Part of the job of President is to spend a LOT of time on aircraft, both airplanes and helicopters. There's no way to avoid doing so, and the rigors of the job mean that you need to able to use the time productively for sleep and getting work done. You often talk to the press while onboard or immediately after landing. And you need to look, well, "Presidential" the moment you walk off an aircraft, often to immediately engage in a highly visible public event.Reminds me of the minor debate surrounding Michele Bachmann's migraine problem. No one seemed to be at all concerned about the fact that the biggest concern about migraine-prone Bachmann in the White House isn't the fact that she might have migraines sometimes. I can't say I know why people were so concerned about that.
Clearly flying is not such big issue that it significantly impairs Romney, but if flying knocks you down even a little, or just gives you an unhappy day, that's not a small thing for a U.S. President.
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If a President Has a Fear of Flying
Though Mitt Romney was obviously being funny (perhaps unsuccessfully) with his airplane windows line, James Fallows is convinced that he's still something of an uneasy flyer. One of Fallows' readers points out that this is no small issue when you're POTUS:
The Hypocrisy of Hate Speech Laws
William Saletan points out the double standard required to ban hate speech against Jews while allowing, even defending, mockery of Muslims. He begins by saying that the most frequently advanced generalisations — in his words, that Jews have too much influence over U.S. foreign policy, that gay men are too promiscuous, that Muslims commit too much terrorism, and that blacks commit too much crime — are poorly stated (and, I would add, in most cases based on a false premise), but each in their own way addressing a real concern. And, he points out, each of these statements violates laws against hate speech. "In much of what we call the free world, for writing that paragraph, I could be jailed."
On Tuesday, Pakistan's U.N. ambassador, speaking for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, told the Human Rights Council:
We are all aware of the fact that laws exist in Europe and other countries which impose curbs, for instance, on anti-Semitic speech, Holocaust denial, or racial slurs. We need to acknowledge, once and for all, that Islamophobia in particular and discrimination on the basis of religion and belief are contemporary forms of racism and must be dealt with as such. Not to do so would be a clear example of double standards. Islamophobia has to be treated in law and practice equal to the treatment given to anti-Semitism.Of course, he's right. And in a democratic society, as Saletan put it, "Either you censor both, or you censor neither." I'll take neither.
Apple Mapocalypse and the Anger of the Internet
As part of what you might describe as an ongoing separation between Google and Apple (who were once, if you can remember it, pretty good friends), Apple has replaced Google's excellent maps app with one they built themselves. And while, by most standards, it's pretty good, it doesn't work quite as it should:
People living outside the US seem to have been hit hardest, suffering problems such as one of Tokyo’s largest railway stations disappearing, large towns such as Antwerp in Belgium relocating, and Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace, even disappearing altogether. Many people have also reported problems with directions given by the app, such as their offering a route to the wrong place.Apple has promised to make things better, and has even gone so far as to suggest that users might like to download competitors apps in the meantime. But as Rebecca Greenfield notes, Apple will never really be able to catch up:
Apple has a people problem. On top of all the technology stuff, there is a team of human beings behind all maps, who iron out the kinks and turn the data into a whole product the works well together. (Right now Apple's human are "under lockdown ... working to fix it," says Apple.) Compared to Google, Apple's team is a joke in Dobson's book. Not only does Google have 7,000 people already working on mapping, but, the smaller contigent at Apple was not as involved in the map-making process. As Alexis Madrigal's piece made clear, people make a huge difference when it comes to map quality. "The sheer amount of human effort that goes into Google's maps is just mind-boggling. Every road that you see slightly askew in the top image has been hand-massaged by a human," he wrote.David Talbott nails it:
It’s nuts that a service that used to work well (when it was Google Maps) suddenly become not only ineffective—but actually counterproductive, even dangerous.(Image via Observatory)
If Samuel Beckett Marked Papers
Matt Bell constructed a marking schedule entirely out of Samuel Beckett quotes. This one, for an E:
Your mind, never active at anytime, is now even less than ever so. All I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended. I can’t go on, I’ll go on: You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson. To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten.The 'F' one begins with a quote from Waiting for Godot's Estragon, I think. "Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful."
Brooklyn's Rise to Cool
New York magazine helpfully provides a chronological, sociopolitical summary of the history (by the way, I'm really not sure what the point of the rest of the article is):
Wrestling the Troll, Ctd
Leo Traynor gives another story of confronting online nastiness:
It started in July 2009. I'd been on Twitter for over two years at that point, having joined in May 2007, and I'd never had a problem. My account was followed by a fairly innocuous looking one which I followed back and within 10 minutes I had received a direct message (DM) calling me a "Dirty fucking Jewish scumbag". I blocked the account and reported it as spam. The following week it happened again in an identical manner. A new follower, I followed back, received a string of abusive DMs, blocked and reported for spam. Two or three times a week. Sometimes two or three times a day. An almost daily cycle of blocking and reporting and intense verbal abuse.It gets worse. Previously on the topic.
Reasons to Give a Damn
I don't know if you've been following this website. It's published by McSweeney's, and in response to the general lack of enthusiasm on the Left for Obama gives one reason each day to "restart the fire" and re-elect the president. Today's reason was from David Lynch; others have included Roger Ebert and Jesse Eisenberg. Though I don't think, of course, that this will be enough to rekindle the fire of 2008, it might go some way to actually convincing people that this election is really important.
At the moment it's as though an electorate needs to have spent eight years in hell in order to appreciate the gravity of a decision like this. Have ordinary Democrats forgotten what Bush-Cheney was like already?
Sometimes Sensibility is Refreshing
Like when Mark Lilla wrote this:
Whenever conservatives talk to me about Barack Obama, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. But what exactly? The anger, the suspicion, the freestyle fantasizing have no perceptible object in the space-time continuum that centrist Democrats like me inhabit. What are we missing? Seen from our perspective, the country elected a moderate and cautious straight shooter committed to getting things right and giving the United States its self-respect back after the Bush-Cheney years. Unlike the crybabies at MSNBC and Harper’s Magazine, we never bought into the campaign’s hollow “hope and change” rhetoric, so aren’t crushed that, well, life got in the way. At most we hoped for a sensible health care program to end the scandal of America’s uninsured, and were relieved that Obama proposed no other grand schemes of Nixonian scale. We liked him for his political liberalism and instinctual conservatism. And we still like him.
The Tyranny of Algorithms
Computerized decision-making poses the threat of a world such as that of Vonnegut's "Player Piano." For most, such an outcome is naturally rather undesirable:
As we think through the role that algorithms should play in our lives—and the various feats of automation that they enable—two questions are particularly important. First, is a given instance of automation feasible? Second, is it desirable? Computer scientists have been asking both questions for decades in the context of artificial intelligence.
Many early pioneers reached gloomy conclusions. In the mid-1970s, Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT railed against depriving humans of their capacity to choose, even if computers could decide everything for us. For Weizenbaum, choosing and deciding were different activities—and no algorithm should be allowed to blur the difference. A decade later, Stanford's Terry Winograd attacked the philosophical foundations of artificial intelligence, arguing that everyday human behavior was too complex and too spontaneous to be captured in rules. The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus said as much in the 1960s, when he compared artificial intelligence to alchemy. But Mr. Winograd's critique, coming from a respected computer scientist, was particularly devastating.
Caught Getting Creative
Until Jonah Lehrer was found by his publishers to be doing it, nobody really knew that it was possible to plagiarise yourself. Repurposing earlier work for new material would have been bad enough on its own, but it was his fabrication of Bob Dylan quotes really put a stop to his fledgling career. Amy Wallace finds Lehrer's behaviour puzzling:
Lehrer must have known he’d likely be found out. Making up Dylan quotes is the journalistic equivalent of poking a stick into a hive of angry bees. When plotting a deception of this sort, wouldn’t it have been prudent to quote someone completely obscure? Or someone with logorrhea, whose words are nearly impossible to track because of their sheer volume? Choosing an icon who rarely gives interviews, each of them the subject of worshipful study by his fans, seems pathologically self-destructive. It reminds me of a remark an LAPD officer made about how, if criminals were true masterminds, they probably wouldn’t be resorting to lawbreaking in the first place. His colleagues’ term for this knack people have for making such revealing and incriminating mistakes? “Felony stupid.”The newest development on the story is that the disgraced boy wonder might be looking to get a book deal out of the scandal.
Sheldon Adelson's Billion Dollar Buy
Mike Allen's written a profile of the casino magnate, in which he attempts to summarise Adelson's motives for becoming Romney's sugar daddy. Among other things, he loathes Obama:
For all his wealth and worldliness (models of each of his personal airplanes hang from his office ceiling), Adelson is driven in part by the concerns of everyday conservatives. He recently read “The Amateur,” the anti-Obama bestseller by Edward Klein. And Adelson complained about Obama’s “czars,” a conservative preoccupation early in Obama’s term. Adelson said he worries about “any man that sets up a shadow government, not accountable to anybody. … What are the czars, if they’re not a substitute for the secretaries of Commerce, of State, of Interior? They’re not under any rules, they’re just consultants to him in his office. And then he’ll come along and say, ‘Well, Bush did it.’ But that’s not the way the government is supposed to be run.”
Obama: No Apologies
The more one actually listens to Obama and his administration on matters of foreign policy, the harder it becomes to believe that the Romney campaign could ever advance the absurd view that he has made a habit of "apologising for America." Today, he certainly made no such apology:
Americans have fought and died around the globe to protect the right of all people to express their views, even views that we profoundly disagree with. We do not do so because we support hateful speech, but because our founders understood that without such protections, the capacity of each individual to express their own views and practice their own faith may be threatened. We do so because in a diverse society, efforts to restrict speech can quickly become a tool to silence critics and oppress minorities.And, most importantly:
We do so because given the power of faith in our lives, and the passion that religious differences can inflame, the strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression; it is more speech -- the voices of tolerance that rally against bigotry and blasphemy, and lift up the values of understanding and mutual respect.
Now, I know that not all countries in this body share this particular understanding of the protection of free speech. We recognize that. But in 2012, at a time when anyone with a cell phone can spread offensive views around the world with the click of a button, the notion that we can control the flow of information is obsolete. The question, then, is how do we respond? And on this we must agree: There is no speech that justifies mindless violence. There are no words that excuse the killing of innocents. There’s no video that justifies an attack on an embassy. There’s no slander that provides an excuse for people to burn a restaurant in Lebanon, or destroy a school in Tunis, or cause death and destruction in Pakistan.This is not what I call apologising. He made it clear at the beginning of his comment on the violence that the film in question was a senseless, offensive, vitriolic attack. He said that the film was not only an insult to Muslims, but to Americans as well. However, when he said "I know there are some who ask why we don’t just ban such a video" and then said that it's because of the First Amendment, I was reminded of the White House's request to have the video removed from YouTube. That's not really something they've any right to ask for. That was the only thing I found remotely off-putting about the speech. But apart from that, it was quite suitable. I'm a free speech absolutist, and the Constitution is a document that adheres to similar absolutism.
The only other strange part — the part that tended towards incoherence within the wider context of the speech — was what he said about Iran's nuclear program:
We respect the right of nations to access peaceful nuclear power, but one of the purposes of the United Nations is to see that we harness that power for peace. Make no mistake: a nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained. It would threaten the elimination of Israel, the security of Gulf nations, and the stability of the global economy. It risks triggering a nuclear-arms race in the region, and the unraveling of the non-proliferation treaty.Andrew Sullivan makes a point of the incoherence:
This is Why You Hate Cyclists
In part, because some of them are annoying. But it's mostly because of us, the drivers, and a fundamental flaw in the way we perceive and remember our experiences:
And there's a perfectly good reason for this kind of irrationality:
If you are a city driver, you have undoubtedly been scared half to death by some maniac cutting across traffic like Frogger on a fixie. Such emotionally charged events stand out in our associative memory far more than mundane events, like a cyclist riding peacefully alongside your vehicle. The affect heuristic is compounded by the idea of negativity dominance—bad events stand out more than good ones. This causes you to overestimate both the amount and the severity of upsetting events, like almost getting some dirty hipster’s blood on your windshield.I know deep down that most cyclists are perfectly rational, reasonable people who are willing to share the road, who won't swerve out in front of me, or do something dangerous that will put me in the position of having to cope with the death of a stupid stranger, thus putting me through a lot of guilt and a very tedious legal process. I know they're not like that at all. But then nobody can be quite that rational. To be honest, they scare the living crap out of me. I'm just like everyone else who isn't a cyclist when it comes to cyclists (even though I know plenty). My view is that they're idiots.
And there's a perfectly good reason for this kind of irrationality:
[Ask] yourself, what causes more deaths: strokes or all accidents combined? Tornadoes or asthma? Most people say accidents and tornadoes, and most people are wrong. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman asks the reader these same questions before revealing, "strokes cause almost twice as many deaths as all accidents combined, but 80 percent of respondents judged accidental death to be likely. Tornadoes were seen as more frequent killers than asthma, although the latter caused 20 times more deaths." Kids careening on bikes are our urban tornadoes—somewhat rare, upsetting events that stick in our craw longer than they should, and seem like bigger problems than they really are.Related article here, titled, "How to Not Kill a Cyclist."
Mugglemarch
Ian Parker, on the release of J.K. Rowling's new adult novel, "The Casual Vacancy":
“The Casual Vacancy” will certainly sell, and it may also be liked. There are many nice touches, including Rowling’s portrait of the social worker’s gutless boyfriend, who relishes how, in an argument with a lover, you can “obscure an emotional issue by appearing to seek precision.” The book’s political philosophy is generous, even if its analysis of class antagonisms is perhaps no more elaborate than that of “Caddyshack.” And, as the novel turns darker, toward a kind of Thomas Hardy finale, it hurtles along impressively. But whereas Rowling’s shepherding of readers was, in the Harry Potter series, an essential asset, in “The Casual Vacancy” her firm hand can feel constraining. She leaves little space for the peripheral or the ambiguous; hidden secrets are labelled as hidden secrets, and events are easy to predict. We seem to watch people move around Pagford as if they were on Harry’s magical parchment map of Hogwarts.
The Democrats' Reagan
I wouldn't say that calling someone anyone's Reagan is a compliment, but Andrew Sullivan thinks there's a definite link between Obama and the GOP hero:
I could be dreaming, I know. No doubt, my hope will be mocked as another dewy-eyed, liberal big-media fantasy. But I wore a Reagan ’80 button in high school for the same reason I wore an Obama T-shirt in ’08—not because their politics were the same, but because they were both right about the different challenges each faced, and both dreamed bigger than their rivals in times of real crisis.Sullivan's vision for a sane Republican Party does have a couple of problems, though.
The hope many Obama supporters felt four years ago was not a phony hope. We didn’t expect miracles, but a long, brutal grind against the forces and interests that brought the U.S. to its 2009 economic and moral nadir. I’ve watched this president face those forces and interests with cunning and pragmatism, but also platinum-strength persistence. Obama never promised a mistake-free presidency, or a left-liberal presidency, or an easy path ahead. He always insisted that he could not do for Americans what Americans needed to do for themselves. In his dark and sober Inaugural Address he warned that “the challenges we face are real, they are serious, and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time.”
"Terrible ideas do not disappear if you ban them"
You remember that the White House petitioned YouTube and its parent company, Google, to have the reprehensible "Innocence of Muslims" film removed from their website. In Bill Keller's recent op-ed piece, he quoted, Salman Rushdie, who would have liked a more robust defence of the right to free speech that made the video's emergence possible in the first place. He said, "It’s not for the American government to regret what American citizens do. They should just say, ‘This is not our affair and the [violent] response is completely inappropriate.’" Keller agrees, mostly:
I would cut the diplomats a little more slack when they are trying to defuse an explosive situation. But I agree that the administration pushed up against the line that separates prudence from weakness. And the White House request that Google consider taking down the anti-Muslim video, however gentle the nudge, was a mistake.We've been talking about these issues a lot recently. NB post here.
"You're Watching it Wrong"
Matt Zoller Seitz was disappointed with a recent audience's inability to appreciate From Russia With Love because of its age:
It’s up to the individual viewer to decide to connect or not connect with a creative work. By "connect,” I mean connect emotionally and imaginatively—giving yourself to the movie for as long as you can, and trying to see the world through its eyes and feel things on its wavelength.I have seen every James Bond film (and can say, albeit with some degree of shame, that I own on DVD every Eon adaptation of Fleming's novels). But whenever people watch the older Bond films, particularly, they seem to have a dismaying propensity to behave in a dismissive manner. One might consider this a consequence of the genre: an action film, though of course requiring suspension of disbelief, capitalises on the best technology available at the time of production to create illusions. Eventually those tricks don't work so well. Audiences become savvier. And as technology becomes better, we simply expect more.
That wasn’t happening here.
I heard constant tittering and guffawing, all with the same message: “Can you believe people once thought this film was daring? It’s so old-fashioned.” The arch double-entendres; the bloodless violence, long takes, and longer scenes; the alpha male attitudes toward women and sex; John Barry’s jazzy, brassy, borderline-hysterical score: all these things elicited gentle mockery. They laughed at Sean Connery’s hairy chest. They laughed at some obvious stunt-double work. When Bond flirted with the secretary Moneypenny and put his face close to hers, a guy a couple of rows in front of me stage-whispered to his friend, “Sexual harassment!”
But that doesn't disqualify the older films. As Seitz put it so well, "From Russia With Love isn't unsophisticated. You are."
Are Schools Neglecting Gifted Students?
Chester Finn thinks that the system fails to provide for promising students, and says the neglect comes in three forms:
First, we’re weak at identifying “gifted and talented” children early, particularly if they’re poor or members of minority groups or don’t have savvy, pushy parents. Second, at the primary and middle-school levels, we don’t have enough gifted-education classrooms (with suitable teachers and curriculums) to serve even the existing demand. Congress has “zero-funded” the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program, Washington’s sole effort to encourage such education. Faced with budget crunches and federal pressure to turn around awful schools, many districts are cutting their advanced classes as well as art and music. Third, many high schools have just a smattering of honors or Advanced Placement classes, sometimes populated by kids who are bright but not truly prepared to succeed in them.
Quote of the Day
"f I come to you and I say we have this terrible national debt and here's my opening gambit. First thing I want to do is increase it by $5 trillion over a decade by doing another round of tax cuts that mostly benefit the people we benefited in the last decade, even thought it didn't produce jobs. Now we're in a really deep hole, much bigger than this clock I just showed you. Now let me tell you how we're going to get out of it. Well, what about the details? See me about that after the election.
"So I wanted to try to explain that in very simple terms. No one else would do that; no one . Unless you were being driven by ideology instead of by evidence. This is a practical country. We have ideals. We have philosophies. But the problem with any ideology is that it gives the answer before you look at the evidence," — Bill Clinton, in conversation with Jon Stewart.
"So I wanted to try to explain that in very simple terms. No one else would do that; no one . Unless you were being driven by ideology instead of by evidence. This is a practical country. We have ideals. We have philosophies. But the problem with any ideology is that it gives the answer before you look at the evidence," — Bill Clinton, in conversation with Jon Stewart.
How to Save Romney's Campaign
Peggy Noonan puts things honestly. He needs to do something, and fast:
It is true that a good debate, especially a good first one, can invigorate a candidate and lead to increased confidence, which can prompt good decisions and sensible statements. There is more than a month between the first debate and the voting: That's enough time for a healthy spiral to begin.
But: The Romney campaign has to get turned around. This week I called it incompetent, but only because I was being polite. I really meant "rolling calamity."
Can Political Theology Save Secularism?
David Sessions thinks secularism in the US is in a deficit crisis of personal meaning. He says books like Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists are emblematic of the current secularist ideology:
What is dismaying about Religion for Atheists is how deeply it embodies the ideology of the present—how it can describe so well the anxiety, isolation, and disappointment of secular life and yet still fail to identify their source. Botton’s central obsession is the insane ways bourgeois postmoderns try to live, namely in a perpetual upward swing of ambition and achievement, where failure indicates character deficiency despite an almost total lack of social infrastructure to help us navigate careers, relationships, parenting, and death. But he seems uninterested in how those structures were destroyed or what it might take to rebuild them, other than a few novelties like a restaurant where patrons are guided into intimate confessions with strangers, or temples without gods. Botton wants to keep bourgeois secularism and add a few new quasi-religious social routines. Quasi-religious social routines may indeed be a part of the solution, as we shall see, but they cannot be simply flung atop a regime as indifferent to human values as liberal capitalism.I've been dismissive of de Botton's thinking on religion because, much like the title of his book on philosophy, subtitled as a "Guide to Happiness," it is based on a false premise. More here.
The Week in Review
Tuesday on the Report, we kicked off the new template design with Niall Ferguson's explanation of why Obama is winning. We had a look at some of the press surrounding the release of Salman Rushdie's memoir Joseph Ashton and made one of many links between the Satanic Verses affair and the recent violence over an anti-Islamic film. Shock for the sake of shock is no longer enough in the art world, nor was it ever, and there's a blog for everything, including unhelpful self-help. Paul Ryan really wants you to know he's fit. Love in the time of YouTube is a strange thing, with viral video proposals and all. We had a first instalment of the response to Mitt Romney's notorious comment about the so-called 47 percent. In short, "From someone wanting to be president, this is unbe-fucking-lievable." Also, Mitt Romney is himself a member of that half, and George Romney was on welfare, thus in his son's eyes a freeloader operating in an entitlement society.
Later that day, we delivered a quick examination of Michael Lewis' wonderful VF profile of Obama, considered the problems associated with a meritocratic society, and asked if a robot could be algorithmically moral. A liberal took up the challenge to survive on only Fox-like conservative news outlets. David Byrne has some thoughts on how our brains process music. A conservative blogger concedes that Mitt Romney needs to do something drastic. Christopher Buckley and wife Carol Blue wrote about the publication of Mortality and its author, Christopher Hitchens. The Occupy movement turned a year old; I renewed my former pessimism and considered myself and others vindicated. The Catholic Confessional really could help solve the dishonesty of the banking industry. Do America's corporations really care about how much people earn? Not really.
Wednesday began with a rebuke of Mitt Romney's political philosophy. We found out that one of the ways in which you get people to actually turn out on election day is to make them think that voting is somehow cool; voter ID laws, in a related post, fix a non-existent problem. We thanked our lucky stars that science fiction writers are generally incorrect. We looked further at who, exactly, comprises the 47 percent, and decided that Amy Davidson gets it. We also parsed the second release of Romneytape, a comment on the supposed lack of any desire among Palestinians, in Romney's view, to make peace. I defended Maureen Dowd, who was accused of making anti-semitic allusions in a recent column, and said that terms like anti-Semite and Islamophobe can be abused, employed as a shield to deflect legitimate criticism. Clint Eastwood says of his recent appearance at the RNC that the organisers should have known what was coming. The rise of e-books continues, and rap is poetry. New evidence suggests Jesus may have had a wife. Filmmakers have pet typefaces. Randy Newman has a new satirical song out. The market continues to be awash with pseudo-scientific books.
Thursday, we asked if Romney's latest faux pas was a turning point, or just the scandal of the week, and at the same time looked at the nature of political coverage in the US. Rushdie has his own views on the 'Innocence of Muslims' controversy. David Carr profiled Neil Young.
On Friday, we had a look at the political novel, the idea that vocab shrinks with age, and how Fox News spins a gaffe.
[Note: I wasn't feeling well near the end of the week. Sorry for the lack of posts.]
How Fox News Spins a Gaffe
A surprising number of conservatives (I use the term lightly; the values these people hold their pet hero Reagan would have found disgraceful), like Ann Coulter, Hannity, and Limbaugh think that Romney's 47 percent gaffe wasn't a gaffe at all. In fact, they seem thrilled that their nominee is thinking the same way. Dave Weigel gives a summary of what the radically conservative pundits make of the whole thing:
“Any Republican running for president has to acknowledge we’re not going to get that 47 percent of the electorate,” said Ann Coulter, who’s promoting a new book this month. “We could probably tell 40 states it’s very expensive, you don’t really need to vote. We just need to have 10 states vote. They’re the only one who we’re not sure about.”The widespread conservative fiction that society can be split into two — the producers and the slobs — is a product of this political media establishment. The Coulter/Limbaugh/Fox triumvirate exists not to provide valid criticism or praise where it's due but to consistently reinforce old prejudices and new myths in favour of a pre-defined worldview. For them, as Obama himself so elegantly put it in his summary of the RNC this year, the message is simple: everything is bad and it's Obama's fault. (Oh, yes, and Romney is the only man who can fix it.) That's the only distorted view of the world worth projecting, they seem to think. Fact can wait; they've got a candidate to get elected.
On his Tuesday night show—the first to mention the tape—Sean Hannity credited Romney with “one of his sharpest critiques yet of President Obama and the entitlement society that he enables” and insisted that “conservatives and fiscally conscious Americans are applauding Governor Romney's statements.” On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh called the video “a golden opportunity,” because “work is how you become independent,” and voters needed someone to tell them.
The big idea, on the right, is that as the ratio of “takers” to “makers” increases, America risks hitting a “tipping point” after which the takers will overwhelm the system. In 2009 and 2010, Tea Partiers bought bumper stickers and signs that read “Redistribute My Work Ethic, Not My Wealth,” and “Keep Working: Millions on Welfare Depend on You!” When conservatives tell Romney to come out and say this, they’re revealing what Julian Sanchez has called “epistemic closure.” They know this is true. Their trusted media sources tell them that it’s true.
But when I say that this is a 'conservative' view, I'm really quite wrong. I honestly can't believe that ordinary Republicans think this way. Or at least I hope not.
Does Vocabulary Shrink with Age?
Robert Birnbaum interviewed Martin Amis, who was once quoted as saying that your vocabulary shrinks as you get older. Asked to elaborate, he replied:
It’s just a fact. Ah, there are horrible statistics to show it. (Both laugh). But I have always been a great user of dictionaries, and thesauruses as well. People get the wrong idea about a novelist and the thesaurus. You are not looking for words like “sinecure.” What you are looking for, most of the time, is a synonym that scans differently. So you need a three-syllable synonym, or one that doesn’t end in “-ation.” It’s just for the euphony. Um, but the COD [Concise Oxford Dictionary] is all you need. You look up a word, maybe a word you know perfectly well, and you see what it’s origin was, and that word is now stamped. It’s your word. And every time I do it, if feels like a gray cell has been born in my head; instead of going out, it’s coming in.
Seeing Things As They Are
Robert Boyers considers the role of politics in the novelistic form:
Of course we do not require that novels dealing with politics refuse to make up their minds about anything. No one doubts that in Demons Dostoevsky mounts a savage attack on the political radicalism to which he himself had once subscribed. James’ portrait of Princess Casamassima in his 1885 novel is intended to reveal the false consciousness and posturing associated with radical chic, long before that term came into use nearly a century later. Even in Turgenev there is little question that the liberalism on offer, however gentle and humane, is ineffectual, hopeless, and that Bazarov’s nihilism is at most a compelling but half-baked idea, a mere rejectionist reflex with no prospect of altering society or mobilizing a mass movement. Novelists can see things as they are, even when they are consumed with ambivalence.
A Different Perspective
David Carr profiles Neil Young:
He decided to do it sober after talking with his doctor about a brain that had endured many youthful pharmaceutical adventures, in addition to epilepsy and an aneurysm. For someone who smoked pot the way others smoke cigarettes, the change has not been without its challenges, as he explains in his book: “The straighter I am, the more alert I am, the less I know myself and the harder it is to recognize myself. I need a little grounding in something and I am looking for it everywhere.”(Image: Graeme Mitchell for NYT)
Sitting at Alice’s Restaurant on Skyline Boulevard near the end of the day, he elaborated: “I did it for 40 years,” he said. “Now I want to see what it’s like to not do it. It’s just a different perspective.”
Salman Rushdie's Death Sentence, Ctd
David Remnick is impressed with Salman Rushdie's new memoir, Joseph Anton. His magazine published an excerpt from the book recently. In a post on the New Yorker's website, he says that the new book may be, in its own way, just as important as Rushdie's masterpiece Midnight's Children. Interestingly, Rushdie had something to say recently about the "Innocence of Muslims" controversy. I hope you'll agree that it's the best response yet expressed on the issue:
Rushdie was in London this week preparing for publication of “Joseph Anton” and, when asked about the film and the related outbursts in Cairo and Benghazi, he told a writer for the Telegraph, “I always said that what happened to me was a prologue and there will be many, many more episodes like it. This is one of those.” Rushdie certainly did not defend the movie, but he went on to say, “The correct response would be to say it is garbage and unimportant. Clearly, it’s a piece of crap, is very poorly done and is malevolent. To react to it with this kind of violence is just ludicrously inappropriate. People are being attacked who had nothing to do with it and that is not right.”Pankaj Mishra, however, has fewer good things to say:
No text in our time has had contexts more various and illuminating than The Satanic Verses, or mixed politics and literature more inextricably, and with deeper consequences for so many. In Joseph Anton, however, Rushdie continues to reveal an unwillingness or inability to grasp them, or to abandon the conceit, useful in fiction but misleading outside it, that the personal is the geopolitical.
Just the Scandal of the Week, or a Turning Point?
The NYT's Room for Debate section poses the question, asking whether the press focuses too much on gaffes in presidential campaign coverage. Maria Popova wins in my opinion. She writes:
The real danger in how such newsiness is framed lies in conflating controversy with shock value – when we do that, controversy becomes the currency of sensationalism, not journalism. But controversy is really about context – about a newly surfaced data point that stands au contraire to a previously established fact or position. It creates a kind of cognitive dissonance between what we previously believed and what we're currently being presented with. A great story doesn't merely trigger this dissonance, it helps us resolve the tension. And that requires context, analysis and reflection.She concludes:
Did Mitt Romney Just Lose the Election? Ctd
Another one:
David Corn captions the newest release, which concerns Mitt Romney's views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Romney says the Palestinians have no interest in establishing peace, among other things:
I think what most offends people about these leaks is that it reveals a fundamental dishonesty about the candidate. Though Obama's notorious "guns and religion" comment showed some degree of condescension toward a small portion of the population, Romney's comments on the '47 percent' only seek to confirm the notion that he totally lacks empathy with almost half the country, to whom, it is now clear, he cannot relate. Now, with the new release, we see another side to his already-opaque views on the subject of Israel. I suppose we can assume, given the blunt candor, that this is the real, unplugged Romney. But even then one can never be sure with Willard.
David Corn captions the newest release, which concerns Mitt Romney's views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Romney says the Palestinians have no interest in establishing peace, among other things:
In public, Romney has not declared the peace process pointless or dismissed the two-state solution. In July, when the Israeli newspaper Haaretz asked Romney if he supports a two-state solution and the creation of a Palestinian state, he replied, "I believe in a two-state solution which suggests there will be two states, including a Jewish state." Yet Romney’s remarks to these funders—this was one of his longest answers at the fundraiser—suggest he might be hiding his true beliefs regarding Israel and the peace process and that on this subject he is out of sync with the predominant view in foreign policy circles that has existed for decades.Of course, this newest revelation is quite a departure from the two-state solution Romney has been advocating openly on the campaign trail, even though it was quite clear to outsiders that his emphasis on peace between the two sides was opposed to the view of his ardently Zionist sugar daddy Sheldon Adelson.
I think what most offends people about these leaks is that it reveals a fundamental dishonesty about the candidate. Though Obama's notorious "guns and religion" comment showed some degree of condescension toward a small portion of the population, Romney's comments on the '47 percent' only seek to confirm the notion that he totally lacks empathy with almost half the country, to whom, it is now clear, he cannot relate. Now, with the new release, we see another side to his already-opaque views on the subject of Israel. I suppose we can assume, given the blunt candor, that this is the real, unplugged Romney. But even then one can never be sure with Willard.
Separating the Pseudo From Science
Michael Gordin examines the pseudoscientific phenomenon:
Shadows are also an inevitable consequence of light. Carl Sagan and other anti-Velikovskians believed that greater scientific literacy could "cure" the ill of pseudoscience. Don't get me wrong—scientific literacy is a wonderful thing, and I am committed to expanding it. But it won't eradicate the fringe, and it won't prevent the proliferation of doctrines the scientific community decries as pseudoscience. Nevertheless, something needs to be done.Elsewhere, Steven Poole dismisses the work of writers like Malcolm Gladwell and the now-notorious Jonah Lehrer as pseudoscientific self-help books "dressed up in a lab coat." Money quote:
So, instead, here is a recipe for writing a hit popular brain book. You start each chapter with a pat anecdote about an individual’s professional or entrepreneurial success, or narrow escape from peril. You then mine the neuroscientific research for an apparently relevant specific result and narrate the experiment, perhaps interviewing the scientist involved and describing his hair. You then climax in a fit of premature extrapolation, inferring from the scientific result a calming bromide about what it is to function optimally as a modern human being. Voilà, a laboratory-sanctioned Big Idea in digestible narrative form. This is what the psychologist Christopher Chabris has named the “story-study-lesson” model, perhaps first perfected by one Malcolm Gladwell. A series of these threesomes may be packaged into a book, and then resold again and again as a stand-up act on the wonderfully lucrative corporate lecture circuit.
Did Jesus Have a Wife?
According to a top religious scholar, Karen L. King, this 1,600 year-old papyrus fragment suggests that early Christians believed Jesus had a wife — possibly Mary Magdalene. Ariel Sabar explores the significance of such a discovery on the persistent theological idea of a celibate Christ:
What it does seem to reveal is more subtle and complex: that some group of early Christians drew spiritual strength from portraying the man whose teachings they followed as having a wife. And not just any wife, but possibly Mary Magdalene, the most-mentioned woman in the New Testament besides Jesus’ mother. The question the discovery raises, King told me, is, “Why is it that only the literature that said he was celibate survived? And all of the texts that showed he had an intimate relationship with Magdalene or is married didn’t survive? Is that 100 percent happenstance? Or is it because of the fact that celibacy becomes the ideal for Christianity?”
Voter ID Laws Fix a Non-Existent Problem
As Kevin Drum reminds us:
There are plenty of gray areas in the fight over voter access, which includes things like early voting hours, voter roll purging, and so forth. But on the specific subject of voter ID laws there are two clear facts: (a) the primary justification for the laws is in-person voter fraud, and (b) in-person voter fraud doesn't exist. Anyone writing about the subject is doing a disservice if they don't acknowledge this.
Insult to Injury
Chances are you've seen this already, but then maybe not given all of the coverage around Romney's latest faux pas about the so-called 47 percent. Maybe, like what I'm guessing is a relatively small number of people, you have actually read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Newsweek article, which was advertised on the cover under the inauspicious title, "Muslim Rage." Unsurprisingly, a group of liberals have taken to condemnation of Hirsi Ali and her publisher, prompting satirical tweets to surface and liberal blogs to brand the author, who renounced her Muslim faith in her thirties, as a peddler of the rare Islamophobic polemic.
Islamophobia? This is nothing of the sort.
You may know her as the Netherlands-based author and outspoken critic of Islam who in association with Theo van Gogh made a short film named Submission, which drew a direct link between the Quran and the plight of Muslim women. (You might recall that van Gogh was murdered by a 26 year-old Dutch-Moroccan, who punctuated eight gun shots by leaving two knives in his victim's body, to one of which was attached a note threatening the West, Jews, and Hirsi Ali herself.)
You might also recall that her criticisms are blunt. She characterises the meeting of western secularism and Islam as a "clash of civilisations," and believes that Muslims have a choice to make between the darkness of Islam and the light of secular enlightenment.
In her response to the "Innocence of Muslims" anger, she draws an apt comparison with the Satanic Verses affair of Valentines Day 1989. It's apt, mostly, because Salman Rushdie has just published a memoir about his years in hiding following the Ayatollah Khomeini's death sentence for the crime of writing a novel deemed blasphemous by senior Islamic clerics. Hirsi Ali says she herself at the age of nineteen participated in a burning of the book, which, of course, she hadn't even read. Angry demonstrators, their rage buttressed by pontificating clerics who call for punishment of Americans by the US government for the crime of making a stupid film, as Hirsi Ali notes, are indifferent to whether or not the source of the supposed blasphemy is a work of literature or an insensitive, amateurish home movie. "All that matters is the intolerable nature of the insult."
Islamophobia? This is nothing of the sort.
You may know her as the Netherlands-based author and outspoken critic of Islam who in association with Theo van Gogh made a short film named Submission, which drew a direct link between the Quran and the plight of Muslim women. (You might recall that van Gogh was murdered by a 26 year-old Dutch-Moroccan, who punctuated eight gun shots by leaving two knives in his victim's body, to one of which was attached a note threatening the West, Jews, and Hirsi Ali herself.)
You might also recall that her criticisms are blunt. She characterises the meeting of western secularism and Islam as a "clash of civilisations," and believes that Muslims have a choice to make between the darkness of Islam and the light of secular enlightenment.
In her response to the "Innocence of Muslims" anger, she draws an apt comparison with the Satanic Verses affair of Valentines Day 1989. It's apt, mostly, because Salman Rushdie has just published a memoir about his years in hiding following the Ayatollah Khomeini's death sentence for the crime of writing a novel deemed blasphemous by senior Islamic clerics. Hirsi Ali says she herself at the age of nineteen participated in a burning of the book, which, of course, she hadn't even read. Angry demonstrators, their rage buttressed by pontificating clerics who call for punishment of Americans by the US government for the crime of making a stupid film, as Hirsi Ali notes, are indifferent to whether or not the source of the supposed blasphemy is a work of literature or an insensitive, amateurish home movie. "All that matters is the intolerable nature of the insult."
Rap Is Poetry and Shit
My cynicism aside, there's now a convincing and serious canon of writing on the subject. In N+1, James Guida reviews books by rappers, including Jay-Z's Decoded:
To Jay-Z, rap doesn’t just happen to talk about hustling: the two roles naturally converge. Both emphasize adrenaline, language, liberty from societal constraints, and a high-stakes psychological education in sizing up people and situations. And of course there are the spoils. Few other emcees present selling drugs as such a high-flown adventure, worthy of endless, detailed elaboration. Given the ubiquity of the subject throughout the genre, this is saying something. It’s always been evident in his best lyrics: “Hope you don’t think users are the only abusers, niggas, getting high within the game/ if you do then how can you explain, I’m ten years removed and still the vibe is in my veins.” But Jay-Z is explicit about this in prose, examining his time dealing and everywhere linking it to the lines of his songs.On rap as poetry:
People Don't Trust Self-Published Books
Rick Archbold rushes to the defence of self-publishing, saying that it can't simply be dismissed as an expression of vanity:
Self-publishing is at a stage analogous to the early days of Wikipedia, when users were reluctant to trust information contained in a communally written encyclopedia. It turns out that online democracy performs quite an effective self-regulating function. The more individuals who contributed to Wikipedia the more reliable it became. Now it is the first place most people turn to for information. Whether the increasingly virtual world of self-publishing will eventually learn to regulate itself is an open question. The appearance of various award programs for self-published books hints at the possibility.
Mitt Romney's Resentment
Amy Davidson gets it:
Romney has been running a campaign centered on resentment, in many forms: the resentment directed at the “successful” that he imagines is driving his critics; the resentment he is trying to fan in his base voters; and, increasingly and most strangely, his own. Romney's resentment has become a matter of temperament, of policy, and of politics. He and his wife, Ann, have made it clear that they take offense when his good will is questioned. Fixated on what he sees as the jealous motives of his critics, he misses the important truths about our economy and the reality of people’s lives that might have informed his agenda. He also reveals a great deal about himself.Also new on the 47% story, Obama has appeared on Letterman, saying, "My expectation is if you want to be president, you've got to work for everybody, not just for some." But Tobin is convinced that in spite of all the media attention, this won't sink Romney.
Quote of the Day II
"If somebody’s dumb enough to ask me to go to a political convention and say something, they’re gonna have to take what they get." — Clint Eastwood, on his now infamous 'empty chair' appearance at the RNC in Tampa.
Deflecting Criticism with a Slur
In Dowd's Sunday column, she questioned the sincerity of Paul Ryan's foreign policy positions, in which she asserted that neocon "puppet masters" were pushing the Romney/Ryan team further towards Zionism, and a fanatic support of Israel. Money quote:
Ryan bemoaned "the slaughter of brave dissidents in Syria. Mobs storming American embassies and consulates. Iran four years closer to gaining a nuclear weapon. Israel, our best ally in the region, treated with indifference bordering on contempt by the Obama administration." American foreign policy, he said, "needs moral clarity and firmness of purpose."This is something that, in the Washington media village, one is simply not allowed to say. To claim in any way that there is a neoconservative agenda at play, and that the fanatic proponents of Greater Israel have too much influence on the GOP's foreign policy positions is to invite fantastic claims of anti-semitism. One commentator branded Dowd's column "outrageous," quoting another columnist who made the strident and unfounded accusation that Dowd's use of the word 'slither' in her headline is some kind of a Nazi allusion. Jonathan Tobin called it creepy.
Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor. The hawkish Romney adviser has been secunded to manage the running mate and graft a Manichaean worldview onto the foreign affairs neophyte."
Jeffrey Goldberg, usually a reasonable person, was more moderate than the others. But he's tutting nonetheless:
Maureen may not know this, but she is peddling an old stereotype, that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews. (Later, Hounshell wrote, "(A)mazing that apparently nobody sat her down and said, this is not OK.") This sinister stereotype became a major theme in the discussion of the Iraq war, when critics charged that Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, among other Jewish neoconservatives, were actually in charge of Bush Administration foreign policy. This charge relegated George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Stephen Hadley and the other Christians who actually set policy to the status of puppets.But there's nothing remotely anti-semitic about Dowd's column, as Kevin Drum writes:
There's nothing anti-Semitic in Dowd's column. She just doesn't like neocons, and she doesn't like the fact that so many of the neocons responsible for the Iraq debacle are now advisors to Mitt Romney's campaign. Pretending that this makes her guilty of hate-mongering toward Jews is reprehensible.This is a theme that has become all too common within discourse on Israel: anytime criticism of neoconservative Israel policies arises, some vague inference can be made and the author can be dismissed as someone with anti-semitic sentiments. My concern, in short, is that even legitimate criticism can be deflected using the charge of anti-semitism. That's all.
(Image via Andrew Sullivan)
Who Is the 47 percent?
Americans who, according to Romney, don't take responsibility for their own lives live in the states that swung Republican in 2008:
The good people at Ezra Klein's Wonkblog crunch the numbers:
The good people at Ezra Klein's Wonkblog crunch the numbers:
53.6 percent of households pay the federal income tax. Presumably Romney is okay with these folks.See the full breakdown here. (Image via Scott Thomasson)
28.3 percent of households pay no federal income tax, but they do pay the payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare. That means they don’t need Mitt Romney to convince them to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” They already have jobs.
Most of the households in this group don’t pay any federal income tax because they qualify for enough deductions that their income tax liability has shrunk to zero. See this Tax Policy Center report for more, which gives an example of “a couple with two children earning less than $26,400. They get an $11,600 standard deduction and four exemptions of $3,700, and that takes their liability to zero.” Indeed, it’s worth noting that many of these deductions and credits were part of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, which Romney wants to extend.
Why Sci-Fi Writers Are Almost Always Wrong
William Gibson, the man who coined the word cyberspace, maintains that, thankfully, he and his fellow science fiction authors haven't got any reliable powers of prediction:
I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. Its record for being accurately predictive is really, really poor! If you look at the whole history of science fiction, what people have said is going to happen, what writers have said is going to happen, and what actually happened — it’s terrible. We’re almost always wrong. Our reputation for being right relies on some human capacity to marvel at the times when, yay, you got it right! Arthur Clarke predicted communications satellites and things like that. Those are marvelous — it’s great when someone gets it right, but almost always it’s wrong.He also spoke to Wired about Twitter and other internet obsessions.
Getting People to Actually Vote
Apparently the way to do it is to make them think that voting is "cool":
For years, politicians have beseeched citizens to do their part for democracy by telling them about the dire problem of nonvoting: Barely half of eligible Americans cast a ballot in presidential elections. But what if, instead, politicians describe the glass as half-full?
In an experiment conducted during the 2005 New Jersey gubernatorial election, Harvard's Prof. Rogers and Yale political scientist Alan Gerber randomly assigned voters to get a phone call with one of two messages that relied on the same underlying set of facts—but cast those facts in dramatically different terms. In one, the caller's script said that "in the most recent election for New Jersey governor, voter turnout was the lowest it had been in over 30 years." The other reported that "in last year's election the vast majority of eligible New Jersey voters actually voted. It was the highest election turnout in decades." Those who heard the second message turned out to vote at a rate five points higher than those who were presented with the more dismal view. The lesson for candidates: Stop begging your supporters to do their democratic duty and instead direct them to join the crowd.
Quote of the Day
"To seek to raise taxes on poor and middle-class people would be a terrible mistake. The idea is bound to be unpopular. And it would alter the character of conservatism for the worse. A desire to cut taxes for people at all income levels, and to oppose tax increases at all income levels, was key to associating conservatism with the diffusion of opportunity in the Reagan years and after. Changed circumstances may demand a different approach than that of three decades ago. They do not compel conservatism to become a creed openly focused on helping one group at the expense of another, a kind of mirror image of egalitarian liberalism. There are many things to worry about in this world. The number of people paying income tax isn’t one of them," — Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review, November 2011 (via Andrew Sullivan).
Did Mitt Romney Just Lose the Election? Ctd
A Tory asks if it's too late for the Americans to draft Rick Santorum:
Sure, Romney's quote might contain a grain of truth. But it’s also cruel and fatalistic. The American Dream is rooted in the hope that someday we’ll all be rich enough to pay lots of tax (or own a bank account in the Caymans). To suggest that some folks will stick with their entitlements forever – that’s un-American. And Mitt makes it so much worse by suggesting that he doesn't care about them, either: "My job is not to worry about those people."Allahpundit thinks any talk of an election turn-around because of the video is empty:
The dirty little secret of most “controversial” political statements is that voters pay them little mind, especially when they’re preoccupied with bread-and-butter issues. The GOP spent three days in Tampa hammering Obama for the “you didn’t build that” line and a fat lot of good it did them in vaulting Romney past O in the polls. Then again, the GOP didn’t have a media megaphone like the one that’s going to be amplifying this for the rest of the week.Ann Althouse keeps things to the point:
I don't see anything bad in there at all.And why would she? Why, come to think of it, would anyone on the Right object to Mitt Romney's comments? The only reason they might criticise him would be for the political implications of essentially telling half of Americans that they freeload on the income tax of others and take no responsibility for themselves. Meanwhile, Josh Barro says today is the day Mitt Romney lost, calling the incident an "utter disaster" for the nominee:
Corn tells us there are more embarrassing moments on segments of the video he hasn't released yet. Romney jokes that he'd be more likely to win the election if he were Hispanic. He makes some awkward comments about whether he was born with a "silver spoon" in his mouth. But those are survivable. The really disastrous thing is the clip about "victims," and the combination of contempt and pity that Romney shows for anyone who isn't going to vote for him. Romney is the most opaque presidential nominee since Nixon, and people have been reduced to guessing what his true feelings are. This video provides an answer: He feels that you're a loser. It's not an answer that wins elections.And Alex Massie has some astute political advice for young Willard:
This is the thing: when you’re already the Man from Bain you don’t need more things cropping up reinforcing the most damaging stereotypes your opponents use against you. And you really don’t need to reinforce those stereotypes yourself. A simple rule of thumb: when people fear you’re a vampire squid don’t encourage them to believe you really are a vampire squid.
Do America’s Corporations Care How Much People Earn?
Not really:
Higher wages mean more consumer spending and more growth, but corporate America is focused, with increasing intensity, on driving wages further down. Important wage-stabilizing policies—minimum-wage laws and collective bargaining, among others—are under assault. Republican governors have declared war on unionized teachers, firefighters, and police officers—all solidly middle-class jobs. And they are looking to extend the reach of so-called “right-to-work” laws that strip private-sector workers of the ability to bargain for decent wages and benefits. Hostility to unions has become so intense that a simple proposal for workplaces to post information about the right to collectively bargain under federal law (as they already must do for minimum-wage, OSHA, and other worker protections) unleashed a torrential assault by the Chamber of Commerce.
Did Mitt Romney Just Lose the Election? Ctd
I said it, didn't I? That by his own criteria, Mitt Romney is himself a member of the so-called 47 percent.
Occupy Is a Year Old
Rebecca Solnit hails the movement as an unqualified success:
Realism is overrated, but the fact is that the Occupy movement has already had extraordinary results. We changed the national debate early on and brought into the open what was previously hiding in plain sight: both the violence of Wall Street and the yearning for community, justice, truth, power, and hope that possesses most of the rest of us. We found out something that mattered about who we are: we found out just how many of us are furious about the debt peonage settled onto millions of “underwater” homeowners, people destroyed by medical debts, and students shackled by subprime educations that no future salaries will ever dig them out of. And here was Occupy’s other signal achievement: we articulated, clearly, loudly, incontrovertably, how appalling and destructive the current economic system is.Charles P. Pierce is doubtful:
I have no patience for the they're-all-alike crowd, or for the fantasts dreamily thinking of the presidency of my old former fencing-parent buddy Dr. Jill Stein, but this is not an opinion that is in anyway irrevocable. Instead, after a year of people yelling quite sensibly, and with great insight, at the right buildings, what do we get? We get this latest from Willard Romney, which, if Occupy actually had "changed the national dialogue" would sink his campaign like a stone.Pierce is, of course, referring to Romney's latest gem. Naturally, he's right: there has been no significant change in the national dialogue, and any shift in the — now here's a good Zucotti word — zeitgeist was absorbed into the pavement as the protesters picked up their things and went home. To say either that it has done nothing or that it has heralded a promising change in the tone of political discourse would be to engage in ignorance on both counts. If anything, it wasn't enough. In Pierce's words:
The Abundant Gifts of Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Buckley reviews his friend's posthumously-published collection, Mortality:
He was a man of abundant gifts, Christopher: erudition, wit, argument, prose style, to say nothing of a titanium constitution that, until it betrayed him in the end, allowed him to write word-perfect essays while the rest of us were groaning from epic hangovers and reaching for the ibuprofen. But his greatest gift of all may have been the gift of friendship. At his memorial service in New York City, 31 people, virtually all of them boldface names, rose to speak in his memory. One selection was from the introduction Christopher wrote for the paperback reissue of “Hitch-22” while gravely ill:The foreword to the book was written by Hitchens' wife, Carol Blue. She writes of the 'unpublished Hitch', an inconceivable concept for his readers:
I miss his perfect voice. I heard it day and night, night and day....I miss, as his readers must, his writer’s voice, his voice on the page. I miss the unpublished Hitch: the countless notes he left for me in the entryway, on my pillow, the emails he would send while we sat in different rooms in our apartment or in our place in California and the emails he sent when he was on the road. And I miss his handwritten communiqués: his innumerable letters and postcards (we date back to the time of the epistle) and his faxes, the thrill of receiving Christopher’s instant dispatches as he checked-in from a dicey spot on some other continent.(Image via The Star)
Quote of the Day
"Contra Dick Morris, Mitt Romney is not winning this election. At least Mitt Romney is not winning the election right now. Conservatives are obsessing over every poll, the turn out models used, and the media bias that is on ful display. Yes, some of the polling models seem screwy, though we all forget the pollsters apply a secret sauce known only to them on top. Yes, reporters are fully beclowning themselves to get their god-king re-elected. But while we may be focused there, the fact is the Romney campaign isn’t functioning well. Lucky for you and me the election is not today. But something needs to happen in Boston and I am less and less hopeful anything will happen," — Erick Erickson, a blogger for RedState.
Life on the Right Side
A liberal, self-described 'news-junkie' embarks on a deranged experiment to see if reading, viewing, and listening to only conservative outlets will in any way change his views. It's like the film Supersize Me, except with more Ann Coulter.
Sounds terrifying.
Sounds terrifying.
Can a Robot Be Moral?
Ronald Arkin, a robotics expert and ethicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, thinks it may be possible to include in robotic warfare devices (such as drones) an "ethical governor" function, which he predicts could save more civilian lives than human soldiers. Such a function would have other purposes, too:
Others in the scientific community say that would be unethical:A year after seeing the Apache helicopter video in 2005, Mr. Arkin, the Georgia Tech roboticist, won a three-year grant from the U.S. Army Research Office for a project with a stated goal of producing "an artificial conscience" to guide robots in the battlefield independent of human control. The project resulted in a decision-making architecture that Mr. Arkin says could potentially lead to ethically superior robotic warriors within as few as 10 to 20 years, assuming the program is given full financial support.
"I'm not talking about replacing war fighters one for one," he says. "I'm talking about designing very narrow, very specific machines for certain tasks that will work alongside human war fighters to carry out particular types of operations that humans don't do particularly well at, such as building-clearing operations."
Rather than risking one's own life to protect noncombatants who may or may not be behind a door, Mr. Arkin says, a soldier "might have a propensity to roll a grenade through there first ... and there may be women and children in that room." A robot could enter the room and gauge the level of threat from up close, eliminating the risk to a soldier.
How to Fix Meritocracy
According to Chris Hayes, you can't simply solve the issue by providing the poor and middle classes with the resources to compete on an educational level:
The defect of meritocracy, in his view, is not the inequality of opportunity that it conceals, but the inequality of outcome that it celebrates. In other words, the problem is not that the son of a postal clerk has less chance to become a Wall Street titan than he used to. It’s that the rewards of a career on Wall Street have become so disproportionate to the rewards of the traditional professions, let alone those available to a humble civil servant.
Being Obama
Michael Lewis' excellent profile of the president is now online at Vanity Fair — and it's excellent. Again and again, throughout the interview process, Lewis apparently put the question to Obama, "Assume that in 30 minutes you will stop being president. I will take your place. Prepare me. Teach me how to be president." He responded:
“Here is what I would tell you,” he’d said. “I would say that your first and principal task is to think about the hopes and dreams the American people invested in you. Everything you are doing has to be viewed through this prism. And I tell you what every president … I actually think every president understands this responsibility. I don’t know George Bush well. I know Bill Clinton better. But I think they both approached the job in that spirit.” Then he added that the world thinks he spends a lot more time worrying about political angles than he actually does.
Did Mitt Romney Just Lose the Election?
Obama's characterisation of Romney being the kind of person to "shoot first, aim later" appears to be something of an understatement, and in no time at all the selection of an Ayn Rand fanatic for a VP nominee begins to make political and ideological sense. From someone wanting to be president, this is unbe-fucking-lievable:
And it doesn't stop there. This just one of the clips released by Mother Jones, for whose staff this kind of a scoop is a big deal. Already, I can hear the cries of liberal conspiracy. But there's no getting around this: in May at a private fundraiser Mitt Romney told his financier supporters that half of Americans — the ones who voted for Barack Obama — are freeloaders who pay no income tax, who take no responsibility for their own lives, and who think that they are entitled to every conceivable basic need and amenity under the federal government. His job, he intoned, "is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."
Well, at least this unseen Romney has the candor that has been so lacking in his campaign. I hope Romney has a sufficiently strong grasp on irony to fathom the hypocrisy of being bitched to about entitlement by rich Republicans in hotel ballrooms. And maybe that's unfair of me, but Americans — even Republicans — should be livid about this. Did Mitt Romney just lose the election? I have absolutely no idea. But it isn't good.
The whole thing got awkward when Romney was faced with the opportunity to respond to leak of the video the video, which he did:
This is what he really thinks. No matter what you make of it, I'm sure we can agree that it's nice to finally know what he and the other people who are prepared to take "responsibility" for their own lives really think of everyone else.
And it doesn't stop there. This just one of the clips released by Mother Jones, for whose staff this kind of a scoop is a big deal. Already, I can hear the cries of liberal conspiracy. But there's no getting around this: in May at a private fundraiser Mitt Romney told his financier supporters that half of Americans — the ones who voted for Barack Obama — are freeloaders who pay no income tax, who take no responsibility for their own lives, and who think that they are entitled to every conceivable basic need and amenity under the federal government. His job, he intoned, "is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."
Well, at least this unseen Romney has the candor that has been so lacking in his campaign. I hope Romney has a sufficiently strong grasp on irony to fathom the hypocrisy of being bitched to about entitlement by rich Republicans in hotel ballrooms. And maybe that's unfair of me, but Americans — even Republicans — should be livid about this. Did Mitt Romney just lose the election? I have absolutely no idea. But it isn't good.
The whole thing got awkward when Romney was faced with the opportunity to respond to leak of the video the video, which he did:
So it’s a question and answer as I recall about the process of the campaign and how I’m going to get the 51 or 52 percent I need and I point out it’s by focusing on those folks that are neither in his camp nor in my camp. Of course there’s a very different approach of the two different campaigns, as I point out I recognize that among those that pay no tax, approximately 47 percent of Americans, I’m not likely to be highly successful with the message of lowering taxes. That’s not as attractive to those who don’t pay income taxes as it is to those who do. And likewise those who are reliant on government are not as attracted to my message of slimming down the size of government. And so I then focus on those individuals who I believe are most likely to be able to be pulled into my camp and help me win the 51 or 50.1 percent that I need to become the next President.So I take it that we can count Willard himself among that 47 per cent? Apart from anything else, the figure is hugely misrepresented:
Mr. Romney’s figure of 47 percent comes from the Tax Policy Center, which found that 46.4 percent of households paid no federal income tax in 2011. But most households did pay payroll taxes. Of the 18.1 percent of households that paid neither income taxes nor payroll taxes, the center found that more than half were elderly and more than a third were not elderly but had income under $20,000. Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the center, wrote in a blog post last summer that about half of those were off the rolls because they had low incomes.Romney and Ryan, in their own ways, have expressed this in some form or another for some time: the outright lie that half of America take no responsibility for their lives, which of course is inconsistent with the assertion that they pay no income tax, which is true. In Romney's mind, apparently, these two ideas are inseparable. It's just the latest in a long run of public failures on his part to display empathy, or even a basic understanding of what it even means to be poor. The difference between Romney's own lack of contributions to the federal government and those of the 47 percent, however, is simple. They can't, he won't.
This is what he really thinks. No matter what you make of it, I'm sure we can agree that it's nice to finally know what he and the other people who are prepared to take "responsibility" for their own lives really think of everyone else.
Love in the Time of YouTube
This is both weird and endearing:
And it has spawned a small industry of production houses specialising in marriage proposals. Maybe the question of why people do this sort of thing is too obvious. The more interesting one is:
And it has spawned a small industry of production houses specialising in marriage proposals. Maybe the question of why people do this sort of thing is too obvious. The more interesting one is:
Why do we like to watch these videos, even as many of us recoil at the idea of exposing what were once some of our most private moments? For the same reason humans have ever shared or reënacted stories in any form. We get to experience a fraction of the life-affirming frisson of emotional excitement. As for why people keep making the videos, the answer is a little more nuanced. Pogue pleads in his own video, “This is an epic love, it deserves an epic proposal—something big, something fantastic, something PUBLIC!” I gather he’s experiencing the oft-cited desire to “shout it from the rooftops.” Personally, I’d be content to whisper it from a step stool, but if others so choose—whether in the form of a poem, a painting, or a digitally condensed narrative—that is their given right as expressive beings. Why else do you think our species invented video cameras, fan fiction, and Instagram?
Paul Ryan Really Wants You to Know He's Fit
He claims to have a body fat percentage between six and eight, describes himself as something of a "fitness guy," and claims to run marathons in under three hours. Let's fact check that.
Shock Isn't Enough
Jennifer Schuessler is right to say that outrage over "Tropic of Cancer" and the work of D.H. Lawrence seems downright quaint these days, when millions of suburban housewives are devouring the "sadomasochistic fantasy" Fifty Shades of Grey. Though many say it's still the duty of an artist to shock people, that's becoming a harder task:
To ask if art can still shock is quickly to invite another question: Shock whom, and where? Connoisseurs of the highbrow jolts delivered, say, by European movie directors like Lars von Trier and Gaspar Noé (whose “Irreversible” assaulted audiences with a nine-minute rape scene) might find themselves shocked at the guilt-free pleasure taken by fans of the torture-porn “Saw” franchise. And violence that might seem humdrum at the multiplex might seem shocking in a live theater, to say nothing of an opera house.
“There are a thousand different audiences,” said Vallejo Gantner, the artistic director of Performance Space 122 in the East Village. “At ‘The Book of Mormon’ the shock is all part of the fun. But it’s much harder to shock a downtown theatergoing audience.”
Salman Rushdie's Death Sentence
The New Yorker has published an extract from the author's forthcoming memoir, about his years in hiding following Khomeini's fatwa. As with much of what Rushdie does, it's very clever, and written using an interesting third-person narrative structure. For such a grave topic, one wouldn't expect wit to shine through, but Rushdie's capacity for humour is evident throughout:
He looked at the journalists looking at him and he wondered if this was how people looked at men being taken to the gallows or the electric chair. One foreign correspondent came over to him to be friendly. He asked this man what he should make of Khomeini’s pronouncement. Was it just a rhetorical flourish, or something genuinely dangerous? “Oh, don’t worry too much,” the journalist said. “Khomeini sentences the President of the United States to death every Friday afternoon.”Incidentally, the reward for his assassination has been raised in the wake of the recent backlash over the amateurish video we're all supposed to be talking about now. There's no comparison, really, since Rushdie's novel was and is a work of art, but it's interesting to see how so comparatively few people have taken a "well, it was stupid of you to make something offensive to Islam" approach in responding to the latest global crisis of religious indignation; it's amazing, looking at the Rushdie case, to see how many people said just that.
Why Is Obama Winning?
Niall Ferguson, as always, is convinced he has an explanation:
Many people subscribe to the view that Romney just isn’t likable. They can more readily imagine having a beer or shooting hoops with Obama. Then there is the religious subtext: Mitt Romney’s Mormonism is just a bit weird, whereas Obama’s Evangelicalism Lite offends hardly anyone. And let’s not forget abortion. For many women, the suspicion that banning abortion, if not contraception too, would be item No. 1 on the Romney-Ryan to-do list trumps all other considerations. The Obama campaign played this card with great success over the summer, with more than a little help from Rep. Todd Akin.
Or maybe, just maybe, this election is boiling down to a contest between white non-Hispanic men and everyone else. After all the high hopes of 2008, it will be depressing if that is the outcome of the Obama presidency: an electorate split along the dividing lines of race and sex.
A Party in Decline
President Obama provides a recap of the GOP masquerade:
And Maureen Dowd pitches in:
And Maureen Dowd pitches in:
The stage show looked like America, but the convention hall did not. The crowd seemed like the sanctuary of a minority — economically wounded capitalists in shades from eggshell to ecru, cheering the man from Bain and trying to fathom why they’re not running the country anymore. The speakers ranted about an America in decline, but the audience reflected a party in decline.
Why We Need Real Critics, Ctd
The critic Richard Brody has something to say on the subject:
It’s as silly to deplore nasty criticism as it is to deplore snark or wit or sarcasm or just plain crankiness. It’s how we are—it’s how I am—and nastiness is as inseparable from criticism as it is from family life, from politics, from business, from the playground, and, for that matter, from art itself....Critics don’t need to be nice (programmatic niceness is itself another sort of self-falsification and self-punishment, and is at least as sanctimonious as self-justifying meanness), but they do need to know where they stand.Previously here and here.
Chomsky's Devils
From David Hawkes review of Noam Chomsky's most recent work:
This ideological chasm between the American Left and its putative constituency yawns nowhere wider than in Chomsky’s withering references to popular religion. He cites the fact that “about 75% of the US population has a literal belief in the devil” as the clearest possible example of American ignorance and stupidity. But is it really so different from his own beliefs? Throughout his career, Chomsky has depicted a world ruled by demonic forces of quite incredible malice and guile. Whatever is running the world Chomsky describes is undoubtedly a very greedy, violent and selfish entity – it would be hard not to call it “evil”, or even Evil, were such tropes not sternly prohibited by the monochrome literalism of our age.Chomsky's slightly conspiratorial worldview doesn't appeal to me much at all. In fact, I'm rather turned off by it. However, I can sympathise to a great degree with his characterisation of spectator sports as a tool to "make people more passive." Rather the opposite function of art, is it not?
Paul Ryan Is a Climate Change Denialist
His anti-environmental record has been cultivated carefully:
The most explicit statement of Ryan’s climate change views appears in this 2009 op-ed, and since he still features it on his official website, we can take it as an indication of his beliefs. And what a litany of classic denialist dogma it is. He starts off with a cheap shot by implying that Wisconsin residents ought to have a hard time believing that global warming is a problem because they still had to shovel snow in the winter of 2009. Of course, it is absurd to think that any one winter says anything about global warming, still less to think that continued existence or even increase of snowfall is in any way incompatible with overall warming. If Ryan wanted to keep things local, he would have done better to talk to ice fishermen on the Wisconsin lakes, who have seen a dramatic decrease in the duration of ice cover over the past decades.