53 posts tagged “politics”

I really appreciated this column by James Fallows on the Fort Hood shooting:

In the saturation coverage right after the events, the "expert" talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre "mean"? A decade later, do we "know" anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.

We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They've got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don't mean nothing.

This doesn't mean that these sorts of things can't be prevented or minimized, of course. That's why we have things like law enforcement and social services.

We're supposed to think that this particular man-made natural disaster is more 'relevant' due to the fact that the shooter was Muslim:

I am not arguing, of course, that American Muslims, as a whole, are violently unhappy with America (I've argued the opposite, in fact). But I do think that elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims. Here's a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course. Elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism. Quite the opposite. It would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.

Other than this shooting being rather poorly timed, given the political context, I don't see his point.

Here's another Atlantic blogger:

If we grant that Hasan was motivated by religion, what does that actually tell us? What is there  beyond the fact that people will, at times, interpret religion as a justification to commit heinous acts?

Jeff asks what we'd say if a devout Christian had attacked Planned Parenthood. Fair enough--we have a pretty good corollary in George Tiller. I could be wrong, but I don't recall a lot of "media elites" trying to divine what Tiller's death said about Christianity, itself. Again, beyond the fact that some wacko interpreted Christianity to mean he had the right to shoot people, what else would there be to say?

That's really my issue. What is the big "thing" that we should be seeing, in this case? What are those elite blinders preventing us from seeing?

This, in better expression, has always been my issue with 9/11 and the 'Clash of Civilizations' it's supposed to symbolize.

Religion motivates people to do really awful things. So do politics, race, sex, money and World of Warcraft. If a group of militant left-handed people flew planes into buildings tomorrow, that wouldn't symbolize some sort of dominant hand-based Clap of Civilizations. It's just be a bunch of crazy-ass people doing crazy-ass shit.

I'm not saying that 9/11 or Fort Hood shouldn't be investigated, or that we can't take any lessons from them. But the real issue for us to confront is, how do we prevent crazy-ass people from taking out their crazy-ass shit out on the rest of us, regardless of their motivation? I know we all hate the term 'War on Terror' now cuz it's gotten us into sandy, mismanaged wars, but it's is actually an accurate name for what the West needs to wage, as long as you accept that terror is a methodology, not a belief.

If we think our cities are at risk of earthquakes, we retrofit our buildings and devise systems for predicting them before they happen and repairing the damage after. Fort Hood and 9/11 don't symbolize a Muslim threat to Christianity any more than Columbine symbolizes the trenchcoat's threat to the T-shirt. 

When you think about it, it's kind of silly that we don't hitchhike more in Western countries, especially the United States. The cars and roads are there. The distances are reasonable. No one is so socially disastrous that you can't make 15 minutes of small talk with them.

Yet we never consider it. Hitchhiking has become so rare that only the weirdos do it. It's taken on cultural connotations (lower-class, hippie, daisy dukes) that no respectable middle-class professional would want to be associated with. Consequently, we waste billions of petro-gallons driving empty chairs from A to B.

We've set up a series of cultural rules for ourselves that prohibit hitchhiking. We're awkward and untrusting in confined spaces with strangers. We're wary of the motives of someone who would want to take a random thumber in their car. We don't like making ourselves vulnerable, or relying on other people. We don't want to risk hearing a John Cougar Mellencamp mixtape.

We look at the cultural practices of developing countries and pull our hair out: 'These people are dying of AIDS yet they won't use condoms because they think it will dampen their manliness? Come on!' You can imagine someone walking around D.C. going, 'These people are so concerned about global warming that they'll spend thousands of dollars on local food, electric cars and building retrofits, yet they won't share their commute with strangers? Come on!' When you control for the cultural factors, we're all idiots.

That said, I'm not gonna start thumb-mmuting anytime soon. It would take hours to get anyone to pull over, and I am wary of their motives and personality. This is the world we've got. But hitchhiking is the kind of thing that governments all over the world should be encouraging, not discouraging. Practices like hitchhiking aren't inherently unsafe. They're unsafe in practice because only the fringe does them. The minute they become mainstream, the risk falls away.

I can't help thinking that prostitution somehow follows this model too. Most people would never get a prostitute  because, well, they're fucking prostitutes. The buyers and sellers of sex are a fringe group, and indeed, there are a number of risks associated with that market as its currently practiced.

But most of the seediness of prostitution really comes from its rareness and practitioners. Just like hitchhiking, the act of prostitution isn't what gives us the gishies, it's the reality of prostitution. The girls are exploited, the pimps are assholes, the brothels have lava-lamps, etc. It's not that it's immoral, necessarily, it's more that it's fucking tacky.

My generation's promiscuous as hell. We're not offended by one-night stands, or fuck-buddies, or threesomes, or any other kind of sexual hitchhiking, as long as its consensual. Yet most of us would never even consider buying or being a prostitute. In the world we've got, that's a prudent decision. But in moral terms, we should acknowledge that it's the current reality of prostitution that offends us, not the prostitution itself.

[P.S. you gotta admire this dude's candor: Why I Slept with 1,300 Women]

One of the only ways Americans seem to know how to assess a public policy is by counting how many jobs will be lost. The increasingly coagulated debate over health care reform, for example, often hinges on the unspeakable risk that some insurance companies will go out of business, or that the industry will shrink due to inability to compete with a public plan.
 

I know the president can't say this, but fuck 'em. Name me one significant positive societal progression that didn't obsoletify a group of workers or an industry. The invention of the printing press deleted the entire profession of scribes. The installation of traffic lights cost traffic-directors their jobs.
 

I wrote a report on the Democratic Republic of Congo last year. A country the size of the US east of the Mississippi that has only 500 miles of roads. Why don't they build more infrastructure? Because every time a road-building project gets underway, there are massive protests by the road porters, who make their living carrying goods from town to town.

The insurance alarmists are showing precisely the same lack of foresight. A public plan, yes, would cost some jobs and businesses. It would also secure the health and lives of 40 million people.
 

Jobs are important, and it's legitimate to discuss economic effects as an unintended consequence of drastic changes in policy. But economies grow and change, professionals move on to other careers. These sorts of shocks are precisely why some countries have social welfare, worker retaining programs and other safety nets: So people who lose their jobs don't end up in poverty (and, ahem, without health care).
 

I'm sure that when the world began to pave itself at the beginning of the Automobile Era, there were loud voices of protest from horse stablers, carriage manufacturers and buggy-whip weavers. The politicians were correct to ignore them.

Is that there's not a whole lot you can do when you get kicked around by less-bad-than-the-other-guys-Crats.

This is the situation gays find themselves in. Obama hasn't done shit for gays, up to and including ignoring all the shit he promised us when he was trying to get us to vote for him instead of Hillary.

So gays are cutting off his allowance. This is great (and about fucking time), but it's somewhat annoying that this is more or less the only thing we can do under the current political system: Keep our teaspoon out of his funding Atlantic.

If you're British and the Labour Party ignores you or won't acknowledge your issues, you can vote for the Liberal Democrats, or the Greens, or a smaller party that might get have a Parliament seat or two. This is how it works in most Western countries.

In the States, however, this 'punish the home team!' shit always feels like that episode of the Simpsons where Bush and Gore are secretly replaced by imperialistic aliens. When the citizens of Springfield get wise to it, the aliens reveal themselves and taunt, 'What are you gonna do, vote for a third-party candidate? Go ahead, throw your vote away!' The episode ends when Kang has been elected and enslaves the human race. 'Don't blame me,' Homer says, 'I voted for Kodos'.

The fact is, Democrats have pretty weak incentives for giving gays full equality. What are gays gonna do, elect the party that brought us Rick Santorum, Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh in protest? Yeah, that'll teach 'em.

I like the effort to shut down the Abomination ATM until we get some results out of our lesser-of-two-weevils political allies. But I always wonder how much further gay rights would have come along by now if we had the option of applying some stick, instead of just less carrot.   

Is the deep and thorough understanding that Denmark is a country among many, and is a player, not the driver, in a number of overlapping spheres (Scandinavia, the EU, 'The West', etc).

Obviously, America is a larger, more powerful, more whatever country. But you see disproportionately dumbass shit like this all the time:

But Obama's calculations are quite different. Whatever his personal sympathies may be, if he is intent on sticking to his original strategy, then he can have no interest in helping the opposition. His strategy toward Iran places him objectively on the side of the government's efforts to return to normalcy as quickly as possible, not in league with the opposition's efforts to prolong the crisis. 

What Obama needs is a rapid return to peace and quiet in Iran, not continued ferment. His goal must be to deflate the opposition, not to encourage it.

America, perhaps less so than Denmark but still fundamentally, is a spectator to the events in Iran. There's not a whole lot America can do, realistically. Yes, the world is watching to see what the U.S. will do, but it's unlikely that anything the president does, from ignoring the unrest to passing out Jell-Pops, is going to significantly change the outcome. Like Denmark, The U.S. is gonna wait to see what happens and then react to the new status quo. The only thing America can control is how dumbass it behaves while it's waiting.

Like a tantruming 8th-grade girl, sometimes America needs to be reminded it's not all about you.

I came across this utterly fucking chilling article today while reading about some waistline-pioneering US Senators who are trying to make calorie-labelling mandatory in chain restaurants. It's amazing how the 'common sense' healthy choices (bagel, salad, turkey burger) are significantly higher in calories than the guilty pleasures (sirloin steak, quarter pounder), and terrifying how easy it is to eat 6,000 calories in a day.

Calorie labelling is one of those issues that I'm kind of surprised doesn't have broader popularity. I mean, we all love that we can flip over a loaf of bread and see what's in it, and how much fiber, sugar and fat we'll be eating underneath our peanut butter or our smoked herring (ugh oh god denmark ugh god no). Why is this suddenly a bad idea to apply the same principle to restaurants?

As a political issue, what really surprises me is the lack of outrage over food contents, especially restaurant food. Ruby Tuesday's, an American chain restaurant, sells a turkey burger and baked potato meal that has fucking 1,500 calories. That's a lunch that has 3/4 of your obeso-units for the entire day. Does this restaurant consider that a remotely reasonable component of a healthy lifestyle? How are people not pissed off about this?

Or what about the fact that pretty much anything you make at home will have fewer calories than the same food at a restaurant? This website says that homemade chocolate chip cookies have 185 calories each. Fine, it's a treat, whatever. The same cookie at Starbucks has between fucking 400 and 610 calories. That's the same as a Big Mac. 

I don't know enough about food science to know why the vast disparity exists, but surely Starbucks could reduce that calorie count if it wanted to. There needs to be some sort of public campaign to bring a bit of common sense to restaurant ingredients and portion sizes.

The problem is that restaurants have no incentive to make their foods actually healthy. They only have an incentive to make them seem healthy. You buy the Bran-Bomb Bagel for breakfast every morning thinking you're being all moderate and shit, you don't make the connection to your carb-dealer when you gain 10 pounds every year.

Opponents of calorie labeling schemes often make the argument that calorie information won't affect peoples' choices, and we should all be eating with our common sense, and have the salad instead of the cake, etc.

But as the above examples illustrate, common sense on food is hella fucking wrong half the time. And yes, everyone ordering the Starbucks cookie-monster knows it's bad for them, but they probably don't know how bad it is. I couldn't help taking a picture of a latte menu in New York, where calorie labelling is in effect, simply because I had no idea that a cup of hot, brown milk could possibly have 850 calories.

So citizens: Get pissed off. Starbucks hates you and wants you to jiggle your way to the grave. And senators: Pass this motherfucker already. Bring all 500-calorie snacks into the light! There is no principled defense, from the left or the right, for denying relevant information to consumers. And everyone else: Go bake some cookies. They're only bad for you if you buy them at Starbucks. 

The Conventional Wisdom is Wrong, chapter 17,643:

Here’s a general rule that applies to basically every development program in every poor country in the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan: want to do something nice and useful for these people? Don’t build them a school. 

Believe it or not, people in poor countries actually have buildings. And they are capable of building more of them. They know how to do it, and it usually, for fairly simple economic reasons, does not cost more in any country to build a building than local people can afford. You know what they don’t know how to do? Teach science and math and English. 

And often, employing a trained teacher does cost more than they can afford in a small village, because such people are scarce, and it’s hard to spare extra labor in subsistence economies.

If you want to spend your money on education, don’t build them a school; pay to train some teachers, and then pay the teachers’ salaries.

 

A lot of my work deals with issues like this, and it's amazing how seldom funding agencies and company foundations hear the advice: 'You want to do something for a developing country community? Ask them what they need.' It's usually pretty simple from there.

George Will inexplicably has a column in a major American newspaper:

Denim is the infantile uniform of a nation in which entertainment frequently features childlike adults (”Seinfeld,” “Two and a Half Men”) and cartoons for adults (”King of the Hill”). Seventy-five percent of American “gamers” — people who play video games — are older than 18 and nevertheless are allowed to vote.

In their undifferentiated dress, children and their childish parents become undifferentiated audiences for juvenilized movies (the six — so far — “Batman” adventures and “Indiana Jones and the Credit-Default Swaps,” coming soon to a cineplex near you).

Denim is the clerical vestment for the priesthood of all believers in democracy’s catechism of leveling — thou shalt not dress better than society’s most slovenly. To do so would be to commit the sin of lookism — of believing that appearance matters. That heresy leads to denying the universal appropriateness of everything, and then to the elitist assertion that there is good and bad taste.

God, what an asshole. Notice the inexplicable reference to a television show that ended 11 years ago as an example of our current cultural depravity. There is also, gobsmackingly, a pejorative reference to 'cartoons for adults'. Drawings that move? Heavens no!

Old people lamenting the fashion and behavioral standards of the young has to be the lowest form of human discourse. This column, devoid of research, understanding, context or any human being more specific than 'youngsters', amounts to nothing beyond 'get off my lawn!' 

Columns like this are a staple of the old-man-with-600-words-to-kill genre. Start with a series of humankind's least sophistocated prejudices ('New is bad! World stay same!'), and giftwrap it in superfluous syllables and foggily understood pop-culture references. You could convey more nuance, understanding and intelligence in a fucking Tweet. 

George Will can fret about The Youth all he wants. If the level of discourse in this column is any indication, though, it's The Old we should all be worried about. 

this paragraph appears in a post defending getting married early:

As commenters to his original post have pointed out, the fertility argument for early marriage does have some weight, since the later women get pregnant, the higher health risks they, and especially the children, face. Also, I believe there is some statistical (and definitely a lot of anecdotal) evidence that, generally, the older you are the less well you raise small kids. Your fifties are probably not the best time to deal with one or several teenagers’ idiosyncrasies…

 

I shouldn't comment on the health issues related to having children later in life, since I have an understanding of health and biology somewhat comparable to my expertise on Esperanto love sonnets, but I really don't see any good reason why older people are somehow unfit to be parents.

As I've gotten older and more of my friends start coupling up and replicating, I've noticed a latent stigma against waiting to have kids. 'I want to be able to play catch with my kids' says my married buddy who recently, at age 28, banished all household prophilactic influences. 'I want to chase those little fuckers around the yard'.

There's nothing remotely wrong with having kids whenever you want them, but I find the lingering social conservatism of 'Your fifties are probably not the best time to deal with teenagers’ totally baffling. Why not, exactly? Why are things like playing catch and running around the yard given primacy over financial security, stability and maturity?

I don't think there's much substance to these 'Leave it to Beaver' indicators that we associate with parenthood. Surely playing catch itself isn't make-or-break fatherly activity. It's a symptom, rather, of the broader attribute that you make time for your kids and engage with them on a teaching-them-stuff level. A 60-year-old can do this just as well as a 30-year-old, it'll just be chess instead of baseball.

Call me a class warrior, but the most important quantifiable indicator of good parenting has to be financial security. Right? Obviously love and attention are the most important variables in child well-being, but you can't measure those, and I don't think old people would be any less likely to be loving or attentive as a demographic group.

They are more likely, however, to be financially secure. Older people will probably have more time, money and vacation days to spend on their kids, and will be better-equipped to raise them in an environment where they're not moving around, switching schools or living in fear of losing their security. Running around in the front lawn with your dad is great, but not if you're out there waiting for the repo men to come. 

I'm not saying people shouldn't have kids when they're young. Have kids whenever the hell you want. If you're loving and attentive enough to hug them, feed them and give them all the right complexes, they'll turn out fine. I just don't get the rush.

I know I'm supposed to get all pissed off about statements like that, from a pedophile-faced Oklahoma senator in the New York Times. But he's probably right: Integrating the military will affect morale and unit cohesion. People in the military tend to be socially conservative, and this is a change that undeniably will make them uncomfortable.

But that doesn't make it a valid reason for keeping 'don't ask don't tell' in place.

Look at the logic. Gay advocates say 'the military ban on homosexuals represents a denial of rights to a recognized minority group'. Right-wing legislators respond with 'but letting gays fight in the military is hard.'

This is like telling your Senator that your brother has been imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, and the Senator responds with 'Well there aren't any buses that go to the prison to take him home, so he'll just have to stay.'

I have no doubt that racially integrating the military in 1948 negatively affected morale and unit cohesion. The military was socially conservative in the 1940s, too. That shit was hard. But it was the right thing to do, so America sacked up, dealt with the consequences and waited for the new normal.

Unless someone comes up with a good reason why gays aren't a legitimate minority, or that they're not worthy of equal treatment (prevalence of 'Ugly Betty' fan club membership, for example), lowered morale just doesn't cut it.