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Friday, May 27, 2005Man, oh man! Hewitt's ripping apart the MSM like a reporter on a Bush nominee! If he gets much sharper with major media figures, someone's going to think he's Busmiller in a White House briefing.But there is a difference: Anybody with an above room temp IQ will figure out in less than 500 words of Hewitt's prose that a) the man has a bias, b) he's open about it and c) he hopes you're aware of it. Here's the nut: This isn't complicated stuff. Dionne, Milbank, a thousand other big names and worker bees in MSM like the people who build them up, and dislike the people who treat them like they treat every other citizen. What it would take a tractor to pull out of Milbank is the admission that his love for Hagel or McCain colors his reporting of them or his reporting of Bush.This is all funny as hell to me, because I spent more than a little time wandering through historiography seminars when I was in grad school. On the subject of absolute truth, I remember the fairly serious historian Lawrence Stone arguing that he was not a "positivist troglodyte," that he was aware of the existence of multiple interpretations of history, etc. The postmodernists took things to the extreme, worrying that subjectivity - the power to judge or impose meaning upon an other but from one's own position, not the position of those upon whom meaning was to be imposed - threatened to turn truth from a vehicle of liberation to the ultimate weapon for tyrannization by those empowered with a voice. They don't seem to have thought of this applying to the scribes who ruined Ray Donavan, but I have, and so I'm greatly amused to see that though Lawrence Stone is no positivist troglodyte, Dionne, Milbank and a fair number of their fellows are. One day, the "we know the real truth" shtick is gonna catch up with them. In fact, it increasingly is, already. How long before our buddy E.J. has to preface his outrages with "Of course my worldview affects what I cover and how I think about it" - a newly necessary admission for keeping crediblility, rather than a secret to be guarded lest the journalistic priesthood lose its sacral trust? 
posted by gbarto at 8:00 PM Umm... I think I see the problem here... Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr writes (in re Scalia and Thomas's antagonism to using foreign law as a guide for US law): Kelly describes Thomas and Scalia as "isolationists," with a "rigid preference for judicial isolationism" that blinds them to the benefits of looking abroad for new solutions. [my italics]The last time I checked, solutions were the province of the legislative and executive. Thomas and Scalia seem fairly offended any time the courts get into the business of deciding what the law should be, rather than limiting themselves to what it is and whether it passes Constitutional muster. I imagine that suggesting that other countries knew more about what the law should be than American legislatures was just the icing on the cake, with its stark reminder that the noble Justice Breyer and his compadres are too busy making the law confirm to their prejudices to notice the wonder of the document they're supposed to uphold. Scalia and Thomas know that most every other "republican" society in modern times has gone to hell and had to rebuild from scratch multiple times because every batch of revolutionaries has tried to make a perfect society and it has failed. They know that our Constitution, a framework for governance that even made allowances for the continuation of slavery, has survived and gradually expanded liberty because instead of defining what society should be, it laid down the rules for each generation to make a lot of the decisions for itself through the legislature. Breyer and Company are quite probably on the right side of history on a lot of issues. In spite of this, they may be the source of our doom. From abortion to gay rights to the death penalty to stem cells, our society confronts a host of controversial issues that the court is gradually wresting from "less enlightened" citizens. In the process, they are changing us from a society that governs itself to a society governed by elites who let the masses tinker at the margins. Because these elites concentrate on taming, rather than convincing, the common horde, a culture of resentment is created in which ordinary folks see their society being taken from them and the elite see an ugly mass hellbent on setting back the clock on the progress they've brought. Make no mistake, the divisiveness in our politics and the abrasiveness of the culture wars is not the result of rednecks yearning for the fifties while hedonists celebrate the sixties. The divisiveness comes from the fact that neither the left nor the right has a real say in what happens next. Once all this stuff moves from the legislatures to a judiciary hellbent on civilizing us, there's no longer any point in dialogue on actual issues. The only game in town is to control everything else long enough to take control of the courts. Right now, a left-leaning court could force unlimited abortion rights, gay rights, homeless rights and anti-property measures on an unwilling population. Right now, a right-leaning court could force unlimited abortion restrictions, sexual restrictions and pro-business, anti-worker and anti-consumer measures on an unwilling population. We're self-governing? Only until an appellate court takes the part of someone who feels justice hasn't been done and proposes its universal remedy. If the courts we're kept out of this, the left would have to make the case for relaxing social norms in spite of the cultural confusion it brought. And the right would have to make the case for keeping social strictures in place that we knew to create serious existential issues for people that, increasingly, aren't just the subject of Lifetime movies but are actual people we know, work with, are even friends with. The two utopian camps, with their notion that society should be remade according to their value system, would then have to confront and convince a vast American middle that wants, more than anything, to stay out of this stuff as long as it isn't forced on them. Imagine our society, twenty years down the road, if we could just get the courts out of it: The right would find that nobody cares if Jim and Bob live together, even buy a house together, as long as they're discreet about it. The left would find, however, that if Jim and Bob were open enough about their lifestyle that you had to explain to your six year-old things you were saving for "the talk" when she hit thirteen, they would not be so welcomed. The right would find that the girl one week pregnant who double-doses on her birth control drew more pity than hostility. The left would find, however, that the girl having an abortion late in the third trimester because, well, she'd had fourth or fifth thoughts wasn't viewed as a profile in courage. The left would find that mandating free ice cream on Tuesdays wasn't so great when the ice cream parlor shut down. And the right would find that tearing down the ice cream shop because the mayor's best friend had a great idea for a strip mall wasn't so popular either. Bottom line: Scalia and Thomas are wrong on a lot of things. But they're right on one big thing that will be the undoing of most of the rest: If in their quest for originalism and small government they pitch a million things back to the state legislatures, our society will be quite topsy-turvy for a while as we deal with the realization that we're actually going to be held responsible for how we vote. But as the cold reality sinks in that we're deciding how to rule ourselves, not who is going to rule us, I suspect we will - or rather, would - come to a lot of decisions that horrified both the far left and the far right - but which enabled us to feel that we'd given our grownup friends as much of a shot as we could at picking their own paths while maintaining a society we felt comfortable raising our kids in. Maybe I give us too much credit, though.
posted by gbarto at 6:36 PM Thursday, May 26, 2005Cicero has been following the latest in France. Looks like a "non" is imminent and the knives are already out.Let's hope so.
posted by gbarto at 6:51 PM Wednesday, May 25, 2005No one likes the French...Sine Qua Non has a great excerpt on perceptions of the French by other Europeans. Read to the end for the really nasty bit.
posted by gbarto at 6:12 PM Protein Wisdom (via Instantman) has the outrage du jour - Italy wanting to haul into court an author insufficiently friendly toward Islam. Makes you want to scream, "Stop the Towelheads!" just to make sure we still can. The TurkeyBlog, of course, believes that there is a fair part of virtue in Islam and that if its practitioners could just muster the same levels of common sense that Jews and Christians (even the Creationists) apply to their religion, things would be hunky dory. The TurkeyBlog just wishes selected Muslims would stop blowing themselves up and doing other things to make him look like an idiot for respecting their faith. Speaking of idiocy, the sharpest bit is Charles Austin's note on one of our idiocies: What if someone uses a lit US flag to ignite a Koran at the same time that someone else uses a lit Koran to ignite a US flag? Just imagine the indignation that would flare up from all quarters to such performance art. Which pyromaniac has committed the greater sin or crime (since they aren’t synonymous—yet)? Better yet, what if we print the Koran on a large US flag. Would burning this Koranified US flag then be wrong in Mr. Conyer’s eyes?I imagine by the time we got done, both sides of the case would be led by attorneys from the ACLU.
posted by gbarto at 5:56 PM Reynolds links Bailey on ID, Creationism and Evolution(ism). By coincidence, I tossed up some of my own thoughts on the matter earlier today at Wittgenstein's Bastard. Readers from all camps should be appalled.
posted by gbarto at 5:32 PM What is Realpolitik? If I'm not mistaken, it involves nations putting traditional moralities away and directly addressing the situation on the ground with a realistic understanding of what is at stake and what must be done. Realpolitik traditionally meant that we dealt with SOBs because, hey, who else was there to deal with? Post-9/11, and with the U.S. staking its foreign policy on the notion that freedom is the ultimate guarantor of our security, though, we have to take a new look at what's realistically in our interests. Part of our problem in the run-up to Iraq was a State Department that believed fervently in the old assumptions of Realpolitik and didn't wish to put our SOBs on edge. Our new problem is that realistically we have no choice. The power of America today rests in the threat that the thugocracy you're leading today will be a democracy tomorrow if you aren't at least transitioning it to be benign dictatorship by next Tuesday, with democracy to eventually come. If we don't hold to our new stick, the threat of peoples liberated, we're being unrealistic about where our best future alliances lie. Do we want Uzbekistan to be "liberated" by fervent Islamists while the people remember our backing of Karimov? Traditional morality in foreign policy requires loyalty to the thugs with whom we have standing arrangements. But for all the Reagan administrations noble efforts in the Cold War, it's hard to top what was accomplished when Marcos was handed a plane ticket to Hawaii and informed that he would be using it, whether he wished to our not. That represented standing for democracy in a very real way. It turned Realpolitik on its ear, or should have. But the result was that for the short term at least our role in supporting Marcos was forgiven thanks to our role in helping democracy come. The Cunning Realist poked at some of this way back on the 18th. It's worth piggybacking on the theme: Can anyone still argue that the old model of realpolitik has not broken down? How much more proof do we need that what was once geopolitical pragmatism is now in many cases self-sabotage as well as dangerous cognitive dissonance?It's time to send Karimov some plane tickets and make very public our desire that he use them. I wouldn't mind sending King Fahd and Hosni Mubarak some plane tickets either. Yes, what would follow is uncertain. But we've got a pretty clear idea what happens when we support or ignore quasi-Islamist thugocracies. Having a foreign policy geared to kicking that can down the road, rather than sending things in a new direction is the wrong way to go.
posted by gbarto at 11:26 AM It's been suggested that there are few more dangerous places to be than between John McCain and a microphone. May we add that you risk a nasty knife wound if patting a conservative Republican on the back in the vicinity of John Warner or Lincoln Chafee.
posted by gbarto at 12:10 AM Tuesday, May 24, 2005Reynolds is writing about device simplicity. He suggests that knobs, buttons and fewer features will make a comeback.If I had my way, cellphones would make outbound calls only (remember when a trip to the Post Office was 15 minutes with nobody bothering you?). The only modern cellphone feature I like is being able to select your ring. And even that's just because it reduced the profusion of earlier cellphones (were they Motorolas?) that went da-dah-dum-dum... da-duh-dum dum duuuuuum. One device I really like is my antiquated Palm IIIC. I like the way it slips onto the compact keyboard and a whole lot of other things. But what I like best is this. On the Palm, at the bottom, there are four buttons. One's a calendar, one's a phone, one's a checklist and one's a notepad. But the buttons are programmable. So the calculator button now gives me my French dictionary, and the checklist my Italian dictionary. In this case, there is a device with (too many) nested menus, but with a few clicks you can reduce your routine usage to the pressing of four buttons. I think a smart compromise - if they can figure out how to deliver it - is to keep offering gadgets with a good number of features, but replace about five of the tiny function buttons with two large ones that you can set for your most common features. That way the grandparents can ask their still enthusiastic grandkids to program the two big buttons for the features they most want to be able to use and avoid the rest while the technophiles can fuss. The smart ones are already doing this with computers, cleaning all but the essentials off the desktop so that the technically unsure can click on the one that says Word or the one that says E-mail, blissfully unaware of the havoc lurking within the "start" key. So here's my thought: Customizable knobs for your favorite functions. The same joystick can be used to position either mirror in the car. So I presume that knobs, too, are customizable. In the future, your mid to lower end (though not low end) gadget will feature all your menu driven functions, plus a handful of knobs. For an afternoon's fussing, you'll be able to reset what the knobs do for the things you most want to do. Then the 90% of us who aren't going to learn the full range of possibilities our devices offer will be able to sleep securely, knowing that if we ever need to do this or that, we can go through the menus when the time comes, but that at the same time we can give over the majority of our efforts to the glory of dialing up and tuning in exactly what our heart desires.
posted by gbarto at 11:12 PM Monday, May 23, 2005Wrote my piece to the FEC about the asininity of regulating blogs.You should too. Click here to find out how. And note that if the TurkeyBlog is sending you to the Daily Kos for a something where we're on the same page, it must be big. After reading the guidelines, I wrote a rather boring letter. Hopefully, it will be up to par for what's needed - an understanding that we're opinion media, not campaign hacks. [What do campaign hacks get paid? -ed. Nothing if they don't get better traffic than we do.] I remain convinced that CFR and the whole shebang is a waste. The more political speech, the better. Eventually, America will choose the campaign that interrupts their favorite television program the least, will tell the pollsters so and the campaigns will get the message. In the meantime, siccing the feds on ordinary folks with opinions so the millionaires' club can maintain control over what issues get put before the public is wrong and lousy. As I put it in the solitary incendiary bit in my letter: I would point out that it was people using their own money or money from friends to self-publish who laid the intellectual foundations for our nation. There are those who would have loved to regulate what those people could say and on what matters, as well as requesting an address where the authors could be found. Our forefathers spent considerable time ejecting those folks from our continent.Be sure to follow the link at let the FEC know what you think about regulating bloggers.
posted by gbarto at 12:48 AM Sunday, May 22, 2005While everyone else is slamming Pepsi, Virginia Postrel is talking about Diet Coke - specifically, how she drinks it.Postrel notes that the other day she purchased three Diet Coke items, all with different per ounce costs, for reasons that make no sense if you're just buying liquid. But, of course, you aren't just buying liquid... you're buying an experience. I love Coke's bite, love both the taste and the chill of a can of Coke just pulled from the fridge. I have to alternate with flavored Cokes and C2 because if I just drank the real thing I'd go through a 12-pack every other day. But a few months ago, a miracle happened. Coke got even better. I'm talking about the refrigerator pack. Forget about the folks who make cancer drugs. The guy who came up with this deserves a prize. In the old days, 12 packs were 4 cans by 3 cans. You could tip the pack on the side and have a little soda pop corner with this setup. But it lacked something. Then Coke came out with the 2 can by 6 can setup. For those who aren't familiar with this (where have you been?), the box slides into the fridge, you pop open the spot at the end, and each time you pull out a Coke (till the last two or three cans), a new one rolls forward for your convenience. When you're done, you pull out the box and slide in another, neat as can be. I don't know that I'd pay more for the refrigerator pack. But that's not the big issue here. Here's where Coke's smart: When I open the fridge, there's almost always a Coke sitting there, nice and out in front, ready for the taking. It usually gets taken. For all the chatter about the packaging not mattering, Coke did a great job here. They made my experience of getting a Coke easier, more enjoyable. And I know at least one place where they're selling more Coke as a result.
posted by gbarto at 3:35 PM From the Belmont Club: We live in a strange world where the Beslan story vanishes in weeks while Abu Ghraib lives on for years. Maybe it reflects the inherent importance of the stories but it more probably demonstrates the media's ability to prolong the life of some stories while ignoring others. I hope it is not impertinent to observe that the media's demeanor towards terrorism bears more than a passing resemblance to cheap cowardice; but though outwardly similar it really springs from a high-minded idealism, deep courage and profound learning. Or so I hope.This week, we've been going through another round of being horrified by what might be being done in the name of our government in the War on Terror. It's worth taking a moment, then, to reflect upon what's been done in the name of Islam. One hopes that one day Muslims will muster as much public outrage over the murder of hundreds of children in the name of their God as Americans managed over the adorning of a Muslim man with women's panties. We've seen the photos of American atrocities. But the photos of Islamist atrocities go quickly from the front pages. Hence the gruesome shot up top, which will remain for a month or so. Just a reminder of why we're fighting the Islamist extremists... It's for the children.
posted by gbarto at 2:51 PM Exactly.
posted by gbarto at 2:08 PM Cicero's apparently been having a look at Les Mis. And at the early reviews. He found a good one from the Atlantic Monthly at gavroche.org. Hugo can be a hard one to puzzle and the reviewer has his problems. Certainly he misses the boat on what will become of Fantine's daughter, Cosette. Likewise, he goes to far in assuming all criminals are to be thought victims. Some are just plain bad. One cannot read the Thénardier saga without realizing this, without understanding that Valjean could have chosen another course, and that he would deserve only the worst had he done so. Contrary to the reviewer's assertion, Les Mis is not an effort to supersede Christianity. It is one expression of it. Valjean is not the new Christ and Fantine is not the lamb of God. They are both very fallen creatures who struggle back toward God and righteousness as best they can. They do not reveal any new truths, but merely remind a somewhat cold and cynical world to consider the value of souls that the society of the time was altogether too casual about losing. The short summary of the novel is that a lot of people make a lot of bad decisions, but those who act on their better natures make just enough good ones for their lives to have made a positive difference. Redemption, then, is available to all. But it isn't a given. In a sense, Les Mis foreshadows... Reagan! It is a call for a level playing field, for a world where everyone has a shot at living up to his or her best nature. But that is not the same as saying that everyone gets out of jail free or into heaven automatically, just that everyone has a chance. There are those on the left who celebrate Hugo as a true socialist. There are those on the right who abhorr him for the same reasons. They're both wrong. While Hugo felt a desire to help those in really rough circumstances, a desire that afflicts even the occasional free-market conservative, he was all for enterprise and innovation. Fairy tale or not, Jean Valjean didn't use his second chance to take up a vow of poverty and wander from village to village preaching on the need for alms for the poor. He opened a factory and employed people. Likewise, Hugo pushed hard to give patents, trademarks and unique designs the same protections as his fiction so that craftsmen of all sorts could earn a decent take off their creations. And his dream for a freer fairer society rested not on the end of property, but on everyone having a chance to acquire some. Marcus' reviewer has put together some interesting thoughts, then, based on the first book of Les Mis. And it's a delight to see them alongside the adulation the work normally draws. But for all its perceptiveness, the review ends by telling us less about "a man who thinks he's Victor Hugo" than it does about the reviewer's own hobgoblins. Still, good fun. Have a read. For thoughts on Hugo as a politician and a capitalist, visit our own The Hugo Pages and check out the essays.
posted by gbarto at 1:54 AM |
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