The case against TED, ctd

In what has been termed the 'Babble Bubble', the popular TED talk threatens to overtake the world of ideas, leaving us with a sort of pop-intellectual, eighteen minute-segmented sphere of discussion. Well, not really. But it certainly seems to have become the new standard of self-actualisation, writes Benjamin Wallace:

Until recently, the universal self-­actualizing creative ambition was to write a novel. Everyone has a novel in them, it was said. Now the fantasy has changed: Everyone has a TED Talk in them. There are people on YouTube who upload webcammed soliloquies about whatever and title them things like “My TED Talk.” There’s now even a genre of meta–TED Talks. For a TEDActive talk in 2010, Sebastian Wernicke, a statistician, crunched the data of extant TED Talks to reverse-engineer both the best- and worst-possible talks. Elements common to the most popular TED Talks, he determined good-humoredly, included using certain words (“coffee,” “happiness”), feeling free to “fake intellectual capacity and just say et cetera et cetera,” and growing your hair long. He created an app, the TEDPAD, a kind of TED-omatic that can generate “amazing and really bad” TED Talks.

If TED’s platinum brand is at risk of becoming a generic, it has been with the full support of the brand’s owner. As the TED Talks online uncovered a far-flung global yen for idea videos, TED’s TEDX program, in which the company grants would-be curators licenses to organize local mini-TEDs, has been unexpectedly popular. Since it launched in March 2009, there have been more than 3,000. There has been a TEDX Hunstville (Alabama), a TEDX Timisoara (Romania), a TEDX Gujranwala (Pakistan). There is now one TEDX, and usually more, every day somewhere in the world.

I have a great deal of respect for a number of speakers at the conference, and indeed its organizers, all of whom seem to have performed the admirable task of spreading and popularizing the pursuit of knowledge and ideas. But unfortunately, I hate conferences. With few exceptions (Alain de Botton's talks at the conference have been reliably intriguing, even the one making the non-point about religion for atheists, and of course Malcolm Gladwell), the segments make use of the kind of jargon-laden prattle that I've come to deplore and loathe wherever it appears.

What's most surprising about the TED phenomenon — if you'll allow me the liberty of calling it such — is that the videos have become so popular. Perhaps the most important factor in their online success is the incentive to share. When someone digitally staples something to their Facebook timeline or includes a link to it in their Twitter feeds, they're not so much looking to share ideas and spread knowledge as they are looking to make a statement about their esoteric tastes and superior wisdom. Never mind what everyone else may actually learn from the content being posted; it's what the online audience will be able to infer about the poster. Just like the passing on of any social content, we're selective creatures, looking to curate and carefully craft our own image. It's not something of which we are particularly proud, but a glance at any given Facebook page may affirm this contention for you. Or maybe that's just me.

Previous post on the case against TED here. (Oh, and I've included Alain de Botton's talk, because it's excellent.)

On the cost of presidential campaigns

It turns out that the massive rise has only occurred in the past few years. Kevin Drum captions:

What's fascinating, to me, isn't that the costs of presidential campaigns have skyrocketed so much, but that they haven't. Until very, very recently, that is. From 1964 all the way through 2000, the cost of presidential campaigns was pretty stable, ranging around $300-600 million in inflation-adjusted terms. It was only in 2004 and 2008 that costs suddenly went through the roof. I wouldn't have guessed that. I always figured that campaign costs had been rising inexorably for decades. But apparently not. They've only been rising inexorably for the past eight years.

(Image via Mother Jones)

What does China see in Syria?

Evan Osnos looks at the strange relationship and China's motivation in maintaining it:

Activists now put the death toll in Syria at more than eight thousand and climbing. If Russia’s motives are easier to divine—Assad has been a loyal customer for years—what is driving China’s calculations on this? What does China get out of Syria? For more, I checked in with Shi Yinhong, an influential international-relations specialist at Renmin University, who told me that, while China sees a “need to keep step with Russia” to some degree, the motivations are distinctly Chinese: “China’s worry about the resurgent Western ‘liberal interventionism’ is playing a substantial part, especially after the abuse by NATO countries” and Arab allies in Libya, he said. Shi, who is an adviser to the Chinese cabinet on foreign affairs, went on: “The Chinese government may feel that it has to stop at somewhere to hold on to the principle of sovereignty and non-intervention…. If this time it and Russia do the same as they did over Libya, very bad developments over Iran would probably come true—uglier and sooner.”

Separation anxiety

There is no question among even casual observers of politics these days that idiocy is all too often ignored, although sometimes even celebrated, within American political discourse. One need only look at some of Barack Obama's critics to know that there's an overarching skepticism on the Right, one that maintains the idea of style over substance has slowly made itself known, and that Obama's smoothness is merely an extension of this dangerous development. But Obama aside, and back to the point about idiocy, it seems that the recent rise of Rick Santorum cannot be simply dismissed as another revolution in the cyclical GOP race, but instead a sign that H.L. Mencken might have actually been correct. Correct, I mean, when he wrote in 1920, "All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men."

One exception of Mencken's rule appears to be the White House's current occupant. Mr. Reasonable has repeatedly proven himself to be both intelligent and articulate, although as I've previously illuminated, this can count against him politically. Santorum is the antithetical candidate when compared to the smooth Obama (okay, maybe Rick Perry then). His recent comments on the separation of church and state were particularly irksome. "What kind of country do we live in that says only people of nonfaith can come into the public square and make their case?" Santorum told an ABC reporter recently, latter adding, "I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute." With any luck the erroneous nature of this statement will already be apparent to you. He refers by the way to John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech on the need for rigid separation of church and state. One wonders if Kennedy's outward Catholicism has any bearing on Santorum's ill-conceived perception that only someone of 'non faith' can come 'into the square'. He had fittingly inspiring closing words on the subject: "That makes me throw up." What a coincidence! I thought your words rather vomitous myself!

We're in need of some correction here. I'm in no mood to go about defending the cult of Kennedy at this stage, but it must be noted (and noted goddamn well) that J.F.K., as with any genuine defender of the church-state separation, meant an institutional distinction. There's no doubt that any president's faith would have some sort of inspirational role in the way he — may I also say she? — governs, just as it does on the character of any individual regardless of their occupation.

Santorum's odious disingenuousness on the matter makes it even more nauseating. Does he even really believe this? I hope not, and my concern stems primarily from the reaction this type of ignorant fear mongering typically receives. People of Santorum's ilk should be left to holler in the street, and the theocratically inclined gentlemen who back his campaign with their votes ought to take up history, but then again this is the kind of conservatism that has somehow managed to acquire a kind of street cred currency within the Republican Party. It might be said that the candidate who can accrue the highest number of these 'points' wins the race. But of course this isn't how the system works, and in spite of their parochial small-mindedness, the most conservative voters in America aren't particularly concerned with delicate policy details.

"The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country," Mr. Santorum also opined. And on what ludicrous pseudo-evidence is this gem based? The risible situation with which we are faced in the United States, one in which institutions can claim tax-exempt status merely on the basis that they endorse or claim to have access to a higher power, is indicative of the extent to which the divinely appointed have been granted a position they simply do not deserve. Hitchens put it well following the death Jerry Falwell when he said that you can get away with the most awful things in the U.S. if you can just get yourself called 'reverend'. How right this is.

Santorum's rise, and the religious rhetoric that he has employed throughout it, is an alarming indication of an erosion, of sorts, within American conservatism. What kind of society awards brownie points on the basis of a candidate's willingness to degrade the tenet of religious freedom? If Santorum were to take home the prize of GOP champion, a prize desirous to many and within reach of few, then it would most certainly damage the Republican party for an indefinite period of time. Even 'President Gingrich' is a less harrowing nightmare than the one that ensues when we hear of another uptick in support for Rick Santorum, the man who said he thew up at the thought of church being separate from the state — and then didn't. Mencken was right: "On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." You'll forgive me for saying that the nightmare may well get worse from here.

(Image via Slate)

Why do people hate jury duty?

Matthew Yglesias can't understand:

When I did jury duty in New York years ago I read The Brothers Karamazov while waiting around. When else do you get the chance these days to tackle the big honking 19th Century novels? Is everyone else's job really so amazing that they can't bear the thought of a few days off to listen to testimony and pronounce on a verdict? I don't buy it. I feel like as a society we've coordinated on a pointless anti-social norm that you're some kind of sucker if you're willing to just smile and do what the judge wants even though there are no really good self-interested reasons to want out. For salaried professionals, jury duty is a paid vacation. What's not to like?

Josh Barro thinks he has the answer:

It’s true that many salaried workers can go to jury duty without losing pay or burning vacation days. But is it really a “paid vacation”? That depends on the nature of your job. If you’re just one interchangeable cog in a corporate or government machine, maybe you can sit on a jury and let your workload fall to your co-workers. But for a lot of salaried professionals, jury duty means being at the courthouse from 8 to 4 and then going into the office to attend to a slew of matters that only you are equipped to handle.

Romney's enthusiasts

There aren't many:


The Times headlines, "For Romney, a Message Lost in the Empty Seats." Indeed.

Syria's horrors

With more than five thousand Syrians dead at the hands of President Basahr al-Assad's frighteningly efficient butchery, the international community now seems to have a sense of urgency, and willingness to help. But no one can agree on exactly how to do that:

Most countries, the United States included, have rightly ruled out military intervention. Mr. Assad is determined to resist, no matter what the cost. The Syrian Army is far stronger and better armed than that of Libya’s under Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. There is legitimate fear that a foreign intervention would unleash an even bloodier civil war and possibly spread beyond Syria’s borders. The only hope is that the Syrian people are determined to resist and Mr. Assad’s isolation is growing. At a meeting in Tunis on Friday, more than 60 governments and organizations agreed to intensify diplomatic and economic pressure on the Syrian leader and vowed to find ways to support opposition forces trying to depose him.

The situation is hardly as simple as it seems, and the case for intervention at this stage remains unconvincing. But there's still some time yet.

Santorum the reactionary

Jennifer Rubin's latest (on her Washington Post blog) is really quite interesting:

A number of social conservatives, sensing that Rick Santorum has hit a trip wire, are complaining that he’s being skewered for being a social conservative. That’s demonstrably wrong. The nonstop flaps (some of which concern past episodes that now have come to light) over the last couple of weeks have nothing to do with Santorum’s pro-life views or even his opposition to gay marriage. They have to do with his desire to uproot decades-old trends (e.g. women in the workplace, women in combat, use of contraception) and to use religious terminology and judgments to cast aspersions on his opponents (e.g. “phony theology,” the devil has infiltrated American institutions). In short, Santorum on social issues is not a conservative but a reactionary, seeking to obliterate the national consensus on a range of issues beyond gay marriage and abortion.

PM Carpenter lashes out at Rubin's perceived hypocrisy:

Is that in fact hypocrisy? Sure it is. But is Rubin even aware of it? It doesn't appear so. It seems to reflect more of a profound cognitive dissonance. She's simply oblivious, utterly oblivious, as she thrashes about in her shallow assaults on all but her partisan love, Mitt Romney. There's a word for her kind, which I won't use, but it ain't "commentator." And its essence is to be found, daily, in the once-respectable Washington Post.

"Santorum on social issues is not a conservative but a reactionary." Yeah, actually: that does seem like a bit of a stretch, doesn't it?

The case against TED

There's certainly one to be made, and Nathan Jurgenson makes it:

The way TED talks fuse sales-pitch slickness with evangelical intensity leads to perhaps the most damming argument against the TED epistemology: It necessarily leaves out other groups and other ways of knowing and presenting ideas. As Paul Currion tweeted, TED seems “unaware of its own ideological bias.” Let’s take one example. Take a wild guess which gender is massively over-represented as TED speakers (answer, via Tom Slee @whimsley). And TEDxWomen stinks of tokenism. Hint: It is better to be more inclusive through and through than to segregate marginalized groups into their own token corners. But the TED style aligns much more easily to articulating ideas that sell than ideas that concern power, domination, and social inequalities. Real cutting-edge ideas also come from the margins. TED’s corporate-establishment voice and style aren’t without their uses, but they are certainly not innovative or cutting edge.

(Just as an aside: the New Inquiry site looks great.)

Franzen, Wallace, and realism

Jon Baskin dissects the relationship between the work of David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen. On Franzen's recent novel, Freedom:

If Freedom is remembered, it will be for the spirit of despair it captures and projects—a despair especially acute among Franzen’s reading public, whose nostalgia for the days of Updike and Mailer (and bookstores and printed magazines) is but one aspect of a broader conviction of a decline. Freedom is Franzen’s darkest novel, chronicling what are, for these readers, America’s darkest moments. Its pessimism and misanthropy reflect precisely the mood of the Bush years, during which most literate liberals threatened to move to Canada. If they turned out to have been exaggerating, Freedom may be taken as an investigation of the impotence and shame that motivated the exaggeration, and have survived it. Franzen’s characters reject American society for the same reasons his readers reject it: because it is stupid, thwarts their plans, and makes a mockery of their politics. But they hold no values other than social values, so they are doomed to return to what they reject, and to suffer from it. Thus the melancholy vision at the center of Franzen’s oeuvre, of a man unable to rid himself of the desire to live in a more just world than the facts allow him to anticipate.

Has Santorum peaked too soon?

Given the caprice of the GOP's base throughout the race thus far, it might almost seem prudent to say yes:

Santorum’s surge has been the result of dazzling timing that capitalized on his personal life (his daughter’s illness that generated sympathy for the candidate and shown a light on his image as a family man), the way Romney and Newt Gingrich eviscerated each other in dueling negative ad campaigns and President Obama’s attack on the Catholic Church that concentrated GOP minds on social issues. But a week can be a lifetime in politics. If the focus on abortion, gay rights and contraception helped Santorum in one sense, it is his Achilles’ heel in another as the media’s demonization of him can serve to remind Republicans that he will be brutalized by the left on these issues in a general election.

(Image: "Rick Santorum at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 10, 2012, in Washington." Via Bloomberg)

Taking on Wikipedia

An historian encounters some trouble in trying to improve one of the website's articles. Money quote from the story:

I tried to edit the page again. Within 10 seconds I was informed that my citations to the primary documents were insufficient, as Wikipedia requires its contributors to rely on secondary sources, or, as my critic informed me, "published books." Another editor cheerfully tutored me in what this means: "Wikipedia is not 'truth,' Wikipedia is 'verifiability' of reliable sources. Hence, if most secondary sources which are taken as reliable happen to repeat a flawed account or description of something, Wikipedia will echo that."

Tempted to win simply through sheer tenacity, I edited the page again. My triumph was even more fleeting than before. Within seconds the page was changed back. The reason: "reverting possible vandalism." Fearing that I would forever have to wear the scarlet letter of Wikipedia vandal, I relented but noted with some consolation that in the wake of my protest, the editors made a slight gesture of reconciliation—they added the word "credible" so that it now read, "The prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, did not offer credible evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing. ... " Though that was still inaccurate, I decided not to attempt to correct the entry again until I could clear the hurdles my anonymous interlocutors had set before me.

Wikipedia is, for all we mock it, a good source of information for the casual reader. It's certainly not a reliable source and should never be cited as such, but this has always been the case with encyclopedias — you wouldn't dare include Britannica under a reference table, for example. But this sort of thing really needs to stop. That is, if the site really wishes to be taken seriously.

Christian jihad

The vast majority of Christian moderates, it seems, are quite happy to ignore their faith's inescapable history of violence and intellectual corruption. Your unassuming churchgoer might not ignore it at all, but consider it for a moment before returning the universally robotic reply of, well, religion has always been used for violence. Excuse me? You'll forgive me if I seem bitingly cynical at this point, but I'm not exactly on thin ground to tell you that all Abramamic religions, including the charmlessly ingratiating one of Christ, provide in their religious texts incitements to murder, genocide, and violence in general. Surely, yet again, this isn't a surprise to anyone, especially not the lovely folk who frequent the world's churches each Sunday.

The Old Testament is a particularly thrilling read. Because it includes much of the silliness for which Christianity in particular is renowned, it's the chunk of the biblical canon which is most at risk when theists reach for their mental red pen. Incitements for genocide and violence, as well as the risk of having to actually live according to the silly (supposedly divine) injunctions on food and hygiene, may provide cause for some to pick and choose their favorite bits. You'll often find the intellectual defense for this selective approach to be that the Bible is a text which was written by numerous authors throughout the centuries, rehashed multiple times by multiple people. Nobody denies this, and the argument can work both ways. Even more reason, then, not to take it seriously.

Patrick Allitt, in his review of Philip Jenkins' Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses, gives the following summary, brilliantly phrased, of the Bible's most disturbing passages:

The most painful passages come in the books of Joshua and Judges, which Jenkins describes as an “orgy of militarism, enslavement, and race war.” The Israelites, emerging from the desert after their escape from Egypt, attack Canaanite cities, whose people are described by the biblical narrator as very wicked. God commands the Israelites to exterminate the inhabitants—men, women, children, and animals alike, until nothing is left alive. Likewise in the Book of Samuel, King Saul eventually loses God’s favor not for his bloodthirstiness in war but for his restraint—he fails to annihilate his enemies. The prophet Samuel denounces him for sparing some of the Amalekites, takes up a sword, and personally hacks the captive King Agag to pieces. To make matters worse, says Jenkins, God sometimes deliberately “hardens the hearts” of other peoples, using them to chastise the sinful Hebrews. Then He raises up Judges, righteous Israelites, to smite and destroy them in turn. It’s almost as if He wanted the highest possible body count.

Jenkins offers a useful thought experiment, asking readers to view these stories through the eyes of the Canaanites themselves. To them, the Israelites would seem as terrifying as the Janjaweed militia of Darfur in our own day, or as the Lord’s Resistance Army of Uganda, whose leader, Joseph Kony, has justified the mass torture and killing of men, women, and children in God’s name.

Nobody can deny that the Bible may be full of metaphorical substance, and in fact the allegorical nature of the New Testament's parables and moral tales seems to confirm this contention — but surely the bible's author was being straight forward when it is said that the Amalekites ought to be destroyed. At least the god of the Old Testament as opposed to the New would reduce the need for questions like the one about bad things happening to good people. The ancient Greeks, in this sense, did indeed have it right: if there is a god or are gods, then he or she is certainly capricious, unloving, and liable to testiness at every turn. Christians are not alone in that they have been saddled with this heavy historical burden of violence and tyranny, as well as supposedly divine genocidal apologetics. It requires something of a logical contortion to get one's head around all of this, and how it can possibly believed. There's just one more (I'd never, ever say final) thing I'd like to quickly address:

What about the idea of extremists using religion for their own violent purposes? Sorry to sound glib, but they're not really using it at all. They're actually just doing what it tells them to. I'll leave the final word to Allitt:

Let me end with another paradox about which I would have liked to hear Jenkins’s thoughts. He encourages us to look at historical events from the vantage point of the weaker party, and he tells us that we need to reincorporate the genocidal passages into our understanding and worship. That got me thinking about another biblical genocide—Noah’s flood. We are all familiar with pictures of the animals lining up two-by-two and parading into the ark; these plucky survivors have become a staple subject for greeting-card artists, songwriters, cartoonists, even environmentalists. What we are not used to thinking about is the fact that God Himself in this story is committing genocide, killing everyone in the world except for the members of a single family. It’s a horrifying tale but one that our culture treats as colorful and uplifting, a prelude to the first rainbow. I’ve never heard a sermon on it as an act of divine rage and apocalyptic destruction. Perhaps that just confirms Jenkins’ general point that we should be a lot more self-aware and self-critical when we think about our religion and a lot slower to condemn the violent tendencies in the religions of others.

Steven Weinberg quite rightly said, "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." Would it be wrong of me to say 'Amen'?

(Image: "Noah's Ark, oil on canvas painting by Edward Hicks, 1846 Philadelphia Museum of Art. Source.)

Rasputin of the Bronx

The Smithsonian's Karen Abbott tells the strange tale of 'the durable' Mike Malloy:

The plot was conceived over a round of drinks. One afternoon in July 1932, Francis Pasqua, Daniel Kriesberg and Tony Marino sat in Marino’s eponymous speakeasy and raised their glasses, sealing their complicity, figuring the job was already half-finished. How difficult could it be to push Michael Malloy to drink himself to death? Every morning the old man showed up at Marino’s place in the Bronx and requested “Another mornin’s morning, if ya don’t mind” in his muddled brogue; hours later he would pass out on the floor. For a while Marino had let Malloy drink on credit, but he no longer paid his tabs. “Business,” the saloonkeeper confided to Pasqua and Kriesberg, “is bad.”

Really: read the rest.

Why the world needs America

Sentiment among America's growing isolationist movement would have you believe that the end of American dominance is a pleasing development. While hoards of foreign policy experts (read: pundits) might posit that democracy and freedom could thrive throughout the developing world without the predominant presence of an America on patrol, there's an increasingly persuasive argument being made for another view entirely: perhaps the world is indeed better with the United States in it, and in it powerfully. Robert Kagan makes the case:

What about the long peace that has held among the great powers for the better part of six decades? Would it survive in a post-American world? Most commentators who welcome this scenario imagine that American predominance would be replaced by some kind of multipolar harmony. But multipolar systems have historically been neither particularly stable nor particularly peaceful. Rough parity among powerful nations is a source of uncertainty that leads to miscalculation. Conflicts erupt as a result of fluctuations in the delicate power equation.

War among the great powers was a common, if not constant, occurrence in the long periods of multipolarity from the 16th to the 18th centuries, culminating in the series of enormously destructive Europe-wide wars that followed the French Revolution and ended with Napoleon's defeat in 1815. The 19th century was notable for two stretches of great-power peace of roughly four decades each, punctuated by major conflicts. The Crimean War (1853-1856) was a mini-world war involving well over a million Russian, French, British and Turkish troops, as well as forces from nine other nations; it produced almost a half-million dead combatants and many more wounded. In the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), the two nations together fielded close to two million troops, of whom nearly a half-million were killed or wounded.

You might also be interested in Kagan's other piece on Ameircan decline, in the New Republic.

(Image: "Multipolar systems have historically been neither particularly stable nor particularly peaceful. Nearly a halfmillion combatants died in the Crimean War," depicted in "The Taking of Malakoff" by Horace Vernet, pictured here. Getty Images/The Bridgeman Art Library)

Business relationships and Aristotle

Or what corporate types could learn from philosophy:

Aristotle explained that in unequal friendships, “each party neither gets the same from the other nor ought to seek it.” The ancient Greek philosopher’s observation applies to corporate relationships, too. So does his warning that “when one party’s position changes greatly, the possibility of friendship ceases.” Just ask the shareholders of Yahoo, Wynn Resorts and Xstrata.

Putin's end

Leon Aron writes that the protest movement currently sweeping Russia may signal the end of the country's self-styled strongman, but that lasting change will require more than protest:

Quite apart from all the obvious and increasingly deadening flaws that have emerged under Putin, his regime's fatal deficiency is moral, even existential. For the Russian Internet generation that has lead the protests, guided by Facebook and inspired by LiveJournal blogs, a generation whose members were young children or in their early teens when the Soviet Union collapsed, it is an inconceivable existential monstrosity, an utterly bizarre anachronism, for a great and proud European nation to have someone -- anyone -- in power for 24 years (which is what many think Putin aspires to if "reelected" for two six-year terms). This is six years longer than Brezhnev and only a few years short of Stalin. "You've got to be kidding!" and "This sucks!" may not be among the categories of political science, but they are fair representations of the growing sentiment on Russian blogs and Facebook pages.

What may be necessary is an entirely new sense of political culture:

Thatcher as King Lear

Julian Barnes reviews The Iron Lady:

Streep’s portrayal of the state of dementia—the panic and the paranoia, the childishness followed by shaky reassertion of adulthood, the slippings and delusions—is exact, as is its scripting by Abi Morgan. In one powerful scene, desperate to drive the image of Denis from her head, she turns on every machine—telly, radio, blender, and so on—until the whole apartment roars. At first we might be puzzled why Denis’s presence is not a comfort to her, why she increasingly rails against it. Then we realize that the sanity she holds on to insists that he is dead, so if he is still appearing to her, it means she is going mad. “I will not go mad, I will not,” she insists at one point, a deliberate invocation of Lear.

I wrote immediately after seeing the film that the use of Thatcher's dementia as a lens surprised me in how flattering it really was to Thatcher. Perhaps flattering is the wrong term entirely: one might prefer to say that it lends an emotive hand to its audience, meaning that regardless of one's views on Thacher's political career (Streep herself said, "The policies you can argue with, but...") you would almost certainly count yourself among a very small minority if you didn't feel strangely sorry for Streep's Thatcher. Maybe even concerned in a detached but familial, maternal way. The power of film, you see?

Filmmakers can't really play the Shakespearean game convincingly anymore, and there are very few artistic avenues that will allow you to do it intelligently. There are certain scenes — other audience members with whom I've spoken tend to complain — that underestimate the intelligence of the viewers, and that unnecessarily explain things that may have survived perfectly well without explanation. The King Lear allusion is made in such an 'up-front' way, it's easy to see where such people are coming from. We can make the connection ourselves. Thanks.

 My original thoughts on the film here.

Shooting your kid's laptop

And then posting a video of it online (which then 'went viral'). It might sound a little extreme as punishment, but it's almost sinfully entertaining:



The internet hive doesn't quite agree on this one. While viewers have mostly been amused by the father's reaction — and supportive, for that matter — it becomes obvious throughout the video that the real punishment for the daughter, and indeed the father, will be the emotionally taxing experience of internet notability. Something tells me that being grounded and without a laptop until "whatever year that happens to be" will be the lesser of her punishments.

Mary Champagne takes an entirely different view to the one expressed by most commenters online:

Fathers who controlled their families at the expense of having right relationship with their children – who were feared leaders left isolated from the mutual affection, love and ease of interaction that we know is possible. One does not have to demand respect through fear, maintain leadership by crushing opposition, or convince oneself that iron fisted authority is an expression of love. There are many examples of fathers who garner respect and obedience from their children through authoritative rather than coercive parenting. These are not laissez faire, “hippy”, disengaged parents who abdicate responsibility for limit setting and leadership. But they achieve the balance of raising healthy and capable children while still having their love and respect as they reach adulthood.

Another nods, adding, "If a husband shot a .45 into a wife’s computer, I have no doubt it would be considered an act of domestic violence. But there seems to be a lot of support for the father out there."

The birth of intellectual protest

In relation to Alfred Dreyfus, according to Piers Paul Read:

The term "intellectual", already used by the novelist Guy de Maupassant and by the nationalist man of letters Maurice Barrès, was ridiculed by the anti-Dreyfusards. Barrès referred to the signatories of the manifesto as the "demi-intellectuals", and the literary critic Ferdinand Brunetière questioned the very idea that authors and academics should possess some superior wisdom when it came to the law. "The intervention of a novelist," he wrote, "even a famous one, in a matter of military justice seems to me as out of place as the intervention, in a question concerning the origins of Romanticism, of a colonel in the police force." He castigated scientists too for their arrogant assumption that their insights into the working of the material world somehow placed them on the moral high ground.

Apologies, this is a bit abstract, but I needed a quote. It's almost impossible with my limited erudition to convey the gist of the article here, so I'll just defer to the author's superior understanding of his subject. Here you go.

Obama's dangerous game with Iran

For Obama, keeping nuclear weapons out of the mullahs' hands, preventing the global economy from imploding, and keeping Israel on side may be a little too much in an election year. These things don't go together particularly well. Some say he may be forced to choose. In Newsweek magazine:

The key question now is how much time is left to achieve a negotiated solution. Israeli officials say that the United States thinks it can afford to wait until Iran is on the very verge of weaponizing, because U.S. forces have the capacity to carry out multiple bombing sorties and cripple the Iranian program at that point. Israel, however, would not be able to carry out such a sustained attack and would need to hit much sooner to be effective—before Iran could shelter much of its program deep underground. One former Israeli official tells Newsweek he heard this explanation directly from Defense Minister Ehud Barak. “If Israel will miss its last opportunity [to attack], then we will have to lean only on the United States, and if the United States decides not to attack, then we will face an Iran with a bomb,” says the former Israeli official. This source says that Israel has asked Obama for assurances that if sanctions fail, he will use force against Iran. Obama’s refusal to provide that assurance has helped shape Israel’s posture: a refusal to promise restraint, or even to give the United States advance notice.

(Video: "Jonathan Tepperman interviews author Vali Nasr about developments in Iran, its relationship with the diplomatic community, and what the United States should do to finally get Iran to the negotiation table. Current sanctions are designed to be more effective than in the past, but will instead be counterproductive, pushing Iran to be more aggressive in return. Dr. Nasr--professor of international politics at Tufts University and former senior advisor to the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan--argues that active diplomacy and policy adjustments are crucial for avoiding military conflict.")

Santorum and his vests

Julia Felsenthal examines the Rick Santorum's penchant for sweater vests:

So what is Rick Santorum trying to broadcast about himself with his sweater vest? Which sweater vest paradigm does he fit into? It’s not totally clear. Writers have speculated that Santorum’s vest may represent an attempt to align himself with the common man. When Santorum wears vests embroidered with his campaign slogan, or other emblems—which makes him look like a guy wearing the schlubby swag from his office’s annual picnic—I can almost buy it. But when he wears unembellished vests—which he buys from Jos. A Banks, and occasionally Brooks Brothers—the look is more WASP than everyman. When he talks about his choice of clothing, Santorum—who gives the impression he doesn’t know whether this sweater-vest thing is going to backfire or make his campaign—doesn’t seem to have the firmest hold on what he’s doing.

India, the world's baby factory

The world's second-most populous country is turning grandmothers into mothers through IVF, writes Anuj Chopra:

In recent years, thousands of fertility clinics have cropped up around India, spawning a new industry of "fertility tourism" for reproductively challenged couples from around the world. They are the medical equivalent of dollar stores, offering IVF treatment at a fraction of the cost in developed economies, and often without the strict regulations and waiting periods that elsewhere make the procedure a logistical nightmare. IVF -- along with other reproductive specialties like surrogacy (the world-famous "womb-for-rent" business), hormone therapy, and gamete (egg or sperm) donation -- are part of India's flourishing fertility treatment business, on track to blossom into a $2.3 billion enterprise in 2012 according to the lobby group Confederation of Indian Industry. The sector, described as a "pot of gold" in a report by the Indian Law Commission, has earned India the dubious reputation of being the world's baby factory.

(Image via Foreign Policy)

Quote of the Day

"All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." — H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, 1920.

Whitney Houston, 1963 — 2012

In an interview with Steve North, Houston's mother said of her daughter's voice:

It’s like déjà vu sometimes, certain licks that she does. It’s uncanny … even scary. Whitney’s so much like me when I was younger. Same size, same mannerisms, that kind of stuff. I’m actually amazed sometimes. She just goes, she soars. And hearing her sometimes just gives me chills.

The New Yorker's music critic Sasha Frere-Jones concluded her reflection on Houston's life by saying:

The ballads in Houston’s catalog reveal the most about her, like “I Have Nothing,” which is ostensibly a ballad in the way many of her ballads are. Houston begins in a mode that seems cowed, maybe sad or wearied, and then the voice takes over and she becomes entirely invincible, at odds with any lyric that hints at weakness. Watching her decline, in public, was especially hard because she was someone who had so little use for musical fragility or any songs that trucked in self-pity. Her biggest late period hit was possibly her hardest, thematically. Houston tended towards the uplifting, as a song picker, but by 1998, Houston’s troubled marriage to Bobby Brown and substance problems had come into view. So “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay,” which exonerates an unfaithful lover, was about as close as Houston would come to claiming she’d accept a loss.

Time Magazine's American sensibility

Like a number of previous missteps on the editorial front, some Time readers are noticing something striking about this week's American edition of the magazine — in short, that the U.S. edition generally favours vapid fluff-pieces over serious journalism:

While readers in Asia, Europe, and the South Pacific—really, the rest of the Time-reading world—confront a serious profile about Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and his role in the euro crisis, Americans are in for a special treat: a cover story called “The Surprising Science of Animal Friendships*.” (The asterisk leads to a footnote at the bottom of the cover that says, “BFFs are not just for humans anymore.”) With not one but two adorable dogs against a hot-pink background, this week’s Time really signifies the editors’ staunch commitment to serious, hard-hitting journalism, even if it means risking unpopularity.

 Time has done this before, remember?

The brainstorming myth

Truth is, it doesn't really work that well:

After a few years at M.I.T., [Noam] Chomsky revolutionized the study of linguistics by proposing that every language shares a “deep structure,” which reflects the cognitive structures of the mind. Chomsky’s work drew from disparate fields—biology, psychology, and computer science. At the time, the fields seemed to have nothing in common—except the hallways of Building 20. “Building 20 was a fantastic environment,” Chomsky says. “It looked like it was going to fall apart. But it was extremely interactive.” He went on, “There was a mixture of people who later became separate departments interacting informally all the time. You would walk down the corridor and meet people and have a discussion.” Building 20 and brainstorming came into being at almost exactly the same time. In the sixty years since then, if the studies are right, brainstorming has achieved nothing—or, at least, less than would have been achieved by six decades’ worth of brainstormers working quietly on their own. Building 20, though, ranks as one of the most creative environments of all time, a space with an almost uncanny ability to extract the best from people. Among M.I.T. people, it was referred to as “the magical incubator.”

Mr. Reasonable

James Fallows' new coverstory for The Atlantic is a must-read:

The second, related argument is that Obama’s passive, even withdrawn-seeming stance as “the only adult in the room” has positioned him better for reelection—and thus for his best chance to lock in the gains he has made—than a more directly combative approach would have. Not until Obama writes his post-presidential sequel to Dreams From My Father, and perhaps not even then, will we know all the sources of his seeming horror of partisan conflict. His above-the-fray pose was certainly the key to his rise in the first place. I was in the arena in Boston when he declared in his 2004 convention speech, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.” The house erupted in cheers, and America’s first black president could not have gone on to win had he struck a more strident or divisive tone.

While it's undeniably difficult not to be charmed beyond reason by Obama's sonorous rhetoric on the topic, I've never found the idea of 'unification' to be compelling. While it might sound perfectly charming in theory, there's more than an undertone of oxymoron to the whole shtick. Conflict is intrinsic to human history, and to human development, yet anyone who speaks of unity is almost certain to invite rapturous applause at its mere mention. This is particularly true of a pre-presidential senator who has not yet had to deal with the strains of trying to have it both ways, or keeping two sets of books. People talk of the so-called politics of division. Well, yes of course, dear: politics is divisive by definition.

(Video: "Fallows talks to Atlantic Senior Editor Corby Kummer (who edited this story) about Obama’s chances for reelection and why he might actually have something to learn from George W. Bush." Via The Altantic.)

Open your mouth and you're dead

James Nestor on the Freediving World Championships.

High-tech schooling is overrated

More agree:

Many would-be educational innovators treat technology as an end-all and be-all, making no effort to figure out how to integrate it into the classroom. "Computers, in and of themselves, do very little to aid learning," Gavriel Salomon of the University of Haifa and David Perkins of Harvard observed in 1996. Placing them in the classroom "does not automatically inspire teachers to rethink their teaching or students to adopt new modes of learning."

Previous post here.

Who needs God?

Kenan Malik appears to understand the difference between believer and the atheist:

The difference between believers and atheists is not about whether either can explain the ultimate cause of the universe. It is about how we wish to explain it. I am happy to say, ‘I do not know what First Cause is, or even if there is one. It may be that one day we discover the answer to that. Or it may be that we never will. For now I am happy to keep an open mind, accept our ignorance of First Cause and live with the uncertainty of not having one’. Believers are unwilling to say that. They insist that there must be a First Cause and that that First Cause must take the form of God. They cannot live with the uncertainty about First Cause that comes with non-belief. In Peter Stannard’s words they know – they have to know – that God exists. The difference between believers and atheists is, in other words, not simply a difference of philosophy, it is also a difference of psychological temper.

The difference between a theist — in particular, a monotheist, such as a Christian — and an atheist is more slight than many on either side seem to believe. What a relatively small number of people understand is that there are an infinite number of possible deities one could believe in, from Zeus and Pan to the gods we might imagine ourselves. Thus, the monotheist and the atheist refuse to believe in an almost identical number of those endless possible gods. The only difference is that an atheist has disqualified just one more.

Crucial and often forgotten consequences of the 'first cause' argument include the fact that even on this rather thin and tenuous logic, you can still only get as far as deism. To go further and maintain not only that there is a creator but that this creator is a 'God' — who has an interest in what you eat, wear, and with whom you go to bed, to name a few minor injunctions — requires a much higher standard of evidence. I have little doubt that someone can, in the right frame of mind, reason his or her way to a deistic worldview. Much harder is the step from deism to theism, and the belief, widely held, that God really is on one's own side.

You've heard about this before. We're all aware of the long-held tendency for nations to claim God's support in wartime, even if the other side happens to align themselves with the same divine almighty. We're also acutely aware that these two things cannot be simultaneously right. And yet this risible contradiction, one that makes itself so immediately and conspicuously apparent that even very young children can identify it, doesn't seem to hinder the religious arrogance of, say, the Catholic Church. Ratzinger cannot claim based on the evidence that his church's doctrines are true any more than a senior Scientologist can do the same —but which of these self-proclaimed truth-bearers is taken more seriously? One must merely ask oneself of the facts in any given matter. There's much less danger in believing the logical conclusion. Religion, even in strange à la carte servings, has a much higher standard of proof than it is generally prepared to admit.

(Image via Chicago Now)

Charles Dickens, not forgotten

Theodore Dairymple adds his to the slew of articles relating to the author's bicentenary this February:

If he had been only a social commentator, though, Dickens would have been forgotten by all except specialist historians of his age. But he is not forgotten; he survives the notorious defects of his books—their sometimes grotesque sentimentality, their sprawling lack of construction, their frequent implausibility—to achieve whatever immortality literature can confer. Over and over again, in passage after passage, the sheer genius of his writing shines from the page and is the despair of all prose writers after him.

When Dickens called himself “the Inimitable,” he was speaking no more than the truth; he was the greatest comic writer in his, or perhaps in any other, language. And the comedy runs deep: it is not trivial, for while it depicts absurdity, pomposity, and even cruelty, it has the curious effect of reconciling us to life even as it lays human weaknesses out for our inspection.

A far earlier post on Dickens here.

Of what are editors afraid?

Nick Cohen knows exactly:

Although it is impossible to count the books authors have abandoned, radical Islam is probably the greatest cause of self-censorship in the West today. When Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed a fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, censorship took the form of outright bans. Frightened publishers would not touch David Caute's novel satirising the Islamist reaction to The Satanic Verses, for instance. They ran away from histories and plays about the crisis as well because they did not want a repeat of the terror Rushdie and his publishers at Penguin had experienced.

Such overt censorship continues. In 2008, Random House in New York pulled The Jewel of Medina - a slightly syrupy and wholly inoffensive historical romance about Muhammad's child bride Aisha - after a neurotic professor claimed that it was 'explosive stuff ... a national security issue'. Most of the censorship religious violence inspires, however, is self-censorship. Writers put down their pens and turn to other subjects rather than risk a confrontation. So thoroughgoing is the evasion that when Grayson Perry, who produced what Catholics would consider to be blasphemous images of the Virgin Mary, said what everyone knew to be true in 2007, the media treated his candour as news. 'The reason I have not gone all out attacking Islamism in my art,' said Perry, 'is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.'

The mere fact that the writing of a certain kind of fiction, whatever its subject, can be called a 'national security issue' is an alarming indication of the extent to which the sinister parties of God have remotely suppressed the basic right to free speech throughout the world. Wherever the right to free speech is valued and upheld, it seems there are always those with a theistic agenda who wish to undermine this simple principle. Thus, editors are rarely faced with the prospect of government censorship, but must instead confront the hideous face of foreign theocracy. The fear of parody or satire is particularly noteworthy: if we cannot laugh at authority, we cannot possibly escape from it.

(Video: "People seem to expect Salman Rushdie to write about his experiences after a fatwa was imposed on him in 1989. He explains why he has not yet done it: At the moment it feels like reopening a room that I locked up for very good reason." Via TimesTalks.)

Selling water

Global warming may cause it to become a common practice:

Floods and drought do not respect borders. As radical as the idea sounds, Canadians, like the pioneers on Milk River a century ago, will have to share their water with the US, through bulk transfers and the management of river systems. Tentative steps toward integrating the North American watershed have already started, with proposals to divert water from Lake of the Woods in northwest Ontario to the Dakotas, and from Shuswap Lake in central BC to the increasingly dry Okanagan, from which it would flow to the US through the Columbia River. One of the largest proposed diversions would reroute water from the Nelson River in northern Manitoba to the US border, earning the province $7 billion annually in export royalties.

Obama's money problem

In writing about Santorum's recent victory, Ezra Klein makes an important observation about Obama's financing:

On Tuesday, there was a lot of talk about President Obama's decision to embrace the need for Democratic superPACs. The decision was born out of necessity, and even so, it may fail to solve Obama's money problem. Wall Street, which aggressively funded Obama in 2008, has turned on him. Hollywood, which is reliably Democratic, is nevertheless furious that the White House helped kill the anti-internet piracy bills SOPA and PIPA. There are still trial lawyers, and unions, and assorted other wealthy folks and interests, but there's a real question as to whether a Democrat who wants to tax rich people and regulate big industries can match the financial firepower that's backing Romney's campaign.

Of course, as Klein correctly indicates in the rest of his post, Santorum's victory illustrates the relative unimportance of the money candidates spend on their campaigns. Aside from anything else, the cost of propelling Senator Obama to presidential level in the public's mind won't be quite the same given that it has been President Obama for some time now. When voters reach the ballot box, such things simply don't matter.

Santorum's very good night

I concur with Kevin Drum:

So Rick Santorum won three states last night. Does this mean we all have to pretend to take him seriously for the next three weeks? I'm feeling a little queasy over the possibility already. At the same time, I'm getting ready to concede that my valiant efforts to show that Mitt Romney isn't really all that strongly disliked were misguided. Republican voters just don't like the guy, do they?

No, they simply don't.

Who will save classical music?

According to Michael Ahn Paarlberg (who, it seems pertinent of me to point out, identifies as Korean-American), the answer is probably asians:

“Music is a huge part of life for most Asian families,” says violinist Sarah Chang. “Most Asian children I know start taking violin, piano, or cello lessons from an early age.” If this sets them apart socially from their non-Asian classmates, Asian parents largely do not care. Their determination to raise musical kids can be single-minded and severe. One memorable passage in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother has Amy Chua threatening her daughter during piano practice: “If the next time’s not perfect, I’m going to take all your stuffed animals and burn them!” In Musicians From a Different Shore, University of Hawaii professor and pianist Mari Yoshihara describes her upbringing in postwar Japan. At the time, a confluence of mass production, rising incomes, and shrinking apartment sizes brought millions of upright pianos into urban households, where they became an emblem of middle-class status. Through her years of practice, she writes, “I never asked myself why I was learning music or whether I even liked playing the piano. Such questions never even occurred to me. Music was not something I had the option of liking or not liking; it was just there for me to do.”

Ben Smith and the BuzzFeed approach

Ben Smith, formerly of the earnest online political rag Politico, certainly raised a few journalistic eyebrows recently when he announced an unexpected defection to Buzzfeed, a site known more for its meme aggregation and LOLcats than serious political coverage. David Carr examines the odd approach:

Before he went to BuzzFeed, Mr. Smith was a force on Twitter, with about 60,000 followers. He was known as a reporter who not only broke news on Twitter but also served as a signal tower, providing links for the news made by others.

Now he is overseeing an editorial world where there are still articles like “The Cutest Boys With Dogs” (not to be confused with “30 Cats Sitting Like Humans”) and “50 Things You Will Never See in Real Life,” which includes a picture of a Chihuahua wearing double cheeseburgers for shoes. That odd numerology is an update of the ancient dark arts in publishing. For some reason, putting a number on something makes it irresistible. For decades, women’s magazines have been telling you about “101 Sure-Fire Ways to Lose Weight” and “18 Secrets to Winning His Heart.”

The site's founder, if I remember correctly, exercised the 'mullet approach' when he was employed as a consultant to the Huffington Post: that time-tested philosophy of business at the front and party in the back. A quick glance at the Post's front page will undoubtedly suffice if you need convincing that they haven't yet abandoned this concept. In fact, if anything, the HuffPo makes no secret of its lowbrow undertones — and I can certainly put up with it, particularly since the high/low universe is the one most intelligent adults now inhabit (the inane columnists, though, must go).

On the psychology of morality

Marc Parry profiles Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist whose main interest is in moral choices:

In 2001, Haidt chambered a bullet at rationalism in a classic paper that tied together moral dumbfounding, philosophy, and recent psychology findings on human judgment, while also bringing in anthropology and primatology. His conclusion: "Most of the action in moral psychology" is in our automatic intuitions. "People do indeed reason, but that reasoning is done primarily to prepare for social interaction, not to search for truth."

Image of the Day

President Barack Obama holds Arianna Holmes, 3, before taking a departure photo with members of her family in the Oval Office, Feb. 1, 2012. Arianna's mother, Angela Holmes, is a departing Special Assistant in the International Economic Affairs office of the National Security Staff. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson, via The Atlantic.)

Raise the crime rate

It's of little surprise to anyone that violent crime was higher in 1990 at the hight of the crack epidemic than it is today, but some might be interested to learn that the fall in crime illustrated by data since then has continued even throughout the recent recession. Of course, it needs to be remembered that this doesn't mean that crime has actually dropped off at all:

Statistics are notoriously slippery, but the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and violence.

Crime has not fallen in the United States—it’s been shifted. Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie—but as the single most shameful lie in American life.

We have discussed a recent article on the American prison system here and here.

The amazing world of box-packing

I'm not joking; it really is amazing:

The real war on Christianity

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom I greatly admire, argues that the murder of Christians across the muslim world receives too little attention in a western world obsessed by claims of 'Islamophobia'. She makes the case in a highly persuasive manner, and I would expect no less:

The litany of suffering could be extended. In Iran dozens of Christians have been arrested and jailed for daring to worship outside of the officially sanctioned church system. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, deserves to be placed in a category of its own. Despite the fact that more than a million Christians live in the country as foreign workers, churches and even private acts of Christian prayer are banned; to enforce these totalitarian restrictions, the religious police regularly raid the homes of Christians and bring them up on charges of blasphemy in courts where their testimony carries less legal weight than a Muslim’s. Even in Ethiopia, where Christians make up a majority of the population, church burnings by members of the Muslim minority have become a problem.

It should be clear from this catalog of atrocities that anti-Christian violence is a major and underreported problem. No, the violence isn’t centrally planned or coordinated by some international Islamist agency. In that sense the global war on Christians isn’t a traditional war at all. It is, rather, a spontaneous expression of anti-Christian animus by Muslims that transcends cultures, regions, and ethnicities. 

"Cuckoo's Nest" turns 50

Years later, Kesey's masterpiece is still strangely relevant:

Although the formula that makes a book popular remains impossibly mysterious, one factor is the cultural environment in which it lands. As the culture changes, some books that appear significant for a time may fail to endure. I had feared "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" would be one of those books. But it isn't. In it, a stranger walks into a closed environment and subverts the rules, asking all along why anyone would passively live that way. This was a message embraced by the hippies of the '60s, but it resonates just as strongly with those who occupied Wall Street; two copies of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" are in the Occupy Wall Street library. Fifty years later, Kesey's work is still great.

If you haven't yet read this book, you really ought to.

Why won't the U.S. accept its atheists?

To be godless in America is to count oneself among an ostracized minority:

A now famous University of Minnesota study concluded that Americans ranked atheists lower than Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society”. Nearly 48 per cent said they “would disapprove if my child wanted to marry a member of this group” (many more than the next most unpopular category, Muslims, at 33.5 per cent). No wonder atheist groups talk of modelling their campaigns on the civil rights, gay and women’s liberation movements. It is not that they claim their persecution is on the same level but that they suggest the way forward requires a combination of organising and consciousness-raising. “We want people to realise that some of their best friends are atheists, some of their doctors, and lawyers and fire chiefs and all the rest of them are atheists,” says [the philosopher and atheist Daniel] Dennett.

(Video: "Hundreds of non-believers gather in the US Bible Belt for the Texas Freethought Convention, with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins the star attractions.")

Weekend silence

Apologies for the deplorable absence of any updates over the past couple of days. I've been away with family in another part of New Zealand without a laptop; thus, blogging never seemed a promising prospect. Back at full speed tomorrow, I assure you. See you then.

How pathetic is glitter bombing?

Bryan Lowder says the strange form of protest needs to stop — now:

Back in the beginning, I was generally supportive of the anti-homophobic glitter bombings; they appeared to be a lighthearted, drag-inflected attempt at undermining the moral seriousness of their targets. But as the trend has continued and the operatives grown more self-important, I’ve come to view glitter bombing with increasing chagrin due to its tantrum-like tenor and inability to accomplish more than minor annoyance. In a culture reawakened to the power of civil disobedience by way of Occupy Wall Street, new forms of protest are bound to proliferate; but that doesn’t mean that all deserve to survive.

Few people would disagree that the gay rights movement has deservedly progressed to become a beneficiary of mainstream acceptance in the past few decades, but no one is so stupid as to ascribe its ascension to 'glitter bombing', or its former equivalents. What is it about this pathetic practice that makes it seem so distasteful, and so lacking in dignity? Any dunce can see that it is more likely to annoy and irritate homophobes than sway them. It's the sort of thing that might make one say, with unmistakable sarcasm, "Oh, how very mature."

The last European dictatorship

Donald Rayfield reviews Belarus: The Last European Dictatorship, by Andrew Wilson, and reaches the following conclusion:

Wilson concludes that Lukashenko cannot go on winning his perpetual game of poker: as his revenues from Russia's subsidies and transit fees shrink, his economy is threatened with collapse. I suspect, however, that Lukashenko, like any other poker player, will merely seek out partners in the West who are easier to bluff. Wilson ignores another factor, notable in the recent demonstrations in Moscow: a younger generation that demands more of life. Unlike North Korea, Belarus allows its youth mobile phones, a modicum of Internet access and travel, and even education abroad. There is a defiant underground culture in Minsk, such as satirical theatres that invite their audiences to last-moment venues by mobile phone. Time will take its toll of Lukashenko's cohort; their children are not like them. The beatings, torture, detentions and executions may go on for a decade, but Europe's last dictatorship cannot last much longer. Whether an independent Belarus will continue to serve its purpose as a buffer zone between Russian and the EU is another matter.

Is Romney too much like Al Gore?

Jacob Weisberg makes the connection, and is forced to surmise that Romney may be too rich, too pompous, and...wait for it...too handsome in order to win over ordinary Americans. Indeed, it can seem at times that Romney's so-called supporters, lacking in any apparent enthusiasm for their favoured candidate, simply wish to see the end of a presidency that they would discard at any cost — even if the replacement is a candidate who, truth be told, they don't actually like that much.

Weisberg writes, and I would agree that:

The public usually picks up on this authenticity gap—the space between who the candidate really is and how he wants to be seen. In each case, the problem manifests itself in a slight different way. A technocrat by nature, Gore disliked the performative side of politics. He wildly overcompensated for this by angrily shouting his speeches at rallies and demonstrating ardor for his now ex-wife with a soul kiss at the Democratic convention. His hyperbolic passion on the campaign trail made it a simple matter for Republicans to brand Gore as a compulsive exaggerator who claimed to have invented the Internet. Kerry’s problem was that he was pompous, too senatorial, and loved of the sound of his own voice. This allowed the Bush re-election campaign in 2004 to paint him Kerry as “French”: an effete snob and an unprincipled flip-flopper.

He goes on, unfortunately, to describe the way in which Romney must grapple with "the affliction of excessive handsomeness." Okay, let's not take this too far. My earlier point remains sound: he's the candidate for people who hate Obama (and can't quite mentally confront the thought of President Gingrich). Fair?

(Image via Reno Gazette-Journal)

"I'm crazy, and I'm right..."

I find these bad lip-reading videos almost too funny:

Some dreamers of the film school dream

Jonathan Zimmerman on the mythology of film schools:

Today, while film schools remain seductive, they have dropped the grit and doubled down on the glamour; their sharp edges have been carefully filed off and their values have been kid-tested, mother-approved. The still prevailing myth of the film-student-as-rebel obscures the banal truth: These are highly profitable institutions, buttressed by a wildly irresponsible student loan system preying on thousands of starry-eyed individuals all vying for “their shot.”

According to David Mamet, Paul Thomas Anderson and other luminaries, these institutions offer the same practical value as a game of Three-card Monte. But film school advocates extol the unique connections and the opportunities available, and admissions officers trumpet the various accolades lavished on their graduates. Less mentioned, by either side, is the actual education provided. Discussing learning alone, it would seem, does not sell books and does not fill up the lecture halls.

Why the war isn't over

Lawrence Kaplan takes issue with the White House claim that the "tide is receding" with regard to war:

Declaring something does not always make it true. Peace cannot be declared in the same way as war. In articulating his vision of peace, the president has likened ours to the post-World War II and post-cold war eras. But these wars had in fact ended before the epochs that followed them. The wars of the past decade have, by contrast, gotten a linguistic cleansing. From this, a supposition about peace—“the tide of war is receding”—has become the foundation of an enormous shift in national priorities.

In its presumptuousness on this score, the administration runs the risk of being prematurely correct. The Obama team’s rhetoric contains an echo of the Clinton years, which reduced everything to a clean narrative of material progress and moral improvement. Or of the 1970s, when another global conflict was presumed to have been concluded before it actually was. Neither era ended well. 

(Image: "U.S. Army Private First Class Issam Zejli carries his gear to a staging area as they wait for the orders to convoy to Kuwait from Camp Adder as the base is prepared to be handed back to the Iraqi government later this month on December 6, 2011 at Camp Adder, near Nasiriyah, Iraq. Camp Adder is one of the few bases remaining that the United States controls as America's military continues its pullout of the country by the end of this year, after eight years of war and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein." Via Newsday.)

What's wrong with the teenage mind?

What is the result of adolescents reaching puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer, according to Alison Gopnik, is "a good deal of teenage weirdness." Gopnik tries to dissect the pubertal mind and its numerous complexities:

One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood. Human children depend on adults for much longer than those of any other primate. That long protected period also allows us to learn much more than any other animal. But eventually, we have to leave the safe bubble of family life, take what we learned as children and apply it to the real adult world. Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers. Puberty not only turns on the motivational and emotional system with new force, it also turns it away from the family and toward the world of equals.

Send in the clowns

It's a Donald Trump endorsement of Mitt Romney, of course:



This is not an entirely unexpected move, but an interesting one nonetheless, particularly when one considers some of Trump's previous remarks when asked about Romney:

Trump told Daily Beast columnist Meghan McCain that Romney is “going to lose” because he can’t connect with voters. “No, he’s going to lose. He doesn’t resonate, you know? Or he would have won last time, in all fairness to your father! He was scheduled to win last time, and he didn’t because your father outdid him. You understand. I watched [Romney] make a speech, and it was all these little trivial statements.”

David Weigel shoots with devastating accuracy:

Who's the winner here? I have no idea. Polling in December revealed that 31 percent of voters would be less likely to support a Trump-backed candidate, 6 percent more likely. Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, both of whom agreed to the Trump debate, can look forward to newsy questions about why Donald Trump thinks they're unelectable. (How would he know?) Nevada voters, given only four days to see candidates between Florida and the caucuses, get to watch a self-promoting birther suck the news cycle dry. And Romney, who gained something when he rejected Trump's first stump, comes off as weak and desparate.

My thoughts exactly. What more of substance can be said except that this makes me wince? One of the things that first occurred to me was Trump's early mention of China, with which he is so obviously obsessed it's almost laughable. It also became quickly apparent that Trump, an ineffably comical fellow with less-than-subtle vibes of self-centeredness, seems almost unable to take the necessary next step towards accepting that he is actually not the centre of the universe, and that his 'endorsement' may constitute more of a burden to Mitt Romney than a boost.

A brief history of blurbs

To be quite brief, everybody hates them:

Let’s be clear: blurbs are not a distinguished genre. In 1936 George Orwell described them as “disgusting tripe,” quoting a particularly odious example from the Sunday Times: “If you can read this book and not shriek with delight, your soul is dead.” He admitted the impossibility of banning reviews, and proposed instead the adoption of a system for grading novels according to classes, “perhaps quite a rigid one,” to assist hapless readers in choosing among countless life-changing masterpieces. More recently Camille Paglia called for an end to the “corrupt practice of advance blurbs,” plagued by “shameless cronyism and grotesque hyperbole.” Even Stephen King, a staunch supporter of blurbs, winces at their “hyperbolic ecstasies” and calls for sincerity on the part of blurbers. 

On the likelihood of global war

Unusually for someone of his ilk, John Mueller has embraced one of Gingrich's numerous ideas — that defense budgets should be "directly related to the mount of threat" faced by the United States. He comes to a surprisingly ignorant conclusion:

There would, of course, be risk in very substantially reducing the military, but there is risk as well in maintaining forces-in-being that can be impelled into action with little notice and in an under-reflective manner. After all, if the country had no military in 1965, it could not have wandered into Vietnam, and the lives of fifty-five thousand Americans would have been spared. If it had no military in 2003, it would never have ventured into the Iraq fiasco and several thousand Americans (and a hundred thousand Iraqis) would still be alive. And had the country needed more time to mobilize (and therefore think) in the wake of 9/11, it might possibly have employed reactive measures more likely to have been effective at lower cost.

I think this to be a contemptuous statement, and all who support it show a vast ignorance. It's impossible, or at the very least irresponsible and intellectually dishonest, to review history and feel as though you know how it may have worked out if a certain event hadn't occurred, or, in this case, that a military hand't been there to fight a particular war. How can Mueller possibly be sure of anything he just wrote? Nobody can say the things he has just said with any degree of certainty beyond the fact that it is possible, and unless he has some supernatural power not at our disposal, he shall have to adhere to the same rules.

Traffic cop doing his job 'like a boss'

To improve the keyboard

Matthew Malady has a few modest proposals:

Please allow me to reiterate the following: CAPS LOCK IS THE WORST! It is of very little use to the average citizen. Nearly everything that results from depressing this key is annoying. While it’s important to consider the interests of groups that rely on the key (those with disabilities that make it difficult to press more than one key at a time, for instance, and people engaged in professions that frequently use all-uppercase text), caps lock also inherently favors yell-y Internet commenters, people who design terrible flyers, and others who deserve little consideration. For the rest of us, the key is a nuisance, its prime real estate leading us to depress it unintentionally and often unwittingly. The next thing you know, you’re submitting to a security-question inquisition from your banking institution, trying desperately to prove your identity having thrice entered your case-sensitive password incorrectly.

Will killing evil people help Obama?

Although Obama and his supporters see the death of Obama as being a great achievement for the administration, and I'm inclined to agree that it is, in reality the so-called 'bin Laden bounce' may not have been long-lasting enough to help him at the polls:

Simply put, no matter the patriotic fervor, there are other issues that matter much more to voters. Even on the issue of terrorism, Obama's ratings have settled back to pre-bin Laden levels. They spiked to a remarkably high 69 percent immediately after the raid, but slipped to 60 percent the next month. Currently, 56 percent approve of Obama on terrorism, according to a January Washington Post-ABC poll, exactly where they were in February of last year. As we've noted before, his relatively strong reviews on terrorism haven't buoyed ratings on foreign policy in general, nor those on his handling of Iran's nuclear ambitions.

(Image via Foreign Policy)

What we can learn from history

Xujun Eberlein reviews two accounts of the great Chinese famine. Money quote:

The Chinese have a saying: “The past that is not forgotten becomes the teacher of the future.” If the famine was the deliberate act of an individual villain (Mao Zedong) as demonic as Hitler or Stalin, then, the villain long dead, the matter is settled. On the other hand, if it was the result of failings in the social and political systems that, at least in part, still persist, then there are important lessons for today’s leaders.

The article appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books, a primarily online-based publication, and an increasingly good source of such material. If you enjoy literary criticism, you may find many of its essays greatly illuminating.

Pakistan's rush for more bombs

Pervez Hoodbhoy explains why:

Pakistan’s position is that it needs to produce still more bombs — and hence more bomb materials — because of India. It cites the US-India nuclear deal, along with older issues related to verification problems and existing stocks. Indeed, that infamous deal is Pakistan’s strongest argument and a correct criticism: the US has committed itself to nuclear cooperation with a state that is not a signatory to the NPT and one that made nuclear weapons surreptitiously. Now that the sanctions once imposed are long gone, India can import advanced nuclear reactor technology as well as natural uranium ore from diverse sources — Australia included. Although imported ore cannot be used for bomb-making, India could in principle divert more of its scarce domestic ore towards military reactors. Pakistan also says that “Cold Start” — an operation conceived by the Indian military in response to more Mumbai-type attacks — requires it to prepare tactical nuclear weapons for battlefield use.

But the US-India nuclear deal may actually be a fig leaf. Pakistan’s rush for more bombs has as much to do with its changing relationship with the United States as with Indian military modernisation. This racing reflects a paradigm shift within Pakistan’s military establishment, where feelings against the US have steadily hardened over many years. Post-bin Laden, the change is starkly visible.

Donald Trump isn't yet over himself

It's awfully tempting to speculate that he'll be announcing some god-awful campaign for president, isn't it? So while he may not be over himself yet, to at least some extent, we aren't either.

Defining heterosexuality

It's a little harder than you might think:

“We don’t know much about heterosexuality. No one knows whether heterosexuality is the result of nature or nurture, caused by inaccessible subconscious developments, or just what happens when impressionable young people come under the influence of older heterosexuals.” Far more scientific firepower, in other words, has been directed at the brains, genes, hormones and general physiologic processes behind homosexual attraction, leaving heterosexuality like a silhouette, outlined only by what it is not.

Romney's "very poor" judgement

In something of a departure from the slick political smoothness we've come to expect from Mitt Romney, the candidate's slight capacity for impudence has an unfortunate tendency to exhibit itself on occasion: today was one such occasion. While not unforgivable, this latest remark — in short, that the very poor have a 'safety net' and, thus, he does not care about them — almost certainly surpasses the last big Romney 'gaffe' of this kind, a remark that "corporations are people, my friend."

Jonathan Chait seems to understand it, remarking, "His slip-up was a gaffe in the classic sense of admitting what he actually thinks." While I'm not in any way inclined to speculate on what politicians may be thinking (you may be well advised to assume they don't),  I suspect Chait may be all too right.

The Western canon is dead

In Harold Bloom's eyes:

“Unfortunately, nothing will ever be the same because the art and passion of reading well and deeply, which was the foundation of our enterprise, depended on people who were fanatical readers when they were still small children.…The shadows lengthen in our evening land, and we approach the second millennium expecting further shadowing.” —“An Elegy for the Canon,” The Western Canon, 1994

Here are five other things he thinks are dead.