Prof. Wombat: second opinion

The Measure of a Man

2012-02-11T11:08:00.000-05:00

Charles Blow, in the Times today, saying it better than I could:

Start with this fact: The truest measure of a man, indeed of a person, is not whom he lies down with but what he stands up for. If we must be judged, let it be in this way. And when we fall short, as we sometimes will, because humanity is fallible, let us greet each other with compassion and encouragement rather than ridicule and resentment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/opinion/blow-real-men-and-pink-suits.html?hp

The Rich Do Better in School: They Have More Money

2012-02-10T09:27:00.000-05:00

The Times treats us this morning to the observation that the rich do better than the poor in school, and the gap is widening:

One reason for the growing gap in achievement, researchers say, could be that wealthy parents invest more time and money than ever before in their children (in weekend sports, ballet, music lessons, math tutors, and in overall involvement in their children’s schools), while lower-income families, which are now more likely than ever to be headed by a single parent, are increasingly stretched for time and resources. This has been particularly true as more parents try to position their children for college, which has become ever more essential for success in today’s economy.

A study by Sabino Kornrich, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid, and Frank F. Furstenberg, scheduled to appear in the journal Demography this year, found that in 1972, Americans at the upper end of the income spectrum were spending five times as much per child as low-income families. By 2007 that gap had grown to nine to one; spending by upper-income families more than doubled, while spending by low-income families grew by 20 percent.

“The pattern of privileged families today is intensive cultivation,” said Dr. Furstenberg, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/education/education-gap-grows-between-rich-and-poor-studies-show.html?hp

No foolin'. Not mentioned is the ubiquity of tutoring specifically oriented towards the SAT exam.

Charles Murray, er, tarred himself with 'The Bell Curve', which purported to show that genetics and race trumped attempts to overcome their burdens. His recent book 'Coming Apart' examines the worsening state of poor white Americans, and comes to the conclusion that it's about values: welfare-encouraged parasitism, single-parent households, crime, misguided government attempts to solve the problem, sex, drugs, rock and roll, like that. Meanwhile, blue collar jobs with decent wages and benefits have vanished or been exported by the millions, leaving rural areas full of closed factories and cities full of burger flippers. Unions, which have a little to do with worker safety and security, are now demonized as one of the causes of economic decline at a time when they are at a low in membership and political power. And study after study shows a widening gap between the rich and everybody else with respect to, well, money; the notion that the gap in education spending might parallel the gap in economic fortune might occur to someone.

Murray, and others on the right and amongst libertarians, call for more personal responsibility, almost always from others rather than themselves. That itself, of course, is oxymoronic. They cast social ills not as problems to be solved, but as moral failings, and therefore the responsibility of someone else but not of themselves. And, too, note that, in a polity where economic analysis has triumphed over all other ways to examine the human condition and deal with it, the role of economics is denied in every situation in which it could be marshalled in favor of granting a common humanity to the poor, and to people of color, while exalted--and, at that, using potted, easily discredited models--when the rich would benefit.

This isn't just Moynihan's 'benign neglect'. This is willful blindness and a flight from personal responsibility. It must be called what it is, and fought.

Citizens Disunited

2012-02-08T11:45:00.000-05:00

Those seeking the Republican presidential nomination have spent a lot of money, in the tens of millions of dollars. Romney outspent Gingrich by 5:1 in Florida, and won. Gingrich disapproved, citing that discrepancy rather than his own failings, and those of his campaign. Santorum today talked of spending far less than Romney, and winning anyway. Meanwhile, Romney's career at Bain Capital has been attacked as 'vulture capitalism'.

The Republican primaries are the first major national contest after the Citizens United decision, and demonstrate the obscene role of money in politics in the USA. So, we have Republicans themselves wondering if all that money is a Good Thing, and if all the ways capitalists make money are socially and morally Good Things. And a staple of libertarian objections to government is 'crony capitalism', the complicity between government and business which the odd lefty also points out.

Looking for coherence from Republicans on the surface is looking for gold in a coal mine. The actual basis of their views is power, its acquisition and its use in service of its clients, no more and no less. Their social positions are crystallizing around a return of unchallenged power to white men, their economic positions around the prerogatives of the rich, their foreign policy around the fantasy of complete freedom of American action arising out of an assertion of military power in service of a fantasy of exceptionalism.

There's something to work with here. A shame were the opportunity lost, ignored or even unrecognised on the left. And, too, a shame were some of the Republicans themselves to continue to reject thoughtlessly lefty positions they themselves find mirroring. But it's striking and appalling that Republicans, and the media reporting on them, don't laugh off the stage people who say the things the Republican candidates have said.

Can I Get a Mittless? Episode IV: Defeated by a Fantasy

2012-02-08T11:23:00.000-05:00

We're greeted today by the news that Rick Santorum has won primaries/caucuses in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri. Let's review Santorum's career for a minute: No significant legislative accomplishments. Turned out of office by his own constituents. No accomplishments since. Now, let's review his qualifications for the presidency: No knowledge or experience in foreign affairs. No substantive economic proposals, or demonstration of any knowledge of economics. Let's move on to his social beliefs: Abortion should be outlawed even for victims of rape and incest. Gay folk are gay by choice, and can be brought to heterosexuality by treatment, and should be banned from marriage. Sex is for procreation, as God intended, and nothing else.

It's easy enough to poke holes in the man. For instance, if God had intended sex to be solely for procreation, He wouldn't have made it such a pleasure, and labor such a trial. But the overall truth is that Santorum offers no evidence, none whatever, to an objective observer of any ideological stripe whatever that he's qualified for the presidency. Neither intelligence, nor knowledge, nor managerial ability, nor accomplishment in decades of what we're pleased to call public service. Too, he's not representative of the mainstream of the country, will not appeal at all to the center he needs to win the presidency and is close to unelectable.

To fair numbers of the Republican faithful, the congeniality of his social views trumps his utter lack of qualifications for the job. His unacceptability to the broader electorate is less relevant to a lot of them than his ideological purity. His social views, arguably the center of his campaign, are more important to them than his more substantive positions, ill-considered and incoherent though they might be. And they view him, on that basis, more acceptable than Romney, who went into these contests soon after his victory in Florida over Gingrich, at the time the only challenger given credibility in the media.

So, the serial attempts by Republicans in this ridiculous primary field to make chicken salad out of chicken shit now move to Santorum's new credibility, at least within the GOP, and further damage Romney, who remains the likely candidate. The most committed Republican voters simply don't like Romney, don't trust him, and won't work for him on the ground the way they'll have to in a general election. I doubt that they'll do it solely because they think beating Obama is important enough to do it. In this way, he resembles McCain, who remained distrusted by many on the right though he pandered to them constantly in 2008, bringing Sarah Palin to national attention.

I can only hope that the country would marginalize, rather than embrace, a party capable of supporting such extremist views propounded by a man who so obviously shouldn't be taken seriously. And, were I Romney, I'd be more nervous about the general election. Fact is, Obama could run close to a complete campaign with YouTube clips taken from Romney's challengers alone, not to mention clips of Romney saying things at odds with his prior positions.

Well, I did mention them. Naughty Wombat...

Islamic Unity

2012-02-03T09:27:00.000-05:00

It should be obvious by now to all observers that Islam is no less heterogeneous than is Christianity. Shiites, Sunnis, Sufis, others. The largest Islamic countries by population are Indonesia and India. The ultra-orthodox (Wahhabi, Taliban and others) get most of the coverage, but aren't representative, much less dominant.

It should also be obvious that Iran's government and its people are quite two things, and frequently at odds. A reformist president was elected with 60% of the vote. THe recent reelection of Ahmadinejad was universally thought fraudulent, and demonstrations against it violently suppressed.

So, in a conference trying to bring the Arab Spring revolts under the rubric of reasserted, unified Islam, the Iranian government found itself, er, questioned:

--A Pakistani television reporter observed that some members of the Pakistani delegation had made vicious slurs against Shiites in their own country, and now mouthed mantras of pan-Islamic unity — presumably, he said, to hedge their bets or seek alliances with Tehran on political issues. “The talk here is of religion,” the reporter said. “But under the surface it is all raw politics.”

...The conference was widely reported in the Iranian news media, and posters bearing the words “Islamic Awakening” were plastered on walls near the conference hall. They were met in some Tehran quarters with dismissive sarcasm. One popular text message, circulated widely on cellphones around the capital, went: “If you’re having trouble sleeping at night, don’t worry: it’s not the high prices, poverty, or unemployment. You are suffering from Islamic Awakening.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/world/middleeast/effort-to-rebrand-arab-spring-backfires-in-iran.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp

And one very interesting, highly heterodox observation was made:

The Iranian effort to hold up the struggle against Israel as a crucible of Islamic unity comes across to many Arabs as doctrinaire and shopworn, no matter how strongly they sympathize with the Palestinian cause.

---I've long thought that much of Iranian foreign policy is directed as much to a domestic audience as a foreign one. I view their movement to develop nuclear weapons in a similar light.

Samuel Johnson's old observation is that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Ambrose Bierce, in 'The Devil's Dictionary', begged to differ, in that it's often the first. We've even seen once or twice in the United States that a government called for domestic unity before a foreign threat.

Many a deficiency in Arab governance has been subordinated to opposition to Israel, and to the United States as its primary supporter. It's unfortunate that Israeli behavior towards the Palestinians so often provides factual material to that end. But the focus on Israel has oft been used to divert Arabs and Iranians from the need for domestic reform.

In which light, the United States, and Israel, make a serious error when they gratuitously offer material supporting that narrative. A military attack on Iran, in particular, would be a catastrophic mistake, empowering the very people we'd like to see out of power. It would confirm the wrong narrative, and unify an increasingly fractious Islam around opposition to the Great Satans. Containment, and a persistent recognition in word and deed that the Iranian people and its government are at odds, and that the government, as in the Arab Spring states, will not survive indefinitely.

Beethoven: A Touch of the Tar Brush?

2012-02-03T09:02:00.000-05:00

The eldest Wombette this morning refers me to this fascinating discussion of the possibility that no less than Ludwig von Beethoven was, in fact, a black man:

http://open.salon.com/blog/ronp01/2009/09/27/the_african_heritage_of_ludwig_van_beethoven

It's interesting that the author, after reviewing the evidence, cites his use of rhythm as evidence of that African heritage, as though that, too, is hereditary. Not sure I'd go there myself. But it's entirely plausible that in a culture where a carpenter's son from the Middle East is oft portrayed as blond haired and blue eyed, a touch of the tar brush in one of its most revered composers might have been, er, whitewashed.

Some of the commentary on the music itself I find resonant. The second movement of the 32nd piano sonata, which the author cites, all of a sudden breaks into a rhythm that sounds a lot like ragtime. It's odd and quite wonderful, and is late in the sonata, which has a lot of sort of beautiful, mysterious music before it.

The comments are fun to read, too. One noted that the Obama 'birthers' are doing the same thing to history. And righties view any achievement by a black male, any at all, other than their natural sense of rhythm and jungle-bred athleticism, comes out of affirmative action. Not that they're racist...

English: Everybody's Second Language, Even Ours

2012-01-31T13:59:00.001-05:00

Lawrence Summers, who memorably suggested women less well endowed than men in the sciences and mathematics, has questioned the utility of learning foreign languages in a world where English is the de facto second language. The Times's 'Room for Debate' features debaters all of whom disagree, more politely than yr. obdt. svt., who's astonished that Summers is reveling in ignorance while being entirely full of shit:

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/01/29/is-learning-a-language-other-than-english-worthwhile

The writers focus on the actuality of language as used in world wide commerce, a broader venue than that of top-level macroeconomics. One also suggested the study of literature in its original language, rather than in translation, adds insights not otherwise available. I'd add to their views two reasons:

1. It's simply polite to acknowledge another's language as fully as worthy as one's own. I've been to countries speaking Spanish, French, Greek and Russian, and found invariably that the slightest, clumsiest attempt to speak the language generates huge amounts of goodwill. When not true, I think, it's because the next reaction is American disgust with the foreign national's inability to speak English, rather than to apologise for one's ignorance, ideally in the foreigner's native tongue. True, too, of multilingual immigrants here, of course. Why such an observation appalls those fearing English's position even in this country, rather than is seen as simple courtesy, is obvious only if considered in the context not of language choice but of bigotry and arrogance, traits all too often correctly ascribed to Americans.

2. There's no better way to truly understand one's own language than to study another, where structure, grammar, vocabulary and history are explicitly examined. An average Americans' competence in grammatically correct, correctly spelled written and spoken English is, well, less than complete. During the unlamented Busherregnum, some suggested that English was GW Bush's second language, requiring continuous translation for English speakers at the UN. Meanwhile, English has more foreign words in it than any other language, and, as it's increasingly used globally, will doubtless absorb more. Is our children learning? ROFLMAO...

The Word's Getting Around: Fromm, Reich and the Right

2012-01-29T15:41:00.000-05:00

I've posted here and elsewhere about the relevance of some of the old psychoanalytic literature, in particular Fromm's 'Escape From Freedom' and Reich's 'Mass Psychology of Fascism', to current rightie/Tea Party politics. Turns out others, believe it or not, have had the same idea. Here's one:

Journalist (Max--PW) Blumenthal documents the movement of conservative evangelicals from the political wings to center stage, delving into the psyches of those who now lead a Republican Party "fixated on abortion, homosexuality and abstinence education; resentful and angry." Guided by Eric Hoffer's 1951 cult classic The True Believer ("Faith in a holy cause, is to some extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves,") and Eric Fromm's 1941 psychoanalytical study of the Nazi movement (Escape from Freedom), Blumenthal suggests that childhood abuse has shaped the personalities of key leaders, including Focus on the Family guru James Dobson. Blumenthal is at his best examining these characters up close, including presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich and his born-again conversion; John Hagee, a Pentecostal pastor who lauded Hitler for "forcing the Jews to Israel"; Sarah Palin, whose political aspirations first came to her as part of a religious conversion; and evangelical pastor Ted Haggard, a self-proclaimed spiritual warrior caught in a relationship with a male prostitute. (Amazon blurb-PW)

http://www.amazon.com/Republican-Gomorrah-Inside-Movement-Shattered/dp/1568583982#reader_1568583982

It may be possible that he's explored the idea at greater length than yr. obdt. svt. Haven't read it yet; will...

Can I Get A Mittless? Episode III: The Dark Side Taught He Is

2012-01-29T14:45:00.000-05:00

We're informed today that Romney has a debate coach, who's taught him to be more aggressive:

The results of that strategy, carried out by a veteran squad of strategists and operatives assembled by Mr. Romney to deal with just this kind of moment, have been on striking display here.

By this weekend, Mr. Romney’s aides were on the offensive and increasingly confident, with some combination of their strategy and Mr. Gingrich’s own performance swinging polls in Mr. Romney’s direction. Even as it acknowledged the damage inflicted on Mr. Romney by the past several weeks, his team suggested that it had learned a lesson about never letting up on rivals, especially if Mr. Romney wins the nomination and confronts Mr. Obama in the general election.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/us/politics/the-calculations-that-led-romney-to-the-warpath.html?hp

One of Romney's amiable traits is doing, saying, believing anything it takes. Does anybody think Romney will look any more genuine out of calculated embrace of aggressive debate? Perhaps, next to an out of control Gingrich, but next to a measured, confident Obama? In a manner consistent with the rest of his smarmy, hypocritical, lying self?

Somebody, somewhere, tell him it ain't fair...Can I get a Mittless? Just a little bit louder...

Republicans: The World as Pulp Science Fiction

2012-01-29T11:33:00.000-05:00

Newt Gingrich has cited Asimov's 'Foundation' trilogy, in which psychohistorians use their science to guide human destiny for its own good from a secret base. He's also talked of building a colony on the moon. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney, asked to name his favorite novel, cited L. Ron Hubbard's 'Battlefield: Earth', in which alien conquerors of Earth meet their match in small bands of human resistance fighters.

I grew up reading all the science fiction I could find, and close to memorized Asimov's early work. He, himself, was an indefatigable champion of science and the power of human reason, at least in his early books. So, the psychohistorians, who, enabled by disinterested scientific insight, via covert manipulations led the blind masses to a better future. I put it that way, well, you might have a question about it. So, in fact, did Asimov. In another of his books, 'The End of Eternity', a group sitting outside of time, again enabled by science, manipulated humanity's history by changing reality without changing themselves, eventually revealed as crippling human achievement, no wiser or more decent than any of the rest of us; (spoiler alert) at the end of the book one last manipulation of reality destroyed them. And, in Asimov's later books, contingent events rather than human ingenuity control events, even superseding the original orientation of the 'Foundation' trilogy: the unexplained, spontaneous appearance of a mind-reading, mind-controlling robot with pure, decent interests in promoting humanity, the chance appearance of a similar mutation amongst human beings.

Hubbard's books, meanwhile, I find unreadable even as pulp entertainment. Trust me that I don't have high standards in such matters, and am capable of enjoying a science fiction novel which would make, say, Green Lantern comic books look like 'Notes From Underground'. But a Mormon, of all people, publicly embracing a book with such a plot, written by the man who founded Scientology, beggars the imagination.

Pulp science fiction, like the Westerns of a prior generation, is a genre aimed mostly at adolescent boys. John W. Campbell, perhaps the most influential editor/publisher in SF, made this explicit. Meanwhile, just as the odd Western transcended the genre's limits and became high art--'The Searchers', 'High Noon', 'Treasure of the Sierra Madre' and others come to mind--so, too did some authors make science fiction more than it was/is at baseline. But the overall appeal was based on uncomplicated, mostly male characters, enabled by strength of ego and special talents/abilities to triumph over unambiguous evil.

There's a strong libertarian streak in pulp SF, of which Heinlein's 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' is perhaps the classic example. Again, this suits adolescent boys down to the ground: get off our backs, let us stand up for ourselves, freedom and independence will unshackle our greatness. And, as with adolescent boys much of whose freedom relies on adults paying for car insurance and food and the like, so, too, libertarians reject the necessity of common enterprise arising out of collective action, in the absence of private action, in mitigating problems or addressing unmet needs.

Which brings me to Ayn Rand, beloved of Alan Greenspan and many others, whose novels I find well written as pulp science fiction, with cardboard characters standing in for archetypes, who also appeals to adolescents: few boys never succumb, at one time or another as their personalities and egos develop, to the notion that they are Men (sic) of the Mind.

We now live in a time when Romney, Gingrich and Greenspan, and most of the right, explicitly embrace ideas that are adolescent to the core, have not developed into an adult grasp of reality, and which center on their own virtues and just rewards, and others' evils and inadequacies and the just deserts arising therefrom. It is possible, I'd hope, to be conservative, and, nonetheless, a grown up. I see no evidence of it these days.

Should the world really be run by men who never finished emotional high school?

Poetry Corner: Two Limericks by WH Auden

2012-01-26T16:05:00.002-05:00

As poets have mournfully sung,
Death takes the innocent young,
The rolling in money,
The screamingly funny
And those who are very well hung.

----

A friend, who is not an ascetic,
Said, 'Ireland, my dear, is magnetic.
'There are all these elves
'Who just OFFER themselves:
'Quite small, but, still, most sympathetic.'

Rope-a-Dope

2012-01-26T16:03:00.000-05:00

John Quiggin, in a post well worth reading which attacks Cowen's apologies for rising inequality and falling socioeconomic mobility in the USA, makes the following observation:

I don’t buy the 11-dimensional chess version of this story, but the slapdown of Obama’s painfully sincere attempts to reach across the aisle was exactly what was needed.

http://crookedtimber.org/2012/01/25/how-not-to-defend-entrenched-inequality/

I agree. I don't think it was Obama's plan to invite an obduracy which would legitimise a more combative advocacy of his positions. Further, I think it long overdue that he counteract Republican views with an alternative vision which, in addition to being more humane, more restorative of a social contract and more likely to improve the economy, is actually based on fact and logic. But nobody can say that he didn't try. And now, he's set out an agenda which, in all likelihood, will be blocked entirely, without anything of substance in its stead, and will get to talk about it all campaign long. Meanwhile, Gingrich and Romney, tearing into each other, legitimise a Democratic attack on either on identical grounds, with ample opportunity to put up YouTube clips using them as surrogates.

It's worth pointing out, too, that Iran's theocrats rebuffed Obama's offer of talks, legitimising a sterner stance not just from Obama, but from the rest of the world. In the context of Obama's recognition, made explicit in his Cairo speech, that the Iranian people and Iran's government are quite two things. Highly important and, assuming (a big assumption) that neither the USA nor Israel use force, simultaneously opposing the government and offering Iran's people hope. A bigger contrast with Bush could hardly be imagined.

It's About Power

2012-01-22T20:37:00.000-05:00

Newt Gingrich won in South Carolina, carrying most of the evangelical/fundamentalist voters concerned about 'family values'. His personal life, of course, is reprehensible.

The two don't contradict each other at all on a deeper level. Bertrand Russell said that the Catholic Church loves hypocrisy, in that the act of hypocrisy recognises and cements the Church's power rather than challenge it. Wilhelm Reich's 'Mass Psychology of Fascism' and Erich Fromm's 'Escape From Freedom' explored fascism from a psychoanalytic point of view, as, amongst other things, a confluence of power and sexuality. The astounding psychosexual carnival that successive scandals involving fundamentalists and right wing politicians have afforded us can be understood in these terms.

So, Gingrich, who's led an entirely despicable personal life, becomes the candidate of family values, and Obama, whose personal and family life is exemplary, is bitterly opposed. It isn't about family life. It's about power, holding on to power, reversing the process of sharing it with others thought unworthy of it.

Rescuing Judaism From Jews

2012-01-20T10:19:00.000-05:00

One could write the history of Christianity as a series of efforts by some of the greatest human beings who ever lived to rescue Christ from Christians. We're now treated to the baleful effects of dogmatic, intolerant fundamentalism in Islam and, now, in Judaism, all three of the Abrahamic religions. An eight year old girl, walking to religious instruction, was spat upon in Israel by ultra-orthodox Jews holding her insufficiently covered. And, too, they demand separation of the sexes on buses and elsewhere in the public sphere. Things have gotten bad enough that an orthodox rabbi takes them to task in the Times this morning:

...It seems, then, that a religious tenet that begins with men’s sexual thoughts ends with men controlling women’s bodies.

This is not a problem unique to Judaism. But the Talmud, the basis for Jewish law, offers a perhaps surprising answer: It places the responsibility for controlling men’s licentious thoughts about women squarely on the men.

Put more plainly, the Talmud says: It’s your problem, sir; not hers...

So the responsibility is now on the women. To protect men from their sexual thoughts, women must remove their femininity from their public presence, ridding themselves of even the smallest evidence of their own sexuality.

All of this is done in the name of the Torah and Jewish law.

But it’s actually a complete perversion. The Talmud, the foundation of Jewish law, acknowledges that men can be sexually aroused by women and is indeed concerned with sexual thoughts and activity outside of marriage. But it does not tell women that men’s sexual urges are their responsibility. Rather, both the Talmud and the later codes of Jewish law make that demand of men.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/opinion/ultra-orthodox-jews-and-the-modesty-fight.html?hp

Just about every belief system, or absence of belief, that human beings have ever come up with can coexist with humanism, decency, generosity, courage and love, or with bigotry, dogmatism, hatred, greed and lust for power over others. Naziism, and other ideologies based on racism, are perhaps an exception, and they, too, have arisen out of a religious as well as an atheistic framework. In so noting, I take issue with Sam Harris and other militant atheists, who hold even liberal religion as oxymoronic, inevitably legitimizing fundamentalist evil. Liberal religious believers have, in fact, fought evil in their religion's name for thousands of years, with courage and at the risk or cost of their own lives. Some have even held Jesus Himself such a one.

The vitally important lesson of Naziism is that we all, all of us, being human, can be Nazis, and that we must recognise and fight that, accepting that none of us is immune to the temptations of evil. The first thought should never be about the failings of others, but, rather, of those of oneself. That, too, is a lesson of the history of just about any religion. Liberal believers, and liberal unbelievers, can share a common ground worth defending, one which recognises a common humanity even amongst pagans, in Israel, in Saudi Arabia and in the United States. During the Republican primary season, the appalling rhetoric over abortion and the rights of women and gays remind me, yet again, that American exceptionalism doesn't extend to proof against the evils of belief. And reviling all Jews, or Christians, or Muslims, based on their fundamentalists' rhetoric and actions, is not only wrong on its face, but extends and ossifies the hatred which allows spitting on children, and sometimes killing them.

One Nation, Under Money

2012-01-18T11:43:00.000-05:00

Kevin Kruse, of the Princeton history department, reminds us that people have found it useful to conflate Christianity, free enterprise and personal wealth, while discrediting government, before:

...Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Mr. Fifield and his allies advanced a new blend of conservative religion, economics and politics that one observer aptly anointed “Christian libertarianism.” Mr. Fifield distilled his ideology into a simple but powerful phrase — “freedom under God.” With ample support from corporate patrons and business lobbies like the United States Chamber of Commerce, his gospel of godly capitalism soon spread across the country through personal lectures, weekly radio broadcasts and a monthly magazine.

In 1951, the campaign culminated in a huge Fourth of July celebration of the theme. Former President Herbert C. Hoover and Gen. Douglas MacArthur headlined an organizing committee of conservative all-stars, including celebrities like Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan, but largely comprising business titans like Conrad Hilton, J. C. Penney, Harvey Firestone Jr. and J. Howard Pew.

In an extensive public relations campaign, they encouraged communities to commemorate Independence Day with “freedom under God” ceremonies, using full-page newspaper ads trumpeting the connection between faith and free enterprise. They also held a nationwide sermon contest on the theme, with clergymen competing for cash. Countless local events were promoted by a national “Freedom Under God” radio program, produced with the help of the filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille, hosted by Jimmy Stewart and broadcast on CBS..

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/for-god-so-loved-the-1-percent/?hp

For the past couple of thousand years, Christianity has been large, diverse and unsettled enough so that its adherents, in Christ's name, have enlisted the Bible and God in service of empire, war, slavery, genocide, imperialism, power, freedom, love, generosity, courage, caring, and, in fact, just about anything human. Still true. And there have always been, are, and always will be those who rescue Christ from some of the Christians, finding depth there unacknowledged in a facile interpretation in service of human interests. Me, I find it hard to construe financial success as a goal or result of Christian teachings. Some ministers concentrate more on Revelation than on 1 Corinthians 13. But they're both in there. I think it important, at a time when atheism is being promoted in the public sphere amongst, most often, the left, to participate in the formation of a Christian narrative more inclusive, decent and perceptive than one which rationalizes the inequalities of wealth and poverty which pose and result from urgent social problems. Christ has been monopolized before. Wasn't pretty, then or now. Wouldn't mind it, as even a gentle agnostic, were the God our nation is under that of, say, Kierkegaard, Pope John XXIII, Oscar Romero, ML King, Dorothy Day and many others...

Physician, Leave That Bagel

2012-01-17T09:25:00.000-05:00

The Times reports today that the Obama administration will require pharmaceutical companies, equipment maker and the like to disclose payments to physicians. These payments can run from a bagel and lox lunch spread to consulting and lecture fees in the millions:

Many researchers have found evidence that such payments can influence doctors’ treatment decisions and contribute to higher costs by encouraging the use of more expensive drugs and medical devices.

Consumer advocates and members of Congress say patients may benefit from the new standards, being issued by the government under the new health care law. Officials said the disclosures increased the likelihood that doctors would make decisions in the best interests of patients, without regard to the doctors’ financial interests.

Large numbers of doctors receive payments from drug and device companies every year — sometimes into the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars — in exchange for providing advice and giving lectures. Analyses by The New York Times and others have found that about a quarter of doctors take cash payments from drug or device makers and that nearly two-thirds accept routine gifts of food, including lunch for staff members and dinner for themselves.

The Times has found that doctors who take money from drug makers often practice medicine differently from those who do not and that they are more willing to prescribe drugs in risky and unapproved ways, such as prescribing powerful antipsychotic medicines for children.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/health/policy/us-to-tell-drug-makers-to-disclose-payments-to-doctors.html?pagewanted=1&hp

This move is long overdue. Such emoluments are ubiquitous, and pose a moral hazard all too often bowed to, and sometimes not even acknowledged. What's a bagel?

The subject of marketing of such things to physicians is, politely put, a target-rich environment. For instance, drug companies routinely recruit cheerleaders, pretty ladies with a positive attitude, as saleswomen:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/28/business/28cheer.html?scp=1&sq=drug%20sales%20cheerleaders&st=cse

Another, perhaps more morally hazardous example: prostate cancer can be treated with radiation or surgery, or, in the case of a slow-growing tumor, even ignored. Specialized radiation units are being marketed, and sold, to the very urological surgeons who usually make the decision regarding treatment. The DaVinci surgical robot has become a marketing tool for both urologists and hospitals eager to increase their market share of prostate treatment without clear benefit over skilled surgery (or sometimes radiation or observation). Tidy profits are made, the units are sometimes leased and always depreciated on taxes by their owners. If you own a hammer, you look for a nail, especially if the nail is worth thousands of dollars to you. Not a part of the free enterprise, profit driven health care system that appeals to a patient interested in an unbiased decision with his needs unambiguously at the core of it.

Can I Get A Mittless? Episode II: The Charity of the Sith

2012-01-16T12:19:00.000-05:00

Told by a woman at a rally in South Carolina that she was struggling to make ends meet, Mitt Romney reached into his pocket, found $50 or so and gave it to her.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/14/romney-gives-cash-to-struggling-supporter-at-rally/?hpt=hp_t2

Those who have money and don't have empathy will applaud this as evidence of Romney's generous soul and impulses. The 99% of the rest of us will recognise the gesture as that of a lord and master demanding unwonted admiration from a serf. A newsclip of this one should be made into a continuous loop and played by the Democrats, in exactly the way Dukakis in a tank was transformed into a national joke.

And not just an astounding act in and of itself, but an utterly incompetent political act on the most pragmatic, amoral level. This is on the same level as citing 'Battlefield: Earth' as a favorite novel, which Romney also did. In both cases, he should have known better. But, then, the lord and master doesn't have to know better, really...

Remember: Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

2012-01-16T11:26:00.000-05:00

When he died, he was working for striking unionized municipal trash haulers, looking for economic justice, and against the war in Vietnam, looking for international justice. He had a dream. A larger dream than he's oft credited with, one encompassing all of us, a world full of us. The content of his character. worth remembering, that.

The Theocratic Nuclear Menace

2012-01-13T11:05:00.000-05:00

An interlocutor asked me how I could possibly not be concerned about Iran's potential emergence as a nuclear power.

I am, of course, worried. It does worry me. Imagine: a state controlled by ultra-orthodox believers, feeling itself entitled by word of God to their nationhood, defiant of world opinion,showing itself capable of ruthless violence using weapons of major war in crowded cities and destroying infrastructure without a second thought, armed with nuclear weapons. Merciful heavens...

Poetry Corner: Two Tramps in Mud Time

2012-01-12T20:11:00.002-05:00

Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard,
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily "Hit them hard!"
I knew pretty well why he had dropped behind
And let the other go on a way.
I knew pretty well what he had in mind:
He wanted to take my job for pay.

Good blocks of oak it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.
The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good,
That day, giving a loose my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom.
It is snowing a flake; and he half knew
Winter was only playing possum.
Except in color he isn't blue,
But he wouldn't advise a thing to blossom.

The water for which we may have to look
In summertime with a witching wand,
In every wheelrut's now a brook,
In every print of a hoof a pond.
Be glad of water, but don't forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth.

The time when most I loved my task
The two must make me love it more
By coming with what they came to ask.
You'd think I never had felt before
The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip of earth on outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

Out of the wood two hulking tramps
(From sleeping God knows where last night,
But not long since in the lumber camps).
They thought all chopping was theirs of right.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
The judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax
They had no way of knowing a fool.

Nothing on either side was said.
They knew they had but to stay their stay
And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man's work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right--agreed.

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.

Robert Frost

Personal Responsibility

2012-01-10T22:08:00.000-05:00

Righties have been talking a lot about personal responsibility. May have the temerity to offer three possible responses to any given problem this fraught, fallen world poses to hapless Homo (sic) sapiens living here:

1. Ain't it awful? The sweep of history is fixed; the problems too great; the forces too powerful; the doom inevitable. Pass the lemon meringue pie and the Chardonnay...

2. Ain't they awful? The spongers, parasites, criminals, out to steal our money, corrupt our daughters and sell the country to heathens. Back in a while, dear; I'm off to Home Depot to buy some more hollow-point 'Maim-N-Kill' ammunition and a few more alligators for the moat...

3. What can I do to help?

Seems to me that only one of these involves an adult notion of responsibility. Which reinforces my notion that a person calling for another person to exert more personal responsibility is putting the cart before the horse, confusing motes with beams in evaluating intraocular foreign bodies, and, in general, being a poopyhead...

The Voters Speak

2012-01-10T21:53:00.000-05:00

A smattering of caucus attendees in Iowa, a state with a population 2/5 that of New York City, has given Romney, Santorum and Paul legitimacy in the media horse race. Today, New Hampshire, a state with a population 1/6 that of New York City's, speaks. Both states, also, are distinctly people-of-color-challenged.

Romney was attacked as saying he 'likes to fire people', referring to his experience as a M&A vulture at Bain Capital. This was a distortion. He said it in terms of demanding that he have the right to choose or dismiss a 'health care provider', a right which the Obama health insurance reform bill supposedly threatens. That, of course, is utter falsehood. He should have been called on that.

Yo, Mitt? Wombat here...

Wombat's Laws: Science Marches On

2012-01-09T10:18:00.000-05:00

Several years ago, I advanced the Wombat Law of Homophobia: the louder and uglier the speech, the more likely closeted. Recent experimental results from the Large Bullshit Collider (LBC) suggest a wider perspective is necessary. In the spirit of scientific inquiry, I submit the Wombat General Theory of Bloviation: the louder, more certain, more dogmatic and more intolerant the bloviation, the more likely hypocrisy or denial/projection are at work. The key experimental observation made my my colleagues at the LBC imply that hypocrisy and denial may, in fact, be two manifestations of the same fundamental particles, dubbed 'coprotrons'...

Can I Get A Mittless?

2012-01-08T12:07:00.000-05:00

Today's the first installment of a planned series on the subject of Mitt Romney, who has the courage of the convictions he holds today. He demonstrated in favor of the military draft during the war in Vietnam. Himself, he earned a religious deferment by doing Mormon missionary work in....

Wait for it...

Paris, France.

Yes. A millionaire's son, spreading the word in the City of Light. Every Vietnam veteran is doubtless grateful that he/she wasn't subject to the horrors...

C'mon, Baby; Let's Do The Twist

2012-01-08T10:31:00.000-05:00

There's a fascinating article about injuries arising out of yoga practice, even careful yoga practice, in the Times today. I grew up in the fifties and sixties, when yoga was oft thought of as an alternative to western sports and exercises, integrating mind and body, resulting in spiritual as well as physical growth. The obvious contrast is with something like relentless strength training, the close to 100% injury rate in American football, with its paramilitary gestalt. Turns out you can get a stroke, or a bad spine problem, or other things, if you do yoga. Not always, obviously, but there it is.

The article closes with the words of one of the most prominent American yoga practitioners and teachers:

...‘Asana is not a panacea or a cure-all. In fact, if you do it with ego or obsession, you’ll end up causing problems.’ A lot of people don’t like to hear that.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/how-yoga-can-wreck-your-body.html?src=me&ref=general

That there ego/obsession business, seems to me, could be a problem inside or outside yoga, with any exercise, or, for that matter, just about anything Homo (sic) sapiens does: the idea is to confront ego, transcend it, master the obsessiveness arising out of it, to better appreciate the rest of the universe, those other carbon-based life forms, and your place in and amongst them. You do that, through basket-weaving, solving differential equations, walking in the woods, loving a good woman, anything, you're part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

Which brings up Ayn Rand, or would, if there weren't only so much fun you can have in one day...

Again, The Lesser of Two Evils

2012-01-03T21:58:00.000-05:00

Someone on Facebook who thinks that my willingness to vote for Obama over any conceivable Republican, despite my disagreements with him, makes me a stupid fucking un-American idiot, and has decided I'm no longer worthy of either friendship or conversation. I'll have to read an extra chapter of DeToqueville tonight to get to sleep. It's going to be an ugly year, and uglier than even it has to be.

It must, I repeat, must be possible to work with those with whom one disagrees. It must also be possible to do so while being clear and true to one's own beliefs. These need not be in conflict, and, in fact, should not. It's possible to be clear that one is compromising, doing some of the work that needs doing, while militating for doing more of it. The alternative is irrelevance or totalitarianism. Neither are acceptable. History is unkind to the notion that withholding a vote for the lesser evil does anything other than empowering the greater evil.

All those who are sure that Humphrey wouldn't have been an improvement over Nixon, nor Carter over Reagan, nor Gore over GW Bush should really, really rethink their inclination to withhold their vote from Obama. Please...

A Nuanced Assessment of Gingrich's Views on Separation of Powers

2011-12-27T17:51:00.000-05:00

That Newt Gingrich is at all taken seriously as a human being, much less an intellectual, by anybody, is appalling. The runaway winner of last week's 'You can't make this shit up' award was a column which tried to salvage Gingrich's years in disgrace by comparing them to Churchill's in the political wilderness, suggesting that pre-1938 Churchill had a low reputation indeed, despised and rejected, that he blossomed into a titan only thereafter, and that Gingrich at his nadir, or at present, could be seen similarly. Only the most recent, of course, of Republicans' ever more ridiculous and incredible attempts to make chicken salad out of chicken shit. I feel like shaking them, saying, for the love of anything you care about, listen to yourselves...

With respect to his respect for separation of powers and checks and balances and the rule of law, Montesquieu, Madison, Jefferson, like that, well, it's been a staple of Republican rhetoric for some time that the Supreme Court engages in unwonted judicial activism, results-oriented jurisprudence, rejection of stare decisis, and resort to ideology over sober legal reasoning. For a while now, I've been agreeing with that position. If you haven't read Justice Stevens' magisterial dissent in the Citizens United case, it's well worth a look: you need dental records and DNA to identify what's left of the majority's opinion, and for legal writing is unusually clear and direct

http://yubanet.com/usa/Justice-Stevens-Dissenting-Opinion-in-Citizens-United-v-Federal-Election-Commission.php#.Tu-JfFZki7s

Which makes the timing of his pronouncement on the subject odd, don't it? So, there are a few reasons why he might have made it:
1. The primary-election base has been drinking this as mother's milk for a long time, and he's positioning himself as the non-Romney. He doesn't need fact of logic to do that; he's laying down a social marker rather than actually contributing to the debate. His rather comical signature on the life-purity pledge is exactly similar.
2. He's anticipating the reelection of Obama and a couple of more appointments, and making rhetoric delegitimizing and rejecting the authority of an 'Obama Court' before the fact, with prescience which he hopes will earn him credibility as a thinker and fighter. After all, it's what the right has been doing with respect to the Obama presidency. And, as with the presidency, this isn't 'mere' disagreement, even violent disagreement, while accepting that they hold the offices to which they were duly elected and/or appointed. This is a rejection of their right to hold office, of any authority they exert consequent to that office. Not, one would think, the sort of thing an intelligent, well educated PhD historian would be glib about.
3. He really is that fucking stupid, vain, hypocritical, demagogic, and evil; a low-born whoreson canker'd nematode, a poopyhead of the first water; a fucknozzle and a shitwhistle; a man whose ethics and intelligence, were they elastic, wouldn't suffice to make suspenders for a cockroach, and whose sociopathic, narcissistic egotism is as inconspicuous and easily glossed over as a tarantula walking on a piece of angel food cake. Not that he arouses strong feelings in me.

Wouldn't rule any of these out. And they're hardly mutually exclusive...

Tanned, Rested and Ready

2011-12-21T10:26:00.000-05:00

I've been away for awhile, and apologise for that, but the wealth of material out there requires that i do something other than whine about it all by myself. So, I'll give my readers, all seven of them, the unparalleled opportunity of listening to me whine, and whine back should they be so inclined. The post below on Tom Friedman is new. I'll add more when, as I read the papers, the mood strikes me. That'll be often, i'm afraid...

Dear Mr. Friedman: Suck On This

2011-12-21T09:02:00.000-05:00

In response to Tom Friedman's column today:

Dear Mr. Friedman:

No, sir, you did not support the Iraq war because we might transform, or collaborate in transforming, Iraq into a democracy. You said, in your column right here, that after 9/11 we needed to do something to show the Arab world and Al-Qaeda that we were still capable of strong military response, and that Iraq was as good a place as any. It came down to, in one of your columns, nothing more nor less than 'because we could', and, as 'winning progressive' points out above, in one of your TV interviews, a schoolyard bully's 'Suck on this!' You do not get off as easily as you would like.

Your 'And, of course, Iraqis paid dearly as well' is appallingly glib. Hundreds of thousands dead, millions of refugees, destroyed infrastructure, looted antiquities, the movement into the power vacuum of people with no interest whatever in democracy. You don't mention Abu Ghraib, white phosphorus bombs, or the $9 billion in cash that vanished. The improbable empowerment of the Iranian theocrats in a country with which they fought a savage, pointless war.

And you didn't mention in your column the name of a single dissenter, offering that opinion before the war. There were a few. Some inspect nuclear weapons sites for a living. Some write in the very newspaper for which you write. One, even, serves to this day as president of the United States.

Not well played, Mr. Friedman. Not well played at all. It won't wash.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/opinion/friedman-the-end-for-now.html?_r=1

Mogadishu is Off the Grid

2011-07-01T11:26:00.002-04:00

Libertarians fantasize that they don't need anybody, and that every social interaction other than on their terms is not merely unnecessary but equivalent to slavery. Were their fantasies actualized, they'd quickly find that common action is necessary against common problems, and that restraint of private actors' power is fully as necessary as restriction on public actors' power.

That has, of course, happened before...

Utilitarian Cannibals: You Are What You Eat

2011-06-15T08:39:00.000-04:00

Watching Michael Sandel's lectures on justice at Harvard, where he discussed utilitarianism via a case in which a group of shipwrecked survivors, adrift in a lifeboat, sacrificed the life of the weakest amongst them, sustaining themselves on his flesh, were rescued and then tried for murder. Had the following points to add to his limited half-hour discussion:

1. The decision not to act is itself an action. No getting around the responsibility to make choices. None.
2. One can rescue Bentham by suggesting that an 'enlightened' view of utility involves dire consequences to the happiness of a nation, and its citizens as individuals, not just now, in this specific case, but going forward indefinitely in time, applied to all cases, of the notion that murder can be acceptable in some circumstances, to the extent that one of the most fundamental laws of that nation is violated. Bentham himself might have voted for conviction out of a utilitarian argument. (He was at pains to define pleasure more broadly than one usually does.) One can, therefore, reject murder consequentially as well as categorically. The two might well not be entirely mutually exclusive.
3. The question then begged is how to evaluate the justice of a law itself: whether Victor Hugo's Inspector Javert, from 'Les Miserables', seeing the necessity of law as a constraint on individual conduct, is justified in hounding Jean Valjean over a stolen loaf of bread, whether Supreme Court decisions such as Dred Scott v Sanford and Miranda v Arizona carry equal requirements that they be followed, whether a citizen of Nazi Germany should follow laws passed by a government clearly supported by a majority of its citizens.
4. Using these arguments, one can reduce the case, as is often done in law school, to a question of the moral basis of the law itself, and the duty of a citizen to conduct him/herself within it. An obvious contrast to Hugo here is Robert Bolt's Sir Thomas More, from 'A Man For All Seasons', who sees law as a bulwark against the Devil, acting through a fallen humanity. Such an argument transcends the actors' duty in the cannibalism case to embrace the duties of all citizens, which obviously introduces political philosophy alongside of, and complementary to, moral philosophy.

The series of lectures is well worth the time, and is online:
http://www.justiceharvard.org/

Nursing Homes: They Don't Have To Take You In

2011-05-11T08:08:00.000-04:00

The Times this morning reviews that talk about cutting Medicaid will affect more people than those parasitic poor brown folk: many nursing home patients depend on it:

The House plan would turn Medicaid, which provides health coverage for the poor through a combination of federal and state money, into a block grant program for states. The federal government would give lump sums to states, which in turn would be given more flexibility and independence over use of the money, though the plan does not spell out what the federal requirements would be.

Beginning in 2013, these grants would increase annually at the rate of inflation, with adjustments for population growth, a rate far below that of inflation for health care costs. As a result, states, which have said that they cannot afford to keep up with the program’s costs, are likely to scale back coverage. Such a reduction, critics fear, could have a disproportionate effect on Medicaid spending for nursing home care for the elderly or disabled...

According to the Congressional Budget Office, in the 2010 fiscal year, 77 percent of people enrolled in Medicaid were children and families, while 23 percent were elderly or disabled. But 64 percent of Medicaid spending was for older Americans and people with disabilities, while 36 percent went to children and families.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, which analyzes health care issues, 7 of 10 nursing home residents are on Medicaid, in large part because even middle-class patients often run through their savings while in a nursing home and turn to the entitlement program.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/health/policy/11medicaid.html?hpw

This is a huge deal. Typically, a middle class aged person goes into a nursing home, where the meter runs quite quickly. They start on Medicare, and, after they spend down their assets and become poor, they go on Medicaid, which lets them stay in the nursing home, and lets the nursing home stay in business. You cut medicaid, not so much. You turn Medicaid into block grants to states hurting for money, and likely to use it elsewhere, worse yet.

Which means that a lot of old folk would be out of nursing homes. Their kids' houses, bank accounts and lives are poorly, if at all, equipped for it. Visiting nurse agencies, home physical therapy, home visits by doctors? You may say I'm a dreamer...

Currently the aging parent's finances are independent (mostly) of the adult child's. That'll change very, very quickly if the Medicaid cuts go through, unless they're content to leave Granny out on the street. What will also change very, very quickly is the sort of financial guarantees from patients and their families that nursing homes will demand before admitting a new resident.

These people vote. They won't like this at all.

Yogi In Middle School

2011-05-09T11:45:00.002-04:00

My daughter, describing a classmate in eighth grade:

'She's one of the popular girls; that's why nobody likes her'

Choose Wisely

2011-05-07T08:45:00.000-04:00

I've been arguing against capital punishment for half a century, with little to show for it. I'll leave it at this: if one has a choice, one should not kill. I don't see it as a leap of logic at all to differentiate ourselves from murderers, and societies condoning murder, by making a choice not to kill when we can make that choice. Nor do I see it as a leap of logic, or flawed logic, to differentiate a society casually and brutally employing show trials, if even those, and executions, from one under the rule of law, restraining a state's power, requiring documentation of a crime and exacting punishment from those found guilty. Quite the contrary: I find the logic inescapable. That Al Qaeda and Bin Laden pose current threats that a defeated Germany did not only adds to my argument: recourse to the rule of law is a mark of courage rather than weakness, of confidence in one's values, and would resound throughout the world as an alternative to non-state actors', or state-sponsored, terror, brutality and murder. I believe such a course to be profoundly in America's national interests, even narrowly construed. Again, half a century's experience with the topic allows the safe prediction that many will disagree. But there it is.

We had a choice at Nuremburg, and tried the Nazis, affording them defense counsel. Israel had a choice with Eichmann, tried him, affording him defense counsel, and executed him. We might, or might not, have had a choice with Bin Laden. His capture was necessary, and if there was no other way to capture him than dead, it was worth doing. If we had a choice, which I don't know and have a hard time opining half a world and a week and a half away, we should have captured him and put him on trial for his crimes. And it is always, always unseemly to celebrate death, even if necessary. I predict disagreement on this point, over a gap that will not be closed by further argument.

Ding Dong, The Witch is Us

2011-05-06T17:32:00.001-04:00

How to have dealt with Bin Laden? The question, once asked, reflects far less Bin Laden's status as a moral agent than ours. It is, after all, our actions which we choose in an elective context, and, therefore, must take personal responsibility for.

The notion of war crimes recalls to me the entirely despicable Curtis LeMay's observation that a victorious Japan would have tried him for war crimes. Meanwhile, Robert Jackson remains amongst the most revered of American jurists, and his concurrence in Youngstown, oft cited as one of the finest ever advanced in the Supreme Court, is a fascinating book end to his Nuremburg role.

I remain of the opinion that Nuremburg was necessary, that the Nazi crimes were to some extent sui generis and required unambiguous documentation for the historical record. The comparison with the Soviet treatment of Stalin, or the current Chinese treatment of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as apartheid ended, is, to my mind, only to the benefit of Nuremburg.

More so, I deeply believe terrorist acts to be unworthy (if that's the right word) of being defined as acts of war rather than crimes. And crimes are to be defined, their commission demonstrated, their perpetrators identified beyond a reasonable doubt and required to pay a price. War is far, far less defined than criminal justice, and invariably involves behavior on both sides which, outside the context of a war, would itself be criminal. A break from the formulation of 'war on terror', without in the least relaxing vigilance with a view towards prevention and punishment of the guilty, would, to my mind, be amongst the most helpful changes in our policy even with respect to our national interests narrowly and amorally construed, much less a renunciation of the perception that fighting terrorism requires terror. To that extent, an imperfect Nuremburg trial, or, with respect to a single actor, a far more appropriate exercise, mirroring the Eichmann trial, seems to me in order.

Bin Laden required capture. I am ambivalent about the violation of Pakistani sovereignty but reluctantly concede that it was necessary and, perhaps, in view of Pakistan's obvious complicity, even desirable. I would have had no problem with Bin Laden's death during his capture were there no other alternative. That isn't clear to me yet. I have great difficulty with exultant celebration, of the sort that one sign in my town rather revealingly summed up as 'Ding dong, Osama's dead.' Munchkins, indeed.

Those Dastardly Teachers and Their Thuggish Unions

2011-05-06T17:21:00.000-04:00

Our local paper last week, appalled, exposed our town's teachers' union as guilty of (prepare yourself to be shocked) the excesses of spending money on a couple of newspaper ads and extending a speaking invitation to Ralph Nader. I wrote this letter in response to their story, which they printed unaltered:

Dear Editor:

It is indeed outrageous that the teachers' union, as one party to a contentious negotiation, seeks to put its views before the public via a couple of half-page newspaper ads and a speaking invitation to Ralph Nader. This sort of thuggish political intimidation shouldn't be tolerated. Only Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, most of the Republican Party, and other lonely patriots such as the Waltons of Wal-Mart and the Koch brothers (six of the world's top 30 richest billionaires on Forbes' list), balance unions' relentless zeal and enormous financial resources in pushing their members' agenda.

I'm grateful that politicians are demanding that unions and their members be denied fundamental rights to contract negotiation and collective bargaining. If prior contracts overly favor one of the two sides, the obvious remedy isn't more competence and courage from the other side, but a denial of long-established rights to the previously successful side. Anybody appalled by excessive government power would agree.

What shocking excess will the union resort to next? Merciful heavens. I'm sure that, as always, the vast majority of our town's voters and taxpayers will attend Town Meeting to make their voices heard.

(Full disclosure: my daughter, now majoring in linguistic anthropology, had many excellent teachers in )xxxx( High School, including )yyyyy(, who, in response to planned decreases in staffing, benefits and funding, and increased class sizes, had the nerve to suggest that he and his colleagues were being asked to do more for less. Another brazen attempt to suppress debate by stating facts. Disgraceful.)

Meta-Honesty

2011-04-18T09:29:00.000-04:00

A Times article advances the notion that such things as Barry Bonds' steroid use and sharp, cheating tax accounting arise in part out of a sense of fairness/unfairness, and not just simple greed and sociopathy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/weekinreview/17chump.html?ref=weekinreview

It's an old observation that you're stuck playing at the gaming table of the world, that, while you're responsible for playing your hand as best you can, you don't deal, you don't cut the deck, you don't make the rules and you can't leave the game. That the rules might just have been written without your interests in mind, whether by Job's God or a legislator who, having been bought by Commodore Vanderbilt, stays bought, is as old as humanity. The question is whether those rules are themselves so unjust, so unfair, as to be illegitimate and therefore exert no moral authority over human action and can be ignored.

This was a common stance on the New Left of the SDS etc. in the 1960s, which evolved towards a stance advocating revolutionary change--'Steal This Book' comes to mind, as does the abuse of police authority and the epithet 'pig' in response covering all police. This is now common amongst the militia types, and those holding that much current government deviates fatally from any possible Constitutional justification. Meanwhile, such as Thoreau ('Civil Disobedience') and ML King ('Letter from the Birmingham Jail') accepted civil punishment, even while rejecting its underlying moral base.

The proper response, seems to me, is to accept the current government as legitimate, while seeking to change it, and seeking to correct the unreasonable, sometimes unconscionable, legal and economic barriers to necessary change from within current structures rather than in revolt against and destruction of them. The former risks legitimizing that which should not be accepted--the Citizens United decision comes to mind. The latter risks replacing the current unsatisfactories with even less satisfactory change, sometimes with horrific consequences. There are ample historical examples on both sides. I consider the risks of revolutionary change, even allowing for their possibility, far greater than those attendant on awaiting another swing of the pendulum, giving it a gentle push on occasion. The most benign interpretation of Obama's presidency after the Busherdammerung is along these lines. I haven't always agreed with Obama across the board, and doubtless won't. But I too have seen an attempt to delegitimize a deeply flawed system yield nothing other than reaction and rejection.

So there. Hrmphf. Get off my lawn, and turn that noise you call music down...

Maybe Bipartisanship really Is Date Rape

2011-04-18T09:05:00.001-04:00

By now, it should be obvious that Paul Ryan's budget--widely praised despite its Draconian cuts on long-standing programs people depend for their live upon, and have for decades--is far more an ideological rant than a serious macroeconomic and fiscal proposal. Since its release, Obama has defended the programs Ryan attacks, demanding that they be saved in essence. The Republican response to Obama, predictably, tries to deny him legitimacy in the debate, as neither willing to face reality as they define it, nor being appropriately civil. Seems that voicing an opinion differing from Republican orthodoxy is shrill. Paul Krugman, who has long been recognized as shrill wherever civilized tongues are spoken, calls them out today:

Sorry to be cynical, but right now “bipartisan” is usually code for assembling some conservative Democrats and ultraconservative Republicans — all of them with close ties to the wealthy, and many who are wealthy themselves — and having them proclaim that low taxes on high incomes and drastic cuts in social insurance are the only possible solution.

This would be a corrupt, undemocratic way to make decisions about the shape of our society even if those involved really were wise men with a deep grasp of the issues. It’s much worse when many of those at the table are the sort of people who solicit and believe the kind of policy analyses that the Heritage Foundation supplies.

So let’s not be civil. Instead, let’s have a frank discussion of our differences. In particular, if Democrats believe that Republicans are talking cruel nonsense, they should say so — and take their case to the voters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/opinion/18krugman.html?hp

All of which assumes that even Obama is correct in joining the regnant narrative placing the deficit at the very center of the nation's problems.

I'd argue that civity and frank disagreement can, in fact, coexist, and that people other than True Believers all know it. The distinction between, 'I disagree with you, holding, rather that .......... is the case and what should be done. Here are the facts, logic, history, economics and politics I used to reach those conclusions. What do you think?' and 'You fucking idiot' remains an important distinction. The 'Moi? They do it, too' defense, advanced against an accusation of incivility, won't wash. But, as many including yr. obdt. svt. have noted, a vain search for 'bipartisanship' clouding one's own positions in compromise after compromise with an opponent calling bipartisanship 'date rape' (Norquist) is bad politics and bad governance.

Obama going into 2012 will find himself fortunate in the timing of economic recovery, and in the astounding lack of plausible challengers. It'd be nice, too, were a stiff breeze from the left to fill his sails. He might even find himself enjoying it.

Unstable Equilibria

2011-04-03T06:14:00.000-04:00

Henry Kissinger this morning, in reviewing a biography of Bismarck, waxes metaphorically this:

Bismarck’s opponents were still wedded to the 18th-century concepts of the international system as a great clockwork with intricately meshed parts: the science of Newton. Bismarck foreshadowed an age whose equilibrium was an ever-changing interaction of forces, themselves in constant flux, like later atomic physics. Its appropriate philosopher was not Descartes but Darwin; not “I think, therefore I am,” but the “survival of the fittest.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/books/review/book-review-bismarck-by-jonathan-steinberg.html?pagewanted=2&ref=books

Now, it's just possible that balance of power politics and diplomacy predated Bismarck. It's also odd that Descartes and Darwin are contrasted as opposites. Too, it's been a while since the teleological 'survival of the fittest' credibly summarized evolution.

The most fun, though, can be had with Kissinger's notion of 'equilibrium' and 'constant flux' presaging 'atomic physics'. The nineteenth century saw Ludwig Boltzmann and J. Willard Gibbs, and others, elaborate statistical thermodynamics, in which macroscopic phenomena were linked to microscopic interactions using Netwonian mechanics. Equilibrium is a basic concept in thermodynamics, used to such brilliant effect that economists, envious of physicists' successes and imagining themselves capable of replicating it by reducing human beings to molecules, borrowed the notion for their market models. Perhaps Kissinger's referring to thermodynamics, in which case it isn't 'later'. Or, he's referring to quantum mechanics, which is not only later but entirely inapposite to the point he's making. Either way, he's wrong.

Whatever you think of Kissinger, he's neither stupid nor uneducated. It's fascinating to see such a person pack so much crap about science into such a small space. And, at that, crap touching on scientific theories of wide and deep significance in intellectual history: you can't understand contemporary thought without having a grasp of evolution or thermodynamics. So not only can I have sport with Kissinger, and his editor, on this. I can safely assume that the vast majority of people reading this review won't even stop to scratch their heads.

Maybe Bishop Ussher was right, after all...

Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

2011-04-01T07:11:00.000-04:00

The hedge fund managers take home real money. Last year, 25 of them took home $22 billion in salaries. They trade in toilet paper with ridiculously high nominal values. In New York City alone, assets nominally valued at well over a trillion dollars are traded daily. The Treasury Dept. estimates the nominal value of derivative securities held in American portfolios at over $600 trillion. That's roughly 50 times American GDP.

So, they take commissions in real money off of trades in toilet paper, and, as long as everyone agrees to keep the obscene game of musical chairs going, all is sort of well. But they can't do that unless they restrict their markets to a self-referential acceptance of asset valuation at wild, impossible remove from reality. A recipe for disaster, that. And the hedge fund managers' income, and countless other exactions of real money from toilet paper, are extraordinary diversions of real resources, while those receiving them perpetuate the illusion, keep the game going. When the inevitable catastrophe recurs, it won't be the real-money people that'll get hurt.

But, then, you knew that....

Shakespeare's Prospero, on derivative securities, presciently:

These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

The Government is Here To Help You

2011-03-11T07:47:00.002-05:00

Their policies will not work. A lot of people have heard lots of bloviation about the deficit, and accepted it at face value because it's presented in a manner that confirms their prejudices while denying common humanity to others during tough economic times. Traditional, all this, happens again and again. But implement those policies, and a lot of people are going to notice that, in fact, government supplies a lot of things they need and count upon. People will get hurt. It'll be a lot less abstract. That, too, is traditional, and will result in change, as it has in the past. But many people will be hurt, for years if not decades. And they should meet far more resistance than they are.

The Wisconsin affair, and those such as in Michigan who emulate Walker's program, will mobilize opposition, perhaps revitalize the labor movement, which has historically been a wellspring of the left. If it doesn't, then we'll just have to wait until the consequences become so unendurable that it'll happen. People forget that liberal social policies didn't come out of thin air, or out of a malevolent socialist conspiracy, but in response to actual social needs. It'd be nice were it not to take catastrophe to remind them of the fact.

The Japanese Eathquake/Tsunami

2011-03-11T07:04:00.000-05:00

Japan still has a social contract, effective government and a world-class infrastructure. Imagine if it happened here. We'd be hearing about all those nasty poor folk looting, and how they deserved to drown because they didn't prepare for it. Not the government's responsibility. Nebraskans shouldn't have to pay for it.

Sad, isn't it?

Oh, and let's remember that the average life span in Japan is amongst the world's longest. Primary care is freely available in Japan, where docs make some of their money by selling prescription medications as well. Japan's per capita health expenditure was $2293 in 2007. That year, America's was $6096. So Japan has more money to spend on infrastructure, even before America's military spending is taken into account, while maintaining a responsive, inclusive health care system. And you don't hear about their governments being bankrupted by rapidly escalating medical expenses.

Odd, that...

Modesty, Blazing

2011-03-11T06:07:00.003-05:00

So here's David Brooks this morning:

Citizenship, after all, is built on an awareness that we are not all that special but are, instead, enmeshed in a common enterprise. Our lives are given meaning by the service we supply to the nation. I wonder if Americans are unwilling to support the sacrifices that will be required to avert fiscal catastrophe in part because they are less conscious of themselves as components of a national project...

It’s possible... that some of the current political problems are influenced by fundamental shifts in culture, involving things as fundamental as how we appraise ourselves. Addressing them would require a more comprehensive shift in values.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/opinion/11brooks.html?hp

Now, you might ask, did Brooks take note at all in his column of the increasingly insane, reality-challenged, narcissistic dismissal of a common humanity with the less fortunate, or merely different, that ever more obviously undergirds right wing politics in this country? And does he observe that possibly, just possibly, that economic thinking alone, exalting profit and a mythical freedom arising out of an equally mythical 'free market', might be insufficient in understanding or bettering the human condition?

Not so fast, class, not so fast...

Godwin's Law: You Are What You Wear

2011-03-07T07:31:00.000-05:00

A fascinating piece in the Times this morning linking fashion with fascism, in the context of Dior's firing of John Galliano for drunken anti-Semitic ranting:

The link is clear: like a fascist demagogue of yore, he was declaring that she did not belong to the gilded group who wear the right boots, and from this Mr. Galliano slid effortlessly to a condemnation of her very flesh, and a wish for her death.

Last week the French daily Le Monde declared that by firing Mr. Galliano, Dior had sounded the “death knell for the myth of the omnipotent designer.” That may be premature, given the myth’s deep roots. But the drunken ramblings of one man in a bar may have set off an important discussion about a less pretty undercurrent in a multibillion-dollar industry. Happy Fashion Week.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07Garelick.html?hp

The reason Godwin's Law resonates as truth is that fascism/Naziism are entirely, totally human, Nazi acts were perpetrated by humans, and that, once you accept that, you find acts compatible with fascism far more widely scattered than is usually assumed. I was astonished, on rereading space operas I loved as a kid, to find them sometimes outright fascist. Consider the two most influential and popular science fiction universes, for instance: the 'Star Trek' United Federation of Planets with 'Star Wars' Jedi Knights, wearing brown shirts, keeping the peace in the galaxy via an unaccountable triumph of the trained will, most effective when used against the 'weak minded'.

And the reason it's crucially necessary to think of fascism in broader contexts is that we're all capable of it, being human, and have to fight it in ourselves. You are what others make you think you are, and what you're willing to accept in yourself. If we, as individuals and as a society, question neither of those, we're in for it.

Economics as Synecdoche

2011-02-19T10:54:00.002-05:00

The primacy, urgency and existence of the need for fiscal sanity amongst all human needs can be questioned. The primacy of dollars and cents, in general, over other measures of human life can be questioned. And the compromise of a union's freedom to contract with an equally free employer, in government or private sector, is, superficially, a passing strange position for someone to take who, as a matter of fundamental political philosophy, above all fears government power against private actors. More than revealing, though, when thought about, because those who deny the necessity for government at all deny explicitly the notion that an individual and a large multinational corporation can't bargain as equals, or that an individual needs any protection at all other than the ability to make choices in a market. Unwonted government power against unions. Unchecked corporate power against individuals. These positions precisely contradict each other if taken at face value. On a deeper level, sadly, they do not.

Humans In Name Only (HINOs)

2011-02-18T06:51:00.000-05:00

Paul Krugman, on his blog, today wonders about birthers, and other crazed beliefs common on the right, through a discussion between John Quiggin and Jonathan Chait:

An interesting exchange between John Quiggin and Jonathan Chait on right-wing agnotology — that is, culturally-induced ignorance or doubt. The specific issue is birtherism, the claim that Barack Obama was born in Kenya or anyway not in America, which polls indicate is a view held by a majority of Republican primary voters.

Quiggin suggests that right-wingers aren’t really birthers in their hearts; it’s just that affirming birtherism is a sort of badge of belonging, a shibboleth in the original biblical sense. Chait counters that much of the modern right lives in a mental universe in which liberal elites hide the truth, and in which they, through their access to Fox News etc., know things the brainwashed masses don’t.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

Such beliefs as the birthers', the Laffer curve, global warming denial, creationism, the 'Cloward-Piven conspiracy', the Aztlan and Caliphate/Sharia threats--there are an astounding number of examples from which to choose--are immune from challenge by recourse to facts and logic precisely because they are social markers, identifying members of an elect group, rather than any attempt to understand and characterize reality. And that flows from a political philosophy which, at its most fundamental level, reflects a division between a virtuous, besieged, deserving Self and a parasitic, evil, dehumanized Other. Questioning of any of these beliefs demonstrates that you are of the Other, and therefore must be rejected, as, perhaps, a Human In Name Only (HINO)--an elitist, liberal, out-of-touch, America hating, Constitution-shredding foe of all that's noble in the human spirit, and, therefore not to be even admitted to the debate. Some of the politicians are fellow true believers. Some, of course, will treat us to the disgusting spectacle of kissing Glenn Beck's, er, ring to be accepted as sufficiently pure to compete in the primaries. But there it is, and to the extent that they're holding the world hostage, they're dangerous. And I also agree that the health insurance reform bill,though flawed, has more merit that the left grants it, and should be supported more vigorously both for its own merits and in the larger context.

Wisconsin: Walker Calls Himself A Governor

2011-02-17T07:50:00.002-05:00

'mornin'

Walker's going to hurt a lot of people. Every last one of the rightie crazies will hurt a lot of people

They all not only forget, but deny, the absolute truth that progressive government interventions, however mild and inadequate to the actual needs, however much left to do even after implementation,did not arise from a vacuum in which they were unnecessary. They were not superfluous. They were not motivated solely by a desire for government power. They were not pushed by those motivated solely by a desire for government power. They were not pushed by those looking for the triumph of jackbooted socialism. They evolved from the reality that that there were needs and problems in people's lives, big ones, urgent ones, that weren't being met by the private sector. They emerged from fundamental changes in economic, social and political life, as ever huger private entities accumulated vast amounts of power which they heretofore had not. Ant that power was exercised solely for their profit and to their advantage, and, at that, frankly celebrated as not only economically but morally, ethically and socially the right thing to do. And, further, the only right thing to do. Any other position on the causes of the appalling results, and potential remedies for them, is dismissed as not only wrong but evil, and excluded from the debate they would like to have.

The needs of the people were seen and acted upon before; they will be again. The questions are how long it'll take, and how many will be hurt. The ever clearer answer, I'm afraid, is way the hell too long, and way the hell too many.

Rightie Horror at Social Security

2011-02-14T08:04:00.002-05:00

The right offers four objections to Social Security, each nonsense:

1. It's fiscally irresponsible and will bankrupt the country if not fixed. False.
2. Recipients are greedy geezers who'll bear the brunt of any fix without trouble, as they luxuriate in Florida or Arizona at our expense, while their families/children avoid responsibility for supporting them. False.
3. It's an investment program, ,rather than a transfer program, and, at that, a Ponzi scheme, fraudulent at its core and invariably bested by private, self-directed investment in equities. False.
4. It's the first step on a slippery slope to Soviet communism. False.

Other than that, they're right all the way...

The Wombat Theory of Federal Spending: Paul Krugman Supports

2011-02-14T07:49:00.003-05:00

Krugman today:

Republican leaders like to claim that the midterms gave them a mandate for sharp cuts in government spending. Some of us believe that the elections were less about spending than they were about persistent high unemployment, but whatever. The key point to understand is that while many voters say that they want lower spending, press the issue a bit further and it turns out that they only want to cut spending on other people.

That’s the lesson from a new survey by the Pew Research Center, in which Americans were asked whether they favored higher or lower spending in a variety of areas. It turns out that they want more, not less, spending on most things, including education and Medicare. They’re evenly divided about spending on aid to the unemployed and — surprise — defense.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/opinion/14krugman.html?hp

Always willing to be supported by an eminent thinker, I remind my readers of the Wombat Theory of pork:

pork: waste, fraud and abuse resulting from government spending in somebody else's district. Cut it. They don't deserve it. Parasites, robbed of free will and initiative, sucking on government teat.
effective governance: any federal funds spent in my district. Only our just due for our taxes, and necessary for building a bridge to the 21st century.

See how easy it is? Glad I could clear that up...

Good Things: Always From The Right

2011-02-12T13:02:00.001-05:00

An easy prediction I made was that positive outcomes in Egypt would be cast as out of rightie virtue, and negatives as another failure of the Marxist Kenyan Americ-hating Constitution shredding metrosexual poopyhead we have for president. That didn't take long:

Who is the hero of the Egyptian revolution? Wael Ghonim? Mohamed ElBaradei? Twitter? The ubiquitous Egyptian man (and woman) in the street?

All good nominees, but there’s one more who’s getting increasing support: George W. Bush. Scoff if you will, but the debate is heating up.

It started with the former State Department official Elliott Abrams at The Washington Post on Jan. 29:

In November 2003, President George W. Bush laid out this question: “Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom and never even to have a choice in the matter?”

The massive and violent demonstrations underway in Egypt, the smaller ones in Jordan and Yemen, and the recent revolt in Tunisia that inspired those events, have affirmed that the answer is no and are exploding, once and for all, the myth of Arab exceptionalism … All these developments seem to come as a surprise to the Obama administration, which dismissed Bush’s “freedom agenda” as overly ideological and meant essentially to defend the invasion of Iraq. But as Bush’s support for the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon and for a democratic Palestinian state showed, he was defending self-government, not the use of force.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/egypts-revolution-bushs-victory/?hp

The author seeks credibility for his views in vain, methinks, by quoting as a lead off source the egregious Elliot Abrams, a convicted liar to Congress. Note the absence of any mention of, er, that man in the list of those who helped on the revolution, his great Cairo speech, his restraint in the past weeks. Note, too, the absence of any criticism of Bush's Iraq war, out of a dubious casus belli, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and millions of refugees while strangthening the (non-Arab) hand of Iran. And Bush's uncritical support of Israel, his applause for Israel's violence in Gaza and Lebanon. And...

Never mind...

An Interesting Exercise

2011-02-12T11:18:00.002-05:00

Anthony Shadid in the Times, a consistently excellent reporter, on Egypt:

The months and years ahead will determine whether the fervor and community of Tahrir Square can translate into a new notion of citizenship, a truce between the state and Islamists and the curbing of the entrenched power of militaries, the police and suffocating bureaucracies that have failed to deliver young people a better life in an Arab world that is becoming ever younger. “It’s not the end,” said Nadia Magdy, a protester in the square. “It’s the beginning.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/world/middleeast/12revolution.html?hp

Here's what strikes me about this paragraph:
1. It's true.
2. Join me in the exercise of substituting 'Obama's election' for 'Tahrir Square', 'fundie Christians' for 'Islamists', 'the United States' for 'an Arab world' and (any left winger in the country) for 'Nadia Magdy'. Provoke a little thought, does it?

Obama and Our Discontents

2011-02-12T11:00:00.000-05:00

Many on the left (the eschaton commenters, for instance) despair of Obama, and seem to spend as much, if not more, time denouncing him than they do Republicans. In response:

At the risk of seeming too charitable:

1. The Cairo speech wasn't only a great speech. It was a significant break from the past. He restated one of Bush's few decent positions, that not all Muslims were terrorists and that he'd fight terror without fighting all Islam. He acknowledged prior American wrongdoing in the context of Iran; every last person in the audience knew about Mossadegh and understood what he was saying. He indeed, though far too slowly, without not entirely finishing the withdrawal, ended most of our military action in Iraq. He publicly opposed Netanyahu on settlements. These aren't trivial things. Not, to be sure, enough in a vacuum otherwise devoid of positive action. Perhaps not nearly enough. But real, nonetheless.
2. I'm going to get really charitable here: the attempt at bipartisanship, in the face of Republican obstruction and the capture of the party by its most extreme elements, will increase Democratic credibility amongst the centrist and mildly right voters the Democrats need to win.
3. Again, being charitable, but, I think more concretely: the health care bill, for all its flaws, improves on anything we've had, both substantively and as an assertion, at long last, that health care for all Americans is a properly asserted federal responsibility, asit is for every other industrialized nation in the world. That, too, is a substantive break with the past, when every such bill got dismissed out of hand or died in the duck pit.
4. Sotomayor and Kagan are substantive improvements over Scalia, Alito, Thomas and Roberts. One of the only hopes for change long term is a court majority that won't emit the egregious jurisprudential and political offal of which the Citizens United decision is perhaps the most exemplary.
5. The repeal of 'don't ask, don't tell' and the confirmation of the new START treaty are also substantive achievements. And better, that's how they were seen by majorities in the country, who responded with approval rather than rejection.
6. Biden is a better human being than Cheney. And Obama remains better, far better, than any conceivable Republican candidate at this point. Anger at, disappointment with, or rejection of Obama's policies--which I understand, acept and share--doesn't alter this point. I accept that many of you disagree with me on that. But there it is.

All of that said, here's Bob Herbert from the Times today, talking mostly about economic and political concessions to the rich:

The Egyptians want to establish a viable democracy, and that’s a long, hard road. Americans are in the mind-bogglingly self-destructive process of letting a real democracy slip away.

I had lunch with the historian Howard Zinn just a few weeks before he died in January 2010. He was chagrined about the state of affairs in the U.S. but not at all daunted. “If there is going to be change,” he said, “real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves.”

I thought of that as I watched the coverage of the ecstatic celebrations in the streets of Cairo.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/opinion/12herbert.html?_r=1&hp

I agree with Herbert, too.

The Christian Thing To Do

2011-02-11T07:02:00.000-05:00

My daughter shares with me this picture of Christians in the square protecting Muslims at prayer in Egypt:

http://yfrog.com/h02gvclj

The divergence from the intolerance, fear and bigotry so oft expressed in this country is enormous. All the more remarkable for it happening in a Muslim majority country where Coptic Christians have been under threat. And, too, an example of decency, tolerance and courage amongst the religious, at a time when strident atheists deny even the possibility.

Ron Paul: Wolves Agreeing on the Dinner Menu

2011-02-10T06:48:00.000-05:00

It surprised some people more than it should have that Ron Paul's first witness was an outright racist celebrator of 'states' rights'. It's yet another display, for those who still need it, of the utter emptiness of libertarianism as political or moral doctrine, as philosophy, and as a basis for policy making.

Paul's take on human liberty amounts to nothing more nor less than that the liberty of the strong to act is a meaningless and empty illusion unless it trumps that of the weak to live without somebody beating the living shit out of them. Citing the fact that government power needs restraint, he refuses to accept that other actors, too, have power requiring restraint, which is one of the raisons d'etre of government in the first place. He basically demands that cigar smokers should feel free to light up in a room full of asthmatics.

The parallel to free speech comes to mind: a First Amendment absolutist refuses to let government censor, say, the right of Nazis to parade through a Jewish neighborhood, lest that same power be asserted to suppress any dissenting voice at all. It's entirely potted to view a citizen's relationship with government similarly; government is nothing if not a creature of its citizens, or, at least, that's what them there Founders' Original Intent was. And without some sort of restraint, or a human nature radically different from that seen throughout history and today, you're left with the strong contending with the weak. Not all that desirable, that, not even, in the long run, for the strong. You'd think the word would have got around...

Health Savings Accounts: For Me, And Not For Thee

2011-02-09T06:50:00.000-05:00

Health savings accounts are theoretically flawed, even if globally applied and available to all in the way that their advocates envision. They proceed out of individual savings and affect or help not at all those who can't save. More generally, they abstract money from the system which is thereby less able to provide care for the poor and unemployed.

The positive social good of insurance is a broadened risk pool's capacity to absorb catastrophic risk. This requires a risk pool composed of those less likely, as well as more likely, to need help. The profit imperative, on the other hand, demands a risk pool restricted to those less likely to file claims, and as much parsimony and delay as possible in meeting claims. Those are in conflict, and, in my view, fatally so for those looking to private insurers for solutions to health care problems. Those advocating health savings accounts play into the companies' goal of restricting risk pools, rather than a public interest in broadening them. They might be good for low-risk individuals who can save their otherwise higher insurance premiums. Not so more generally.

Another example of placing individual priorities above those of the larger polity--selfishness, some might call it--in service of the false and morally questionable notion that We're virtuous and deserving, and Their misfortunes, being Their Fault, have nothing to do with us, and We shouldn't help Them. Demonstrably false, even pragmatically, much less as a belief system which might underlie a better world, or better policy.

Who Lost Egypt?

2011-02-08T06:21:00.002-05:00

Roger Cohen, in today's Times, is OK on Egypt as far as he goes, calling on Israel to transcend rejection and fear. But he doesn't once mention the fact that much foreign policy, especially that based on fear rather than engagement, arises as much from domestic political imperatives--both in Israel and the United States--as it does from a sober assessment, even a wrongheaded one, of foreign issues based on national interests.

True during the Cold War. True of the national security state and its assumptions which both parties have embraced here since the end of World War II. And, perhaps most nakedly, true of American politics after 9.11 and Israeli politics since the Rabin assassination.

Which sets up the question, should current events play out poorly, of 'who lost Egypt', paralleling a prior era's 'Who lost China?' When Mao prevailed, his victory was blamed on the small group of American diplomats who actually knew something about China, as if they were capable of influencing events in a country of 600 million people half a world away. If Egypt turns for the worse, of course, it'll be Obama's fault. If, on the other hand, things go well, it'll be part of the Reagan legacy. But in either case, it'll be played out with an eye as much on domestic politics as on actual events.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/opinion/08iht-edcohen08.html?hp

Kristol vs Beck: Two Go In, One Comes Out

2011-02-08T06:05:00.000-05:00

Thers on the eschaton board refers to a post on the differences between Glenn Beck and William Kristol by Steve Benen:

Over the weekend, The Weekly Standard's William Kristol, a Fox News contributor, had seen enough. "[H]ysteria is not a sign of health," Kristol wrote in a new column. "When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He's marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s."

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2011_02/027882.php

---Benen also cites such comments in the National Review.

Beck's crazier in affect and presentation than is Kristol, and frequently goes off into paranoid territory. And if you aren't a Beckist, you're unlikely to be converted or even find him sympathetic with further exposure. So Kristol's trying to legitimize himself and his cobelievers in mainstream politics, contrasting themselves with Beck. I do agree with Thers that Kristol and the other neoconservatives are, too, reality-challenged, and that their views are immune to the challenge that repeated, catastrophic failure when put into practice should bring.

So, in that sense, the dissent on the right isn't enough, and will never be enough. But when such as Kristol denounce the Pope of the Tea Party in such terms, it has political implications as (gack) the 2012 primary season approaches, and they start to realize the gap between what it'll take to get the Republican nomination and what it'll take to win the general election.

Reagan and Reality

2011-02-07T06:12:00.002-05:00

It's also worth noting that nothing Reagan did in terms of actual action, in fact, shakes the faithful in their adulation. That's because that adulation isn't based on what he actually did, or the results of his actual policies. It's based on his constant reassurances that it's OK to be narrow-minded, bigoted, greedy, dismissive of others' humanity. He offered them a congenial, smiling, imperturbable mirror in which to see themselves. The utter irrelevance of facts, logic and reality here has accelerated into the Busherdammerung, the Tea Partiers' potted constitutional and fiscal ravings and Glenn Beck's paranoid madness, increasingly at remove from anything approximating a grasp of the real world, in fact denying the necessity for it. Their opinions, as I've said, are social markers meant to connote membership in their group. Their correspondence with reality is not only irrelevant, but those who question it, even rightly, are automatically branded elitist liberal constitution-shredding America hating socialist threats to every freedom that made our country great.

There's always been some of that--Richard Hofstadter back in 1960 made the point. But its current incarnation began with Reagan. Another reason they love him.

Ronald Reagan

2011-02-07T05:57:00.000-05:00

Well, he was born 100 years ago. So:

Ronald Reagan--it's morning again for bigotry and greed. States' rights in Philadelphia MS, a wreath on an SS officer's grave at Bitburg. His disgraceful actions, or lack of them, in the early years of HIV/AIDS might have killed millions of people. Iran-Contra.

And, tying it all together, a delegitimization of government, or any other common enterprise we might embark upon to help each other rather than ourselves. One of his most famous lines was that nothing struck so much fear into a citizen as hearing someone say, 'I'm from the government; I'm here to help you.' He, and his heirs, have striven ever since to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy. The potted macroeconomics of supply-slders has weakened every level of government in this country, leaving one problem after another unaddressed, while leading to concentrations of wealth in the top 1% that we haven't seen in this country since the 1920s.

Consider how you'd feel if you heard 'Im from BP, or Monsanto, or Goldman Sachs, or Worldcomm, or Blackwater, or Humana, or AIG, or Columbia-HCA, and I'm here to help you.'

No thanks. Keep him.

Mr Fantasy...

2011-01-21T12:32:00.000-05:00

Eschaton has up a description of an Irvine CA home up for sale for a mere $18 million.

http://lansner.ocregister.com/2011/01/21/new-mansion-is-shady-hills-priciest-18-9-million/96316/

Then there's my fantasy dwelling. Neither big nor tiny. A walk-up second floor apartment in a fantasy town with a good library, a good bookstore owned and staffed by people who love books, good schools, a pub that makes its own beer and hosts local musicians playing jazz or chamber music without amplification, a non-fussy restaurant where the chef cares about the food without beating you over the head with his/her cleverness, stores owned by real people with idiosyncratic offerings, a good bakery and farmers' market, the whole town surrounded by woods, fields and farmlands, and with a train that in an hour or so takes you into a major city. Not that i'm asking a lot here.

Or maybe living on a boat moored in a harbor, most of whose activity is small-scale commercial so I can go over two docks and buy fresh fish.

Do I ask too much? i don't think so. Or I shouldn't be asking too much. But I'm struck by the fact that my fantasy involves the place I'm living in, the society in which I find myself, and its priorities, than it does my material circumstances once I have heat, comfort, electricity, Internet and three square meals a day. And, at that, with little or nothing separating me from all that: no fences, huge yards, moats with right-wing alligators armed with AK-47s...

State/City Bankruptcy: Not Just For Breakfast Anymore

2011-01-21T08:31:00.000-05:00

A fair amount of state and municipal finance requires ongoing rollover of bonds, which requires that bonds be sold. Interest rates on those bonds are, to say the least, important considerations in government financial operations. You start talking about government bankruptcies, you make it much harder to market the bonds that they need to sell in order to roll over the old ones, and, even if you succeeded in getting the suckers to buy 'em, the interest rates would be close to unaffordable short and long term. That would jeopardize governments far more than bankruptcy would. Not only would investors in current bonds take a huge hit. Reorganization after bankruptcy would be difficult, to impossible. Unless, (er, I hate to even bring it up) newly issued securities were backed up or insured by the federal government.

The odd bond, too, resides in the odd investment portfolio of the odd rich person and institutional investor. Were those bonds worth pennies, if that, to the dollar after a bankruptcy, there'd be a bit of unhappiness consequent to it. Too, assets nominally valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars turning to crap would remove a little value from the economy. Only a churl would point out that deflation, recession/depression and a reversal of even the current anemic recovery might supervene. In which case, a sane macroeconomic approach would be to expand the money supply with, say (prepare yourself for a shock), deficit spending and money creation. Not the most politically viable stance, these days.

Worth noting, by the way, that federal laws sheltering municipal bond interest from taxation is, in fact, a subsidy, fiscally identical to a direct payment to those holding them. Ah, the endless cornucopia of the free market, at least, for those with the intelligence, initiative and coupon-clipping scissors enough to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps.

There's only so much fun you can have in one day, but they really, really might want to rethink this one...

Beck on Frances Fox Piven

2011-01-21T06:38:00.000-05:00

For a while now, Glenn Beck has been tracing a paranoid history of an extraordinarily effective left wing's covert plan to subvert American freedom, linking implausible co-conspirators to the progressive movement at the 19-20th century turn, and Woodrow Wilson, right through Obama. One of his frequent targets is what he calls the 'Cloward-Piven conspiracy', whose origin is this article from the Nation in 1966.

http://www.indycons.net/Documents/ClowardPiven.pdf

The authors suggest here that if everyone eligible for local and state aid actually applied for it, the systems would be overwhelmed, and that politics might then shift to make a federal role in such things more acceptable. You should read it, to understand just how crazy Beck is. If you Google 'Cloward-Piven conspiracy' you get 150,000 hits, mostly rightie nonsense echoing Beck.

For a while, Prof. Piven was more bemused than anything else at the idea that a lefty sociology professor could be imagined by anybody to be that sinister and powerful, that an article in the Nation, a small lefty weekly in Murdoch's world, could usher in totalitarian socialism. After Tucson, harder to remain puzzled without being alarmed, especially as Beck's rhetoric has become even more strident:

Beginning in September of 2010, Glenn Beck started branding Piven, a distinguished professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, as an “enemy of the Constitution.” Piven, well known for advocating for the organizational rights of the poor and encouraging voter registration, has since received threatening phone calls and letters, and has become the subject of many death threats left open to the public on Glenn Beck’s website, The Blaze"...

The Center for Constitutional rights details a backlash through some of the many violent quotes on Beck’s website. Examples include, “Maybe they should burst through the front door of this arrogant elitist and slit the hateful cow’s throat,” “We should blow up Piven’s office and home,” and “I am all for violence and change Frances: Where do your loved ones live?”

http://www.ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/ccr-appeals-fox-news-president-help-silencing-glenn-beck-misinformation-camp (thanks to Thers on eschatonblog.com for the cite)

---Beck really, really isn't at this point, nor has he ever been, merely an entertainer, or a commentator coming from a legitimate, though extreme, position on the political spectrum. He's outright, completely, crazy. And nothing he says, no matter how crazy, seems to give his enablers and supporters pause. This isn't Goldwater saying, 'Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.' This is a guy who needs more Stelazine than he's taking. And he made $35 million last year, and, after attacking George Soros using nakedly anti-Semitic language and source material, was unequivocally supported by Rupert Murdoch.

It'd be precious were an occasional person to the left of Attila the Hun note the fact that Beck isn't just wrong, but crazy, and that Murdoch's defense of his craziness might, just might, not be in service of elevating the American political conversation.

Demands of History

2011-01-15T09:15:00.000-05:00

The NY Times magazine tomorrow has an article about the idiosyncratic relationship between Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel. It points out that, while they clearly dislike each other, they have to work together for the sake of a sustainable, coherent European Union:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/magazine/16MerkelSarkozy-t.html?hpw

I grew up with old lefties, who viewed history as arising independent of, and superseding, any given individual--economics, if you're a Marxist; or Hegelian dialectic, Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier theory of American history, or Gibbon's portrayal of Roman decline as irreversible by even a supremely gifted emperor. The alternative, derisively labeled the 'Cleopatra's Nose' theory--that were her nose three inches long and covered with zits, history would have changed dramatically--depended on idiosyncrasy, individuals arising unpredictably in crucial places. Alexander, Paul of Tarsus, Mohammed (for the non-believer in Islam's Allah), Napoleon, other examples hard to dismiss come to mind.

Karl Popper called the notion of historical theorizing along grand lines excluding individuals 'historicism', and rejected it in 'The Poverty of Historicism'. Isaiah Berlin, too, was deeply suspicious. Large historical theories subordinating the individual, they said, leads to an acceptance, even justification, of totalitarian states and totalitarian actors, of egg-breaking to serve better omelets. They're wrong morally for that reason, they said, as well as wrong on their own terms, there being abundant counterexamples. Too, theories like those can't be tested all that well before or after the fact, leaving competing theories subjects of contention as, say, Newton's mechanics weren't until new observations demonstrated their limits. Nevertheless, Hitler, say, clearly arose in a context of German defeat, hyperinflation and so on, but was, in fact, Hitler and nobody else, and it's hard to imagine a different individual, even leading a Nazi Party in control of Germany, having a similar effect. So, Sarkozy, whose supermodel wife's pictures, some of them in the nude, are up on the Internet, and Merkel, the 'matronly' PhD chemist, grating on each other in a relationship obviously arising out of their personalities, required by larger forces, whatever they are, to work mindful of the constraints and requirements that the historical moment requires of them.

Meanwhile, mathematics has demonstrated that very large systems indeed can be exquisitely dependent on initial conditions. Ray Bradbury's 'A Sound of Thunder', in which a time traveler's butterfly killing step in the Jurassic produces huge alterations 100 millions of years later, and Edward Lorentz's butterfly effect in weather modeling, come to mind. It's hard not to imagine the possibility that world history, too, may produce far less inevitability, far less a priori and a posteriori coherence, than it's natural to suppose. Leaving not only Sarkozy and Merkel with more personal responsibility than might be supposed, but, perhaps, even lesser individuals--you and me, perhaps, even...

Boehner's Absence

2011-01-13T09:25:00.000-05:00

There are two ways to explain the Great Pumpkin's absence from the memorial service at which Obama spoke yesterday.

First, he chose to attend a fund-raiser. Nothing, but nothing, seems more important than raising money from clients. Darrel Issa last week asked businessmen to tell him which burdensome federal regulations should be repealed. They might as well put up a 'For Sale' sign.

Second, Obama was performing a ceremonial function as president of the United States. Entirely non-partisan, uncontroversial, but, nevertheless, clearly acting as if he were, in fact, the president, speaking to and for the country. Can't have that. Recall, for instance, the outrage which greeted his entirely benign address to schoolchildren. His opponents demanded the right to exclude their children from the horrific threat to freedom that a president acting ceremonially poses to the Republic. Never, ever can they concede that Obama is, in fact, the president, by virtue of anything other than crime, corruption, deceit and treason.

Palin's 'Blood Libel'

2011-01-12T17:01:00.000-05:00

It's hard to think of a more stupid, despicable, ignorant remark she could have made. Comparing criticism of her violent rhetoric to the suffering of European and Russian Jewry is unacceptable, and should be unacceptable to anyone regardless of ideology.

Charitably, she's merely ignorant of its historical meaning, and, once apprised of it, will apologise. Less charitably, she knew exactly what she was saying, which is not merely ignorant but reprehensible. In the context of Beck's nakedly anti-Semitic extended attack on George Soros, after which Murdoch defended him, worse yet.

In either case, she has forfeited any right to any sort of public platform at all, much less a potential candidacy for the presidency. It would be precious were one or two Republicans to take her to task for this ugliness.

Fear Is The Key

2011-01-12T07:48:00.000-05:00

Robert Wright, in this morning's NY Times, writes with coherence and sanity on the political tug of war over the Tucson shootings:

To be sure, at this political moment there is — by my left-wing lights, at least — more crazy fear-mongering and demonization on the right than on the left. But that asymmetry is transient.

What’s not transient, unfortunately, is the technological trend that drives much of this. It isn’t just that people can now build a cocoon of cable channels and Web sites that insulates them from inconvenient facts. It’s also that this cocoon insulates them from other Americans — including the groups of Americans who, inside the cocoon, are being depicted as evil aliens. It’s easy to buy into the demonization of people you never communicate with, and whose views you never see depicted by anyone other than their adversaries.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/before-hatred-comes-fear/?hp

--He, I think properly, says elsewhere that there's more of a problem on the Beckoid right than on the Olbermannish left these days, as I've said in previous posts. But he also touches on something less specific to these times, less confined to one side of the ideological spectrum over time, that I also rant about regularly: the separation of virtuous Self from demonized, dehumanized Other, made worse by the echo chambers of the Internet. My postings on the mostly righty docs' blog are more temperate than those I post here, though in terms of arguments consistent, because i want to make room for them rather than have them entirely dismissed, and the possibility that a lefty might be a reasonable human being as well. Were I in a really public media venue, I'd only rarely speak as such as Olbermann, with whom I often agree, speaks, for the same reason. We all need to vent, and I'm passionate about what i write here. I loathe Beck, Limbaugh, Palin et al. for the reasons I've stated. But i, too, see a need to empathise, assert a common humanity, and if at all possible reach out rather than demonize, even to those well to my right.

I recall a time when the left indulged in violent, eliminationist rhetoric, calling for revolution, 'off(ing) the pigs), damning those who disagreed with them as racist, imperialist mass murderers in a system corrupt beyond repair that needed to be destroyed. A few of us went from such rhetoric to building bombs and committing armed robbery, killing sometimes innocent people in the process. All this was deeply wrong, as well as politically wildly counterproductive. I've talked in other posts about such things, and recognize the context, the violence of the right and the government at the time and so on: make no mistake that i held/hold only the left responsible. But we, too, were capable of such things. Today, we aren't nearly as vociferously speaking of our foes' evil as once we were. But we must, in discussing the current environment, find a way to reach out to others than ourselves, or nothing will change. Nothing may change anyway; i don't expect Beck et al. to respond in the slightest. But let us be on the side of change for the better, rather than ossification or even worsening of the entirely unsatisfactory current situation.

I do not for a moment suggest that we fall into the trap set for the left in the 1950s, where we accepted the rules set by the right: either renounce a larger political vision for broad social change in this country, accept the national security state and military-industrial complex, or be branded a Communist, a fellow-traveler, a 'comsymp' and so on. Such a trap is again being set, in that one must accept destructive righty macroeconomic nonsense to be credible all too often. We should resist that.

But consider, for instance, the Arab-Israeli situation. At this point, I feel that Israel, by far the greater economic and military power, is exacting from more from the Palestinians than conversely, has far greater freedom to change things. But Palestinians shouting 'Gunships in Gaza! Walls and checkpoints! Sabra/Shatila! Zionist apartheid!' and so on, and Israelis shouting 'Munich! Ma'alot! Sbarro! Suicide bombers! Katyushas!' at each other will continue to kill each others' children. If they don't find a way to transcend the weighing of grievances, nothing will change. There are those on both sides who profit mightily from the current situation, just as here there are those whose prominence, riches and power derive from their embrace of dehumanization of their enemies and delegitimazation of views other than their own. Such people must be resisted, but in a context recognizing that such behavior hasn't historically been limited to the right, that they and their followers, too, are human, and that change must come out of that recognition. It will not come as a 'victory', but, if at all, it will come out of attempts in a middle ground to solve problems together, through messy compromise rather than purity of ideology.

'Moi? You do it, too!!' Isn't What Jesus Would Have Said

2011-01-10T06:17:00.000-05:00

Let's exclude for a minute the gross disparity between left and right with respect to elinimationist rhetoric, which Dave Neiwart's been tracking for years on Orcinus. Let's exclude, too, the fact that there's been no leftie political violence to speak of for decades, and the wild extent to which righties embrace the Second Amendment and have been buying guns and ammo. Let's, for the sake of argument, accept the idea that both sides have been immoderate in their rhetoric, reacting against each other's excesses in a vicious circle. Consider how few of those good Christian souls can't react to the murders by mourning the dead, caring for the living, and looking to themselves, reaching out, trying to understand, see that there's a problem out there and be part of solving it, out of empathy and love and a larger vision than us v them, trying to help.

But that isn't what they do. They don't just accept bitter partisanship; they revel in it. It defines them. A day without dehumanizing others is like a day without sunshine. Coming together? That smacks of reknitting a social contract, of weakness and appeasement and moral relativism. And it would threaten their movement to its core.

A few of us on the docs' blog have tried to cast the matter in the terms I outlined in the first paragraph, trying to keep a dialogue going. A gratifying number of righties there, who have seemed decent guys/gals anyway and with whom I get along pretty well despite our different politics, have joined and extended the idea, even to the extent of saying, essentially, what Keith Olbermann said: that there's been too much crap out there, that we shouldn't add to it ourselves or accept it from others, that we can be better than that. Amongst them was perhaps the most politically active and most widely respected guy in the group. Many of the docs there, even the righties and Randers and libertarian types, have actually moved, on this issue, more in a positive direction than I've seen elsewhere. One of them, to my astonishment and admiration, even authored a post citing moderate Muslims acting generously and courageously against extremists, reconsidering a former position he'd held equating Islam with terror, abuse of women and medieval Shar'ia. Then there were others (like the guy who playfully associated Michelle Obama with the Tontons Macoutes) whose pathetic bloviations could be reduced entirely to 'Moi? They do it too!', in a manner that'd be entirely unacceptable in a second grader.

The docs there have done better as a group than I've seen the right do in general. I've been upset by this one, and have taken to responding to the trolls with 'Mourn the dead, hope for the living and shut the fuck up.' The very least you can do. Put down the shit for a minute, stop flinging it, and wonder about how we can stop killing nine-year-old girls in this country. And, if you can't do that, I'll personally rip that fucking 'What would Jesus do?' bumper sticker off your car.

Re: Congresswoman Giffords and the Others

2011-01-08T16:04:00.003-05:00

I spent this morning on the doctors' blog, where a thread was started mocking Michelle Obama on broccoli. Fine; they hate Obama. One poster moved on to denounce the 'cult of Obama', and likened her to Elena Ceausescu. I objected. The reply was that Obama deserved it.

The thread went on to an unfavorable comparison of Michelle's physiognomy to that of Carla Bruni, whose nude picture one poster cited; appalling sexist posts rained down. I held my tongue; if they didn't get why Ceausescu was unacceptable, I didn't think it worth it. I apologise for that.

Next, one clever fellow humorously suggested that Michelle Obama would enforce a 'broccoli mandate' using Tontons Macoutes. I posted that this was despicable, racist and entirely unacceptable, opinions about Obama be damned. Maybe 10 or 20 posts later, nobody finds this crap even mildly objectionable. How much further the fuck need one go to meet disapproval from anybody but me?

I have no doubt that some of these highly paid, highly educated professionals will have little if any problem with Giffords' wounds, and will accuse liberals of a typical hysterical overreaction to the act of a single, isolated madman.

And, too, the Tea Partiers/Republicans say something along the lines of, well, he shouldn't have shot her, but we understand why a defender of the Constitution and the fucking Second Amendment would be outraged by her liberal subversion of all this country holds dear. Just as they said, well, they shouldn't have killed Dr Slepian as he was eating breakfast at home with his family, or Dr Tiller as he was leaving church, but abortion is murder. Just like they said McVeigh shouldn't have leveled the Murrah building, but the government is too big. Just like they said they shouldn't have shot those ATF agents, but those jackbooted thugs want to tell us how to live and take our guns. Just like they said he shouldn't have flown that plane into an IRS building, but taxation is theft.

They have much to answer for, and they won't do it, and far too few people in this country will call them to account for what they've said and done. They were all on the grassy knoll today. Bastards.

Betcha His Appendage is Less Noodly Than Yours

2011-01-07T06:50:00.000-05:00

I found this in the Times yesterday, a small pleasure to make you laugh a bit: Dwight Garner demolishing a self-help book in a hilarious review:

He can use without irony, as he does in “The 4-Hour Body,” lines like: “I was enjoying French food and a bottle of Bordeaux with a 25-year-old female yoga instructor new to San Francisco, fresh from the Midwest.” This poor woman lets slip that she’s unable to have an orgasm. Mr. Ferriss, as any humanitarian would, makes it a point to fix this problem for her. “I was able to facilitate orgasms,” he writes, “in every woman who acted as a test subject.”

Everything about Mr. Ferriss’s book declares: This is not your auntie’s self-help book. No muffled “I’m OK — You’re OK” tone here. The vibe is: I’m Superbad, bro, and I have dimples. You’re a mole person who, if you become an angel investor in my books, might someday touch the hem of my Speedo.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/books/07book.html?hp

--I smiled at the review, rather than allow myself to be appalled that this guy is getting rich on this crap and that he isn't laughed at wherever he goes. And i'd venture a guess that the author is likely to find Limbaugh and Beck more sympatico than, say, Andrew Bacevich or Rachel Maddow. Could be wrong, though...

I Should Have Seen This Coming

2011-01-06T08:34:00.002-05:00

The NY Times reports today on an eminent and well-respected psychologist's paper, about to be released in a peer-reviewed journal, supporting a finding of extrasensory perception:

The paper describes nine unusual lab experiments performed over the past decade by its author, Daryl J. Bem, an emeritus professor at Cornell, testing the ability of college students to accurately sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side of its screen. The studies include more than 1,000 subjects.

Some scientists say the report deserves to be published, in the name of open inquiry; others insist that its acceptance only accentuates fundamental flaws in the evaluation and peer review of research in the social sciences.

“It’s craziness, pure craziness. I can’t believe a major journal is allowing this work in,” Ray Hyman, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University Oregon and longtime critic of ESP research, said. “I think it’s just an embarrassment for the entire field.”

The editor of the journal, Charles Judd, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, said the paper went through the journal’s regular review process. “Four reviewers made comments on the manuscript,” he said, “and these are very trusted people.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/science/06esp.html?hp

The article notes the respect Bem commands. They even cite Ray Hyman, a critic, who wonders whether he didn't mean it as a joke. Hyman's a mainstay of the Skeptical Inquirer, whose raison d'etre is debunking paranormal claims. I'd say the mass of evidence mostly favors the debunkers, but it's also obvious that they, too, have an agenda, and themselves can't entirely avoid biases of social construction.

Out of my field enough, this, so all I can bring to the table is skepticism, tempered with the odd, lingering hope and belief that sooner or later, someplace, there'll be something brand new, from an utterly unexpected source, that'll shake us out of our complacency as much as Riemann, Lobachevsky, Becquerel, Planck, Einstein and Godel shook 'em up back then.

Now, I'll admit that part of my bias is that the phenomena hypothesized, if actually present, should manifest themselves in far less ambiguous terms. Were telepathy or precognition possible, one might leap to the perhaps erroneous conclusion that they should be manifest in the sort of abilities routinely displayed in pop fiction, rather than culled from subtle statistics. Meanwhile, we daily get offers from wall Street types selling prognostications we should act upon which, were they as accurate as is implied, would offer the prognosticator opportunities far greater than those of magazine marketing, and, at that, best kept secret.

So, one is, too, offered the bemused thought that if the Gifted Ones exist out there, They don't want us to know about Them. Maybe Hyman is one of 'em. That'd explain it all. The next step, clearly, is to study in meticulous detail the funding of the Skeptical Inquirer. But, then, you saw that coming, didn't you?

Poetry Corner: 'A Satire Against Mankind'

2011-01-05T19:17:00.002-05:00

Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man)
A spirit free to choose, for my own share,
What case of flesh and blood I pleased to wear,
I'd be a dog, a monkey or a bear,
Or anything but that vain animal
Who is so proud of being rational.

The senses are too gross, and he'll contrive
A sixth, to contradict the other five,
And before certain instinct, will prefer
Reason, which fifty times for one does err;
Reason, an ignis fatuus in the mind,
Which, leaving light of nature, sense, behind,
Pathless and dangerous wandering ways it takes
Through error's fenny bogs and thorny brakes;
Whilst the misguided follower climbs with pain
Mountains of whimseys, heaped in his own brain;
Stumbling from thought to thought, falls headlong down
Into doubt's boundless sea, where, like to drown,
Books bear him up a while, and make him try
To swim with bladders of philosophy;
In hopes still to o'ertake th' escaping light,
The vapor dances in his dazzling sight
Till, spent, it leaves him to eternal night.
Then old age and experience, hand in hand,
Lead him to death, and make him understand,
After a search so painful and so long,
That all his life he has been in the wrong.
Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies,
Who was proud, so witty, and so wise.

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

Financial Musical Chairs

2011-01-05T06:48:00.002-05:00

This morning's NY Times offers William Cohan on Goldman Sachs and Facebook:

Last August, Facebook was valued at $27 billion and now it’s $50 billion — for a company with a reported $2 billion in revenue and negligible profits. If General Electric, with 2010 revenue of around $150 billion, traded at a similar multiple of revenue, it would be worth $3.75 trillion instead of $200 billion. Facebook is now considered to be worth more than Time Warner, DuPont and Goldman’s rival Morgan Stanley.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/friends-with-benefits/?hp

--He goes on to explain in detail the coming next round of high-finance musical chairs, in which Facebook is worth that much as long as the music's playing, Goldman plays IBGYBG and finds a seat when the music stops, and billions of dollars of asset value vanish into thin air, leaving not a rack behind. Read the whole thing; it's well worth it.

Yet again, we're offered an illustration of the difference between speculation and investment. One sets up an unstable situation destined to crash and burn; one builds lasting wealth and adds value to the economy. To the extent that resources and ingenuity find quicker and larger returns in the former than the latter, the, er, unbillionaire class will always be worse off. That's because the rich guys get their marks to trade trillions worth of dubiously valued assets at their nominal value, but, each trade, take real money off the top. That abstracts money out of the productive economy into their pockets, as surely as even the most punitive tax would.

One of my small, but real, glimmers of hope for the future is if the marks realize that they're being gamed, and wise up. Meanwhile, radar continues to sweep the skies over Schloss Wombat; no pigs yet detected...

Love Me, I'm A Liberal

2011-01-03T09:32:00.000-05:00

In the context of discussing Obama's not unmixed record, my friend Karin on the eschaton blog recalled Phil Ochs' great 1966 or so song 'Love Me, I'm a Liberal'. I remember every word of it. Nor did I vote for Humphrey in the 1968 election after the disgrace in Chicago.

The key lines of Ochs' song close it:

But now, I am older and wiser
And so, I am turning you in...

That gets complicated, like, wicked quick. A lot of old lefties casually embraced the Soviet Union, apologized for Stalin; later, others would embrace Mao, of the Great Leap Forward and the cultural Revolution. A good part of the 1950s was about forcing the left into a pusillanimous liberalism endorsing the military-industrial national security paradigm of the Cold War. The equation of a broader left version of societal change with outright treason was all too casually accepted. Getting older and wiser sometimes meant reconsideration of such things, at a time when the left was swept away with the romance of the defeat of colonialism by national liberation movements, viewed with utter lack of skepticism both in themselves and as models for domestic politics. Just as one could easily oppose the war in Vietnam without mistaking Gen. Giap for a Jeffersonian Democrat, one could, too, have supported the Johnson who passed Medicare, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act--all substantial gains to the country, on a scale equaled only by FD Roosevelt--without mistaking the Gulf of Tonkin incident as described for reality. One could have, perhaps even should have, gotten older and wiser, and still never have turned anyone in. Ochs, whom I love dearly, equated those two, just as serious old lefties casually viewed reformers, who subverted class hatred and delayed the Revolution by legitimizing the current system, as worse in some ways than outright fascists. He was wrong to do so.

Equating Humphrey-style liberalism with complicity with McCarthy, Vietnam and domestic racism can't be justified in retrospect. And I would vote for Humphrey in a heartbeat today, were he running against Nixon, who, to my astonishment, can no longer be considered the most despicable, stupid, incompetent, ruthless, evil human being ever to be president of this country.

Pseudo-Religious Pseudoscience

2010-12-31T08:23:00.000-05:00

Another thought on Brooks's column re my last post: consider the reliably potty way such things as cosmology, relativity and, especially, quantum mechanics are viewed by many, if not most, who actually read and think about them. Even scientists well acquainted with them aid and abet this sometimes, making wild claims distant from their fields. So, the strangenesses and philosophical difficulties of quantum mechanics are contrasted with earlier certainties, as if there have never been such things. Meanwhile, the astonishing precision and power of general relativity and quantum mechanics, their confirmation by experiment, their theoretical predictions of the universe's beginning and future in far more detail and testability than any prior religious tales, the extraordinary advances in biology and physiology, all far less a part of how most view them. Even evolution, ever more confirmed as science, is ever more wildly applied to such things as psychology and gender socialization. Part of all this, of course, is the sheer difficulty of the math and concepts. But part, too, is the search in science for a substitute for religion, and, at that, an inadequate one, rather than an illumination of the universe in different terms, and, at that, oft denying that any such thing is happening.

Even Brooks notes the primary role of communal, social institutions, and the threat to them. Everybody does, even on the right: their take on religion, immigration, the nuclear family and its vicissitudes, demand for social change all bespeak their perception of a threat to their group identity and institutions. The reconstruction of those institutions--desperately needed--can arise from a realistic grasp of their origins, which would allow a new appreciation of a common humanity, or a retreat into an artificial tribalism, extending only to Self and denying the common humanity of the Other.

One of these is likely to have a better result than the other, but is less likely, in that it will be opposed by those most enabled in the deeply unsatisfactory current reality, whose interests lie elsewhere.

Alienation: We Need More God And More Sports

2010-12-31T07:53:00.000-05:00

Back to David Brooks, who I read this morning so you don't have to. He's been reading philosophy again. It seems that modern man's anomie is best explained by a substitution of the uncertainties of science for the pieties of religion, and that we poor souls take delight in sport and other things in search of what we've lost:

For the past hundred years or so, we have lived in a secular age. That does not mean that people aren’t religious. It means there is no shared set of values we all absorb as preconscious assumptions. In our world, individuals have to find or create their own meaning.

This, Dreyfus and Kelly argue, has led to a pervasive sadness. Individuals are usually not capable of creating their own lives from the ground up. So modern life is marked by frequent feelings of indecision and anxiety. People often lack the foundations upon which to make the most important choices...

We have official stories we tell about our culture: each individual is the captain of his own ship; we are all children of God. But in practice, willy-nilly, the way we actually live is at odds with the official story. Our most vibrant institutions are collective, not individual or religious. They are there to create that group whoosh: the sports stadium, the concert hall, the political rally, the theater, the museum and the gourmet restaurant. Even church is often more about the ecstatic whoosh than the theology.

The activities often dismissed as mere diversions are actually central. Real life is more about serial whooshes than coherent meaning.

We can either rebel against this superficial drift, or like Dreyfus and Kelly, go with the flow, acknowledging that the autonomous life is impossible...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/opinion/31brooks.html?hp

---So, the notion that vastly more horrible wars, ecological destruction, medical care ever less personal and more invasive, alienation from work, economic insecurity and inequality, the systematic destruction of the social contract, the exaltation of selfishness, consumption and the 'free market', the centrality of profit in marketing, advertising and entertainment all pursued with billions of dollars, the distractions and lack of commitment undermining education--you know, those things--aren't all that important compared to the social deterioration consequent to an abandonment of the primacy of God in favor of, y'know, actual knowledge of the universe. And the remedy is MORE SPORT, MORE EMBRACE OF SPORT--things not now in evidence--to reconstitute the social contract.

You can't make this shit up...

Utopias and Villains

2010-12-27T09:08:00.001-05:00

Thinking more about Harry Potter: Voldemort, now he's an obvious villain type, potted Nietzschean, power for its own sake, and knowledge in service of power. We know him well, his type all over pop culture, one of its guilty pleasures: old Westerns' Black Barts, Krauts and Japs, James Bond's sneering opponents, Islamic terrorists, ruthless drug lords, serial killers, all of the same ilk. He's instantly identifiable as a villain: the face, the manner, the way he treats even his allies. And far more Nazi than Communist, and by design--Nazis dream of exerting unrestrained power as a member of the Master Race over others, rather than of working together in a universal brotherhood of the proletariat--so the wizards over the Muggles, the oppression and exploitation of such as goblins and elves, fits far better. But Umbridge is a masterpiece: a roundish, pink-wearing cat lady, never raises her voice or even has an unpleasant edge to it, an everyday Englishwoman to her core, and utterly sinister, a living, breathing reminder that we, all of us, have to choose Gryffindor over Slytherin, not despite our humanity but because of it, and that the right choice isn't always the default position.

Norman Davies, a historian of Europe with a special interest in and sympathy for Poland, in his history of Europe, stopped to consider the question, more common in earlier generations, of whether Naziism or Communism is the greater evil. The actual numbers of dead were greater in Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China. And Davies writes with merciless clarity about Soviet evil. But he, too, notes that the Communist Utopia, though dependent for its achievement on a human nature we don't see much of, would be a good place, and the Nazi Utopia, all too realizable in a world of human beings subject to the temptations of privilege, power and tribalism, would, even if achieved, be a nightmare.

The libertarian/Ayn Rand Utopias, like the Communists' and in contrast to the Nazis', wouldn't be bad places, either: all those people picking themselves up by their bootstraps, actualizing themselves, free at last of constraint and perverse incentives, innovating, building, their labors rewarded, the cornucopia of free markets overflowing, individuals' right conduct, in charity and restraint, arising from themselves rather than imposed from without. And just as impossible to achieve as the Communist Utopia, and for the same reasons: humans aren't wired that way, and human rights and desires are incommensurable, cannot all simultaneously be achieved, and require inevitably imperfect reconciliation and judgment when they conflict. The Communists and the libertarians both, oddly, dream of a withering away of the state, when humanity is free of, well, humanity, and are both too damned willing to break eggs by the millions in service of their Utopian omelets. The Nazis dream of an unrestrained, all powerful, racist state in service of their own ego/ids, acknowledging human conflicts and resolving them with gun and gas. Umbridge would have been a good German; the Nazis would have applauded the Mudblood Registry. More compatible, alas, with human nature, and all too possible on earth. Not, strictly, a Utopia (literally nowhere): it has happened, and will again, in small as well as large. We must not be seduced by Utopias offered by ideologues. But, more important, we must reject, and actively resist, that which gives rise to Naziism, and that arises, above all, within ourselves.

One, Two, Many Mario Savios

2010-12-23T09:33:00.000-05:00

I was criticised by a poster on eschaton for reconsidering the 'New Left' of the 1960s as at best a mixed blessing, after he cited Mario Savio (Berkeley Free Speech Movement), who found the system so odious that only withdrawal sufficed, and further participation in it acquiescence. I responded thusly:

I watched Mario Savio, Mark Rudd, Ted Kaptchuk and too many others fade into solipsistic irrelevance, as they wildly misunderstood the United States as ripe for progressive revolution rather than reactionary repression. By the time they were finished, having withdrawn from participation in an admittedly deeply flawed, odious system, they were, on the one hand, Weatherpeople and Symbionese, embracing and committing violence, even fatal violence, in potted emulation of third-world anticolonialist movements and the Cultural Revolution credulously viewed, or Progressive Labor people who, seeking sufficient purity, eschewing all music save Beethoven's and, in seeking actual role models amongst the world's nation states, embraced Mao's China, even, in one group I sat in on, Hoxha's Albania. And let's not forget the left's rampant sexism of the times: the classic remark was Stokely Carmichael's 'The position of women in the movement is prone.'

The SDS started out with a principal belief in participatory democracy. Their stance in the Johnson-Goldwater campaign was 'Part Of The way With LBJ'. They could have evolved, as Johnson sank into Vietnam, into more participation, more outreach. They didn't. They did quite the opposite, and played into the hands of the right. I'm entirely aware that this didn't occur in a vacuum: they were opposed with every weapon of propaganda and force the right, the corporatists, the racists, the national security priesthood, all of them could muster. I know that. But in the end, they were complicit in their demise as a viable political force in this country. And, while their opposition to racism, and later (too much later) sexism, racism and homophobia, was enormously positive, many of their other positions and tactics wound up more diversionary than effective, splitting and isolating the left. It needn't have been so. The withdrawal Savio, and others, not only advocated, but demanded as the only admissible moral response, was, and is, wrong.

Only those viewing the past through the rosiest of glasses deny the egotism, ineffectiveness and descent into political irrelevance of much of the 'New Left'. Been there done that. One need concede nothing in hatred and opposition to the right to fault their analyses, their tactics, their blindness to how the vast majority of the country saw them. The right used every fair and foul means in opposition. Some, like the Berrigans and Zinn, avoided the trap. Many did not. I was there, i put myself on the line, I thought long and hard about such things then and now. I'm skeptical of Obama, for all the reasons commonly cited on the left, more than accepting of him in toto. But the suggestion that he isn't completely, irredeemably evil either is far from acquiescence in his every move. I reject entirely the notion that sullen, cynical withdrawal, out of a hopeless view that real change is impossible, is the only correct moral, ethical, political, strategic and tactical response to the ample perfidy we see out there. It isn't true, it doesn't work, it never worked, it plays into our opponents' hands. The New Left never, not once, added members and political strength by shouting 'Up Against The Wall, Motherfucker', watching 'The Battle of Algiers' for the 103rd time, or applauding the Cultural Revolution. Not once.

If It Walks Like A Lame Duck, Talks Like A Lame Duck...

2010-12-23T07:19:00.001-05:00

Now that the lame-duck session is over, and a few decent things got done amidst the plethora of unsolved, ignored or exacerbated problems of the country and the world, i can go back to my cup being 90% empty, resenting the lesser-of-two-evils business, and resuming the mistrust, cynicism, anger and despair that always has been my lot as a lefty. I'm only partially snarking here: the world, the nation, power and politics really are largely in a sad state, and what's been accomplished, while real, and suggesting an actual, though minuscule, possibility of further positive change, hasn't been nearly enough.

There was a Bugs Bunny cartoon in which Elmer Fudd and Bugs switched roles; both found it uncomfortable, and resumed business as usual at the end...

Gail Collins, on the lame-duck session, finds her cup half full this morning:

Good work, White House! Thank heavens we got rid of our former president, Barack Obama, who couldn’t even get the trade agreement he went all the way to South Korea to sign. Our current president, Barack Obama, would never let that happen, and, in fact, came up with a really excellent trade agreement with the South Koreans just the other day.

“Administration officials have bent over backwards to try to solve every problem that’s come up,” said Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, one of the Republicans who reached across the aisle ...

...let’s admit it. Nothing would have gotten done if Obama hadn’t swallowed that loathsome compromise on tax cuts for the wealthy.

If he’d taken the high road, Congress would be in a holiday war. The long-term unemployed would be staggering into the new year without benefits. The rest of the world would look upon the United States as a country so dysfunctional that it can’t even ratify a treaty to help keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists. The people who worked at ground zero would still be uncertain about their future, and our gay and lesbian soldiers would still be living in fear.

It’s depressing to think that there was no way to win that would not have involved giving away billions of dollars to people who don’t need it. But it’s kind of cheery to think we have a president who actually does know what he’s doing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/opinion/23collins.html?hp

---I'm not sure I'd concede that accepting the tax cut is the 'high road'. I'd feel marginally better about it had he been more forthright and persistent in opposing it, had it come in isolation rather than as part of a pattern of one-sided 'compromise' characteristic of the Obama administration, and had he not gone out of his way to disparage the doubts of those 'supercilious, overly pure' members of the base who elected him. But I've struggled, throughout the campaign and since inauguration, with being unhappy with Obama's acceptance of the limitations of the politically possible, while recognising that he's accomplished some things--again, not enough--that move the goal posts just a bit, and had eluded his predecessors. And I'll doubtless continue to do so...

The Right on Cruise Control

2010-12-22T11:39:00.000-05:00

The Tea Party right's conspiracy theories, methinks, can be explained (absent frank psychosis) as can their trivialization of fact. They divert and dominate the discussion. The moral panic, the existential threat, is thereby excluded from the discussion, just as those advancing facts contradicting their narrative thereby identify themselves as pointy-headed, out of touch, elitist liberals, lacking entirely in virtue or legitimacy, who--wait for it--want to impose their sense of reality on everybody else.

They deny evolution in large measure because accepting it results in loss of control of the narrative. 'God said it, I believe it, that settles it.' If they're wrong about any one thing, they can be wrong about anything and everything. Looking outside themselves or their group, according others' take on reality respect at the cost of bringing their own into question, introducing ambiguity, that's a non-starter. Not everyone is strong enough to be uncertain.

Treaty Confirmation: What will Be The Next Obama Failure?

2010-12-22T07:54:00.002-05:00

The Times is careful today to place the apparent imminent passage of the arms treaty in proper perspective, as but a minor victory in what will be seen, eventually, as yet another arena of failure of the Democrats and Obama before the principles and puissance of their opponents:

WASHINGTON — The new arms control treaty with Russia, whose ratification now seems assured, was initially envisioned as a speed bump on President Obama’s nuclear agenda, a modest reduction in nuclear forces that would enable him to tackle much harder issues on the way to his dream of eventually eliminating nuclear weapons altogether.

It turned out to be a mountain. And while Mr. Obama is savoring another major victory, just days after he won repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rules that dominated the lives of gay and lesbian members of the military, his own aides acknowledge that the lesson of the battle over the treaty is that the political divide on national security is widening. The next steps on Mr. Obama’s nuclear agenda now appear harder than ever.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/us/politics/22assess.html?hp

---I agree that far more needs to be done, about nuclear weapons and their proliferation, and that it'll be difficult. I agree that the pattern has been to settle for a definition of what's politically possible rather than try to change it, and to dismiss, even ridicule us supercilious, overly pure types who want more. But it's utterly predictable that any success of Obama, any at all, no matter how small, and, for that matter, even any action which asserts the legitimacy of his presidency, is to be dismissed entirely, or even characterized as further evidence of failure. That's especially egregiously on display here. A way of countering it would be to marshal a political base with a different perspective in support. But, then, you knew that...

RIP: sarah deere

2010-12-22T07:44:00.000-05:00

A former regular on the eschaton board, sarah deere, died yesterday. A lovely and loving soul, she never quite recovered from the loss of her dearly loved grandchild in her middle school years to embryonal cell rhabdomyosarcoma, a cancer we know neither origin nor how to treat. Sometimes I wish I believed in heaven; if I did, I'd be comforted that she's up there with mended heart, reunited with her Warrior Princess, cruelly struck down in this vale of wrath and tears during a blameless childhood by one of those far too numerous things that for me exclude the presence of an omnipotent, omniscient, just and loving God. I join the rest of the eschaton community in wishing we could have helped her cope with that with which it is nearly impossible to cope. I join most of us in being both glad and sorry I'm human. Her death makes my humanity, for all its limitations, all its opportunities to encounter beauty and horror, the picayune and the infinite, more poignant and harder to feel grateful for, even as I read of a life well lived.

Some deaths seem the natural end of a long life, even timely. Most of us, perhaps--certainly just about every health professional--hopes for a graceful exit with little pain, quick progression, maintenance of faculties and a chance to say goodbye, rather than a prolonged flogging of what little life is left in an obscene festival of tubes, lines, machines, dependence and pain. We don't always get what we want, but at least there's the possibility. I fear my own death not at all. But childhood cancer, especially, violates every last one of our coping mechanisms for dealing with death, and our sense of justice, striking the innocent unexpectedly and all too often mercilessly. Me, I think looking for justice down here is nothing more than denial of the appalling contingency of our lives, something so troubling that, for many, it becomes unacceptable, to the extent that it requires mitigation with simplistic religion, or the Kubler-Ross sort of dream of making death a natural part of life to be embraced, rather than the cause of fear and anger. Her steps for coping with death/loss are valid; I observed them and used them every day in practice. But a good part of her work suggests that one can always cope with death; the dark side of it is that if you can't, it's out of personal failing. And, with respect to another's death, rather than one's own, as often as it's an accepted part of life, it's something to be fought, out of anger, love and lost opportunity:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

(I always found the strict form of the poem, a villanelle, not only high artistry, but, too, a poignant assertion of control of the uncontrollable...)

Property Rights For the Foreclosed Upon

2010-12-22T07:16:00.002-05:00

The Times reports that in some cases, not only do banks/lenders foreclose erroneously, making procedural errors based on sloppy or non-existent documentation, but their contractors break, enter and steal personal property.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/business/22lockout.html?hp

The mortgage allows foreclosure under certain circumstances for delinquent payments. Court action is required. Even assuming proper foreclosure, personal property isn't at all included in the secured property. Taking it out of the home might be permissible. Taking possession of it without possession or compensation, making it unavailable to the owner on demand, is conversion (theft) and entirely actionable.

--Even assuming the article is correct in asserting that this crap is rare, it's more common than, say, terrorist attacks, which have engendered massive, costly responses throughout the country. Were I a legislator, I'd propose a law which makes break-in and theft of personal property under the direction of a mortgagee (the holder of the loan) punishable by immediate voiding of the foreclosure and unraveling of the mortgage, reducing its outstanding principal to zero, in addition to holding any contractor acting thus for the mortgagee (the bank/lender) liable for triple damages. That'd solve the problem instantly. I'd expect right wingers, who hold property rights perhaps the most sanctified of all rights other than to carry firearms, to be in the forefront of those outraged by such behavior. How come they aren't? Anyone?

Word-Processing: They Don't Want You To Know

2010-12-21T08:51:00.000-05:00

Autocorrect and Spellcheck are the Devil's work. The former, a jackbooted, thuggish program's compromise of your individual freedom of expression, the Black Helicopter of Code. The latter, a nanny-program's misguided, altruistic theft of incentives to individual excellence...

The Gurus Just Keep On Coming

2010-12-21T08:15:00.001-05:00

David Brooks reports this morning that he has found love, in one Ericka Brown, who teaches her notion of Judaism in Washington. She's tough, but empathetic. Makes latecomers to her class sit in a chair in the corner. Gaawrsch:

I concluded that Brown’s impact stems from her ability to undermine the egos of the successful at the same time that she lovingly helps them build better lives. She offers a path out of the tyranny of the perpetually open mind by presenting authoritative traditions and teachings. Most educational institutions emphasize individual advancement. Brown nurtures the community and the group.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/opinion/21brooks.html?hp

--Let me repeat that: 'the tyranny of the perpetually open mind'. Amongst the world's pressing problems, surely that isn't the worst. And Brooks' implication that toughness and an open mind are incompatible is utter nonsense. Meanwhile, the community and group, while necessary and, today, placed far lower than individuals in political rhetoric, can themselves be 'tyranny'. Yet another facile manipulator of weak people, this Brown, no different from those arising in countless other traditions.

Community and group can tyrannize as well. A perfect example is Brown's assertion that one's obligated to expose adultery, even at the cost of friendship. Some marriages complicated by adultery (and a myriad other secrets and transgressions) are worth saving; some aren't; the decision should obviously be up to the married couple rather than an external observer. Brown advocates the destruction of all adulterous marriages in the name of group values, while, rather incredibly, dismissing friendship as a group value. This, too, is tyranny, as well as incoherent.

Yet another manipulator, seems to me, turning gold or dross into hogwash for those yearning for authority.

Not to mention that, hearing Brooks describe Brown, Freud smiles from his grave. I quote Tom Lehrer on the subject:

From the Bible to the popular song, there's one thing we've heard right along:
Of all the things we hail as good, the most sublime is motherhood.
There was a man, though, who, it seems, once carried this ideal to extremes.
He loved his mother, and she loved him, and yet his story is rather grim...

RIP: A Friend, of Complications of Diabetes

2010-12-16T08:26:00.001-05:00

Frank Patterson, aka plantsman, a good friend from the Eschaton boards, died of a heart attack following a period of poorly controlled diabetes. He was a good, gentle, generous soul, a landscaper who wanted nothing more than to coexist with the beauties of the earth. We'll miss him.

The vascular complications of diabetes (including heart attacks), and not the sugar lability, are what kill most patients with the disease. The complications can be prevented, to some extent, by meticulous, ongoing, management by committed, accessible primary care docs working with equally committed patients with the money and intelligence to comply. This, of course, is precisely what every incentive in the US health care system militates against:

The vogue for such specialties (ENT, plastic/cosmetic surgery, dermatology, radiology, anaesthesia and others--ProfW) is part of a migration of a top tier of American medical students from branches of health care that manage major diseases toward specialties that improve the life of patients — and the lives of physicians, with better pay, more autonomy and more-controllable hours.

“It is an unfortunate circumstance that you can spend an hour with a patient treating them for diabetes and hypertension and make $100, or you can do Botox and make $2,000 in the same time,” said Dr. Eric C. Parlette, 35, a dermatologist in Chestnut Hill, Mass. (an affluent Boston suburb--ProfW), who chose his field because he wanted to perform procedures, like skin-cancer surgery and cosmetic treatments, while keeping regular hours and earning a rewarding salary.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/fashion/19beauty.html?scp=5&sq=doctors+botox+diabetes&st=nyt

--Go ahead. Click on the link and read the damned thing, while you're thinking about Frank's death. Just don't expect it to add to your equanimity.

Tears of the Great Pumpkin

2010-12-16T08:01:00.000-05:00

Gail Collins is great this morning on our next Speaker of the House's propensity to cry:

“He is known to cry,” the outgoing speaker, Nancy Pelosi, told Deborah Solomon in The Times Magazine. “He cries sometimes when we’re having a debate on bills.”

Pelosi, of course, does not cry in public. We will stop here briefly to contemplate what would happen if she, or any female lawmaker, broke into loud, nose-running sobs while discussing Iraq troop funding or giving a TV interview.

(Pause)

O.K., moving forward...

We will stop again briefly to imagine what would have happened if Nancy Pelosi, upon being elected speaker, had confessed on national TV that she was unable to visit schools in her district because the sight of little children made her break into sobs (as has Boehner--ProfW).

(Pause)

O.K. About Boehner...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/opinion/16collins.html?_r=1&hp

---Any feminist would recognise the double bind applied here to Pelosi that won't be demanded of Mr. Pumpkin at all. The essence of the right's game is that its rules exclude even the possibility of someone else winning. Once that's understood, it's a short logical step for anyone else to refuse to play it.

Exile

2010-12-15T08:14:00.000-05:00

It occurred to me this morning that Kryptonite is worth thinking about: Superman, empowered and protected from injury under the yellow sun of his new home, an exile from a destroyed home, is vulnerable in the presence of tangible chunks of his homeland. And he feels the need to construct a Fortress of Solitude, accessible only to him. Not the most trivial of metaphors arising from the twentieth century.

And he came as a baby. Good thing he didn't land in Arizona...

Wikileaks and the Flat World

2010-12-15T07:02:00.001-05:00

I read Tom Friedman so you don't have to: he's waxing wroth on the alternatives to a strong America, notably a China less than embracing human rights. He includes, amongst those who might enter the power vacuum a weakened America would create, empowered individuals such as the Wikileaks folk:

As for the superempowered individuals — some are constructive, some are destructive. I read many WikiLeaks and learned some useful things. But their release also raises some troubling questions. I don’t want to live in a country where they throw whistle-blowers in jail. That’s China. But I also don’t want to live in a country where any individual feels entitled to just dump out all the internal communications of a government or a bank in a way that undermines the ability to have private, confidential communications that are vital to the functioning of any society. That’s anarchy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/15/opinion/15friedman.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fopinion%2Findex.jsonp

--A casual equation of Wikileaks to an economic superpower whose population is roughly a fourth of humanity. Now, that's breathtaking, mind-bogglingly stupid. And, too, not 'zackly consistent with what most of us would call journalism, though entirely consistent with, say, Tim Russert's assurance to sources that they're off the record in default.

Aside from which, it's hardly clear that private conversations which reflect a divergence between public assertions of decency at some odds with actual beliefs and practices should at all be privileged and private. There's little, if any, popular interest in private documents which only reinforce a public appearance of decency. If the only alternative to maintaining the privacy of conduct which, if viewed in the light of day, would appall the general citizenry is anarchy, that's an extraordinary indictment of the governments and business entities for which it's true. Friedman goes on to extol America's 'core values' as essential to America's role in the world. The revelation of a wide divergence between public and private values, on the other hand, is, we're told, as much a threat to governance as an essential check on wrongdoers.

Pfui...

World Wide Middle Class Values

2010-12-14T08:04:00.002-05:00

My public service this morning is reading David Brooks, so you don't have to. He suggests that the growing world middle class should adopt the values of America's:

American culture was built on the notion of bourgeois dignity. We’ve always been lacking in aristocratic grace and we’ve never had much proletarian consciousness, but America did produce Ben Franklin, one of the original spokesmen of middle-class values. It did produce Horatio Alger, who told stories about poor boys and girls who rose to middle-class respectability. It does produce a nonstop flow of self-help leaders, from Dale Carnegie to Oprah Winfrey. It did produce the suburbs and a new sort of middle-class dream.

Americans could well become the champions of the gospel of middle-class dignity. The U.S. could become the crossroads nation for those who aspire to join the middle and upper-middle class, attracting students, immigrants and entrepreneurs.

To do this, we’d have to do a better job of celebrating and defining middle-class values. We’d have to do a better job of nurturing our own middle class. We’d have to have the American business class doing what it does best: catering to every nook and cranny of the middle-class lifestyle. And we’d have to emphasize that capitalism didn’t create the American bourgeoisie. It was the social context undergirding capitalism — the community clubs, the professional societies, the religious charities and Little Leagues.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/opinion/14brooks.html?_r=1&hp

--The social context underlying capitalism was the illusion that it helps everybody, that a stable, confident middle class is the natural and inevitable result of unrestrained capitalism. The narrative of self-help usually, if not universally, excludes the possibility that self-help alone might be insufficient; its dark side is that failure is the fault of the individual and not of the rest of us. Brooks studiously avoids mention of the factors atomizing the middle class, setting factions at each others' throats: racism, sexism, the criminal 'justice' system, denial of a common humanity with others. He, too, fails to mention the absolute primacy of money, materialism, economic thinking undergirding it all, and that primacy's role in shredding the social contract, which barely exists anymore even here, much less worldwide--that, too, a term he fails to mention.

Other than all that, I agree with him entirely...

Mortal Wombat

2010-12-11T07:46:00.000-05:00

via Gimlet on the eschaton board:

http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/9e0ad9ec-25ae-45ed-b842-0050c6faffb5.jpg

No more Mr Nice Marsupial. Tasmanian rules, suckers...

Other People's Children Left Behind

2010-12-11T07:05:00.000-05:00

Charles Blow, in this morning's Times, reminds us that children are being hurt, right now, by what we aren't doing to help them:

Parents play a large role in this inequality, but so do policies. As the report wisely asks, “Is there a point beyond which falling behind is not inevitable but policy susceptible, not unavoidable but unacceptable, not inequality but inequity?”

I say absolutely.

I would hope that we could move to improve this situation. But at the very least, we mustn’t make it worse.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/opinion/11blow.html?hp

I wrote Mr Blow to thank him. When I was in college in the late 1960s, Arthur Jensen's scientific racism was in flower. I interviewed the magisterial, brilliant Doxey Wilkerson, a professor of sociology, on the subject. He began by pointing out that, even were Jensen's work assumed valid, any given black child might be further to the intelligent side of the Bell Curve than any given white child, and, therefore, Jensen's work could not be used to make policy that would deny black populations any of the educational opportunities available to white children. Prof. Wilkerson--a black man, as it happens--then went on to demolish Jensen's methodology. Today, it seems that such as Jensen, and the later Murray and Herrnstein work, are unacknowledged cornerstones in the world views of too many, in fact but not in name, and the need to solve problems rejected in cynical dismissal of even the possibility. And, to add insult to injury, they oft label those who disagree as 'political correct', or even racist, their most visible spokesmen employing appalling, ugly rhetoric to do so. At a time when they cite a potted macroeconomics to justify, again, an evasion of personal responsibility for any but themselves, Blow's work is especially valuable.

How It's Done

2010-12-10T09:52:00.002-05:00

The Republicans managed to block 'don't ask, don't tell' repeal yesterday.

Were Lyndon Johnson, say, pushing repeal, he'd have had every senator over for lunch. He'd have said, 'We have the majority. You represent the good citizens of the State of (), who'd like their bridges to remain safe to drive on, their farmers to be subsidised, their water to keep flowing, their airports and airlines still in service, their state's businesses the beneficiary of military contracts, and like that. They'd also like to be sure that, next time they vote for a Senator, they aren't voting for someone who fucks pigs and eats small, cute puppies. Senator, I'm the president of all the people, and I care about your constituents too, and appreciate your desire to do well by them. I really do, and i'd like to help. Now, let us come and reason together, you asshole, and don't fucking forget who I am.' I'd guess they'd have eked it out...

Down to the Sea Again

2010-12-09T06:51:00.000-05:00

I've always been interested in the merchant marine, as a romantic kid and, later, as an adult admiring practice and skill. Reading World War II history, I found myself in unusual sympathy with the guys who sailed the Lend Lease ships to Murmansk as much as the usual suspects. One of my favorite books, John McPhee's 'Looking for a Ship', is about the merchant marine, and, in his subtle manner, a lot more besides. Did surgery for 25 years or so: routine, endless hard work and detail, occasionally terrifying, and seen by those without utterly differently from the way I saw it. A freighter captain or engineer might know something about that...

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amythysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

John Masefield, 'Cargoes'

I know where that's at, intimately, as a surgeon, and I'd guess anyone who's ever seen reality intrude itself on a daydream too. I wonder how a merchant seaman would see it. Meanwhile, I myself saw that dirty British coaster romantically, and, a little, still do, turning Masefield on his head a bit...

Left/Right, Self/Other: more

2010-12-07T16:49:00.000-05:00

Thinking more on the subject, I recall times when I saw such a Self/Other paradigm on the left. When i was in college (late 1960s) the left became more strident and doctrinaire as it fractured. The reigning paradigm of purely heroic and virtuous third-world liberation movements became ever more the realm of the purity troll, ever less skeptically applied to domestic issues such as civil rights, as if everyone other than a black man (sic) was an entitled white person living a privileged life in Algiers' European colony, as if all who didn't agree with black students brandishing machine weapons taking over colleges, Mao's Cultural Revolution and the like were imperialist fascists and would get their just deserts come the Revolution, as if the left were the sole repository of decency. As time went on, more information became available and the political and moral bankruptcy of such positions made clearer, I see the left as having mostly moved from such positions. Meanwhile, the works of such as Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest finally and completely ended the left's ability to even apologise for, much less embrace, Stalin and the Soviet Union, and such events as the murderous tyranny of Pol Pot and the divergence from Jeffersonian democracy of the newly unified Vietnam forced the left to find an intellectually honest way to further an agenda of social justice while unequivocally rejecting those perpetrating horror in its name. A chastened, circumspect, but still committed left emerged. The work of the late Tony Judt, notably 'Ill Fares The Land', seems to me the best reasoned, most knowledgable and deeply intellectually honest current presentation. But the right has never acknowledged similarly flawed, strained actions of its own--embrace of domestic and foreign racists, apologies for the horrors of imperialism, applause for the resolve and determination of such as Hitler and Mussolini, potted histories of slavery and Indian genocide, the manifest injustices of unbridled capitalism, the equation of sober assessments of such things as hatred of America and/or freedom, and so on. So, today, now, while acknowledging out of a belief in our common humanity our universal capacity for error, I think the Self/Other paradigm best fits the right far more than the left.

Consider, in this context, the right's, most of all the Christian right's, embrace of Likud Israeli policies. They identify entirely with the fantasy Israel as a virtuous, embattled Self, surrounded by bellicose, brutal, dehumanized Others, but, unlike that politically correct, pusillanimous America subverted and weakened by 'liberals', unapologetic in its military strength and its casual use in the face of world opinion. They wish 'their America' did that, too. And, as always, domestically as well as abroad. And those who disagree with the Likud are not just anti-Semitic, though that, too, is oft said. They, in that disagreement, in their assertion that there are alternatives open to Israel, assault frontally the right's view of domestic and foreign politics, morality and policy across the board. Out of this, too, arises their casual equation of Israeli Judaism, American Judaism, contemporary Zionism, nineteenth century Zionism, the Likud, AIPAC and so on as identical, and their denial of the existence of dissent within Israel and the American Jewish community. Another example of why negotiation with these people is difficult to impossible, and why they so stubbornly embrace even those positions easily demonstrated to be counterfactual.

So, the right, while decrying 'feminazis' and like that, actually embrace one of the bedrock principles of feminism--that the personal is the political--though they'd never acknowledge it. They can't empathise; they positively reject empathy; it threatens them to the core.

Where Have You Gone, Marcus Welby? A Nation Turns its Lonely Eyes To You

2010-12-07T06:49:00.000-05:00

Several posts on Eschaton this morning revolve around nasty, aloof, judgmental doctors providing unsatisfactory care. One of the symptoms of the deterioration and inadequacy of our current health care system, or what passes for it, is a deterioration in the doc-patient relationship. Nobody goes into med school thinking they'll wind up viewing patients judgmentally, as adversaries. Then, docs get beaten up, physically and mentally, in training, graduate with $150,000 or so in average debt, and see themselves as economically, legally and politically under assault in a world granting them nothing like the moral capital and economic privilege they deserve. Meanwhile, third parties pay little for services (like neurology) involving thinking rather than doing. Patient visits of greater than 7-10 minutes oft barely pay for themselves. It's little surprise that, in the absence of time spent together, patient compliance with medication regimens is low, recommendations for lifestyle changes are ignored and resented, and 'alternative' practitioners who are more 'touchy-feely' without much science on their side seen as more attractive. The docs' blog I show the lefty flag on is full of docs venting, judgmentally rather than empathetically, about non-compliant, lawsuit-happy patients refusing to take responsibility for their own health, while feeling--wait for it--entitled to medical care without paying for it. Not all docs are like that, obviously, but we've all met some like that. I'm a doc, and, when I had thyroid cancer (cured, easy one, 1989 or so), my endocrinologist refused to talk to my wife about my cancer, my prognosis or treatment. He said, in these precise words, 'I haven't the time; you're a big boy; you do it.' I found myself another (wonderful) endocrinoligist, and thought that if this happened to me, it happens that much more often to lay folk. It's important, when you have such an entirely unsatisfactory interaction with a doc, to note that, while the doc doesn't have to be an asshole, that the system militates in favor of producing them, in large numbers, and should be changed. Even some of the righty docs understand this, hate it and want to do something about it.

The Internet Unabomber

2010-12-07T06:32:00.002-05:00

Those arrayed against Assange are numerous and powerful enough to bring him down via any number of methods from the complex to the straightforward. He may be a decent person; he may not. But he's also involved in perhaps the world's greatest threat to that lack of accountability so central to the way the powerful operate. And, too, he's demonstrated the relative ease with which anyone could do what he's doing. So, if he's brought down, if Wikileaks is discredited, if the Internet is understood as enabling of cyberterrorists and intrinsically dangerous to Our Way Of Life in its free, unregulated state, well, that wouldn't surprise any of us a whole heck of a lot.

It wouldn't do to simply blow him away. It'd make a martyr of him. Cries of, 'I am Assange!', of 'One, two, three, many Wikileaks!' would arise, in a world where the Internet is central to commerce. So, to my paranoid way of thinking, the better way to do it would be to recast him as a sort of Unabomber of the Net, and such enterprises as Wikileaks as paranoid excesses which any number of methods used to suppress them would be legitimate. I'd suggest that Assange's guilt/innocence isn't a trivial question, but impossible to separate from all of that.

The DSM: Good For What Ails You

2010-12-06T08:51:00.002-05:00

The Times discusses here the vicissitudes of psychiatry's DSM definitions of disease with respect to narcissism:

“There’s a lot of self-centeredness in the world, and narcissist has become an instantly recognizable type,” even if people don’t appreciate the complexity of the diagnosis, said Dr. Andrew E. Skodol II, chairman of the DSM personality disorders work group and research professor of psychiatry at the University of Arizona College of Medicine.

Stripped of most — but not quite all — of its pathology, “narcissist” becomes an easy way to flag the self-smitten (if not used as an all-purpose insult), and sounds so much more thoughtful than “egomaniac,” the older term, invoking Greek myth and modern psychiatry. “It’s a shorthand you can apply to all these powerful and famous people that allows you to feel superior and have this gloss of science,” said Dr. Michael First, a psychiatrist at Columbia and a former editor of the DSM.

A word like that is not going anywhere, regardless of what the experts working on the DSM decide. On the contrary: in recent months some of the researchers pushing to drop the diagnosis have softened their stance; the betting now is that the diagnosis is going to remain in the final revision.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/weekinreview/05carey.html?ref=weekinreview

You watch old movies--I saw 'The Lady Vanishes' the other day--and, one after another, Freudian references to the sub/unconscious come out, and seem ridiculously anachronistic. Then, too, 'hysteria' for women, 'homosexual neurosis' arising out of distant fathers and oppressive mothers--isn't everything mom's fault?

Narcissism, like depression, is oft considered diseases to be treated, as diseases are--by empowered professionals speaking opaquely, using medicines and other methods. Selfishness and sadness/grief, on the other hand, are part and parcel of daily life, and close to universally apparent, at least on occasion, in every honestly observed human life. I'm not sure about this one. I've benefited myself from antidepressant medications and ECT, had good and bad therapy. I'm uneasy about a self-policing, self-defining elite arrogating to itself the right to assert a unique power or competence in dealing with entities which are impossible to differentiate from, well, life as we all live it. Don't like it when priests do that, either, despite the comfort some get from them. And then, there's Scientology, which loathes psychopharmacology across the board, and some dogmatic AA meetings which see individual therapy of any kind as subverting an alcoholic's only hope of recovery. With enemies like these...

States' Wrongs and Potted Federalism

2010-12-03T08:13:00.001-05:00

Found this on the eschaton board this morning:

The Sons of Confederate Veterans plan to hold a $100-per-person "Secession Ball" on Dec. 20 in Charleston's Gaillard Municipal Auditorium. It will feature a play highlighting key moments from the signing of South Carolina's Ordinance of Secession 150 years ago, an act that severed the state's ties to the Union and put the nation on the path to the Civil War.

Jeff Antley, who is organizing the event, said the Secession Ball honors the men who stood up for their rights. "To say that we are commemorating and celebrating the signers of the ordinance and the act of South Carolina going that route is an accurate statement," Antley said. "The secession movement in South Carolina was a demonstration of freedom."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/us/30confed.html

---First, any definition of freedom centering on the freedom to own slaves is despicable and should be instantly dismissed. Now, consider 'states' rights'.

Roger Taney's opinion in Dred Scott v Sandford, in the name of states' rights, denied even the possibility of citizenship to freed slaves, denied the ability of states to ban slavery and refuse to cooperate in it, and allowed roving bands to enter free states and, contrary to those states' laws, forcibly kidnap escaped slaves and return them to bondage. Hardly, seems to me, a straightforward application of federalism. And so, throughout history, 'states' rights' arguments have consistently been in the service of racism. When Reagan endorsed 'states' rights' in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were murdered, everyone understood exactly what he was saying. Today, libertarians such as Rand Paul view acquiescence in denial of civil rights as potentially in the service of freedom. Some even call for repeal of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Meanwhile, folk on the right oft call for Congress to pass 'tort reform', preempting long-standing state authority. They call for federal preemption of states' rights to limit and regulate insurance companies. They violate, and applaud violations of, the clear constitutional authority of states to regulate elections. Medical marijuana, assisted suicide, gay marriage, other social issues. it's almost as if, were one seeking consistency in their positions, one would have to look elsewhere than in high-minded application of what they think the Federalist Papers have to say on the subject.

They Must Be Fought

2010-12-03T06:28:00.001-05:00

Paul Krugman, in today's NY Times, has pretty much given up on Obama:

Whatever is going on inside the White House, from the outside it looks like moral collapse — a complete failure of purpose and loss of direction.

So what are Democrats to do? The answer, increasingly, seems to be that they’ll have to strike out on their own. In particular, Democrats in Congress still have the ability to put their opponents on the spot — as they did on Thursday when they forced a vote on extending middle-class tax cuts, putting Republicans in the awkward position of voting against the middle class to safeguard tax cuts for the rich.

It would be much easier, of course, for Democrats to draw a line if Mr. Obama would do his part. But all indications are that the party will have to look elsewhere for the leadership it needs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/opinion/03krugman.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&src=ig

I have occasionally given Obama the benefit of the doubt with respect to the limitations of the politically possible. I can't anymore. Those bastards need to be fought. They need to be called out, called by name, and fought. Their history is potted. Their understanding of economics is wholly potted and, if implemented or even taken seriously, would be a disaster for the country and the world, even, be it noted, rich people running a business. Their leading media spokesmen tell black folk to take the bones out of their noses and slander Jews as Nazi collaborators and puppet masters. Perhaps their most visible political figure can't speak coherent English, knows nothing about anything, and maligns the grizzly bear, a noble beast, by claiming it as her own. They have said, outright, that they won't pass or even allow to the floor a single Democratic initiative unless their every desire is conceded. If ever there were a time to stand one's ground, to yield not at all, to make your opponent pay a political price, this is it. If ever there were a time when there was less to lose by doing so, this is it. The Democrats don't do that, Obama doesn't do that, they'll get rolled, and, worse, their failure will be attributed to their policies rather than their character.

Recovery from this disaster, not just of the economy but of the polity, will be too slow, too late, far from assured, and will cost lives as well as treasure. It'd be precious were this political, moral disaster fought with the same resources that the possible bankruptcy of the Bank of America and AIG were fought. Wouldn't it?

'Constitutional Conservatism'

2010-12-02T06:45:00.000-05:00

Found this in the Times, from a short piece by Lincoln Caplan that should have been longer, about Republicans' view of 'constitutional conservatism:

A polemic called the Mount Vernon Statement used the phrase last winter to rally an expanded Republican Party. The statement noted five principles: limited government; individual liberty; free enterprise; advancing freedom, opposing tyranny; and defending family, neighborhood, community and faith.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/opinion/02thu4.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&src=ig

'Liberals', whatever they are, of course, support tyranny and oppose individual liberty; that's why they support Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union, and humorlessly demand political correctness from fun-loving righties. And they despise neighborhoods, which is why they organize communities and encourage their participation in government. As for faith, well, Godless atheists and secular humanists, all of them; one can hardly attend church services in this country without having a tomato thrown at one by humanists inspired by the likes of Harris and Dawkins. And, of course, all this is easily found in the Constitution, whose 'original intent' excluded blacks, women and others from the franchise, while empowering rural states over more developed mercantile ones.

Seems to me that a counternarrative, pushed as vociferously and relentlessly in the public sphere as theirs, is long overdue: the constitution as a flawed, time-bound product of flawed men of European ancestry (no women, no black folk), written 225 years ago and since revised, reinterpreted and amended to meet the evolving perceptions and requirements of what government is, should be, and is required to do, for, uh, er, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...