Tracy Clark-Flory rejoiced after science finally confirmed her long held belief that hookup culture doesn't kill off all chances for love:
University of Iowa sociologist Anthony Paik's survey of 642 adults in
Chicago initially found that "average relationship quality was higher
for individuals who waited until things were serious to have sex
compared to those who became sexually involved in 'hookups,' 'friends
with benefits,' or casual dating relationships," according to a press release.
But when he controlled for people who had zero interest in having a
relationship, that difference disappeared. "Couples who became sexually
involved as friends or acquaintances and were open to a serious
relationship ended up just as happy as those who dated and waited."
Troy Patterson reviews the new Laura Linney program:
If we must take away any "messages" from The Big C —and the show, a gently mordant comedy about a
42-year-old cancer patient, insists that we try a small few—then chief
among them is this: Dying well is the best revenge.
I don't entirely agree with this read on Judd Apatow's critical success, but it's an interesting take:
They strain to wring relevance out of Apatow’s pro-family message. (Who
in America is against families and children?) They strain to argue for
his place in a tradition. They use him as a cudgel against flawed
filmmakers who are both smarter and more ambitious than he is. All the while they miss the simple moving force behind the gratuitous
cameos, the accumulating in-jokes, the repeated casting of the
director’s wife, children, and friends, and the constant carping about
aging in Apatow’s films; they miss all the vanity. He is allowed this
vanity because he delivers a message Americans crave to hear. As long as
you behave yourself, take on a modicum of responsibility, and wear the
yoke of commitment, it is entirely acceptable—even preferable and
profitable—to be stupid.
Alex Gurnham interviewed the artist Brandon Bird about his most recent foray into pop culture madness, starring Nicholas Cage:
I think that's really what pop art, or maybe even all
art, is about. Presenting something people encounter every
day in a way they had never considered. Whether that something is a
sunflower, or a soup can, or Sam Waterston's awesome face.
After being compared to a Holocaust denier because of a piece he wrote criticizing Elie Wiesel, Terry Teachout fired back:
I'd like to think that anybody who read a piece (or a posting or
tweet) in which I was compared to a Holocaust denier would simply roll
his eyes and move on. But I'm old enough to know better. More and more
of the American people are choosing to live in closed circles of
collective concurrence, and I have no doubt that in certain of those
circles, those who read such an attack on me would nod their heads
sagely and say something on the order of "Yep, it figures. Probably
beats his wife, too."
George Washington once drew up a list of rules of civility. Here is the first one:
1st Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present.
I'm with the father of our country. To be gratuitously nasty in
public discourse is like relieving yourself in a swimming pool. Even if
nobody knows you did it, you still made the pool a dirtier place for
everybody--yourself included.
Anyone who has had the distinct privilege of working for a large,
soulless, multinational chain is familiar with the hideous crap that is
the corporate training video. They can be hours and hours long with
such riveting topics like “how to fold jeans the right way” or “how to
stock shelves” – it doesn’t make for a pleasant viewing experience. Step
in Wendy’s. Well, Wendy’s in what my guess would be the
Bell-Biv-DeVoe/Debbie Gibson era early 90s, and these two absolutely
brilliant and hilarious training music videos: “Hot Drinks” and “Cold
Drinks.” Instructive and danceable! Makes me want to grab a Frosty™ and
get down.
New research suggests wearing knock-off designer goods impacts more than your ego:
Wearing counterfeit glasses not only fails to bolster our ego and
self-image the way we hope, it actually undermines our internal sense of
authenticity. “Faking it” makes us feel like phonies and cheaters on
the inside, and this alienated, counterfeit “self” leads to cheating and
cynicism in the real world.
Wired's Lisa Grossman reports that the solar system may be almost two million years older than we believed, based on the "fairly messed up" meteorite which scientists originally used to calculate the date. Co-authors of a new study Audrey Bouvier and Meenakshi Wadhwa found a more pristine meteorite to work with, NWA 2364:
“Most of what shaped the formation history of the solar system, and
the planets and asteroids and all that, a lot of that happened within
the first 5 to 10 million years,” she said. “Being able to actually
pinpoint to within something like 2 million years what the age of the
solar system is does make a difference in terms of trying to resolve the
sequence of events that happened subsequently.”
Researchers are looking into an extract from the Kudzu vine to treat cocaine addiction. Originally brought over from Asia to prevent soil erosion, Kudzu has spread across the bible belt and is otherwise known as the "vine that ate the South."
When my family first moved to North Carolina, I remember thinking how beautifully the vines anthropomorphized all phone poles, trees, and abandoned structures, only to discover it was actually doing a good amount of harm to the native plant species. Here's to hoping the vines can one day be harvested for a good cause.
Scott Fayner reviews how technology has historically been helped by pornography and its earlier adherents, and how that classic relationship has been upended by free porn on internet "tube sites."
All this back-and-forth between the porn studios and the tube sites is
just the latest episode in a relationship between porn and technology
that goes back at least to the printing press. And the rise of the
tubes is hardly the first time technology has overturned pornography's
established modes of business. The Polaroid camera, the VCR,
pay-per-view, 900 numbers, live chat, video chat, and high-speed
broadband all got early exposure as porn delivery systems. As a result,
porn has been normalizing the use of new technologies for a long time.
"Things like the book or the motion picture weren't invented with the
idea of 'Oh, let's make pornography with this,' " says Jonathan
Coopersmith, a history professor at Texas A&M who has studied the
porn industry for more than a decade. But porn "quickly becomes a tool
for diffusing knowledge of how these new things work, and it creates an
early market," he says. "Even without porn, we'd probably all have
high-speed Internet, but it would have been adopted more slowly, in the
same way that the spread of the VCR would have been delayed if porn
weren't around, because the early adopters wouldn't be there."
Today's poem is a late summer romp by Galway Kinnell called "Everyone Was In Love." An excerpt below, but do click through since the ending is one of the best parts:
One day, when they were little, Maud and Fergus appeared in the doorway, naked and mirthful, with a dozen long garter snakes draped over each of them like brand-new clothes. Snake tails dangled down their backs, and snake foreparts in various lengths fell over their fronts, heads raised and swaying, alert as cobras. They writhed their dry skins upon each other, as snakes like doing in lovemaking, with the added novelty of caressing soft, smooth, moist human skin.
Daniel Roberts profiles New York author Tao Lin and heralds him as the as the next big thing in net-savvy hipster lit. For those unfamiliar with Lin, here's the opening lines from Lin's Shoplifting From American Apparel:
Sam woke around 3:30 p.m. and saw no emails from Sheila. He made a
smoothie. He lay on his bed and stared at his computer screen … About
an hour later it was dark outside. Sam ate cereal with soymilk. He put
things on eBay then tried to guess the password to Sheila's email
account, not thinking he would be successful, and not being successful.
Robert's analysis:
Where Lin is coming from, and what his readers share, is a sense of
loneliness. The malaise is not specific to New York, of course, but it
is typical of a certain ilk of detached 20-somethings across the
country.
The loneliness could be attributed to the Internet. Lin and his
literary peers spend hours and hours online, and although doing so
fosters a sense of connectedness, it is equally isolating. No matter how
many fans or fellow writers Lin "meets" online, at the end of the day
it's still him, sitting at his laptop alone.
You have until noon on Tuesday to
guess it. Country first, then city and/or state. If no one guesses the
exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to
VFYWcontest@theatlantic.com. Winner gets a free The
View From Your Window book, courtesy of Blurb. Have at it.
Adam Gopnik's survey of Churchill is a spot-on read, with all the right flourishes of detail. Here he is on Churchill's speeches:
Churchill was a cavalier statesman who could never survive roundhead
strictures on ornament and theatrical excess in speaking. That’s why he
could supply what everyone needed in 1940: a style that would mark
emphatic ends (there is no good news), conventional ideas (we are an
ancient nation), and old-fashioned emphasis (we will fight). Perhaps the
style never suited the time. It suited the moment. The archaic poetic
allusions in the June 4th speech—the reference to King Arthur’s knights,
the echoes of Shakespeare and John of Gaunt’s oration on England—are
there to say, “What’s to fear? We’ve been here before.” The images are stale, the metaphors are violent, the atmosphere is dramatic—and the moment justifies them all.
He goes on to perfectly illustrate the importance of temperament in Churchill's legacy:
He is, with de Gaulle, the greatest instance in modern times of the
romantic-conservative temperament in power. The curious thing is that
this temperament can at moments be more practical than its liberal
opposite, or than its pragmatic-conservative twin, since it rightly
concedes the primacy of ideas and passions, rather than interests and
practicalities, in men’s minds. Churchill was a student of history, but
one whose reading allowed him to grasp when a new thing in history
happened.
Der Spiegel interviewed German author Günter Grass
about his new book on the German history and language behind the Brothers Grimm, Grimms' Words. A Declaration of Love:
SPIEGEL: You describe the two brothers as "word sleuths," who are
concerned about every single letter. You also write: "On the one hand,
words make sense. On the other hand, they're well suited to creating
nonsense. Words can be beneficial or hurtful." How have the various
facets of words shaped your own life?
Grass: I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and
create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense. Adolf Hitler's
"Do you want total war?" is one such example. But the same thing applies
to the sentence: "Our freedom is also being defended in the Hindu
Kush." (Editor's note: The sentence was famously uttered by former German Defense Minister Peter Struck to justify Germany's military mission in Afghanistan.) Such sentences carry a strong meaning, and they are able to
exert this meaning because they are not sufficiently questioned. I have
heard my fill of hurtful words. I think it's especially egregious when
citizens like me, who point out abuses in their country, are referred to
as "do-gooders." This is how a phrase that can be used to stop an
argument dead becomes part of common usage.
A new study says that people who are physically clean feel superior to others and are prone to judge other people or social issues more harshly. In one experiment:
Hundreds of participants [who] were told to read a
short passage that began “My hair feels clean and light. My breath is
fresh. My clothes are pristine and like new” made harsher moral
judgements about 16 social issues compared with those primed to feel dirty by reading a passage that read “My hair feels oily and heavy. My breath stinks. I feel so dirty.”
I credit all future kindnesses to my distaste for showering.
Today on the Dish, we judged books by their covers and judging by Mehlman, gays were either destroying our country or don't exist. Conor captured start-ups and wipe-outs on the California scene and made the case for localism. The Catholic Church got the mosque treatment; hipsters got more of the church treatment, and Dan Savage asked the crazies to have a little faith.
Will Wilkinson got some post-partisan love; liberty and tyranny still weren't very useful for liberals, or libertarians; and B. Daniel Blatt thought being gay among conservatives was easier than the other way around. High class city living across the country was pretty hard to compare; while government officials were wreaking havoc on poor people's property in Montgomery, Alabama and firefighters' pensions were probably unsustainable according to one in the know. The Arab press responded to the Park 51 mosque; Larison did another round with Douthat; and we disassembled the military conservative complex and parsed the Pakistani military role in the humanitarian crisis.
Egypt got a little risque with Coca Cola; we charted the bard; and sharks may or may not bechasing our boss. Facebook sued so teachers can't use the "book;" and the cat came back to haunt us. VFYW here; Malkin award here; FOTD here; creepy ad watch here; MHB here; and long form ketchup journalism here. Bristol is going dancing with the Situation and Levi was sorry for saying sorry about his situation.
(By Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)
Thursday on the Dish, we debated Americans' obsession with moderate Islam and how it eclipses the greater battle against extremists. Exum declared a different sort of victory in Iraq; we saw a another side of the war in Afghanistan; Wilkinson and Conor debunked the myth of the much brighter past; and this reader mused on memorials. Frum found Romney's Achilles heel; Reid went negative; and sometimes rental inspectors save the day.
We got a glimpse of the view from your recession; some blowback on the Cash for Clunkers debunking; and Mehlmancame out of the closet. We wrapped our minds around the fallout from the housing market crash; tuned in to drop-outs; and tackled why no one really wants to live in the middle of the woods and get paid in cash. Pensions came back to haunt us; Kinsley pushed for more stem cell research; and Bernstein put liberals and conservatives into their respective camps.
We compared cats and children; kept an eye on Christianists, and an ear on Marin's Christianapology. VFYW here; MHB here; FOTD here; long form accolades can be found here and here; the case against envy here, and poking continued across international lines. We inducted Neutral Milk Hotel, Nick Cave, and Black Sabbath into the annals of hip Christian rock; Infinite Jest battled infinite Joyce; and liberals and libertarians all wanted to swim in the deep end.
Wednesday on the Dish, Conor arm-wrestled with Poulos over liberty vs. tyranny. Drezner dissected the millennials' attitudes on war; private prisons seemed a little perverse; and we heard a personal testimony from the ground on dropout factories. Alaska may be the start of the establishment upset thanks to Palin, and an apologetic Christian said sorry to his gay best friends, but still thought it was a sin.
On the Mosque, Santorum spread lies; Harper had faith in American society; and Daniel Larison threw in his two-cents. Conor differed with David Pryce-Jones over how most Americans view Islamist radicals and this stabbing was a bad omen. We checked in on Pakistani politics and a trucker's view of the traffic jam in China. Drum defended statism; renters were searched like second class citizens; and used cars cost more thanks to Cash for Clunkers.
Facebook dissed pot, approved cocaine, and lectured you on having babies. Religioushipsters continued to rock; and we kept up the rants on hula hoops, Christmas trees and the rat race. Serwer wanted his video games to stay unrealistic, and when it comes to gadgets and redevelopment projects, sometimes less is more. We got a sobering view of one man's depression and the chart of the day here, VFYW here, MHB here, FOTD here, and Colbert bait here. Time Magazine grew up; firefighters got rich (thanks to pensions); and this woman got caught hating cats.
Suva, Fiji, 11.51 am
Tuesday on the Dish, Mosque detractors papered the streets of New York; readers reminded us of past and present real estate and Mosque clashes; and Budiansky railed against excessive memorials. We assessed the odds of Obama being a Muslim vs ghosts existing; Weigel compared slurs; and the New York Post costs less than Skittles. Mormons reacted to the Mosque on religious freedom; and there are round-ups of the rest of the debate here and here.
We analyzed our two unfinished wars; the WikiLeaks rape case didn't help cases of real sexual assault, and Conor parsed whether the military should have cooperated with WikiLeaks, with Conn Carroll on Bloggingheads. Fallows reminded us about how declarations of war have to work; and Lynch argued Goldberg's article makes an attack less likely.
We baited Sullivan on the natural law of beards; bedbugs are worse in recessions because of our moods; and the Fox News farce reached all new heights. Readers berated the extravagant burial process; while Conor mocked email footer madness, and others ranted on cursive, curse words, and going topless. Balloons should cost more; and your long form fix for today is here. Creepy ad watch here; MHB here; island VFYW here; FOTD here. VFYW contest #12 winner here; and this reader of the day living vicariously and happily through better traveled Dish fans here.
Monday on the Dish, Muslims prayed at Ground Zero, while detractors angrily protested a non-Muslim man. Stephen Prothero putMormons on the spot; Kinsley kept at Krauthammer; Eli Lake and Adam Sewer squared off for a Blogging Heads round; and moderate Muslims do (obviously) exist. We opened the thread on America and its ruling elites and asked the Tea Party what changes they might propose.
Sharron Angle campaigned against jersey colors, Hasselbeck supported gay marriage, and John Hawkins wanted to make the Republican party actually inclusive. We parsed Obama's faulty logic on gay marriage and examined whether Ron Paul really mattered. Conor riffed on liberty vs tyranny; Reihan took the rightier road to keeping the rich here in the U.S; and we dropped in on high school and college dropout factories.
Goldblog and Lynch expounded on Israel; Mongolia begged us to visit, and a surge in porn markets could be good for Iraq. Damaged irrigation systems could lead to food shortages in Pakistan, and combat operations never end when governments say they do.
TNC went night walking; bloggers got taxed in Philadelphia, and others got paid by the GOP. Our choices for beverages were limited, but we learned we're not that good at choice blindness anyways. The dog pile on Cesar Millan continued; hipster Christian rock bands have to pass the sniff test; and we all paid the fear tax.
Question of the week here, VFYW here, MHB here, FOTD here, and awkward family pet portraits here.
Ron Replogle uses the abortion debate to explain political group formation:
Your ideological community is the class of people whose moral and
political sensibility, their inventory of political principles and
battery of moral reflexes, carry weight in your political deliberation.
An ideologue is prepared to reject a favorite principle when enough of
her ideological comrades have sufficiently powerful moral qualms about
its applications. And she’ll swallow her own moral qualms about a
principle when she and her comrades can’t think of a better one.
This needn’t be a matter of peer pressure subverting one’s better
judgment.
Based on the material you've been showcasing, "Can church be hip?" is not the question you're actually exploring. Those songs may make reference to Christian concepts or images, but they are lyrics; they display an intimate, personal, unique and emotionally charged state of mind, and are clearly intended for performance or for private listening as recordings. They are manifestly not appropriate for "church" in any sense that I as a lifelong churchgoer would recognize. They are not songs for worship - communal in nature and addressed to God or expressing the community's universal understanding of God or the faith story.
I could see these pieces in a "Christian coffeehouse." But if the "hip" emergent church or the megachurches have begun using this sort of material for "worship," then they have departed even further than I realized from thousands of years of Judeo-Christian tradition for gathered celebration and supplication. And in that case, the answer to your question would be, it may be hip, it may be Christian, but it's not church, because it's not worship, any more than listening to a reading of John Donne's or T.S. Eliot's lyrics - admirable Christian poetry - would be worship.
True, the thread has veered a bit from the original post, but Dish threads always have a life of their own. And without getting into a semantic debate about what constitutes "church" and "worship," I think the central theme of "religion and credible indie music are not mutually exclusive" holds. Plus, the thread is a good excuse to air great music. Another writes:
This
reader underestimates the importance of gay visibility outside of urban
America. In poorer and more rural parts of the country, being gay may
have become more visible in the last several decades, but there are
still major impediments to being out and proud. America is a huge,
diverse country, and nowhere near uniform in any way. If Mehlman is
going to have an impact, it'll be on people like the low-level staffers
and wonks that are rising within Republican circles. Hardly the most
powerful figures in D.C., but not a bunch of nobodies either.
A young girl, displaced from her home by flooding, lines up for food rations with others holding empty containers and ration cards at a Pakistan Army flood relief camp on August 27, 2010 near Sukkur in Sindh province, Pakistan. The country's agricultural heartland has been devastated, with rice, corn and wheat crops destroyed by floods. Officials say as many as 20 million people have been affected during Pakistan's worst flooding in 80 years. The army and aid organizations are struggling to cope with the widespread scale of the disaster that has killed over 1,600 people and displaced millions. The UN has described the disaster as unprecedented, with over a third of the country under water. By Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images.
[W]here does the preoccupation with [raising the retirement age to] age 70 come from? That would represent a decrease
in the expected number of years of retirement since 1970, during a
period in which the United States has become nearly twice as wealthy.
That doesn't even begin to make sense. Sure, life expectancy may
increase in the future, but if it does then we have the option of
increasing the retirement age when it happens. For now, we should make
policy based on current reality, and the current reality is that life
expectancy at age 65 has increased only 3.5 years since 1970. There's
no reason the retirement age should increase five years in response.
Dan Savage is awesome usually, but during this period in which he's been on a "roll" he also denounced a rather benign Toronto church group as "Christofascists" based on incorrect information provided by a YouTube poster who later admitted he had no evidence for what he was saying. That was pretty bad. Full story here.
This video, from students at the Vancouver Film School, visualizes a different sort of pseudovariety, this time within our natural food systems. Out of 80,000 edible plants we choose only 30 to supply 90% of the calories in our diet; 14 animal species make up 90% of our livestock. The scariest realizations are about 1:45 in.
Personally I’m not interested in “limited government” as an end in
itself, but as a means to greater individual liberty. I’m opposed to
government programs that waste taxpayer dollars because higher taxes
restrict my freedom. But I’m much more opposed to government programs
that use taxpayer dollars to restrict freedom directly. I’m not
interested in joining a “limited government” movement that considers the
two equivalent. And I’m definitely not interested in being
part of a movement that gives torture and preemptive war a free pass
under the heading of “national defense” while it focuses instead on
fighting the tyranny of SCHIP and unemployment insurance.
Cohn returns to the subject and makes a couple worthwhile points. A reader focuses on NYC:
I don't know much about compensation in the rest of the country but I do know about New York and its cops and firefighters. I grew up with them. My father (retired), both brothers, best friend from high school (retired on medical) are all FDNY. The (suburban) block I grew up on had 11 houses: 5 firemen and two cops. The significant other of the fireman who wrote in presented a version of things that doesn't really square with my experience.
The firefighters that I know are all hard working people who do or did a tough and nasty job. They've all seen very terrible things that generally do not intrude upon my workday. Bad, bad stuff. They are very well compensated for this. It's a good job. Some people like it and some don't. Whether or not its worth it to any particular person is up to that person but the line is long to get a spot and the pension is no small part of the draw.
Mehlman would like us to believe that he didn't know he was
gay back then. And, I'm sorry, but that doesn't pass the
smell-my-finger test. Mehlman rose quickly through the ranks of the
GOP, wound up on top, cashed the checks, made the contacts, did real
and lasting harm to other gays and lesbians, and Mehlman knew damn well
what he was and what he was doing.
Ken Mehlman now wants to use his contacts and influence to help me win
the right to marry. I don't care if he ripped the heads off baby
bunnies back in 2004, if he's willing to help us now. My enemy's enemy
is my friend. And if Ken Mehlman wants to be my friend, and start on
the path towards making up for all the bad things he did in the past,
I'm not going to spurn his help, and set our movement and community
back by missing this incredible opportunity, simply because the guy
(rightfully) pisses me off.
Dan is on a bit of a blog roll lately; today he reacts to a new poll showing 75% (!) public acceptance for ending DADT, and checks in on those kooky Mormons.
Since so many Dish readers write me from California, I thought I'd mention two very exciting journalistic efforts that are based in the Golden State, though of sufficient quality that outsiders will find them enjoyable too. One is the site California Is a Place. Its excellent videos blend the styles of photojournalism and art photography to produce some stunning pieces.
And then there is Slake, a new Los Angeles based quarterly that I described here. Its Web site recently launched. Cool photos here.
As long as we're talking Southern California, I should note that the swells have been big recently, and I took the opportunity to go down to The Wedge with my girlfriend to watch surfers and boogie boarders braver than me. Its difficult to do the place justice in words, except to say that most places one watches surfing for epic rides, whereas at The Wedge on a big day there can only be epic wipe-outs.
In his latest column at The Washington Examiner, Tim Carney argues that President Obama and his hostility to libertarianism are evidence that Brink Lindsey's project to encourage an alliance between liberals and libertarians failed.
The column is pegged to Mr. Lindsey's departure from the Cato Institute.
Mr. Carney writes:
Libertarian donors tend to be small-businessmen, and when they look
at the nation's increasing debt, regulation and taxes, they begin to see
Obama as the devil.
Obama's excesses are making free-marketeers more partisan. The same
entrepreneurs who two years ago cursed Republican overspending and Bush
bailouts are now asking one question: How can we drive Obama, Pelosi and
Reid from power?
In such an environment, ambiguity about Obama - maybe he's not the
devil - comes across as lukewarmness for liberty. This is a problem,
because it means Republicans - no heroes on limiting government - could
get a free pass from donors and activists.
Blissfully removed from Washington DC, I haven't any idea whether or not Mr. Carney is correct in his speculation about why Mr. Lindsey and Cato parted ways. But his column, and the libertarian donors he is channeling, make the same mistake (one he astutely recognizes in their case): operating on an inadequately short time horizon. I don't know if a liberaltarian alliance is ever going to be a reality, or if the project is doomed to fail, but it's folly to evaluate it based on two years of a single presidency. This is especially so when practically speaking, pursuit of the liberaltarian project is perfectly compatible with staunch opposition to President Obama and every aspect of his agenda.
Mr. Lindsey's project has never been about the 2010 midterms, or the 2012 presidential election, it's been about gradually reorienting America's ideological coalitions in a way that makes liberals more friendly to libertarian ideas, and libertarians less captive to the worst aspects of conservatism. Libertarian donors ought to fund efforts to oppose President Obama in the short term. They also ought to invest in intellectual projects with longer time horizons that only bear on particular electoral and legislative outcomes indirectly. If they can't distinguish between those projects, or if they actually display thinking as immature and counterproductive as "Obama is the devil" and "maybe he's not the devil" equals "lukewarmness for liberty," they're inadvertently sabotaging their own cause. Were I a wealthy man, I'd help fund Mr. Lindsey if only to avoid keeping all the libertarian eggs in the right's less than reliable ideological basket (the short time horizons apparently extend backward too).
Attention to the crisis has been heavily focused on the security angle. The dominant narrative
regarding Western aid is that Pakistani extremist groups are gaining
influence by controlling the aid distribution process, and that the
West should thus increase its own aid distribution in order to counter
these radicals. John Kerry, for example, visiting the region last week,
mimicked this line of thinking:
"Miles upon miles of destroyed homes, of people dislocated, people in
camps in great heat, losing their possessions, growing frustrated,
worried about the future. We need to address that, all of us rapidly, to avoid their impatience boiling over or people exploiting that impatience."
But
note how this narrative obscures the humanitarian angle, and downplays
the notion that governments have a responsibility to assist peoples
beyond their borders. Our aid policy in the wake of this crisis should
largely be constructed and justified based on a notion of shared
humanity -- not merely on a narrow assessment of American interests.
That Pakistanis are suffering and desiring of international aid should
be enough to warrant our attention, our dollars, and our support.
Imagine you come home from work one day to a notice on your front
door that you have 45 days to demolish your house, or the city will do
it for you. Oh, and you’re paying for it.
This is happening right now in Montgomery, Ala., and here is how it
works: The city decides it doesn’t like your property for one reason or
another, so it declares it a “public nuisance.” It mails you a notice
that you have 45 days to demolish your property, at your expense, or the
city will do it for you (and, of course, bill you).
Your tab with the city will constitute a lien on your property, and
if you don’t pay it within 30 days (or pay your installments on time; if
you owe over $10,000, you can work out a deal to pay back the city for
destroying your home over a period of time, with interest), the city can
sell your now-vacant land to the highest bidder.
ABC News has more. And the Institute for Justice is helping with an upcoming protest.
Defending these demolitions is Todd Strange, Mayor of Montgomery, Alabama, and a Republican. The Conservative Christians of Alabama said prior to the last election that "conservatives see a vote for him as their only chance to save Montgomery from liberal Democrats."
This would seem to be an example where libertarians, already on the scene doing excellent work, might ally themselves with a carefully chosen liberal challenger for mayor, given that the local conservative establishment is insufficiently enamored of property rights and limited government. If Strange doesn't face or beats back a primary challenge prior to the next election -- some local conservatives are upset too -- I don't see how any libertarian voter could fail to root for his ouster in the general election.
Stephan Thiel at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam has charted Shakespeare in various ways as part of his B.A. thesis:
The goal of this approach was to provide an overview of [each] play
by showing its text through a collection of the most frequently used
words for each character.
My favorite is how often "Oh" seems to occur in Romeo and Juliet. Oh, young love...
In California, local government is where our political failures begin.
Does anyone pay regular attention to their City Council or County Board of Supervisors? The people in Bell didn't, and were typical in that way. Those local bodies are used as stepping stones to the state legislature and beyond. But the folks who rise aren't doing so based on the considered judgment of citizens so much as their ability to curry favor with donors, spend on campaign advertising, and win elections via name recognition.
It's a contest that's grown too sophisticated for amateurs.
Several factors militate against civic engagement. Ours is a large state with huge counties that contain sprawling municipalities. Our population is famously transient. A series of progressive reforms and populist ballot measures (especially Proposition 13) tended to strip control from local authorities, so that Sacramento grew in political importance. When the County Board of Supervisors sets property taxes, residents damn well show up at the meetings, whereas scrutiny is orders of magnitude less when the most contested subjects are settled regionally.
Nowadays so many critical matters of public policy are being decided by anonymous, faraway state officials, or even worse, their federal equivalents. In a way, life is less burdensome for people when they can safely ignore local civics, but the price in dysfunction and ceded influence is high. The thing about national or even state elections is that voters can only get their information from the mass media or professionally run campaigns. Though these are the best methods we've got, they are pretty terrible. Have you watched cable news lately?
Those of us who advocate federalism, and want states to give as much control as possible to locals, aren't just cranks who worry that tyranny is going to sweep the land if a marginally looser construction of constitutional law prevails. Our insight is that self-government works best when important matters inspire civic participation at a level where it can actually matter.
On Wednesday nights, a ten minute car ride is sufficient to arrive at city hall in time for the weekly meeting, where you can stand up at a podium, speak your mind directly to actual decision-makers, and respond if you still don't get your way by talking with people afterward -- the ones who cheered when you spoke up, and might even be willing to back your own run at local elective office. These kinds of encounters inspire confidence that regular people can make a difference.
And we'd be far better off if our politicians started out as folks with particular passion for grassroots civic efforts, rather than coming from a power hungry class drawn by the prospect of a remunerative career in elective office.
Everything about national politics is awful. The candidates, the disingenuous talking heads, the artificially binary separation into Team Red and Team Blue, and especially the lack of weirdness, which is another way of saying that American communities and people are a quirky sort. Their diverse approaches to the pursuit of happiness are given short shrift if they're always forced to make consequential decisions in concurrence with everyone else.
In Cato Unbound, Glenn Greenwald's essay on the surveillance state is now posted alongside comments by John Eastman, Julian Sanchez and Paul Rosenzweig. Mr. Greenwald has a response up here. It's a good debate, and another illustration of how the liberty versus tyranny framework isn't very useful for assessing liberal arguments.
Since you have a platform to ask interesting questions (and get back interesting answers), I have one I'd like to have asked, dealing with the way Americans of differing ideologies frame their debates.
My own camp is generally "not conservative", so I often feel I'm among the targets of conservative denouncements of liberal "tyranny." And some of what they say makes sense. While I'll admit to being in the liberal camp, I'm pretty centrist (e.g. I actually feel like Obama is delivering what I heard him promise during his campaign), so conservative calls for smaller government and greater personal freedom do resonate with me.
Still, I'm never actually convinced it's anything beyond rhetoric, mostly because of a single, gigantic exception - conservatives give the military (and really anything security-related) a huge bye. I can understand the argument, for instance, that if taxes are too high then personal freedom is to some degree eroded, but that seems very metaphorical compared to government's power to physically lock you up. For all their talk about freedom and liberty, the enthusiastic embrace of the military and security culture by many conservatives pretty makes that seem like a lot of empty rhetoric to me.
I don't mean it as a critique so much as a question - why does the military-security culture get such a huge pass? I honestly don't understand how you can cast yourself as a defender of liberty on one hand, while be fully in support of expanding the government's ability to physically remove your liberty on the other. (To be clear, I don't expect conservatives to be pacifist - I'm thinking of specific examples like denouncing any criticism of the Iraq war as unpatriotic and casting skeptics of the Patriot Act as loony leftists - and of course, all the torture, er, enhanced interrogations).
I have no beef with evangelical Christians who support full civil
equality for gays and lesbians despite believing that gay sex is a sin.
Heck, I'll personally mow the lawns of evangelical Christians who are
willing to refrain from actively persecuting gays and lesbians. I've
said that it's a mistake to get into arguments about theology with
people, and that people have a right to their own beliefs. I don't care
if someone thinks I'm going to hell when I die and I'm not going to
argue with him for the same reason I'm not going to argue with someone
who believes that I'm going to the lost continent of Atlantis when I go
on vacation.
All gays and lesbians want from evangelical Christians is
the same deal the Jews and the yoga and instructors and the atheists
and the divorced and the adulterers and the rich all get: full civil
equality despite the going-to-hell business. (And isn't hell punishment
enough? Do we have to be persecuted here on earth too? It's almost as
if they don't trust God to persecute us after we die. Have a little
faith, people!)
Scores of readers wrote in with similar sentiments, and I wish I could post them all, but Dan really does say it best.
A lesser-known band, but one that's easily as inventive and respected in certain circles as Starflyer 59 and David Bazan, is mewithoutYou. They formed out of the Philadelphia hardcore scene in the late '90s, have been on Tooth and Nail - the same label Starflyer and Pedro the Lion got their start on - since their first album in 2002, and have toured with David Bazan a couple times. The first album was pretty hard stuff, with singer Aaron Weiss doing more speaking/shouting than singing, but each successive album has gotten a little softer, with Weiss singing more and more.
Their fourth and most recent album, "It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All a Dream! It's Alright!" finds Weiss given over to singing every song and the band playing stuff that is a kind of gypsy/folk sound. It's also the first album ever on a Christian label and sold in Christian stores that's a largely Muslim work. Weiss and his brother were raised by parents who were into the Sufi faith, and this album has that kind of thing all over it. In fact, the album title is a quote from Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, an important Sufi mystic, and some of the songs are his parables [see video above].
For my money, it might be the best Christian album ever. It's got talking animals and food, songs about King David and a baby Jesus, themes of environmental responsibility (the band drives around in an old bus converted to cooking oil), and one-ness with everyone else. It even closes with a song repeatedly using the name "Allah" for God. Musically it's outstanding too, and their live performances are as energetic and engaging as any band I've ever seen.
I read that a few years ago, Christianity was just "business"
to you and that you wanted to "just make out with chicks" (at one
point). It wasn't until you spent a time in a communal living situation
that things changed for you. What made you join that commune?
I suppose it was a longing for something real, something different than
what I'd known. The Christianity I'd been exposed to was primarily
concerned with the afterlife, little concern for people's tangible,
immediate needs. We pray, of course, "your kingdom come ... on earth as
it is in heaven," and I found myself wondering what the world would
look like if the kingdom did come, if it were a paradise, right here,
today. And it seemed like communal living was a step in that direction.
"I don't think being mayor is about qualifications. It's really about the people liking you and believing in you," - Levi Johnston, on his intent to fill Palin's old seat in Wasilla.
Michael Moynihan takes aim at the overheated language on the cover of that new book by Markos Moulitsas, "American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right." And he rightly dings progressives who gave it cover blurbs, despite lamenting similarly idiotic language when it was used by blowhards on the right.
I understand the financial incentives that cause authors and publishing houses to choose these kinds of titles. But I don't know why anyone thinking strategically about political impact cheers them. It's a marketing strategy that basically guarantees a book will never be read by anyone who disagrees with it. The emotional satisfaction some people get from extreme vitriol is an astonishingly powerful driver of counterproductive political behavior.
Despite my reputation for calling out vituperation, I really don't think my standards are particularly exacting. Don't compare ideological adversaries to murderous totalitarians. Refrain from rudely interrupting emotionally troubled black women if your planned interjection is the n-word. Don't tell callers to your show that they're so annoying their spouse should put a gun to their head. (Note to skeptical Web historians: yes, those are all actual examples!) It's getting to the point where publishing houses are going to start re-issuing classics from their catalog under new polemical titles.
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