evangelical and go to church at least weekly

GOVT KNOWS BEST REPUBs - 13%
- Focused on social issues
- More likely to be life-long GOPers
- Strongest supporters of government intervention to solve social and environmental problems
- Skeptical of the Patriot Act, many would like to see less defense spending

DENNIS MILLER REPUBs - 14%
- Focused on social issues, esp. illegal immigration,
- Strongly oppose people gaming the system to get a “free lunch”
- They are more likely to be gun owners

FORTRESS AMERICA - 8%
- Focused on foreign policy and national security issues
- Concerned about the war, want to see an orderly end to war in Iraq
- Strong Isolationist streak runs through this group
- See government’s top job as protecting the homeland

BUSH HAWKS - 20%
- Focused on national security issues
- especially War on Terror
- want to see America using its might spreading democracy
- Support the war and are in it to win it, no timeline

HEARTLAND REPUBs - 8%
- Focused on bread & butter economic issues
- More pragmatic and less ideological
- Concerned with gas prices & economic growth
- Less frequent church goers – less focus on Moral issues

FREE MARKETEERS - 8%
- Focused on economic issues
- Skeptical of government action, they want tighter reigns on spending and lower taxes
- Less frequent church goers
- More libertarian -- counterbalance to “Moralists”

Fabrizio notes that in spite of these variations on focus, there are obviously a broad set of issues that (generally speaking) unite the GOP (otherwise they couldn't function as a coherent political party), whereas there are others that cause internal tension:

ISSUES THAT UNITE GOP
- Desire to balance the budget
– Belief that government spends too much
– Belief that taxes are too high
– Belief that federal government is too big and does too many things
– Belief that current immigrations laws should be followed and no special treatment
– War in Iraq was the right decision
– Belief that our Foreign Policy should be based on our own security and economic interests
– Support of employment non-discrimination for gays. **

** Even 60 percent of Moralists believe that private businesses should not have the right to discriminate against gay people.

ISSUES THAT DIVIDE GOP
- Top priority, cutting taxes or balancing budget?
– Whether health care coverage is a right
– Fund SS or allow private investment
– Level of military/defense spending
– Role of federal government in education
– Allowing gays to serve in the military
– Role of federal government on global warming
– Private initiative vs. government safety net
– Influence of religion on public policy
– Abortion **

** On abortion – only 28 percent want it totally banned

So, just for the record, many of my prior references to conservative inclinations were principally designating the Moralist / Gov't Knows Best components of the GOP and the modifications to public policy that they may seek to impose.

On the economic front, I am skeptical, like many a GOP Free-Marketeer, of the government's capacity to efficiently spend tax funds. A federalist approach (i.e. taxes raised locally for local needs) seems to be inherently more efficient than massive spending at the federal level.

But, I have been convinced that my money is safe (enough) with Democrats that I can vote against the heavy-hand of social intervention that some Moralists would seem to prefer the government engage in. In some senses, this makes me socially and economically liberal (in the classic economic use of the word "liberal," which of course today means conservative, only to further cloud the issue from a pure labeling standpoint).

The point, if there is one here, is that conservative, as a stand-alone word, doesn't effectively mean any one specific thing. And, as much as I may delight in the criticism of the lazy usage of language or sweeping generalizations by others, I should endeavour not to spare myself the lash if deserved, though one would hope any prior postings were still clear when taken in their own broader context.

It's my world, Andrew Sullivan is just living in it

2009-02-09T12:34:00.000-08:00

I actually beat Sullivan to the punch on his Don't Divorce Us post which appeared today on his blog referencing the Courage Campaign's efforts in California to save the existing same-sex marriages in the state from being invalidated ex post facto by the court.

And, no cross-link by Sullivan back to the GingerMan?!? Where's the love for us straight, ginger white-boys, Andrew??

In fairness, the video was all over the web, so it wasn't like it was some scoop on my part, but it was odd to see it show up on Sullivan's blog after it appeared on my own, given that many of my posts are riffs on items he has posted first.

Please don't divorce my dads

2009-02-08T07:44:00.000-08:00

Ken Starr returns (yes, *that* Ken Starr), much like a horror movie zombie who simply will not die, with a legal brief -- on behalf of the "Yes on 8" campaign -- that would forcibly divorce the 18,000 same-sex couples married in California last year before the passage of Prop 8.

California Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on March 5, and will then make a decision within 90 days on the validity of Prop 8 and these 18,000 marriages.

Info above and the video link below are courtesy of Crooks and Liars, but don't watch without Kleenex nearby.

Quote of the Day: "Medical experiments for the lot of you..."

2009-02-07T03:00:00.000-08:00

50 People, 1 Question

2009-02-06T17:30:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of escapegrace, comes this short but brilliant video link. Somebody setup a camera on a street corner in Brooklyn and asked 50 random strangers the same, simple question: "Where would you like to wake up tomorrow?"

Like a lot of inspired art, the premise is austere, but the results are beautiful. I smiled the whole way through at the wonderful humanity of it. Quirky, funny, fantastical and sad. Just like life.

See what you think...

Fifty People, One Question: Brooklyn from Fifty People, One Question on Vimeo.

Randolph, my dearest

2009-02-06T07:29:00.000-08:00

I was reading the SwampLand blog (Time magazine) the other day and noticed for the first time that one of their contributors named Jay Newton-Small is actually a woman. This reminded me of the fact that, as a young man, I often thought, at first blush, that women with seemingly masculine first names (e.g. Alex) had a special sex appeal. Maybe it just gave them an air of formidable confidence that was alluring.

However, efforts to convince my wife to change her first name to Randolph have thus far fallen flat. All things considered, this is probably for the best.

Quote of the Day: "May I take your trident, sir?"

2009-02-06T06:41:00.001-08:00

Unbearable Cuteness Alert

2009-02-05T21:09:00.000-08:00

Tiger cub plays in the snow.

The pre-historic GingerMan emerges

2009-02-05T12:36:00.001-08:00

One of the blogs I read regularly is Rod Dreher's Crunchy Con. As an Orthodox Christian and social conservative, Dreher & I have little in common philosophically, but this is why I find it interesting to read him. I get some insight into a mind that works very differently from my own.

Shortly before I started this blog, I posted a reader comment to Dreher's blog. It was the first comment I had ever made there, or on any blog anywhere. But, a short time later, the GingerMan was born.

Thus, my blog comment on Dreher's site stands as a kind of proto-GingerMan climbing out of the primordial ooze of my thoughts and onto the dry land of the blogosphere, but still struggling to stand upright on its own (though I am not sure that Dreher would appreciate my choice of a Darwinian analogy here).

Here was Dreher's post in the midst of the initial unveiling of the credit crisis on Nov 20, 2008:

The WSJ's Daniel Henninger sees the economic crisis as fundamentally a crisis of faith and morals. [em: mine]

Excerpt:

What really went missing through the subprime mortgage years were the three Rs: responsibility, restraint and remorse. They are the ballast that stabilizes two better-known Rs from the world of free markets: risk and reward.

Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down. And so we come back to the disappearance of "Merry Christmas."

It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions. [em: mine]

The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines.

Feel free: Banish Merry Christmas. Get ready for Mad Max.

Well, everybody said "Merry Christmas" back in 1929, and still. But I see his point.

Now, those who read Dreher regularly will readily see the appeal of this article to Rod's sensibilities. It refracts the economic crisis through a lens of moral degeneracy and reframes the narrative as one of retributive cosmic justice for our straying from the moral path we had formerly embraced. All that's missing is a few thunderbolts from the sky to bar-b-que Bernie Madoff in his shoes before he is imprisoned for massive financial fraud.

This struck me as utter bunk. And, it got my blood up. So, I posted the following comment (in part) as a reply:

This is just pathetic.

Let me tell you a fairy tale about the great Pastoral Fantasy of American past. Back then, people were nothing but wonderful, neighborly yeoman farmers. We were all Christian and lived by a strict moral code and an ethic of honor. Owing to this fact, there was no greed. It was just hand-shake agreements and square-dealing all-around. Then the Sixties came and the Garden of Eden was overrun with hippies and gays.

Ever hear of the Dutch Tulip mania of the 1600's?

[snip]

The reason the Greatest Generation may have been more “restrained” in their risk-taking appetite is not due to their superior sense of morality but because they had come through the searing experience of the Great Depression itself.

While you wave at this point in your comment at the bottom of the post, Rod, you are also way too quick to lay the blame for any societal ill at the feet of individual personal morality and lack of religious adherence. Otherwise, you wouldn't have posted this horses*** in the first place.

In a weird way, when I read such obvious self-congratulatory moralizing, I feel that I am more in touch with our collective "fallen nature" than conservatives such as Dreher. I don't think human nature has changed much over time, and the ethical failures of our current age (to the extent that this particular crisis itself even has a principally ethical root, which I dispute) are the same as they ever were. Whereas, Dreher and others long for some mythical Eden-like past where, owing to stricter religious observance across society, we escaped our capacity to sin and lived in a Latin Mass-centered moral paradise.

I don't believe such an ethical nirvana has ever existed (that's in Heaven, remember?). The critical moral issues that religions speak to were all present in the past and remain so today, irrespective of differences in formal modes of religious observance.

In short, being religious on the surface of one's life does not ensure an ethical core. You would think this would be a lesson someone such as Dreher would have internalized better than most. But, maybe it is one lesson that is only learned slowly and painfully.

As Dreher recently admitted:

Most Catholics, though, and most people in general, have a very difficult time seeing that their own side is capable of doing terrible things. Before the scandal, I was what you might call a political Catholic. Yes, I knew that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, but in truth I believed that the real problem in the Church was the liberals. And I could give you a lengthy catalog of the bad they had done to and in the Church. Though I'm not a Catholic anymore, I don't think I was wrong about those things.

What I was wrong about, though, and very, very wrong indeed, was assuming that "our side" was therefore blameless. I really did think ideologically. Once, when I lived in Washington, someone brought up then-Bishop Charles Grahmann of Dallas for some reason. "Is he orthodox?" I asked. Yes, came the answer. And that settled it for me: Grahmann was one of the good guys. No more questions needed to be asked.

In fact, as I would find out once I got here, Grahmann was one of the bad guys in the Church. His public orthodoxy, while commendable, told us very little about the way he governed the Catholic Church in Dallas -- which, as it turned out, was terrible.

As I was beginning to report on the Catholic sex abuse scandal, I was warned by a reputable and deeply knowledgeable Catholic priest, a man who has been made to suffer for his orthodoxy, that I better not assume that just because a priest or layman claims to be orthodox, that they're trustworthy. Many villains hide beneath the cloak of orthodox Catholic piety, he told me. It's a feint they use to throw people off their scent. Trust me, he said, I've seen this a lot.

[snip]

What I found in actual experience is a mixed bag. I found liberal Catholic laymen and priests with whom I agree about little theologically, who were absolutely heroic in the scandal. I found conservatives with whom I agreed about most everything who were cowardly. What I found mostly, though, was that a man's true character could not be reliably discerned from his theological orientation. It was so much easier to be able to separate the sheep and the goats by ideology. But it's not real, and to give into that temptation is to set oneself up for humiliation, or worse, the perpetuation of evil. [em: mine]

[snip]

It's a temptation every one of us faces -- and if you don't think you face it, you are setting yourself up for a fall. I'm not saying there is no such thing as good and evil, right and wrong, or that all sides are always equally culpable in wrongdoing. What I'm saying is what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said: the line between good and evil runs right through the human heart. As soon as we forget that, we're in trouble.

"As soon as we forget that, we're in trouble." Now that's a place where Rod & I can agree in full voice.

Quote of the Day: "Every time I start talking about boxing..."

2009-02-02T18:55:00.000-08:00

Steele carries the beakless soccer mom vote to victory

2009-01-30T13:41:00.001-08:00

The GOP just elected Michael Steele (note: black dude) to the position of RNC chairman in a 6-way race that got much more publicity than one would normally expect for such intra-party politics due to the infamous choice by Chip Saltzman to rally support for his candidacy by sending out promotional CDs featuring song parodies, including one titled "Barack the Magic Negro".

Steele won on the 6th ballot over Katon Dawson of South Carolina who resigned from his country club last September and it was later revealed that the club's deed has a "whites-only" restriction and has no black members. Talk about your stark choices.

[Note: I am not saying that Dawson is definitively racist, but symbolism matters in politics and this looks horrible no matter what his actual personal ethics are.]

Wonkette covered the multiple roll-call votes with typical snarkiness. Although, being required to "live-blog" the voting for a new RNC chairman in order to earn a living would put almost anyone into a bad humor. To wit:

2:34 PM — Truly, these are the worst looking people in America. Even the “youngish” ones look old, they are pale and wrinkled, bad hair and schlubby suits, the few women have awful pinched little mouths, like anteaters, or beakless chickens.

Quote of the Day: "Well, ain't this place a geographical oddity..."

2009-01-30T05:47:00.000-08:00

Store Clerk: I can get the part from Bristol. It'll take two weeks, here's your pomade.

Ulysses Everett McGill: Two weeks? That don't do me no good.

Store Clerk: Nearest Ford auto man is Bristol.

Ulysses Everett McGill: [examining pomade] Hold on, I don't want this pomade. I want Dapper Dan.

Store Clerk: I don't carry Dapper Dan, I carry Fop.

Ulysses Everett McGill: Well, I don't want Fop, g**damn it! I'm a Dapper Dan man!

Store Clerk: Watch your language, young feller, this is a public market. Now if you want Dapper Dan, I can order it for you. I'll have it in a couple of weeks.

Ulysses Everett McGill: Well, ain't this place a geographical oddity. Two weeks from everywhere!

Free-Association Synthesizing, but w/o the Purple Trench Coat

2009-01-29T11:37:00.000-08:00

Here's the way my head is working today: Blog -> Synthesizing -> Synthesizer -> Synthesizer riff -> DMSR.

Alice says the thing she likes about my blog is the way I "pull things together." And, certainly for my longer posts, I tend to try to knit together a distillation of my thoughts by gathering pull-quotes from multiple sources on any given topic.

It is a matter of processing and synthesizing the opinions of others in order to figure out what I ultimately think.

The word synthesizing got me to think about the synthesizer as a musical instrument. This got me to thinking about my favorite synthesizer riff in any song I could remember.

And so, without further ado, I present Prince releasing the hounds of funk on DMSR.

All the white people clap your hands on the floor now...

Watch more imeem videos on AOL Video

(P.S. Prince-nerd shout out: Those of similiar ilk to myself will recall this one as featured during one of the party scenes at Tom Cruise's house in Risky Business.)

Quote of the Day: "And, it worked for my family..."

2009-01-29T08:15:00.000-08:00

Christy Cummings: It's interesting, we have kind of a family dynamic going on here which pretty much mirrors what I grew up with, I'm the daddy figure, the taskmaster, the disciplinarian.

Sherri Ann Cabot: [nodding to Christy] Mr. Punishment over here.

Christy Cummings: Oh, but I also reward, and Sherri Ann is responsible for the unconditional love.

Sherri Ann Cabot: And the decorative ability.

Christy Cummings: She's the heart and the soul, which was what my mom did, that was her role, she was there for the unconditional love. And, it worked for my family, you know... until my mom committed suicide in '81.

To those who prefer their f-bombs served straight up

2009-01-29T07:13:00.001-08:00

Quote of the Day: "You're being very un-Dude."

2009-01-28T14:40:00.000-08:00

The Dude: [answering phone] Dude.

Nihilist: [on the phone] Who is this?

The Dude: Dude. The bag man, man. Where do you want us to go?

Nihilist: Us?

The Dude: Sh*t! Uh. Yeah, uh. Me and, uh, the driver. I'm not handling the money, driving the car and talking on the phone all at the same time.

Nihilist: Shut the f*** up.

Walter Sobchak: Dude, are you f***ing this up?

Nihilist: Who the f*** is that?

The Dude: That is the driver.

[Nihilist hangs up]

The Dude: Sh*t! Walter, you f***... you f***ed it up! You f***ed it up! Her life was in our hands, man!

Walter Sobchak: Nothing is f***ed here, Dude. Come on, you're being very un-Dude. They'll call back.

My Hope for Obama

2009-01-28T10:18:00.000-08:00

Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish is the first blog I ever started to read on any regular basis. I can no longer remember why, but I presume it is because I often buy The Atlantic Monthly when I travel. Something in the magazine must have motivated me to seek out the website, and as Andrew is the first blogger (from left-to-right in the navigation bar) on the site, The Daily Dish is where I landed.

I still haven't made it down to Barbara Wallraff on the right hand edge of the navigation. Maybe she should petition to re-order the bloggers alphabetically by first name (though Andrew would still beat her out for the alpha spot).

But, now that I have a blog of my own, I guess I can cite Sullivan as my blogging godfather in a way.

One of the things about reading someone for a long period of time is you get a real sense for the cadence of their written voice, the pattern of their thoughts, and even the texture of their personality as it leaks through on the screen. Sullivan can be overly-emotional at times (at least for my taste) and given to hyperbole. But, it may simply come with the form.

Given that he blogs so prodigiously, there is less time for real-time editing and considered reflection. Inflamed commentary is "walked back" in future posts if needbe, but what you get most of the time is the immediate gut reaction.

So, taking that grain of salt, I can't help but post this item from Sullivan today in its entirety. I can't say that I feel the claims he makes therein are uncontestable. It may be a matter of heart and hope coloring his eyes (and mine) at this very early stage.

What I can say is that this is what I wanted to see from Obama more than anything else he could do policy-wise as President. But, I believe it is more than simply wishful thinking and projection, as so many have claimed that Obama's campaign was built around -- people casting their own idealized notions of Obama the myth onto the tabula rasa of Obama the actual candidate.

What Sullivan describes is what I thought I saw revealed in Obama under the kleig light glare of the campaign spotlight. It was the measure of the man, not his platform.

And, if he can actually govern in accordance with the spirit that Sullivan identifies below, then I will be one very proud American:

One impression from Obama's interactions with the Republicans and Democrats in Congress: Obama clearly sees the presidency as a different institution than his immediate predecessor. This is a good thing, it seems to me. Bush had imbibed a monarchical sense of the office from his father and his godfather (Cheney). The monarch decided. If you were lucky, you'd get an explanation later, usually dolled up in propaganda. But the president had one accountability moment - the election of 2004 - and the rest of the time he saw the presidency as a form of power that should be used with total boldness and declarative clarity.

At times, Bush's indifference to the system around him bordered on a kind of political autism. And so one of the oddest aspects of Bush's presidency was his tendency to declare things as if merely saying them as president could make them so. The model was clear and dramatically intensified by wartime: the president pronounced; Congress anemically responded; the base rallied. At the start, it felt like magic, but as reality slipped through the fast-eroding firewall of reckless spending and military misadventure, Bush's authority disappeared all the more quickly - because his so-certain predictions were so obviously wrong. The Decider had no response to this. He just had to keep deciding and asserting, to less and less effect, that he was right all along. Hence the excruciating final months. Within a democratic system, we had replicated all the comedy and tragedy of cocooned authoritarianism.

Now look at Obama. What the critics misread in his Inaugural was its classical structure. He was not running any more. He was presiding. His job was not to rally vast crowds, but to set the scene for the broader constitutional tableau to come to life. Hence the obvious shock of some Republican Congressman at debating with a president who seemed interested in actual conversation, as opposed to pure politics. Last Tuesday, there were none of the bold declarative predictions of the Second Bush Inaugural - and none of the slightly creepy Decider idolatry. Yes, Obama set some very clear directional goals, but the key difference is what came next: a window of invitation. The invitation is to the other co-equal branches of government to play their part; and for the citizenry to play its. This is an understanding of the president as one node in a constitutional order - not a near-dictator outside and superior to other branches of government. It is a return to traditional constitutional order. And it is rooted in a traditional, small-c conservative understanding of the presidency.

If Bush was about the presidency as power, Obama is about the presidency as authority. It's fascinating to watch this deep difference in understanding slowly but unmistakably realize itself in public actions. Somewhere the Founders are smiling. The system is correcting itself after one of the most unbalanced periods in American history. But it took the self-restraint of one man to do it.

Let the people say Amen.

Quote of the Day: "From Moses to Sandy Koufax..."

2009-01-26T19:30:00.000-08:00

Walter Sobchak: I'm saying, I see what you're getting at, Dude, he kept the money. My point is, here we are, it's shabbas, the sabbath, which I'm allowed to break only if it's a matter of life or death...

The Dude: Will you come off it, Walter? You're not even f***ing Jewish, man.

Walter Sobchak: What the f*** are you talkin' about?

The Dude: Man, you're f***ing Polish Catholic...

Walter Sobchak: What the f*** are you talking about? I converted when I married Cynthia! Come on, Dude!

The Dude: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah...

Walter Sobchak: And you know this!

The Dude: Yeah, and five f***ing years ago you were divorced.

Walter Sobchak: So what are you saying? When you get divorced you turn in your library card? You get a new license? You stop being Jewish?

The Dude: It's all a part of your sick Cynthia thing, man. Taking care of her f***ing dog. Going to her f***ing synagogue. You're living in the f***ing past.

Walter Sobchak: Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax... [shouting] You're g**damn right I'm living in the f***ing past!

The Loss of a Dog

2009-01-26T12:01:00.000-08:00

Bill Simmons lost his dog recently:

The day after The Dooze left us, our little boy woke up and my wife carried him downstairs to feed him like she always does. I was still half asleep and could hear her footsteps. Then I heard this: "Day-zee. Day-zee."

That part didn't make me sad. The part that made me sad happened three mornings later ... when my wife was carrying him downstairs again and he didn't say anything.

Sadie is only 4 and in perfectly good health (knock on wood), but it was hard as hell to read this.

I love my dog :)

Sullivan on Gay Marriage and Prop 8

2009-01-25T17:10:00.000-08:00

To any that did not see it at the time, I can highly recommend Andrew Sullivan's response to Rod Dreher's post on this topic as one of the best defenses of gay marriage that I have come across:

Rod longs, as many do, for a return to the days when civil marriage brought with it a whole bundle of collectively-shared, unchallenged, teleological, and largely Judeo-Christian, attributes. Civil marriage once reflected a great deal of cultural and religious assumptions: that women's role was in the household, deferring to men; that marriage was about procreation, which could not be contracepted; that marriage was always and everywhere for life; that marriage was a central way of celebrating the primacy of male heterosexuality, in which women were deferent, non-heterosexuals rendered invisible and unmentionable, and thus the vexing questions of sexual identity and orientation banished to the catch-all category of sin and otherness, rather than universal human nature.

To tell Rod something he already knows: Modernity has ended that dream. Permanently.

[snip]

But how do those who are ready to live in this modern world coexist with those who still believe that it is not only misguided but evil? And, of course, vice-versa? There is only one way.

That way is to agree that our civil order will mean less; that it will be a weaker set of more procedural agreements that try to avoid as much as possible deep statements about human nature. [em: mine]

[snip]

Sorry, Rod, but you and I have to live in the disenchanted world our generation was born into. The dreams of total pre-modern coherence - whether in the malign fantasies of the Taliban or the benign aspirations of theocons longing for the 1950s in the 21st century - are dreams undone by freedom. We live in a new world, and we can and should create meaning where we can, in civil society, in private, through free expression and self-empowerment. But we cannot enforce that old meaning on others by law.

The great thing about this post is that it gets beneath the surface legalisms at issue and exposes the heart of what is really under debate, which is the philosophical conflict between traditional conservatism and modernity itself. Gay marriage is simply the battle de jour upon which "deep statements about human nature" are being argued.

As Dreher himself writes even on the heels of the Prop 8 "victory" in California:

The concept of marriage has largely been severed from established norms in the popular understanding and is now seen as a contract formalizing the love a couple (for now) has for each other. Today, marriage has no intrinsic meaning that people are meant to serve; rather, it can be shaped to support people's desires.

This is the logical next phase in the development of modernity, whose 500-year project has been the gradual emancipation of the individual will. When gay marriage proponents argue that conservatives are on the wrong side of history, they're right. [em: mine]

Moreover, the prejudice – both in the bad, bigoted sense, and the good, Burkean sense – that protected traditional marriage is evaporating. Conservatives will lose this war because they have lost the young. And they have lost the young because they have lost the culture.

And, this is the "loss" that conservatives such as Dreher are really inveighing against. It is not about marriage per se, but rather about the long, slow loss of unquestioned cultural authority that is now being realized via modifications to our formal systems of legal authority (e.g. divorce, abortion, gay marriage).

Notice Dreher's obvious lament of the "gradual emancipation of the individual will." Taken as a standalone statement, one might be tempted to label a "gradual emancipation of the individual will" as freedom, which within the secular ethos of the American polity is always categorized as an unmitigated "good."

But, within a philosophical framework of Original Sin and the inherent fallen nature of man, emancipation of the individual will, by definition, leads to evil. There can be no good outcomes for mankind or society without the constraints of religious doctrine to check our baser impulses. The apple beckons and we are futile to resist.

Or, as Wilkinson more succinctly noted in a discussion of Atheists vs. Pedophiles and which group was more despised by the American public:

Wilkinson (facetiously):

I mean it's kind of obvious. If God is dead, then everything is permitted. And if everything is permitted, the first thing you want to do is abuse children.

Oddly, I think somehow that this moment provides an opening for religious conservatives to advocate more effectively for the positions they hold dear, since (in a modern context) they will be forced to justify and argue for the utility (moral or otherwise) of the positions they espouse. There is no unified cultural North Star doing all the heavy lifting of justification for them.

And, my sense is that those elements of religious faith that serve humanity (the Golden Rule, et al) will survive unscathed from the confrontation with modernity, while those that are merely relics of a different social order will simply fall over time, since the weight of cultural inertia alone is no longer enough to sustain them.

A 5 foot 2 inch black man who can slay with a guitar

2009-01-23T19:53:00.000-08:00

I still remember seeing this performance live on TV from over 20 years ago. I told Alice, before even finding the video on the Interwebs, what he was wearing and about the moment when he kicks the microphone over (you could see Cyndi Lauper stand and pump her fist in the audience, but is not easily visible here due to the poor video quality).

Needless to say, the accuracy of my recall indicates that I:

a) am not yet currently showing signs of senility, and;
b) was a massive, fanatical Prince fan as a high school student.

But, with performances like this, who could blame me... (keep scrolling, couldn't figure out why this extra white space appears)

Goodbye Bush

2009-01-20T12:20:00.000-08:00

Julian Sanchez reflects on Bush's helicopter exit and the surprising lack of incoming rocket fire from the gathered crowd:

That George Bush got to leave the White House in a helicopter, rather than dragged from the rear bumper of a Buick, is a testament to the almost mindboggling restraint of the American people. It’s an act of mercy bordering on injustice that the man is facing execration rather than execution.

“Derangement” at this point consists in the failure to appreciate how easy he’s getting off.

Disguise yourself to fool our avian overlords

2009-01-19T10:09:00.000-08:00

I wrote previously about an interesting experiment with a NYU researcher who taught crows (through Skinnerian behavioral modeling) to drop coins into a vending machine for peanuts.

Find below a video of him describing the intelligence of crows in greater detail.

Paraphrased from below:

At the University of Washington they were doing some experiments a few years ago where they were catching some crows on campus. Some students went out and netted some crows, brought them in, weighed them and measured them and let them back out again.

And, they were entertained to discover that, for the rest of the week, whenever these particular students walked around campus, these crows would caw at them, and run around them and generally work to make their life miserable.

They were significantly less entertained when this went on for the next week after that... and the next month... and after summer break... until they finally graduated and left campus and when they came back sometime later, they found that the crows still remembered them.

So, the moral of the story being don't piss off crows. Now, students at UW who are studying crows do so with a giant wig and a big mask.

Really amazing description of their adaptive behavior at the 5:00 mark.

And take your GWOT with you

2009-01-17T17:55:00.001-08:00

One of my favorite books from high school is Orwell's 1984. Mostly for the lesson in how language can be used as a framing mechanism for controlling what can be effectively communicated, or even conceived of to start with.

Language is the the key to abstract thought, and abstract thought is the key to reason.

So, as I wave goodbye to the Bush years, I am extremely hopeful that Obama will quickly retire the ridiculous term "Global War on Terror." I always always always hated this formulation. Mostly, because since it was so purposefully inaccurate -- it has been said it made as much sense as declaring a War on Hand Grenades; since it is a tactic, not an enemy -- that it seemed to imply bad faith a priori on the part of those proffering it. And, in retrospect, I think it is clear this assumption of bad faith was true.

By contrast, here is a statement by UK foreign minister, David Miliband, in the wake of the recent terrorist attack on Mumbai.

I agree with every word of it:

Terrorism was not invented or started on 9/11. But since then, the notion of a "war on terror" has defined the terrain. The phrase had some merit: it captured the gravity of the threats we face, the need for solidarity amongst allies, and the need to respond with real urgency - and where necessary with force.

But for a couple of years now the British Government has used neither the idea nor the phrase "war on terror". The reason is that ultimately, the notion is misleading and mistaken. Historians will judge whether it has done more harm than good. But we need to move on to meet the challenges we face.

The issue is not whether we need to attack the use of terror at its roots, with all the tools available to us. We must. The question is how we best do so.

The notion of a war on terror gave the impression of a unified, transnational enemy, embodied in the figure of Osama Bin Laden and the organization of Al Qaeda. In fact, as India has long known, the forces of violent extremism remain diverse. Terrorism is a deadly tactic, not an institution or an ideology.

The global threat from violent extremism has become more real because technology enables terrorists to connect more easily with each other, whether to plot and plan or to ape each other's tactics and techniques. But it is also more potent because Al Qaeda and its ilk seek to aggregate different local, regional and religious problems into a single complaint: the alleged oppression of Muslims around the world.

Yet the motivations and identities of terrorist groups - from Hizbollah to the Taleban, Tamil Tigers and Lashkar e Toiba - are disparate not singular. The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common, and the more we magnify the sense of threat. The trap to avoid is inadvertently sustaining Al Qaida's propaganda - their claim that disparate grievances add up to a unified complaint. We should expose their claim to a compelling and overarching explanation and narrative as the lie that it is.

This strikes me as a mature, thoughtful, direct and steadfast statement about the principles that should underlie our ongoing confrontation with radical Islamic terrorists.

Of course, it stands in stark contrast to the black/white, Us/Them jihad against jihad that the Bush White House has subjected us to for the past 7+ years.

Christian Brose, in Foreign Affairs, highlights Bush's unyielding and mind-numbing consistency on this point right on through his farewell address to the country.

Here is Bush last night:
The battles waged by our troops are part of a broader struggle between two dramatically different systems. Under one, a small band of fanatics demands total obedience to an oppressive ideology, condemns women to subservience, and marks unbelievers for murder. The other system is based on the conviction that freedom is the universal gift of Almighty God and that liberty and justice light the path to peace.
I have little to quibble with in the descriptions; it's the comparison that bothers me. And the reference is clear. Here is President Harry Truman speaking to Congress on March 12, 1947:
At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.
One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.
There was a time after 9/11 when America needed a president who saw the people who had just attacked us as a world-conquering, ideological counterweight to American liberalism. And Bush answered that call.
Now, more than seven years on, we need to insist -- without compromising one bit of our post-9/11 seriousness, vigilance, or willingness to defend ourselves -- that by raising al-Qaeda and company to our level, we are only degrading ourselves while painting them as the very thing they aspire to be.
Our enemy in this confrontation is a deviant bunch of bitter-enders, whose only ideas about organizing society have been rejected everywhere -- everywhere -- they've been forced on people. The sooner we start treating them as such the better.
Bush could never accept that, let alone do it.

It is said that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. In this case, there was more than a hobgoblin at work. It was the frickin' Godzilla of small minds on the loose.

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out

2009-01-16T19:33:00.000-08:00

On the doorstep of the end of the Bush years, I just came across this great peice by Jay Rosen from back in 2006 that reaches to the philosophical core from which the fatal course of the Bush Presidency was set.

Rosen credits the reporting of Ron Suskind, particularly his Without A Doubt article from the New York Times Magazine, as revealing the intellectual scoop for how to interpret the Bush White House.

From Rosen:

A different pattern had appeared under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The normal checks and balances had been overcome, so that executive power could flow more freely. Reduced deliberation, oversight, fact-finding, and field reporting were different elements of an emerging political style. Suskind, I felt, got to the essence of it with his phrase, the “retreat from empiricism.”

Which is a perfect example of what Bill Keller and others at the New York Times call an intellectual scoop. (“When you can look at all the dots everyone can look at, and be the first to connect them in a meaningful and convincing way…”) Over the last three years, and ever since the adventure in Iraq began, Americans have seen spectacular failures of intelligence, spectacular collapses in the press, spectacular breakdowns in the reality-checks built into government, including the evaporation of oversight in Congress, and the by-passing of the National Security Council, which was created to prevent exactly these events.

[snip]

The alternative to facts on the ground is to act, regardless of the facts on the ground. When you act you make new facts. You clear new ground. And when you roll over or roll back the people who have a duty to report the situation as it is—people in the press, the military, the bureaucracy, your own cabinet, or right down the hall—then right there you have demonstrated your might.

It was Suskind's reporting that led to the coinage of the now famous phrase the "reality-based community." As noted, this seeming disdain for the facts wasn't so much an unintended result of anti-intellectualism run amock as it was a calculated method for clearing the ground for actions the White House wanted to take.

Facts or dissent could create roadblocks to desired actions. So, facts had to be subverted, channeled or ignored.

To paint Bush as simply a bumbling, redneck bumpkin who slid into the White House on Daddy's coattails is to undercut the level of intentionality at work here. It is a way of shifted or mitigating the blame. Or, to frame Bush, as some of his remaining supporters do (can there still be any?), as a good man led astray by bad advice.

This simply doesn't wash for me. His trajectory is more complex and directed than the simple narrative of "good man, bad advice" will allow.

It was more than dim-witted ignorance that was propelling him. It was arrogance that served to cover, for all his vaunted Texas swagger and machismo, a real weakness at the core of the man. A man whose doubt has to be covered with needless and unearned certitude.

A strong man can afford to be humble. A weak man cannot, as there is no pillar from which to hang his humility.

From Bob Woodward, via a post by Dreher:

During a December 2003 interview with Bush, I read to him a quote from his closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, about the experience of receiving letters from family members of slain soldiers who had written that they hated him. "And don't believe anyone who tells you when they receive letters like that, they don't suffer any doubt," Blair had said.

"Yeah," Bush replied. "I haven't suffered doubt."

"Is that right?" I asked. "Not at all?"

"No," he said.

Now try to square this attitude with the following description, by Rosen, of the White House debrief of the first leader of the post-war Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Jay Garner:

When Jay Garner returns to the White House from running the American effort in Iraq, Bush, Cheney, Condi Rice and Rumsfeld are there to greet him. Not only does he know to give a falsely upbeat assessment in his written report and stick to cheerful banter during the meeting, but he finds that no one asks him a single question about the situation on the ground in Iraq. [em: mine]

Here you have the best possible reporter, but there is no report. The scene (as described by George Packer) is highly ritualized. A message is being sent about who gets to define what’s happening on the ground, and it isn’t the people on the ground.

Honestly, it is hard to read such stupid s*** like this and not want to strangle the dumb m*****f***** with my own bare hands. He had a f***ing responsibility here that was much bigger than any self-aggrandizing dreams of himself!! A responsibility to the lives of 150K+ soldiers (not to mention the millions of Iraqis), and the cavalier attitude that he managed to revel in while simultaneously abdicating this responsibility through willfully blind recklessness and outright incompetence is truly enraging.

Rather than suffusing himself to the responsibility of his Presidential authority, that authority was bent in the service of his own ego.

For instance, Bush has a well-known habit for giving nicknames to everyone around him. On the one hand such behavior could be be seen as an ice-breaker, a way of tearing down the formal stiffness that might naturally be present when one finds oneself addressing the President of the United States.

On the other hand, it is an interpersonal power play. Bush can nickname, jibe, even soft-handedly demean the other person with full knowledge that the same will never be returned in kind, given the authority of his position. And, thereby Bush can relish in the capacity to lord his authority over others around him, even in such an insignificant manner.

This is the mark of a weak man and tyrant by nature.

And while Bush is often criticized due to his various malapropisms and mangled syntax, it was this quote that always riled me the most:

I'm the commander, I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation.

There is an imperial sensibility at work here. I am in command and what I say goes.

In such circumstances, loyalty is the highest value in one's subordinates. Since disunity is a threat to a weak king. It threatens to pull back the curtain, to reveal the man who is really there. And, that is something that Bush couldn't abide.

So as this sorry chapter in our political history draws down, I find that this commenter to James Fallows blog captures the sentiment of these times for me properly:

I too thought the final Bush press conference was a remarkable performance; if an actor were to memorize and replicate it, it would seem like something out of Eugene O'Neill, staged in a barroom, and we might feel pity.
The inept man without words realizes that he cannot say what he must say: an admission of failures across the board, a realization that his pipe dreams were deadly, an understanding that his nation and the world now hold him in low esteem and wish him gone.
And not to be able to say these things is to remain their captive forever. But there is no expiation for Mr. Bush, and that is the objective tragedy. How can he live without awareness?
He also must see how much Barack Obama is his opposite, how much he is admired and welcomed to the office, so unlike the stolen Bush arrival in 2000. It's a remarkable achievement for Mr. Bush: every moment of his presidency is touched with a shame that cannot be bathed away. I think he will disappear; I cannot see any post-presidential role he could fulfill without the full recollection of that shame.

And, this is a shame that is fully deserved. And, so it is not with a twinge of sadness or pity that I read the following revelation from the devastating retrospective assessment of Bush by the Economist which characterizes his presidency as one of "partisanship, politicization and incompetence."

He leaves the White House as one of the least popular and most divisive presidents in American history. At home, his approval rating has been stuck in the 20s for months; abroad, George Bush has presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America’s reputation since the second world war. The American economy is in deep recession, brought on by a crisis that forced Mr Bush to preside over huge and unpopular bail-outs.

America is embroiled in two wars, one of which Mr Bush launched against the tide of world opinion. The Bush family name, once among the most illustrious in American political life, is now so tainted that Jeb, George’s younger brother, recently decided not to run for the Senate from Florida. A Bush relative describes family gatherings as “funeral wakes”. [em: mine]

Well, he's getting a full f***ing dose of reality now, isn't he? Too bad for the rest of us it was eight years too late.

I, for one, won't be sending the SOB any flowers.

Look Ma, I Can Fly!

2009-01-15T14:11:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of Panopticist.

A Six-Foot Black Woman Who Says What She Means

2009-01-07T13:11:00.000-08:00

For those not familiar with Ta-Nehisi Coates, blogger and writer for the Atlantic Monthly, I can recommend you to his blog.

And, additionally, to his recent profile of the soon-to-be First Lady, Michelle Obama, from the magazine itself:

In most black people, there is a South Side, a sense of home, that never leaves, and yet to compete in the world, we have to go forth. So we learn to code-switch and become bilingual. We save our Timberlands for the weekend, and our jokes for the cats in the mail room. Some of us give ourselves up completely and become the mask, while others overcompensate and turn every dustup into the Montgomery bus boycott.

But increasingly, as we move into the mainstream, black folks are taking a third road--being ourselves. Implicit in the notion of code-switching is a belief in the illegitimacy of blacks as Americans, as well as a disbelief in the ability of our white peers to understand us. But if you see black identity as you see southern identity, or Irish identity, or Italian identity--not as a separate trunk, but as a branch of the American tree, with roots in the broader experience--then you understand that the particulars of black culture are inseparable from the particulars of the country.

Pop culture has laid the groundwork for that recognition. Barack Obama's coalition--the young, the black, the urban, the hip--was originally assembled by hip-hop. Jay-Z and Nas may be problematic ambassadors, but their ilk are why those who thought Barack and Michelle were giving each other a "terrorist fist jab" were laughed off the stage. We are as physically segregated as ever, yet the changes in media have drawn black idiom into the broader American narrative.

[snip]

When I saw Obama in Chicago and took her for white, it was not because of her cadences, mannerisms, or dress, but because of the radical proposition she put forth--a black community fully vested, no DuBoisian veil, in the country at large. A buddy of mine once remarked that Michelle "makes Barack black." But that understates things. She doesn't simply make Barack black--she makes him American.

[snip]

These heralds offer a deeper understanding of African American life, a greater appreciation of the bourgeois ordinariness of our experience. “People have never met a Michelle Obama,” the soon-to-be first lady said toward the end of our interview. “But what they’ll come to learn is that there are thousands and thousands of Michelle and Barack Obamas across America. You just don’t live next door to them, or there isn’t a TV show about them.”

There is now.

There was some discussion during the primaries that Barack should find the opportunity for a Sister Souljah moment in order to distance himself from "blackness" or racial identity-based politics. There was also a certain mythology that merely the act of electing a black President would somehow magically heal certain lingering racial wounds in our society (allowing blacks to shed racial grievance, eliminate lingering white guilt).

One frequent suggestion was that Obama should campaign on a pledge to shift from race to class-based affirmative action policies. The thinking being (a la Nixon goes to China) that it will take a black Democrat to drive such changes through, since he will not be open to cheap charges of racism, given his personal identity.

For my money, I doubt that Obama will do any such thing, and moreover, I would hope that he would not. Any symbolic benefit to be obtained from him being our first black President is only going to be realized by his being an effective American President first and foremost, outside of simplistic racial classification. And, this is not because he must explicitly reject or negate any black identity, but rather that he simply needs to implicitly live it, as Coates notes, such that the "particulars of black culture are inseparable from the particulars of the country."

Any move he might make as President that reeks specifically as a self-conscious performance of his blackness, of using his racial identity (even if for presumed positive ends) as a political tool, will by definition retard any such objectives. At this stage, basic competence within the White House would be a massive step forward for the country in completely non-racial terms.

Or, as Chris Rock noted on Larry King Live:

KING: You must be … proud that at this stage in our history a black man is running for president on a major ticket.
ROCK: I’m proud Barack Obama [is] running for president... If it was Flavor Flav, would I be proud? No. I don’t support Barack Obama because he’s black.

KING: I said just as a proud feeling. That’s normal.
ROCK: There’s a proud feeling because of the character of the man.

I sincerely hope Rock is right, because with everything that is going to be on Obama's plate, we are going to need it.

On a side note, any of you who have seen me spend time with my own niece, Mahlia, will know that I have a soft spot for elementary-school and middle-school aged kids (like Miss Mahlia herself). I am not as naturally drawn to babies and teenagers, but I like kids a lot.

So, I am all in favor of the coming Cuteness Stimulus, as Yglesias has termed it:

Obama transition team acts to counter national cuteness deficit by posting photos of Sasha and Malia getting ready for their first day at school

If true, my wife may become Methuselah

2009-01-06T13:39:00.000-08:00

Scientists discover pumpkin-pie-based cancer cure.

Our World is Upside Down

2009-01-05T20:21:00.000-08:00

It strikes me that the principle difficulty facing traditional norms and values today is not liberal secular ideology (the right-wing radio boogeyman), but simply the rate of change in our world. When I was a child, I watched Captain Kirk say "Beam me up, Scotty" into his transponder. That was science fiction.

Today, I have an iPhone. Granted it doesn't do the full blown teleportation yet, but according to WikiPedia:

In August 2008, physicist Michio Kaku predicted in Discovery Channel Magazine that a teleportation device similar to those in Star Trek will be invented within 100 years.

So, the difficulty in passing on traditions to the next generation is that, other than certain basic ethical propositions (don't kill, steal, lie, etc.), the world today's children are going to have to navigate is going to be significantly different from that of their parents and light years different than that of their grandparents.

See Dreher for an anecdotal example:

The day I got my first paycheck in my first post-college job, I walked into my old campus saloon - the gang hardly recognized me in a suit - leaned on the bar and ordered a Heineken. Not a pitcher of whatever watery suds were on sale to the penurious undergraduates, whose wretched lot I shared only a few weeks earlier. Nope, I asked for an imported brand. And you know, for once I didn't have to worry about it.
That was 20 years ago. I don't know when I drank my last actual Heineken, but in a way, I've been a Heineken man ever since. That is, though I've never known wealth in my working life, I've also never had to do without, not in any serious way. There has always been money for Heineken. Live that way long enough, and you begin to think that the easy availability of Heineken is the natural order of things.

My father, he drinks whatever's on sale and doesn't care. That's his way. He was a child of the Great Depression. When I was a senior in high school, I tasted my first Heineken in, no kidding, Holland (cheap flights, a strong dollar - ah, 1984). When Daddy was a senior in high school, he installed the first indoor plumbing in his family's house.

Same planet, different worlds. [em: mine]

Economic dynamism loosens the relevancy of the past. The world changes, sometimes radically. In such circumstances, the wisdom and rituals of ones forefathers can seem less like the insight of the ages and more like old fuddy-duddyism that is simply out of touch with the times.

And, in such a chaotic environment, it is harder to implicitly teach the next generation simply "how to be," much less how to be successful or moral or wise. Not only are there not commonly agreed upon standards for what constitutes such behavior, but the very nature of society itself, and the demands it makes upon individuals, is constantly shifting.

And, gaping into such uncertainty can be daunting, decentering, and even disabling. A commenter on Dreher's blog captures the sense of cultural dislocation well:

(Caveat: I am Indian, so no scolding me about using the term "Indian"...that's what we call ourselves among ourselves).
Long ago, when Indian boys were very small, 5 or 6 maybe, their Dads made them a little set of bow and arrows. They used these to practice hunting. When they got a squirrel, or a rabbit, or even a little bird, they would take it solemnly to Mom. Their first kill was celebrated, no matter how small it was, and they were praised as hunters for anything they brought in to feed the family.
They were called "that MAN" when they did things like this, to build them up. And most importantly, ANYthing they brought in, the scrawniest little bird, a big deal was made about it, and right in front of everyone, the little morsel went right into the family cooking pot, alongside the deer or buffalo or anything else. It started that early, the work, the praise as men feeding the family. Yes, we men need that building up, from the earliest experiences. You would be surprised what proud words can do, or what the reverse can do to.

Now of course, little girls too were given miniatures of the tools they would use as women, would work alongside mom and grandma, learning to bead, to tan hides, making food, caring for the babies...this again from the age of 5 or 6. And they were also praised, and a big deal was made about the moccasins they made, and called "this WOMAN" even as a little girl when she did grownup work.

I contrast this with what I see when I see 18 year olds in this culture, doing horrible things, and people trying to keep them out of jail saying they didn't know any better, or they were so young. Doing terrible terrible things to each other. Unbelievable some of it. And all excused by parents, who want to be friends rather than parents.
If parents built up kids from the earliest age, 2 or 3, saying how proud they were when the kid did something good, was kind, picked up toys, made a big deal, that would be something. Not ignore them when everything is going ok, or act inconsistent. And when kids do bad, shame them, be disappointed, call them a "baby." Give them a rattle or a bottle. But then praise them again when they do good and call them a MAN or a WOMAN. That was how it was in the old traditional days among our Indian people. Back in the old days, sometimes kids even had to fight to protect their families, go to war, life and death.

I am really sad when I see the homeless kids. No one told them to be a MAN or a WOMAN was to help the family, be courteous to strangers, have self-respect. They think being a man or woman only means to have sex, to talk vulgar, drink, be violent, nasty, do drugs. That's not being a man or a woman. That is just being crazy (although now to many "crazy" means something good) and ugly. Teens want to be thought of as adults, it is a major thing. So how has it come to mean "adult" means sex and vulgarity, while taking care of yourself and others is "lame." Our world is upside down.

When the world is upside down, the old frameworks, standards, traditions no longer graft easily onto it. It becomes harder to always know where to turn, which direction to point ourselves, which way to guide our children. Many get lost.

And, according to Grant McCracken, it isn't likely to get any easier.

The original transformational power, once the property of gods, elders, and shamans, is now in civilian hands. Once collective, it is now individual, open to everyone. Once sacred, it is now profane. Once directed by the ceremonial calendar, it can now happen anywhere, anytime. Once strictly bound by tradition, it is now free, or at least freeform. When the power of transformation entered the profane world, it was exhuberantly transformed. Once this culture learned to give itself "bodies of another kind," it did not cease until it was capable of endless range and variety.
The price, of course, was high. Driving ritual from the temple cost us dearly. The punishment was the loss of an enchanted world that submitted to, that resonated with human designs. The universe became a chilly alienated, dislocating place. Good thing everyone now had their own powers of self-invention. They were going to need them.

The LizardMan Cometh

2009-01-04T20:53:00.001-08:00

I wrote recently about Grant McCracken's new book: Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture (see my overview of the thesis if need be).

In our postmodern world, individuals are taking more and more radical steps in personal transformation (not just through participation in sub-cultures, the rejection of social conventions, or the creation of new or modified public personas), even down to almost inconceivable changes of physical appearance, such as The LizardMan, Erik Sprague.

From McCracken:

Sprague has had more than 450 hours of tattooing to give his skin the appearance of scales. He had plastic surgery to install Teflon bumps in his forehead and to bifurcate his tongue. He has had his teeth filed to make them look like fangs.

On the heels of the successful mapping of the human genome, our collective future portends potential transformative capabilities beyond that which even the Erik Spragues of the world are presently tempted to dream. The nature of the some of the points of conflict is summarized below:

Another issue is whether scientists should seek to alter genetic structures to "improve" the human race. One of those who discovered the DNA structure, James Watson, is decidedly in favor of such action, the London Times reported April 24.

Watson, currently president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state, said that spurious objections from left-wing and religious groups were slowing the pace of the medical advances that rely on genetics. "I think you should be able to do all you can to improve human life," he said.

Addressing a gala dinner at London Guildhall, Watson commented: "I don't see genetics as offending the gods, as I don't think there are any gods out there." The Times also noted that Watson recently opposed a ban on human reproductive cloning. [em: mine]

Others are pointing out the dangers of tampering with human genetic structures. In an April 14 essay for the Los Angeles Times, Bill McKibbon, author of "Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age," welcomed the celebrations of the anniversary of the DNA discovery.

But he warned that "the latest plans of Watson and his followers are monstrous." Such schemes "look forward to a world of catalog children, who might spend their entire lives wondering which of their impulses are real and which the product of embryonic intervention. They replace the fate and the free will that always have been at the center of human meaning with a kind of genetic predestination that will leave our children as semi-robots."

He added: "A species smart enough to discover the double helix should be wise enough to leave it more or less alone."

Dr. Leon Kass is also wary of the trend toward genetic consumerism. Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, addressed the issue in an essay in his recent book, "Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics."

Genetic technology, he observed, "comes into existence as part of the large humanitarian project to cure disease, prolong life and alleviate suffering. As such, it occupies the moral high ground of compassionate healing."

But this same technology, he noted, "also represents something radically new and disquieting." We should reject the attempts by some scientists to cast the debate about genetic technology as "a battle of beneficial and knowledgeable cleverness against ignorant and superstitious anxiety." [em: mine]

Genetic manipulation, Kass explained, is decisively different from other medical technologies. First, changes to human genetic structures will be transmissible into succeeding generations. Second, genetic engineering may be able to create or improve human capacities and therefore new norms of fitness and health.

Moreover, genetic technology and the practices it will engender are not morally and humanly neutral, Kass warned. Scientists will end up judging other beings' worthiness to live or die based on genetic information. And the temptation to produce designer babies will bring about the commodification of nascent human life. [em: mine]

We have only begun to scratch the surface of the moral conundrums that are embedded therein. And, one doesn't have to be a religious conservative to wonder about our capacity to wield such power with wisdom and care.

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

- Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834 - 1892)

The Bum Rush

2009-01-03T07:23:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of the Freakonomics blog, comes this revelation by Edward Conlon whose memoir Blue Blood recounts his experience as a Harvard-educated writer who joins the NYPD.

Conlon has been getting information from a homeless heroin addict named Charlie, regularly paying Charlie small sums of his own money in exchange for tips.

Charlie has a homeless friend named Tommy. One day on the street, Conlon runs into Tommy, who tells him a location where crack sales occur.

Conlon writes:

I handed Tommy some money, he held up his hands and said, “C’mon, Eddie, you don’t have to, it’s okay.” I said, “It’s all right, you guys work, you take risks for us, you should get paid.” He took the money, but he shook his head.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I feel a little funny, since you guys pay out of your own pockets. Do you know how much we make out here, panhandling, during rush hour?’

“No, how much?”

“About a dollar a minute.”

“Oh.”
I didn’t take my money back, but I saw his point. Charlie and Tommy made more money than us. I should have realized that earlier, as the math was not complicated — we took home less than a hundred dollars a day, while their habits were at least that.

I tried not to dwell on the fact that, economically, a New York City police officer was a notch down from a bum.

It is amazing when you think about it. Our society is so damn rich that even the bums are living large.

That is what Our Father said it was

2009-01-02T20:19:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: I made slight modifications to the text to make my final point more clear.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Just finished reading Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture by Grant McCracken.

Difficult read in places, but paints a picture of the development of the concept of self-hood and how an individual can/cannot change within a culture through different "transformations" (e.g. rites of passage, for example) which demarcate modifications in the nature of the self.

I will probably have multiple entries on the book (since there is much richness to draw on), but I'll try to summarize the thesis broadly below. He describes our culture as transitioning from:

Traditional - Face-to-face societies where ritual and myth are the means of transformation. Only prescribed types of transformations are allowed. Individuals may not choose or invent their transformational routines.
Status - Hierarchical societies where individual station is defined by birth (e.g. class or caste systems). Individuals could endeavor to change their status by cultivating exteriors (clothing, speech, deportment) and interiors (thought, emotion, outlook) to create a convincing performance of the social self.
Modern - Beat poets (previewing the 60s social upheaval) declared war on status transformation and adopted an oppositional cultural stance against the pretensions of bourgeois society. Authenticity and the individual self were valued above (and were in conflict with) mainstream social norms. Even within the mainstream, modern faith in technology and progress depicted an evolutionary self, one with the capacity for self-directed change, that was always forward looking and unmoored from its past.
Postmodern - The self is porous, fluid and open to near complete self-determination. The individual claims the right of self-authorship and the right to change the cultural categories that define him/her. Moreover, the individual consists of many "selves" with an emphasis on exploration of multiplicity over singular authenticity.

In short, the portrait moves from a sense of selfhood that is defined and limited by the outer societal norms, to one where the self is free to become nearly anything that one can imagine.

Now, the thesis is NOT that we shifted through all 4 phases, one displacing the one prior, but that they are additive. We still have "traditional" forms (e.g. weddings, etc.) but the power of society to define and control those meanings is limited and even contested (e.g. Prop 8).

I found this quote regarding traditional societies to be an echo of many present day culture war issues:

The ruling ideas of a traditional society are truly sovereign. They discourage criticism, originality and the "disposition to change." They discourage the very concept of reform. As J.S. La Fontaine puts it, these societies "base their concept of society on the idea of tradition, established once and for all. Society is the projection over time of the original founders, heroes or ancestors."

[snip]

What does not serve the "traditional forms" of a society is not allowed to matter. For many of these societies it isn't wisdom unless it is received.

When questioned as to why a particular ceremonial activity is carried out in a particular way, Navajo singers will most often say, "because the kiyin dine - the Holy People - did it that way in the first place." The ultima ratio of non-literates tends to be "that is what our fathers said it was." [em: mine]

The quote above reminded me of this recent Dreher post on the schism within the Anglican church.

Damon is troubled, and understandably so, by the fact that American churches are breaking apart based on positions congregations and individuals within them hold on culture-war issues. I don't see how any serious believer, whichever side he takes, can be cheered by schism. But I am inclined to think of schism as the second-worst option, if the only other is to accommodate one's church to a serious heresy.

As Damon notes, the stance a believer takes on issues like abortion, homosexuality, order and authority in the family, and a related constellation of concerns, typically places one within one camp or the other. It's no accident that there's a thread connecting stances on both sides; i.e., there's a reason why Christians who oppose abortion rights are more likely to oppose same-sex marriage rights, and vice versa. It all comes down, in the end, to Authority. [em: original]

If you believe that Scripture, or Scripture and the institutional Church, is the Authority for deciding questions of meaning and morality, then you are far more likely to fall on the traditionalist side of these questions. If you believe that individual conscience is the Authority, then you are likely to be a progressive.

To Dreher, a social conservative, the ultima ratio on any such question comes down to: that is what Our Father said it was.

Morality, like art, consists in drawing the line somewhere

2008-12-30T14:26:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-29T14:29:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-27T19:49:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-25T15:23:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-23T19:34:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-22T14:45:00.000-08:00

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:

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.
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:

Impulsiveness - As quintessentially summarized by the Palin selection, but also by his well-reputed outbursts of temper.
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

2008-12-19T20:47:00.001-08:00

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.