Boris and Romney

The way this London trip has worked out is simply too funny:

Does America Have a Responsibility to Stop Mass Killings?

Yes and no, but ultimately, as Friedersdorf points out, the decision is up to Congress:

I think it's Congress that should decide whether America has a "responsibility to protect" in a given instance. That is partly because I am a stickler for acting in accordance with the Constitution, a rare quality these days. But it's also because, like the Founders, I believe that presidents would be too inclined to start wars if given the prerogative; that the most legitimate way to decide if it's justified to use American resources when our national security interests aren't at stake is to put the question before the representatives of the people; and because the legislative branch is less likely than the executive to misrepresent facts on the ground in a target country.

(This is in response to a panel discussion in Aspen that included Jeffrey Goldberg and Anne-Marie Slaughter.)

Romney's Visit to the "Nation of Great Britain"

That was actually the phrase the GOP nominee used for the name of his host. Of course, no such nation exists (it's the United Kingdom), but never mind. And that was one of his minor incidents. As far as I've been able to tell, according the reports of the mainstream media, this foreign tour was intended to reaffirm Anglo-American chumminess, or some such thing, complete with meetings with Cameron and Miliband and all the rest. There was a faux pas here and there, of course, as one would expect. But there were also slightly more disturbing comments about London's staging of the Olympics.

His was actually meant to be about seeing the Games, but he's generating headlines of a slightly different kind. The situation's all rather entertaining, naturally, since Romney oversaw the Olympics in Salt Lake City, and must be brimming with an arrogance that comes from thinking he's perfectly versed in the challenges of mounting an international on an Olympic scale.

This made me chuckle — a lot:

“There are a few things that were disconcerting, the stories about the private security firm not having enough people, the supposed strike of the immigration and customs officials, that obviously is not something which is encouraging,” Mr. Romney said in an interview with NBC on Wednesday.

That brought a tart rejoinder from Mr. Cameron: “We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world. Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.” The allusion was to Salt Lake City, which hosted the Games that Mr. Romney oversaw in 2002.

The truth is, Mitt Romney doesn't really like Britain. In his book No Apology, he said that England was basically just a small island that made things nobody wants to buy. (At least he got its name right that time, though.) He just doesn't really get the English, it would seem, as this Telegraph columnist points out:

But his comments to NBC, particularly his doubts about Britons’ ability to celebrate the games, showed how poorly he understands the land of his forefathers. If he possessed a smidgeon of insight into the British psyche he would have known that despite all the pre-match whingeing and the carping, that on the night we will celebrate the games with all the gusto and fervour they deserve. We moan, and then we smile; that is just our way.

One nice thing came out of the whole affair, however, and that was that David Cameron has reaffirmed his support for gay marriage. At least the Tories are making progress in that area. As for that Mitt Romney fellow — have you heard? That guy wants to be president.

(Image: "Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for the USA presidential election, leaves 10 Downing Street after meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron on July 26, 2012 in London, England. Mitt Romney is meeting various leaders, past and present, on his visit to the UK, including Tony Blair, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg." Peter Macdiarmid/Getty)

Veepstakes: The Politics of Boring

Mitt Romney needs to walk a fine line between being safe and being boring in his choice of a running mate:

As the shrouded vice-presidential selection comes down to the wire — and amid some signs that the choice could come sooner rather than later — the court of Republican opinion seems to be swinging back toward the notion that a little bit boring may be the right play in a close election in which the challenger can’t afford any mistakes or unscripted drama.

Quote of the Day

"Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to mike land originally.

"Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came." — Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice Part III (here likened by one smart redditor to Obama's "you didn't build that" speech)

David Frum and His Detractors

From Mark Oppenheimer's profile of the columnist in The Nation:

The Astronaut Bride

It's a fairly simple fact, but one that has received little attention and merits much more: the first American woman in space, the late Sally Ride, was gay. Her 1982 marriage is covered in the endnote to the Times obituary with an a strange kind of terseness:

Dr. Ride is survived by her partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy; her mother, Joyce; and her sister, Ms. Scott, who is known as Bear. (Dr. O’Shaughnessy is chief operating officer of Dr. Ride’s company.)

Brushing over the fact like that has led some to suspect that the relationship was taken less seriously by the mainstream media because it was homosexual. Andrew Sullivan had a bone to pick with the newspaper over its inability to confidently confront the fact in the main body of the obituary, and a number of others expressed a similar sentiment. Sullivan wrote:

Now talk about a buried lede! The only thing preventing the NYT from writing an honest obit is homophobia. They may not realize it; they may not mean it; but it is absolutely clear from the obit that Ride's sexual orientation was obviously central to her life. And her "partner" (ghastly word) and their relationship is recorded only perfunctorily. The NYT does not routinely only mention someone's spouse in the survivors section. When you have lived with someone for 27 years, some account of that relationship is surely central to that person's life.

While we're on the subject, 'partner' really is a ghastly word, isn't it? I mean: to anyone who thinks that the semantics of marriage don't matter — that 'civil union' is a perfectly acceptable substitute — should consider how dismissive that sounds. How condescending. The word itself implies that those to whom it is ascribed belong to second class of relationship, and a second class of marriage — and surely, then, a second class of love altogether.

I wouldn't go nearly as far as Sullivan has in calling out the NYT on homophobia. And I certainly wouldn't want them to parade her sexuality around as though being the first lesbian in space is somehow an achievement. But it does make me grind my teeth to see a basic fact so blatantly and carelessly ignored.

(Image via Engadget)

America Is a Violent Country, Ctd

Steven Pinker explored the overall decline in violence in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. He gave an interview last year to Reason. Money quote:

Just a couple of centuries ago, violence was pervasive. Slavery was widespread; wife and child beating an acceptable practice; heretics and witches burned at the stake; pogroms and race riots common, and warfare nearly constant. Public hangings, bear-baiting, and even cat burning were popular forms of entertainment. By examining collections of ancient skeletons and scrutinizing current day tribal societies, anthropologists have found that people were nine times more likely to be killed in tribal warfare than to die of war and genocide in even the war-torn 20th century. The murder rate in medieval Europe was 30 times higher than today. What happened?

Post on the decline of violence in America here.

Is Honesty Overrated?

Lee Periman touches upon the question:

Since Nietzsche, the choice of which version of ourselves we identify with has been widely understood as a choice between lying and truth-telling — to ourselves as much as to others. The moral ideal has become authenticity — a particular kind of honesty. Of course, just about any philosophical ideal is grounded in some sort of honesty: the search for Truth requires truth. Yet Aristotle describes honesty as a virtue only of self-presentation — the balance between self-deprecation and boastfulness. And Plato never lists honesty as a virtue at all, and even distinguishes between “true lies” and useful or noble lies. From the modern to the post-modern era, honesty and authenticity shifted to become much of the telos of life, where before they had been but means in our progress toward that end.

Bad Taste Alert

The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto has something provocative (or rather, something 'WTF' worthy) to say about the Aurora shootings:

I hope the girls whose boyfriends died to save them were worthy of the sacrifice.
— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) July 25, 2012

Dan Amira says it's a pointless thought:

It's an odd question — were they worthy? — because they were clearly worthy to the boyfriends who died saving them. That's all that matters. Whether they are good people who donate money to charity or volunteer at homeless shelters, or whatever else Taranto has in mind when he uses the word worthy, seems irrelevant.

But it's okay, of course. He says he's sorry.

Penn State's Vacated Victories

On Monday, the NCAA made what can only be described as a strange decision. It determined that all of Penn State's on-field victories from 1998 until 2012 were to be erased, or 'vacated', thus stripping Joe Paterno of his coaching record. Gary Alan Fine senses an Orwellian kind of madness to the decision, the kind that only comes when someone attempts to edit history:

The more significant question is whether rewriting history is the proper answer. And while this is not the first time that game outcomes have been vacated, changing 14 seasons of football history is a unique and disquieting response. We learn bad things about people all the time, but should we change our history? Should we, like Orwell’s totalitarian Oceania, have a Ministry of Truth that has the authority to scrub the past? Should our newspapers have to change their back files? And how far should we go? Should we review Babe Ruth’s records? Or O. J. Simpson’s? Should a disgraced senator have her votes vacated? Perhaps we should claim that Joe McCarthy actually lost his elections. Or give victory to John Edwards’s opponent?

Previous coverage of Penn State here.

(Image: "The now empty Joe Paterno statue site outside Beaver Stadium at Penn State University in State College. The university announced Sunday that it was taking down the monument." Paul Chaplin, via The Patriot-News)

Against Liberalism

After falling out of favor with those on the Left over the circumcision debate, Giles Fraser explains why he doesn't consider himself a liberal:

All of which presents an opportunity to clear the decks and say why I am not a liberal. No, I'm not a conservative either. I'm a communitarian. Blue labour, if you like. But certainly not a liberal. What I take to be the essence of liberalism is a belief that individual freedom and personal autonomy are the fundamental moral goods. But I don't buy this. What we need is a much more robust commitment to the common good, to the priority of community. It is intellectual laziness and a form of cheating to think we can always have both.

Norman Geras doesn't buy it:

He either doesn't know what he's saying or else he's underwriting a sinister form of precedence that could be used to justify any form of trampling on the interests of human individuals. For, unless one recognizes that individual freedom, personal autonomy, more generally, the fundamental needs and interests of individual persons, are themselves the proper and original source for conceiving any type of 'common good', one leaves no restraints upon what the common good may be said to be. 

Does Romney Belong to a Cult?

I'm just going to say it: Romney's Mormonism is a serious problem. In general, I don't subscribe to the view that a candidate's religious views are somehow off-limits for political discussion. Ask anyone with any knowledge on the matter, and they'll tell you that a Mormon is Romney: like most people who can somehow summon faith into their lives, his faith has assumed a kind of centrality. So therefore it would be foolish as a discerning observer not to question the influence his religious convictions may have in shaping his time in office, should he be granted it.

It would be silly to think that the Mormon thing will get out of Romney's way if he were to become president. He is, after all, pretty serious about the church:

In Mitt Romney’s case, not only is he a privately devout Mormon, he has donated millions of dollars to his church and once served as a bishop in the Boston ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is reasonable to conclude, then, that his Mormon faith will inform the decisions he makes if he becomes president, even if he is reluctant to openly discuss it.

To compare, in Obama's case, his religion informs his moral and ethical decisions, no doubt, but not his politics.

The American Right too often makes it seem as though God and government are inseparable, and while these two things needn't necessarily connect, the thrust of Mormonism as an issue (and it is an issue, believe me) into the race makes the unholy marriage of religion and politics in the United States more troubling still. To have a serious Mormon contender for the White House would have been wholly unthinkable not all that long ago. (Still, a black president was never considered a likely prospect before 2008, either.) And yet here we are.

I have little clue as to whether 'cult' is an appropriate description of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as Robert Jeffress has insisted. Nor am I entirely sure where the line between religion and a cult should be drawn.

Who am I to judge? Who is to say that the interpretation of history preached from the LDS pulpit is any more ridiculous or laughable than those of, say, the Catholic Church? That is, the Rome-based institution of which I am, by no choice of my own, a member. Is that not just slightly cultic? Will Jesus Christ return — don't laugh — in Missouri rather than Israel, as the Mormon faithful are told to believe with all their heart and soul? I wouldn't bet on either outcome as likely, but I think you get my point.

When it comes down to a simple matter of distinction between a cult and a religion, things can get hazier than you might expect. There are cult-like properties in every religion, but in America's very own homegrown religious practice, they seem almost too good, too clichéd to be true. They have a president, whom they regard as a prophet, and who is steeped in papal infallibility. There's the infamous underwear, to mark them off from the rest of us, as well as the commitment to a puritan rejection of anything remotely indulgent, like alcohol, sex, or caffeine. Sounds fabulous, right? Its members can be ordered to shun those who show signs of losing interest, and it is believed that the church can be even harder to leave than it is to join. How charming.

Some have said that it's this lack of openness that distinguishes Mormonism as a cult. While I don't quite understand the appeal myself, it's encouraging that anyone can wander into a Catholic parish and sit down and feel fairly welcome in the company of its members. We have made a habit of considering religions to be more benign than sinister. But there are exceptions to every rule: for example, only a cretin trembling with fear of retaliation from the deluded would be so generous as to describe Islam as benign.

And then there's this loathsome little nugget: recently Church leaders have taken to amassing the souls of the dead, and performing posthumous conversions. Perhaps you didn't know that the six million victims of the Holocaust are now counted as LDS adherents. What's more, once the ghastly practice had been discovered and condemned by outsiders, there was still a reluctance to stop the divinely-inspired campaign of identity theft.

The crass enterprise inspires a resounding "how dare you?" response. And rightly so.

Faux Masterpieces

The Times interviews a creator of masterful art imitations:

Spreading half a dozen of his Guardi replicas across the living room floor, Mr. Perenyi said he developed his artistic technique on his own and learned the forensics by working for a restorer and a frame maker when he was in his 20s. Through extensive research and trial and error, he figured out how to simulate the telltale signs of age: the distinctive spider-web cracking in the paint, the tiny dots of fly droppings, and the slimy green look of old varnish when viewed under ultraviolet light. One of his best, he says, was a Heade-style passion flower that Sothebys sold as a new discovery in 1994 for $717,500. A copy now hangs over his fireplace.

How Not to Cover a Shooting

J.J. Gould proposes a different kind of coverage in the event of shootings like the one in Aurora:

One way is that, rather than merely adopting a code, and promulgating a norm, about not featuring certain things in their coverage of mass murder, our better media can do what our better media has always done as a matter of vocation: It can go on the attack and shame those responsible for social exploitation -- in this case, their fellow media outlets for their journalistic failures in covering stories like the Aurora killings.

And on the subject of politicization, Max Read says there's no such thing:

James Holmes did not materialize in a movie theater in Aurora this morning, free of any relationship to law and authority and the structures of power in this country; nor did he exit those relationships and structures by murdering 12 people and injuring several dozen more. Before he entered the theater, he purchased guns, whether legally or illegally, under a framework of laws and regulations governed and negotiated by politics; in the parking lot outside, he was arrested by a police force whose salaries, equipment, tactics and rights were shaped and determined by politics. Holmes' ability to seek, or to not seek, mental health care; the government's ability, or inability, to lock up persons deemed unstable — these are things decided and directed by politics. You cannot "politicize" a tragedy because the tragedy is already political. When you talk about the tragedy you're already talking about politics.

(Video via Helen Lewis)

Progress Here, Regress There

You might recall that the Boy Scouts of America stirred up controversy when they decided to enact a ban on gay people. One of its members, an 18 year-old, explained the initiative: "The vast majority believe that homosexuality is morality wrong. To allow them in would destroy Boy Scout organization." Nice, huh? Conversely, the Pentagon has decided it will allow uniformed military personnel to march in gay pride parades. Andrew Rosenthal applauds:

Such steps, in the direction not of mere tolerance but of acceptance, make the Boy Scouts’ decision to exclude gay members seem all the more ridiculous. If you’re gay, you can serve openly in the military, and march in uniform in San Diego, but you can’t work as a scout leader in your spare time.

I sense something's wrong here.

The Argument from Ugliness

In a nutshell:

he general problem for theistic teleological arguments is that the world is a mixed bag. Yes, there is order, pleasure, goodwill, and beauty aplenty. But there’s also disorder, suffering, hate, and ugliness. Now, if we are reasoning from effects to a cause, then the cause of the mixed-bag universe must be a mixed bag as well. But God can’t be a mixed bag.

Contrary to how it might appear, I don't really pick fights with the religious. (Okay, maybe sometimes.) But it's an activity I recommend highly: it is almost never boring, and never a waste of your time, even though it can be awfully tedious and frustrating. Atheists generally repeat each other in their arguments, because the position is always more or less the same; so even at the risk of being called predictable, we don't mind sounding like broken records. The primary pleasure of debating religion with its most ardent believers is that you never — never — know what they're going to say next.

But there are a couple of things you hear regardless of whom you're debating and when, and one of them is a lengthy oral dissertation on the beauty of the world. They seem to assume that a lack of religious feeling demonstrates a lack of appreciation for nature (what atheist hasn't been asked if they've seen the sky on a clear night?) and that this is somehow a valid argument for the existence of a creator. Neither preposition is true, of course. It obviously hasn't occurred to those who advance an argument for God based on the beauty of His creation that you can't credit the deity with only the beautiful things.

All your work is still ahead of you.

(Image via NASA)

Outing Rapists Online

It's becoming increasingly common, and if it weren't for the ethical issue of making public claims that have not been proven in a court of law, it would work.

Did Malcolm Gladwell Cause Lehman to Fail?

University of San Diego professor Frank Partnoy, in an interview about delaying decision-making, said recently:

I interviewed a number of former senior executives at Lehman Brothers and discovered a remarkable story. Lehman Brothers had arranged for a decision-making class in the fall of 2005 for its senior executives. It brought four dozen executives to the Palace Hotel on Madison Avenue and brought in leading decision researchers, including Max Bazerman from Harvard and Mahzarin Banaji, a well-known psychologist. For the capstone lecture, they brought in Malcolm Gladwell, who had just published Blink, a book that speaks to the benefits of making instantaneous decisions and that Gladwell sums up as “a book about those first two seconds.” Lehman’s president Joe Gregory embraced this notion of going with your gut and deciding quickly, and he passed copies of Blink out on the trading floor.

The executives took this class and then hurriedly marched back to their headquarters and proceeded to make the worst snap decisions in the history of financial markets. I wanted to explore what was wrong with that lesson and to create something that would be the course that Wall Street should have taken and hopefully will take.

Felix Salmon wrote to Gladwell to ask him if he thought he had effectively caused the recession. He replied:

What Colour Are You?

Angelica Dass is recording and cataloguing human skin tones and displaying them against Pantone shades in an effort to 'collect' them all:

The goal of the project is to record and catalog every possible human skin tone for posterity. Dass uses an 11 x 11 pixel of each model’s face and assigns the skin tone a Pantone value from it. She then creates a background in that very shade and shoots the subject in front of it. Considering that Pantone is the leading authority on color in the world, the result is a clinical chromatic inventory/art work that shows off how truly colorful we humans can be.

Refusing to Commemorate Munich, Ctd

Despite mounting pressure, the IOC still refuses to set aside a minute's silence for the victims of the Munich massacre. On Monday, I agreed with Tablet's Deborah Lipstadt that the massacre is, fundamentally, a non-political issue and should be commemorated at the 2012 Games, but balked at the accusation of anti-semitism or anti-semitic sentiment. The IOC maintains that it does not wish to involve itself in politics, which seems like a weak excuse. Paul Mirengoff expresses my view better than I could:

Cronkite Syndrome

Conrad Black reviews Douglas Brinkley’s new biography of Walter Cronkite, and takes a dim view of his politics:

Brinkley tells us that “Walter Cronkite forfeited electoral politics to protect the integrity of American journalism.” It is mind-reading to surmise his motives, though premonitions that McGovern was going to run the most disastrous and incompetent campaign in U.S. history may have figured in them. Given his position, he should not have allowed his name to be bandied about as a political candidate. By his endless subtle attacks on the U.S. effort to salvage a non-Communist South Vietnam, Cronkite contributed importantly to the destruction of the integrity of American journalism.

Bachmann Boost

The idiotic conspiracy theory peddling Michele Bachmann has been doing lately is really very her. So I shouldn't be surprised. But I can't help but feel that someone who has risen so high as a politician could be so incapable of rational thought. Her baffling and seemingly unprompted quest to expose Islamic infiltrations in Washington is not only perplexing in how unfounded it is, but how stupid a move it is politically, too. It would seem as though her witch hunt is really only assisting her Democratic opponent:

Graves said he’s seen an “uptick in financial support” on the ground in the 6th District as Bachmann’s quest to rid the federal government of “Islamist” infiltrators has dominated headlines. Many of Bachmann’s fellow Republicans, including her former presidential campaign manager Ed Rollins, have condemned her recent charges, especially the ones aimed at State Department staffer Huma Abedin.

And the other question here is what effect it will have on the Republican establishment. Even they're already getting concerned. Establishment Republicans are making the savvy political decision of distancing themselves publicly from her. Bachmann's dedicated pursuit of this bullshit theory linking a top Clinton aide to the Muslim Brotherhood isn't a positive PR campaign, but when it's put in perspective really only marginally more embarrassing than her ill-fated foray into the science behind vaccination, or her frequently expressed interpretation of history. Sure, it's pretty bad, but I don't think it will have an effect nearly as great as the one Juan Cole is projecting:

Just as Arizona governor Jan Brewer’s campaign against Latinos has helped deprive GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney of support in that community, Bachmann’s targeting of Muslim-Americans and, implicitly, Arab-Americans, could hurt Romney in those communities.

In any case, if her fellow Republicans can avoid becoming tangled in her conspiracy theorizing, then they might be able to avoid becoming tainted by her brush.

Why We Love to Hoard

Tom Stafford says it's often due to what he calls the Endowment Effect:

This might sound like a nonsensical riddle, but if you’ve ever felt overly possessive about your regular parking space, your pen, or your Star Wars box sets, then you’re experiencing some elements behind the psychology of ownership. Our brains tell us that we value something merely because it is a thing we have. This riddle actually describes a phenomenon called the Endowment Effect. The parking space, the pen and the DVDs are probably the same as many others, but they’re special to you. Special because in some way they are yours.

And the fix, apparently, is easy:

Now, knowing the power of the bias, for each item I ask myself a simple question: If I didn’t have this, how much effort would I put in to obtain it? And then more often or not I throw it away, concluding that if I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t want this.

(Video: You might remember the show about compulsive hoarding. If not, it's hugely entertaining.)

One Direction as Role Models

Over at the blog of the Oxford University Press, Mark McCormack seems optimistic about the influence of the boy-band One Direction, who he says are, in a way, redefining masculinity:

One Direction are just one example of a vast number of famous men to embody this softer, more inclusive masculinity. Yet crucially, such behaviors are not limited to celebrity elites. Rather, these men both model and mirror the gendered behaviors of today’s youth. When researching for my latest book, I found that British youth are redefining masculinity for their generation. Undertaking ethnographies of three British high schools and hanging out with the male students, it was evident that the homophobia, violence and emotional illiteracy of the past have vanished for these young men. Toxic behaviors have been replaced with hugging, cuddling, and loving.

Well, that's charming — but not particularly true. The wider implication that we're witnessing a change in the meaning of masculinity is maybe true in media and entertainment, but it would be difficult to argue that such a change has materialized in the real world, too. Also, the post gives the group a little too much credit for whatever it is we're seeing, assuming it's anything at all. The message is still much the same, only with better clothes.

So, What Is Yahoo?

David Carr has a question for newly-appointed Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer:

I’m going to take a whack at it and say that Yahoo is a media company, mostly by accident (more on that in a bit). Yes, its headquarters in Silicon Valley are filled with technologists and have the familiar trappings of a digital enterprise — foosball, anyone? — but for most Americans, Yahoo is where they get news.

In business, people will tell you that everything else is secondary to being first. And Yahoo, despite its tattered reputation, is No. 1 in 10 content categories, according to the measurement service comScore, including news, finance, sports, entertainment and real estate. Yahoo reaches more than 75 percent of the total Internet audience in the United States, with 167.2 million unique users in June. On any given day, 30 million or more people stop by. Globally, about 700 million people visit the site in 30 languages every month.

If you're here, I'm guessing you're not one of them.

Paterno on His Pedestal

Maureen Dowd asks if it would be right to pull down the statue of disgraced Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, in her words, "as though he were Saddam Hussein." She writes:

Paterno is the tragic figure in the case, the man who went to church and taught his players “success with honor,” but succumbed to supporting depravity. His name was derived from the Latin word for father, and JoePa was the beloved paterfamilias of Happy Valley. So how did he crack his moral compass? It’s the story of “Faust,” a morality play that unspools daily in politics, banking, sports and the Catholic Church. It has taken many artistic forms, from puppet theater to the Marlowe and Goethe plays to opera to a buoyant musical that was also a sports morality tale, “Damn Yankees,” about a middle-age real estate agent who sells his soul to be a slugger named “Shoeless Joe” Hardy for the Washington Senators.

Though some of the columns caused a little controversy, I actually thought Dowd's reporting from the Sandusky trial was excellent — not everyone agreed. On the question of whether or not the statue should be removed, she's a little clearer. "If I were the Decider, I’d leave it up," she wrote. "But I’d put up another darkly alluring statue behind Paterno, whispering in his ear: Mephistopheles."

(Image: "With Joe Paterno's statue in the foreground, a plane dragging a banner that said "take the statue down or we will" circled Beaver Stadium for about 3 hours." Photo by Michael Bryant)

A Song for Mitt Romney

Actually, I take back all those thing about Romney's supporters not being enthusiastic:

Bird-Watchers Are Annoying

Or at least Laura Helmuth certainly thinks so:

Quote of the Day

"The villain in The Dark Knight Rises is named Bane, B-a-n-e. What is the name of the venture capital firm that Romney ran and around which there’s now this make-believe controversy? Bain. The movie has been in the works for a long time. The release date’s been known, summer 2012 for a long time. Do you think that it is accidental that the name of the really vicious fire breathing four eyed whatever it is villain in this movie is named Bane?" — Rush Limbaugh

The Neuroscience of Immortality

Ken Hayworth, a 'veteran' of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a self-described "outlandishly futuristic thinker", believes that he can live forever. It's just he has to die first. Most people are unconvinced, though:

To Hayworth, science is about overturning expectations: "If 100 years ago someone said that we'd have satellites in orbit and little boxes on our desks that can communicate across the world, they would have sounded very outlandish." One hundred years from now, he believes, our descendants will not understand how so many of us failed for so long to embrace immortality. In an unpublished essay, "Killed by Bad Philosophy," he writes, "Our grandchildren will say that we died not because of heart disease, cancer, or stroke, but instead that we died pathetically out of ignorance and superstition"—by which he means the belief that there is something fundamentally unknowable about consciousness, and that therefore it can never be replicated on a computer.

Afghanistan Without America

Vanda Felbab-Brown explains the complicated logistics of getting out of Afghanistan, and concludes:

The pace and shape of the U.S. and ISAF drawdown in Afghanistan, which are yet to be fully determined, will produce far greater pressures than simply logistical ones. How many U.S. troops are left behind in Afghanistan after 2014 and what roles they retain will influence whether civil war will, in fact, materialize. Ultimately, although Pakistan is likely to continue cultivating vicious allies like the Haqqanis, an unstable Afghanistan will destabilize Pakistan, too. Resolving the logistics to get out of Afghanistan on schedule is important. But staying in Afghanistan in a sufficiently robust and wisely structured presence so that security can be strengthened and Afghan governance improved is even more crucial. The worst possible outcome would be to be rushing out of Afghanistan and then lacking even the logistical routes to do so.

The question right now is whether a U.S. withdrawal will lead to civil war. A recent New Yorker story by Dexter Filkins confronted the dangerous prospect. In particular, he discussed the massive power imbalance between the government and Afghanistan's various militias:

Semicolons; So Tricky

I just can't get over the recent slew of articles on the most-feared of all punctuation marks. This from Mary Norris' post at Page Turner:

In college, whenever I used a semicolon in a paper, it came back to me with a big red circle around the offending member. I thought semicolons were just inflated commas, and I realized that I had no idea how to use them, and was afraid it was too late to learn, so I decided to do without them. I stuck with what I knew: the common comma, the ignorant question mark, the occasional colon, the proletarian period.

Previous post on semicolons here.

For Lack of a Better Romney

Ezra Klein quotes a friend of his, who put the election in these "depressingly clear" words:

This election is a choice between a Democratic president who voters don’t think is able to solve our economic problems and a Republican candidate who voters think is committed to the same doctrines and institutions that helped produce them.

What would the better Mitt Romney look like? Klein says that he would tell a more honest story about the human cost of doing business:

Rather than denying that Bain’s activities sometimes hurt workers, he would admit it. Rather than offering paeans to free enterprise and risk taking, he would acknowledge that the modern economy isn’t fair and is sometimes downright cruel. Workers lose their jobs, their health insurance and their self respect because management is insufficiently farsighted, or because advances in shipping technology make it cheaper to move a factory to China. But the solution, he would say, isn’t to make our companies less competitive. Rather, the answer is to make our government more compassionate and more effective in helping those left behind.

I think the quality in Romney people find most offensive is the creeping insincerity and disingenuousness that underlines his every vapid utterance, and that's a fairly accurate assessment without going into the vacuity and dullness of his tired refrains about belief in America or some other platitude. Romney's words make Obama's "Yes We Can" phrase look promisingly articulate and revealing. Unlike Obama, whose character seems to suit perfectly that all-too-twentieth-century word 'genuine', in most people's eyes Romney is a distant Wall Street master of the universe who doesn't really understand how the country works. The propensity to laugh awkwardly in uncomfortable moments and at inappropriate times is only the tip of the iceberg.

But not even Romney's status as a like-ability challenged candidate counts among his top issues as a candidate. Undoubtedly his greatest hurdle will be to give his base something in him to throw their energy behind. At the moment, I think it would be fair to say they have nothing.

Conor Friedersdorf had an interesting take on Romney's likability issues, saying that it's probably better that nobody really likes him, and cites the arguably disastrous presidency of George Bush as an example. In general, conservatives tend to be better presidents if their supporters aren't too keen on them:

Refusing to Commemorate Munich

In spite of a prolonged effort to have a minute's silence set aside at the 2012 Olympics to remember the Israeli athletes who were murdered at the Munich games in 1972, the IOC remains steadfast in its refusal. Deborah Lipstadt is outraged:

The IOC’s explanation is nothing more than a pathetic excuse. The athletes who were murdered were from Israel and were Jews—that is why they aren’t being remembered. The only conclusion one can draw is that Jewish blood is cheap, too cheap to risk upsetting a bloc of Arab nations and other countries that oppose Israel and its policies.

I have long inveighed against the tendency of some Jews to see anti-Semitism behind every action that is critical of Israel or of Jews. In recent years some Jews have been inclined to hurl accusations of anti-Semitism even when they are entirely inappropriate. By repeatedly crying out, they risk making others stop listening—especially when the cry is true.

The accusation of anti-semitic sentiment here is perhaps a little much, but so is the IOC's characterization of the massacre as a political event.

Obama Ahead in Florida

Good news:

A new Survey USA poll in Florida finds President Obama leading Mitt Romney by five points in the important battleground state, 48% to 43%.

"Is he coming? Is he? Oh God, I think he is."

GQ has published Sean Flynn's definitive essay on the Anders Breivik Norway massacre.

When Cockburn Was Bigger than Hitchens

Though they later sparred and went in different directions politically, with Hitchens becoming the better-known writer, Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens were once much the same in terms of their reputation:

There were certainly many similarities — both were witty, charismatic Brits who wrote about politics with a literary flair. Both started out on the left, but while Cockburn stayed there, Hitchens swung way over to the right. Hitchens’ fame now greatly overshadows Cockburn’s, but it’s easy to forget it wasn’t always that way. Back in the 80s the two shared very similar politics and and probably roughly equivalent name recognition in political journalism circles. In fact, Cockburn, who back then had a regular political column in the Wall Street Journal (!), probably had a higher profile than Hitchens.

No obituary for Cockburn was complete, it seems, without some mention (sometimes extensive discussion) of their rivalry. No, seriously. One I came across devoted most of the piece to explaining why Hitchens was inferior.

Initial post about Cockburn's death here.

The Fatter of Two Evils

Americans, 67 percent according to a Gallup poll, are more afraid of getting fat than smoking cigarettes. Daniel Engber says they've got it all wrong:

The analogous number for those who consume at least one pack of cigarettes per day is 3.7, meaning that heavy smokers are almost four times more likely to perish than nonsmokers, about double the risk associated with obesity. Estimates of avoidable deaths reflect this difference in the odds: According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, smoking accounts for an excess mortality of more than 400,000 Americans every year, compared to just 112,000 for obesity. That's despite the fact that there are many more fat Americans—obesity rates are now 50 percent higher than smoking rates.

This is particularly true as smoking becomes less socially acceptable as an activity. In New Zealand, smoking is generally perceived as a profoundly anti-social habit: something to be scorned and treated with contempt. The government has declared it their goal to wipe out the consumption of tobacco by 2017, and is pushing ahead with a plan to deprive cigarette packaging of basic branding — a policy that conforms with the other equally-infantilising social legislation here. (You might remember that New Zealand was the first to introduce a ban on smoking in restaurants and bars.) It must feel like such an insult to be treated as though you can't make good consumer decisions on your own.

I'm genuinely fine with governments broadcasting ads advocating 'smokefree' spaces and anti-smoking measures — even the strident ones, which tend to be easy to ignore. But I think we may be well advised to dispense with the notion that legislation, not a natural evolution in opinion as new information emerges, is to be credited with curbing the tobacco problem.

Alexander Cockburn, RIP

The writer who made a career of being a contrarian, though he stopped short of courting the title, has died of cancer:

Alex kept his illness a tightly guarded secret. Only a handful of us knew how terribly sick he truly was. He didn’t want the disease to define him. He didn’t want his friends and readers to shower him with sympathy. He didn’t want to blog his own death as Christopher Hitchens had done. Alex wanted to keep living his life right to the end. He wanted to live on his terms. And he wanted to continue writing through it all, just as his brilliant father, the novelist and journalist Claud Cockburn had done. And so he did. His body was deteriorating, but his prose remained as sharp, lucid and deadly as ever.

Jesse Walker remembers discovering the author as a fourteen year-old:

I pick up a copy of The Nation, which I've heard of but never read before. Inside I find a two-page spread labeled "Beat the Devil," written by someone named Alexander Cockburn. The feature fascinates me: First it's talking about Jesse Jackson, but then suddenly the subject is Vanessa Williams, the Miss America who had to give up her crown when an old nude photo shoot turned up in Penthouse. "And she was not just posing with anyone," wrote Cockburn. "She was posing with another woman. I doubt even a full repudiation of Louis Farrakhan and all he stands for would have gotten Williams off the hook at that point." [...] I had never read anything like this before. It wasn't that the article was stylish and erudite; it's that it was a stylish and erudite response to a porn shoot, a column that casually mixed culture and politics, serious analysis and jokes. The op-ed page in the daily paper wasn't like this at all. I was hooked, and I got in the habit of picking up more free copies of The Nation at the bookstore.