You are witness to the birth of Glenn Beck, Mark 2...hope you enjoy my new direction
Wow. How humiliating for him. Then again, real Americans don't live in big cities, so it's hard to count this as a loss for him. I'm sure he killed in Batavia.
Saturday, December 05, 2009
Friday, December 04, 2009
An end of the quarter treat: "Batman Is My Boss"
The final assignment of my visual rhetoric course is called Rhetoric in Practice (or RIP). It has two components. To paraphrase the rubric: the students create their own rhetorical performance, explore questions of how to target an audience, follow the conventions of a genre, choose the medium for their message, and all the while, use the critical tools they’ve been learning all quarter to develop their ideas. They then perform a rhetorical analysis of their own work via a detailed writer's memo.
The pedagogical theory behind this is sound: by forcing them to do something fun at the end of the quarter, I get better evaluations the tools I taught them over the course of it become more solidly ensconced in their brain-space. Only this time, instead of deducing the rhetorical intent behind someone else's decisions, they must decide how to communicate their message to their target audience most effectively. Over the years I've had many successful projects, including
- a Batman-centric version of The Game of Life that opens with pegs for two parents and one child already in the car and an Alfred peg in the wing awaiting the inevitable
- a pop-up book of Watchmen, in which the first page consisted of pulling a tab that sends the Comedian crashing out a window and into the reader's lap
- a scored and recorded soundtrack to Alan Moore's The Killing Joke
- a New York Review of Books style review of the novelization of Batman Begins, in which the book is slammed for its Ludlum-lite car chases and unconvincing fisticuffs
- an adaptation of this issue of Planetary by Cormac McCarthy
- a Master Legend-type recruitment video for a superhero academy
She plans on updating it both for the class and, with encouragement, after it ends. Go encourage her already!
World Cup draw
Some very preliminary thoughts:
Great draw for both the U.S. and England. Algeria is clearly the weakest African team and Slovenia might be the softest Euro side. Right now it looks like it would be a monumental upset for the Mother Country not to make it through group play, while the U.S. will be a very solid favorite to do so. And of course this sets up a replay of the famous 1950 game -- quite arguably the biggest upset in the history of major international sports. Another big break for the U.S. is that the world's four top-ranked teams (Spain, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Italy) are all on the other side of the draw, which means the Americans can reach the semis without facing any of them.
France: Unbelievable. After FIFA did what it could to punish the Gallic hand of God, they draw not only South Africa, but the weakest South American team (Uruguay) as well. Mexico is the other fortunate recipient in this group so two-thirds of NAFTA should be in the knockout round.
Most unlucky team: Probably Portugal. The European power is stuck in a monster group with Brazil and the best African team (Cote d' Ivoire), and as an extra special bonus will almost surely have to play world #1 Spain in the round of 16 if they manage to get through group play.
Relatedly, Spain probably has the easiest route to group play, but then is bracketed opposite the Group of Death, and will probably have to knock off a very good team in the round of 16 and then Brazil just to reach the semis.
Most certain to go home early: North Korea
Most likely #1 seed not to make it through other than South Africa (no host team has ever failed to get through group play but it seems unlikely they will): It's tempting to say Brazil, but Brazil is Brazil. I'll say Italy, which draws tough South American and European sides (Paraguay and Slovakia) to go along with sacrificial lamb New Zealand.
Helicopter Ben
Obviously, in a more rational world his testimony would have ended his chances for re-appointment. But it says even more that in light of Alan Greenspan's straight-faced assertions that we needed upper-class tax cuts because we were in danger of spending down the surplus too quickly anybody takes the policy recommendations of libertarian Fed chairmen seriously...
Scroll Down. No, Farther Down. Keep Scrolling.
Hey. HEY! The only thing that's important is that UK made the List of Top Public Schools. It doesn't matter where we are on that list.
And yes, such rankings are nonsense. Also, while I haven't done a comparative study of the behavior of state legislatures, I can say that the perception among the faculty at UK is that the legislature remains relatively generous to UK, compared to other states and their flagship universities. There is less to say, I think, about the legislature's generosity to the rest of the public schools in the Kentucky state system.
Thursday, December 03, 2009
GOP: Beck/Taitz '12 or Bust!
I wish I could say I'm surprised by Sarah Palin going birther. But...
I also I wish I could say that this was political suicide, but in terms of her (real) chances of getting the GOP nomination it may be a net neutral, and (granting that she pushes the boundaries of this truth) essentially anyone who could get a major party nomination could win under the right circumstances. Terrifying stuff.
...see also Weigel, Marcotte, and Terkel. For those readers who have never encountered political discourse before, "questions are being rightfully asked" is a classic consipracy-theorist forumulation, and certainly no 9/11 troofer would get a pass on similar language.
Civil War!!!!!!
The most consequential Civil War game ever played will begin shortly. It's fair to say that over the past six or seven years, the Oregon-Oregon State rivalry has utterly displaced the Oregon-Washington rivalry that dominated my college and graduate school years. It's all right, everything is all right, the struggle is finished. I have won the victory over myself. I hate the goddamn Beavers.
....ROSE BOWL!!!
The Monty Hall problem and counter-intuitive teaching
The Monty Hall problem is a well-known thought experiment in probability analysis. The problem is fairly simple, but for reasons that aren't well understood the right answer is sufficiently counter-intuitive that a very large majority of people get it wrong on their first attempt. More interestingly, I've found that students often resist the validity of the correct answer, even when the problem is analyzed in some detail. The problem:
Suppose you're on a game show and you're given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. The car and the goats were placed randomly behind the doors before the show. The rules of the game show are as follows: After you have chosen a door, the door remains closed for the time being. The game show host, Monty Hall, who knows what is behind the doors, now has to open one of the two remaining doors, and the door he opens must have a goat behind it. If both remaining doors have goats behind them, he chooses one randomly. After Monty Hall opens a door with a goat, he will ask you to decide whether you want to stay with your first choice or to switch to the last remaining door. Imagine that you chose Door 1 and the host opens Door 3, which has a goat. He then asks you "Do you want to switch to Door Number 2?" Is it to your advantage to change your choice?
(Taken from the wiki page if you want to look up the answer).
Here are some strategies I've used for explaining the solution to students who resist accepting it.
(1) Redescribing what the offer to switch gives you, i.e., by switching you are in effect choosing two doors instead of one, and thus doubling your odds of success.
(2) Recharacterization via different quantities, i.e., what if there are one hundred doors and 99 goats and a car, and Monty Hall is required to show you 98 goats after you choose a door?
(3) Explicitly working out all the potential iterations, i.e., if you choose Door 1 and there's a car behind it then X, but if there's a goat behind it then Y etc.
(4) Empirical testing. Have the student run the experiment and observe the results.
These are listed in descending order of abstraction, and probably not coincidentally ascending order of pedagogical effectiveness. (Occasionally there will be a holdout even after (4). This person is invariably male and almost certainly a future litigator.
Anyway, teaching the problem is a fun way to get students to think about the limits of common sense intuition, which is a much-cited source of wisdom for legal interpretation in general, and statutory interpretation in particular. It's also a good way to get people to think about how people tend to cling to intuitively correct answers, even in the face of demonstrations that their intuitions are wrong.
Update: Thanks for the comments, and especially to J.W. Hamner's variation on explanation (1) and Vardibidian's card trick for explanation (2) -- I'm going to use those.
Lemuel Pitkin and Mike Schilling emphasize that it's crucial that the rules of the game require Hall to reveal a goat after the initial choice, and that without this caveat the situation is different. Just for the heck of it, gaming that out: The contestant doesn't know what if any post-choice decision rule constrains Hall, or even if Hall knows what's behind the doors. What should the contestant do?
Possibility (A) Hall doesn't know what's behind the doors.
Possibility (B) Hall knows and is indifferent to whether you win or lose.
Possibility (C) Hall knows and wants you to win.
Possibility (D) Hall knows and wants you to lose.
If (A), then the revealing of a goat moves the odds to 50/50 for the remaining doors, and therefore switching neither helps nor hurts.
However, this is where "pure" game theory needs some richer sociological context. In our culture it would be a very strange game show in which the host didn't know what was behind the doors, and therefore might accidentally reveal the car. So as a practical matter the contestant can probably rule out (A) as an actual possibility. In any case, the sum probabilities created by (B), (C), and (D) remain dispositive, since (A) would leave the contestant indifferent to switching or staying, i.e., whether you estimate the odds of (A) being the case as 1% or 99% makes no difference -- the only thing that matters are the odds governing the other possibilities.
Moving right along, if (B) is the case, then as long as you assume he's not going to choose to show you a car, which given the rules of game shows is a pretty safe assumption, we're right back to the classic description of the problem, and you double your odds of winning by switching.
If (C) is the case, then deciding whether to switch comes down to your estimate of Hall's assumptions regarding your mental state. Maybe you've chosen the goat, and because he wants you to win he's giving you additonal information that, if you both understand the probability structure and that he wants you to win, tells you to switch. But here's a disturbing possibility: maybe you've chosen the car and he wants you to win, but he's showing you a goat precisely because he believes that if he does so he'll encourage you not to switch, because like most people you'd get the probabilities wrong under the classic assumptions of the game's rules, and it's more likely you'll choose to stay than switch because of endowment effects or sheer stubborness. Remember you don't know the rules -- you don't know whether he even has to open one of the other doors. The analysis is the same for (D) but reversed.
Ultimately if you don't know the rules of game, you have to make two separate judgments: what are the probabilities that (B), (C) and (D) are the case, and what are the probabilities within each of those possibilities? Those two estimates then determine whether to switch or stay, since (A) leaves you indifferent.
ChiComs Under the Bed!
Al Kamen, via Jason Sigger:
This month marks the 10th anniversary of the Clinton administration's cavalier handover of the Panama Canal -- leaving an alleged front for the Chinese Red Army in control of the strategic passage -- despite the strong misgivings of some top foreign policy experts.
"If we do nothing, I can guarantee you that within a decade, a communist Chinese regime that hates democracy and sees America as its primary enemy will dominate the tiny country of Panama, and thus dominate the Panama Canal, one of the world's most important strategic points," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) told a House subcommittee on Dec. 7, 1999, as it debated the handover.
Retired Adm. Thomas Moorer warned that China could sneak missiles into Panama and use it as a launchpad for attacking the United States. And former defense secretary Caspar W. Weinberger wrote that fall that Panama's contract with Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa to control ports at both ends of the passage was "the biggest threat to the canal."
Is that a money back guarantee, Dana?
QOTD
Edroso, on one of the most prominent bigots on the "Democratic" side of the aisle in Albany:
I will say that Hiram Monserrate surprised me, in that I don't see how he manages to be so perfectly disgusting all the time. From his beginnings as a deranged cop to his (as a councilman) Willets Point double-cross to his involvement with the Albany "Gang of Three" shakedown artists and Coup to his assault on his girlfriend, this guy seems almost consciously determined to set new standards of repulsiveness. Maybe he's a government experiment of some kind.
And what's even worse is that when it comes to determining the most loathsome member of the Democratic caucus he has serious competition.
...a more positive example.
World Cup 2010 seeds
The seedings for Friday's group stage draw were released yesterday.
There were some fairly significant changes from past practice. For the past three, four, or five? World Cups, a combination of past performances in the World Cup (either two or more often three tournaments back) with an index based on current, one year, and two years past FIFA rankings. For 2010, it's the October FIFA ranking (only) combined with geography. The hosts, as is practice, are also seeded.
Teams are divided into four "pots"; each group will be populated with one team from each pot. Here they are:
Pot 1 (seeds): South Africa, Brazil, Spain, Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Argentina, England
Pot 2 (Asia, Oceania and North/Central America): Representing Asia: Japan, South Korea, North Korea, Australia; Oceania: New Zealand; CONCACAF: United States, Mexico, Honduras
Pot 3 (Africa and South America): Africa: Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria, Algeria; S. America: Paraguay, Chile, Uruguay
Pot 4 (Unseeded Europe): France, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland, Greece, Serbia, Denmark, Slovakia
The logic is the "best" eight sides are kept apart in the group stage, and no two teams from the same confederation will meet in the group stage (thus making my dream match of South v North Korea highly unlikely) except for Europe -- there will be five groups with two European teams.
Hence, by selecting what FIFA believe to be the top eight sides, even though those top eight sides are not directly related to their own sketchy monthly rankings, and ensuring that those eight sides are placed in eight different group, the odds are significantly enhanced that those eight will make it through to the knock-out stages.
This doesn't always happen of course; France finishing last in its group in 2002 is a clear memory, but all eight seeded sides did progress in 2006, but it does sharply reduce the odds of, say, an Algeria v North Korea quarter final (but imagine the TV ratings back in Pyongyang).
There are, as usual when it comes to FIFA, some idiosyncrasies. Neither France nor Portugal are seeded, even though they both are (currently) ranked higher than England. I don't think France are all that any longer, but Portugal did knock England out at the quarter finals of both the 2006 WC and the 2004 European Championships. BBC Radio 5 Live suggested this morning that the French are being punished for the Ireland tie. What has not gone reported is that the seeds were based on the October, not November, rankings, in order to mitigate any built in advantage that teams involved in playoffs (as opposed to friendlies) during the month of November might have enjoyed.
Which is a different way of saying "FIFA sleight of hand". The only two teams in the top seven in November are Portugal (5th) and France (7th). Neither Argentina nor England would have been seeded.
What does this mean for the USA tomorrow? It's going to be grim, regardless; put the Confederations Cup performance away (which was uneven in any event). There are several best / worst case scenarios out there in blogosphere, but before we get too depressed, The Times has this worst case scenario for England:
a worst-case scenario would still involve them being drawn in the same group as France, Ivory Coast and the United States.How sweet of the English media to suggest that the USA are in their own personal group of death. For the US, placing the CONCACAF and Asian and Oceania teams in the same pot means that we can not draw any of them -- this screws us as it's the weakest of the four pots; while ruling out the North v South Korea match, this also rules out the USA v North Korea match (remember France 1998 against Iran? I'd rather I didn't as well).
Prost Amerika suggests these best / worst cases:
Best Case Scenario: Argentina, USA, Algeria, Switzerland.
Worst Case Scenario: Spain, USA, Ivory Coast, France.
I'd rather draw South Africa from the first pot, but that would rule out Algeria from the third. It's a worthy trade off I think, so this is my best / worst case scenario:
Best: South Africa, USA, Paraguay, Greece (or Slovenia, or Switzerland . . . )
Worst: Brazil, USA, Ivory Coast, Portugal.
When it comes to drawing from the first pot, outside of the hosts they are all scary; when it comes to drawing the least dangerous of the European pot, there are several that are equally preferable to Portugal, France, or Denmark.
I will be discussing the resulting draw at some point this weekend, possibly even tomorrow evening (UK time).
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Thers has a more extended rant on the subject, but this is rich:
Republican senators feel burned by Al Franken — and not by his old jokes.The band of Republican crybabies includes John Cornyn, whom you might remember was one of the people willing to stall Eric Holder's confirmation hearings because the prospective attorney general didn't promise to excuse Bush-era torturers from prosecution. So John Cornyn appears not only to be perfectly fine with torture in the service of boneheaded military adventures, but he also seems to believe that it's Al Franken's job to troll the blogosphere and defend him from accusations that he's perfectly fine with torture and rape in the service of boneheaded military adventures. No word yet on whether Franken is supposed to ask us to stop referring to his friends as "box turtles".
The Republicans are steamed at Franken because partisans on the left are using a measure he sponsored to paint them as rapist sympathizers — and because Franken isn’t doing much to stop them.
We'll Dance Around Like Ol' John Brown on the Long End of a Rope
I dunno; I'm as contemptuous of the antebellum American South as anyone, but I'm still not convinced that John Brown deserves a pardon. You can be sympathetic with Brown's ends, and even recognize that his actions played a significant role in emancipation, while being reluctant to embrace the idea that private citizens ought to be able to murder other private citizens for the conduct of activity which is perfectly legal. I appreciate that pardons are often used to recognize conduct which is laudable without being legal, but it's difficult to forgive Brown the murder of Hayward Shepherd, who was not a slaveholder, and who likely did not support slavery. I think that there's rather a better case for the pardon of Nat Turner, on the grounds that the institution of slavery freed its subjects of any ethical responsibility to the constituted legal authority.
In any case, I doubt that Brown would approve of even a 150 year posthumous pardon.
I Am Shocked, Shocked to Learn of the Necessity of Additional Troops!!!
Donny Rumsfeld, not quite lying:
In his speech at West Point last night, Obama claimed that before he took office, "commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the Taliban, but these reinforcements did not arrive."
Rumsfeld is now strongly denying that claim, calling it a "bald misstatement."
"I am not aware of a single request of that nature between 2001 and 2006," Rumsfeld said. "If any such requests occurred, ‘repeated’ or not, the White House should promptly make them public. The President's assertion does a disservice to the truth and, in particular, to the thousands of men and women in uniform who have fought, served and sacrificed in Afghanistan.”
There is a sense in which Donald Rumsfeld is telling the truth. The sense in which he is telling the truth is structured as follows: Donald Rumsfeld either intimidated or outright fired anyone in the military brass who tried to make a formal request for additional troops, in either Afghanistan or Iraq. He made it clear from a very early point in his tenure that he would view such requests as acknowledgments of defeat, both in terms of the wars in question and for his project of military transformation. As Bradley Graham details, when the idea of reinforcement was mooted or when informal requests were made, Rumsfeld brusquely interrogated the generals in questions until the topic was dropped. Sending more troops was not something that Rumsfeld was prepared to entertain, and he was careful to surround himself with people who made certain that the topic was never seriously raised.
So yes, Don Rumsfeld is telling the "Truth." Virtually everyone understands the worthlessness of this "Truth;" even wingnuts, enamored of the post-Rumsfeld surge, are reluctant to man this particular barricade. Recognition of Donald Rumsfeld's incompetence is perhaps the last truly bipartisan consensus in modern American politics.
Keep Waitin'
I must remind everyone once again that Peter Beinart, like so may centrist contrarians, was wrong about many things other than the Iraq War. You may remember his claim that the New York courts refusing to end the state's marriage discrimination was the best thing ever to happen to same-sex marriage rights in New York. Well, as we were reminded again today, this was and remains egregiously false. (Depressingly but not surprisingly, 8 Senate Democrats hopped on the bigotry train.)
In a rational world, the comparison of New York and Maine on the one hand with Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecutcuit, and Iowa on the other would put the countermobilization myth to bed once and for all. Alas, if you're pitching articles contrarianism sells a lot better than rationality.
Deep Thought
I am absolutely shocked that, despite a near-total lack of precedent, a wealthy professional athlete has engaged in sexual relations with persons to whom he is not married, and I hope that cable news will devote more time to these remarkably surprising and important revelations.
Instant Reaction: Bloggingheads Style
Last night, I diavlogged with Matt Duss on the subject of the Obama speech:
As this suggests, I'm pretty ambivalent about the escalation.
Imperial naivete
St. Ignatius of Georgetown bestows his benediction on Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan, but, being a liberal columnist at the liberal Washington Post, he regrets that the announced plan fails to commit the nation explicitly to perpetual war:
Obama thinks that setting deadlines will force the Afghans to get their act togetherat last. That strikes me as the most dubious premise of his strategy. He is telling his adversary that he will start leaving on a date certain, and telling his ally to be ready to take over then, or else. That's the weak link in an otherwise admirable decision -- the idea that we strengthen our hand by announcing in advance that we plan to fold it.
Of course one would have to be an idiot to imagine that Obama's announced strategy of employing a Surge(tm) with a "date certain" for withdrawal is what it pretends to be. The plan as presented is obviously for public consumption: the real plan will have to be either:
(1) To abandon Afghanistan, as the Bush administration eventually abandoned Iraq, but only, as in Iraq, after a face-saving military triumph over the current wave of civil insurgency, aka the declare victory and leave option; or
(2) Perpetual occupation.
The most Orwellian moment last night was Obama's proclamation that, unlike previous empires, "we do not seek to occupy other nations."
We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours. What we have fought for – and what we continue to fight for – is a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity.
As a country, we are not as young – and perhaps not as innocent – as we were when Roosevelt was President. Yet we are still heirs to a noble struggle for freedom. Now we must summon all of our might and moral suasion to meet the challenges of a new age.
Stirring sentiments indeed. He might want to repeat them in Oslo next week, when he picks up his Nobel Peace Prize. It certainly beats "We should invade other countries when it gets good results."
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Blair: The Biggest Villain?
As a British naval historian friend I know once noted, the time when the British government could have helped -- and perhaps stopped the war -- was back in the winter of 2002-2003. Real friends speak up when a friend is making a big mistake. Instead, Tony Blair may have destroyed the "special relationship" by supporting the invasion when he should have opposed it. My friend said he believes Blair should be confined right now in the Tower of London.
Observations:
1. I wonder if Blair really could have stood and said "No." I always kind of suspected that Blair pursued the Iraq War with the enthusiasm he did because he believed that he couldn't stop it if he wanted, and a) wanted to be part of the action, and b) wanted to maintain the "special relationship." This isn't to say that Blair privately opposed the war, just that his primary motivations were about the relationship more than conviction about the wisdom of the invasion. But I really don't know.
2. If Blair had said "no," would the neocons have spewed the same vitriol towards Britain that the sprayed at France? I would have loved to see a book explaining how the United Kingdom is our enemy, and in fact has always been our enemy; it makes even more sense than France.
QOTD
Americans have come to believe that spending government revenues on U.S. citizens here at home is usually a bad thing and should be viewed wth suspicion, but spending billions on vast social engineering projects overseas is the hallmark of patriotism and should never be questioned. This position makes no sense, but it is hard to think of a prominent U.S. leader who is making an explicit case for doing somewhat less abroad so that we can afford to build a better future here at home. Debates about foreign policy, grand strategy, and military engagement — including the current debate over Obama’s decision to add another 30,000-plus troops in Afghanistan — tend to occur in isolation from a discussion of other priorities, as if there were no tradeoffs between what we do for others and what we are able to do for Americans here at home.
Via Yglesias
Scam
At the risk of invoking the wrath of dsqaured, I will admit that when I compile my list of "movies I watch with some frequency although they're not very good [and because a DVD allows you to skip the especially overwrought scenes with the overacting father]" Boiler Room would be on it. I think there was a missed opportunity, however, in the extent to which "respectable" brokerage firms were held up as an alternative to the transparent scam he got involved with. The structure of the movie would have been much better served if Seth had gotten his dad's dream job for him at J.P. Morgan and learned a similar lesson. Really, high-churn mutual finds are also analogous to but less honest than Seth's backroom card game: essentially, you're giving up a significant house edge for "expertise" that is no better than throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal (or, to use another term, "gambling.") And it's not as if high-pressure sales tactics and cold calling are unknown to the "respectable" brokerage industry either.
...and, yes, mpowell is right that hedge funds are, if anything, even worse.
When is non-consensual sex rape?
One of the keys to interpreting reactions to the arrest of Roman Polanski is understanding that, culturally speaking, a lot of sexual assaults aren't considered crimes by the men or boys who commit them, and to a lesser extent by the women and girls who are assaulted. Consider this letter to a nationally syndicated advice columnist, and especially the columnist's response.
The writer is confused about whether she was raped, because even though she told a man "many times" that she didn't want to have sex with him, and he went ahead and had sex with her anyway, she wasn't "kicking and fighting him off." In the formal legal sense, the facts as described are unambiguous. Practically, of course, things are a lot more complicated, as the columnist's response reveals.
The columnist seems to be drawing a distinction between rape and "sex that shouldn't happen," with the latter category including sexual assaults between acquaintences when one or both parties are intoxicated. How else are we to understand her otherwise bizarre advice that the raped woman talk to the man who raped her "in order to determine what happened?" The woman's letter indicates no uncertainty at all about the fact that she was forced to have sex against her will despite making it very clear that she didn't want to have sex. She just wants to know if this constitutes rape.
The answer, again culturally rather than formally legally speaking, is that this type of rape isn't "really" rape, because the victim is to blame for putting herself in a compromised situation, i.e., being intoxicated in the presence of a man while having a vagina (the second factor was apparently supefluous in the case of the versatile Mr. Polanski).
These kinds of factors are what makes Polanski's sodomizing of a 13-year-old girl something Anne Applebaum etc. consider a "far from straightforward" situation. It would be nice to think this is a generational thing, and that young people today are getting a clear message that rape is rape, but given both columns of this sort and the response to Polanski's arrest the evidence seems mixed.
UPDATE [by SL]: See also Amanda Hess.
Monday, November 30, 2009
"They know that everybody can make it"
Southern Female Lawyer watches a Glenn Beck promo in a vain effort to figure out what the fuck The Christmas Sweater is all about:
Unfortunately, despite my rigorous research, I still have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER what this is about. I have gleaned only the following:At $549 I can only hope paying customers will get to watch Glenn Beck drop his pants like David Yow. Otherwise, what's the point?
- That it is, in fact, about a Christmas sweater.
- That it takes Glenn Beck approximately 2 minutes, 17 seconds to squeeze out a tear.
- That Glenn Beck’s eyes are the color of a sweet and innocent summer sky, but that only the very strong can gaze into them.
- That something happened at some point, or possibly many points, and he hasn’t been able to talk about something for thirty years, but can now. Or will, if you buy something. And even though some event happened decades ago and changed him forever and from that point forward he was forever changed, he was also still simultaneously unchanged until only recently, and has apparently engaged in mucho jackassery for which he is now seeking or perhaps once sought forgiveness (which is free) and redemption (which costs around $549.00).
Unless you're a glutton for [insert something about silly online debates], I recommend skipping all the links in the second paragraph.
If you're interested in contemporary science fiction, I've reviewed what Kim Stanley Robinson and I agree is the best novel of 2009 period here. I can't recommend it highly enough.
If, on the other hand, you're interested in watching Jeff Goldstein self-implode at the mention of my name (again!), I direct your attention here—sorry, that link goes to his latest (and most specatularly desperate) attempt to emotionally blackmail people into paying him to write. I meant to send you here, where he demonstrates something or other about me, in the course of which he hilariously mistakes a completely unrelated post as a response to something one of his lackeys wrote, and when called out on it, makes fun of me for looking like a standard-issue academic instead of an insecure bodybuilder ...... all of which is another way of saying I'm re-recommending you skip all the links in the second paragraph.
Minaret Ban
I think the ban on the hijab in public schools and other public places in France and elsewhere is deeply misguided at best, thinly veiled racism at (much more likely) worst, but at least in that case, I understood the plausible rationale behind the policy. I've read several discussions of Switzerland's Minaret ban, and have come up completely empty on the reconstruction of a plausible non-bigoted justification. (The closest I've seen is a bizarre, metaphorical 12-year old quote from The Turkish Prime Minister.)
File under "Reasons why unpopular minorities and those concerned with their status remain unenthusiastic about plebiscitary democracy, #43,214."
Missing the Trees for the Forest...
Atrios misses out on the key benefit of the electric driverless taxi cab; without taxicab drivers, it would be literally impossible for Tom Friedman to write books. That's an outcome we can all get behind.
Greatest Coaching Genius In History Loses Job
I'm sure Notre Dame -- who remain relevant as a major football power! Really! -- will rue the day they let this great coach get away. (Seriously, what gets me is not the hire, which was reasonable, but the ridiculous extension midway through his first year.)
Rumors that Joba Chamberlain -- already having become bored with establishing a new Dow 36,000 Gold Standard in pitching and looking to master another field -- is the frontrunner to replace Weis are unconfirmed at press time. If that falls through, I hear another Genius former Bill Belichick assistant may soon be available...
...Mr. Bogg says it with less.
Grumble Grumble Grumble
It's probably not worth bellyaching about this, but when Geoffrey Dunn at HuffPo takes/receives credit for "discovering" that Sarah Palin misquoted John Wooden in an epigraph of Going Rogue, it would be awfully generous of him to give credit to the blog where this embarrassing detail first surfaced, particularly since he finds the actual quotation in a source linked in the original post here.
Just saying....
Derek Jeter: Sportsman of the Year
The moment that this blog has been dreading since its creation has come to pass.
In all semi-seriousness, the hero worship athletes elicit is a subject worth studying. As I noted in the Tiger Woods post below, there's a deep and widespread desire to see supremely accomplished athletes as generally admirable human beings, even though if anything there's probably something of a negative correlation between the two things. For one thing, while it's not necessary to be deeply selfish, or egomaniacal, or a narcissistic perfectionist, or a child of parents in the grip of grandiose manias, or some combination thereof, to get to the top of any sport or other competitive enterprise, it often helps quite a bit, as anyone who has had much contact with such people can attest. (In this regard I recommend Gary Smith's portrait of the young Tiger Woods, "The Chosen," from the December 23, 1996 Sports Illustrated issue which named Woods Sportsman of the Year. Another excellent essay on the subject in general is David Foster Wallace's portrait of Michael Joyce, an obscure professional tennis player).
Of course the highest levels of achievement always require those who achieve them to have certain admirable qualities, such as a willingness to work extremely hard in the pursuit of initially distant goals. But it's too easy to extrapolate from that fact all sorts of false conclusions, such as that the people who reach the top of a field have done so primarily because they have worked harder than other people. In a loose sense this is true (for example every major league baseball player or PGA golfer has undoubtedly worked very hard to get where he is), but there is no good reason to believe that Derek Jeter is a superstar while Joe Smith has just been granted his unconditional release from Pittsburgh's AAA affiliate because Jeter works appreciably harder than Smith, or "wants it more," or whatever other cliche sportswriters like to deploy when celebrating Jeter's greatness.
This is a point that has more general ideological significance. It's an article of faith in this country that rich people are rich primarily because they work harder than other people. This is the kind of belief that can and is maintained in the face of all evidence to the contrary, because people want to believe it -- just as they want to believe that being the best golfer or shortstop in the world is primarily a matter of working harder at golf or baseball than everybody else.
Another parallel is that a lot of people believe that a high batting average and a high marginal tax bracket are both good proxies for moral election. This is one of those ideas that is sufficiently idiotic that it usually won't be said in so many words -- hardly anyone, after all, will actually say "I think the fact that Derek Jeter is a great baseball player indicates he's a morally admirable person," but anyone who has ever been stuck in a conversation with an Ayn Rand fan knows this line of thinking can be found well beyond the world of sports.
Leverage and Influence
This doesn't seem right to me:
During the Cold War, the United States and Turkey formed a "strategic partnership" based on both countries' fear of Soviet intervention in the Middle East. The Truman Doctrine offered a specific guarantee that both Turkey and Greece would be protected from Soviet aggression - a fear that was quite real in Turkey at the time. In exchange, the United States received access to military bases, support in the Korean War and a strategically advantageous position in the Middle East. Despite serious disagreements - particularly over Cyprus - the relationship worked to each sides' mutual advantage until the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago.
Today, the United States wants Turkish support on a wide variety of important issues, including stabilizing Iraq, supporting the mission in Afghanistan, preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, moving energy to Europe, serving as a Muslim ally, and providing stability in its neighborhood.
In exchange, the United States offers security guarantees, military assistance, and the benefits that accrue from an alliance with the world' most powerful military. All of these things are very important to Turkey (and to many other countries). The problem is that the United States is not in a position to credibly threaten to withhold these benefits without undermining the international order in which it has invested so much. For example, both Washington and Ankara know that Turkey's stance on Iran's nuclear program will not jeopardize the American security blanket.
Of course, there are red lines that Turkey (or any other country) could cross that would change U.S. policy. But the point is that Turkey has a great deal of running room before those red lines are crossed. Turkey, both because it is a NATO ally and a strategically critical country, knows that it can pursue an independent foreign policy while still enjoying the benefits of American power.
The basic problem identified here is that it's difficult to exclude particular countries from the benefits (such that they are) of hegemony, and consequently that it's much more difficult for the United States to exert influence than it would seem on paper. My response, I guess, is as follows: This is not a new problem, it characterized the Cold War, and in many ways small and medium sized states had more leverage during the Cold War, rather than less.
The central issue is thus: the Cold War granted the US a certain degree of leverage over countries like Turkey because the United States could provide protection against the Soviet Union. However, it simply wasn't the case that the United States could, as a matter of policy, routinely threaten to exclude Turkey from the umbrella of protection. The loss of US influence over Turkey would, during the Cold War, have been understood as a colossal strategic setback for the United States. Indeed, threats of the "loss" of countries far more trivial than Turkey were treated in US strategic circles as harbingers of the Apocalypse, and client states of the US routinely made (usually implausible) threats of realignment in order to cajole more support from Washington. Kenneth Waltz may have been correct in demonstrating that the shift of a few small and medium sized powers could not fundamentally affect the balance of power between the US and the USSR, but Hans Morgenthau was surely more accurate in his prediction that small states could wield inordinate influence over large powers by threatening defection. Consequently, during the Cold War the idea that the United States could "exclude" Turkey, or Japan, or West Germany from the benefits of its umbrella is simply crazy; indeed, the smaller states held a great degree of leverage. Moreover, I'm not convinced that even formal exclusion from the US sponsored system of alliances entitled actual exclusion from the US security umbrella; the Russians probably didn't want to invade Sweden or Yugoslavia anyway, but an effort to do so might well have sparked a general European war even in the absence of a direct NATO security commitment.
As Ben argues, post-Cold War the United States still can't plausibly exclude states like Turkey from the benefits of a US dominated international system. However, small and medium size states generally lack the same degree of leverage that they possessed when the Soviet Union existed. The US became indifferent to the fate of lots of Cold War hotspots as soon as the USSR collapsed; I suspect that if the USSR (and its enmity with the US) had survived, the US would have continued to pay very close attention to happenings in Somalia, Afghanistan, Zaire/Congo, etc. Threats of defection from the US sponsored global system only grant leverage if the US cares, and if such threats are credible; on balance, I'm not convinced that exerting influence is any more difficult today than it was in 1980.
"In Poor Taste" Doesn't Begin to Cover It...
It is probably a total coincidence, but Parkland is 22 miles down I-5 from Evergreen State College, the radical leftist school that helped create Rachel Corrie and Andrew Mickel, the later of which ambushed a police officer in Nov 2002, and is now on death row. Another radical leftist shot and killed a police officer on Halloween after firebombing four police cars on Oct. 22, and was in turn shot earlier this month.
Yep, Gomer; it probably is a total coincidence.
Now, I'm as Critical of Rabid Angry Uncivil Wingnuts as the Next Guy . . .
at least until Michael White goes moderately Over The Top in his latest rambling, expansive Guardian piece on Friday. While LGM readers know that I am highly critical of the Wingnut approach to democracy and debate, and I don't consider it healthy at all, I'm not about to start drawing comparisons to Ft. Sumter in 1861.
While White may largely be correct here:
It is the scale of the irrational, emotional and, dare I add, ignorant, reaction his presidency has unleashed on the American right, some of it understandable in a fast-changing and confusing world, much of it ugly and increasingly violent in tone.
But a latecomer here:
Friends keep saying: "It's changed since you lived there, Mike."White lived in the US from 1984 to 1988, so, um, duh, of course it's changed. That's a generation. I'm willing to bet that Britain has changed since 1988 as well.
I interpret the present reaction of the right not all that differently from that unleashed by Bill Clinton. Since Reagan, the right views the White House specifically, and governance in general, as a birthright. They're the only true Americans. Fortunately for the rest of us, most of them live in Real America. Therefore the current tone and tenor of debate from the right doesn't surprise me in the least -- if anything they're more scared, because whereas Bill Clinton won with only 43% of the vote, Obama did significantly better. And, Obama's a Muslim Fascist-Communist as we all know, born, where was it? Kenya? Indonesia? That must scare the right as well.
To reiterate, unlike White I do not perceive this wave of wingnut lunacy any differently than the Clinton administration. This isn't new. (Of course, dare I say it, we know how that ended up). Furthermore, while the faults of the United States are legion, this is true of every democracy on the planet -- and hey, we didn't give the world, and the European Parliament, Nick Griffin, who somehow weaseled his way into representing the entire EUP at the Copenhagen climate change conference. His views on climate change are reassuringly similar to his views on race relations.
But perhaps I should have more time for White and his viewpoint: not only was he punched by Alastair Campbell, but he punched him back.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Dumond This Isn't
Given Huckabee's gruesome history on related matters, it's tempting to say that he deserves any demagoguery he's on the receiving end of because of this. But it would be wrong. As Matt says, on its face there's nothing unreasonable about granting clemency to a someone given 60 years for burglaries committed when he was 17. Evidently, if you grant parole and clemency (or, for that matter, give out finite sentences) to significant numbers of people some percentage will commit more crimes, but individual cases can't in themselves justify more draconian policies, and also don't mean that Huckabee's judgment at the time was wrong. Putting pressure on the the parole board to release a rapist because some wingers developed some quarter-witted Clinton conspiracy theories, on the other hand...
I also wonder if this might affect Kennedy's vote on the juvenille sentencing cases the court is considering.
Brett Favre and the hype machine
Speaking of the culture of celebrity and media saturation, an ironic aspect of the ridiculous levels of worshipful coverage that Brett Favre has gotten over the years is that it has made it eas(ier) to overlook that he's in the midst of one of the most amazing seasons in NFL history. His 24 TD passes, three interceptions, 69% completion percentage, and 270 yards per game passing add up to by far the highest quarterback rating of his career, and one of the highest in history. He's doing this at the age of 40, and today he tied Jim Marshall's record for consecutive NFL starts by a non-kicker (282).
Another aspect of this story I like is that last August all the football insider types were certain that Favre's flirtation with the Vikings would be, if consummated with a contract, harmful to team chemistry and other similarly mysterious alembics, and that indeed the whole soap opera of his second un-retirement was going to harm his "legacy."
The Chosen One
The Tiger Woods incident provides an interesting glimpse into the world of celebrity image making, and the corporate and media interests that enable it. Woods got into a minor car accident early Friday morning after he was apparently attacked by his enraged wife. She seems to have smashed in the back window of his SUV with a couple of golf clubs as he tried to flee their home at 2:30 AM. Woods was found lying in the street drifting in and out of consciousness and suffering from facial lacerations, raising questions regarding whether the window was the only thing his wife connected with. Woods is refusing to talk to the police, which isn't surprising, given that a truthful account of the proceedings would probably require his wife to be charged with committing domestic violence.
He did however release this statement on his website, which is a kind of negative masterpiece of botched public relations.
Absurdly, Woods is issuing a fulsome apology to the world in general, while at the same time claiming all that happened is that he got into a fender bender just beyond his driveway. Even more ineptly, he addresses the "many false, malicious and unfounded rumors that are circulating" about him. By doing so, he's practically requiring the mainstream media to report on, and ask him about, a National Enquirer story claiming that he is having an affair -- a story that to this point the more respectable media have refused to even mention, let alone question him about.
The most ridiculous feature of the statement is his whining plea for "privacy." Tiger Woods has become a billionaire by marketing himself so assidiously that he's now the most recognizable athlete, and indeed one of the most recognizable people, in the world. His vast wealth (less than 10% of which has been earned directly through his athletic achievements) is a product of making himself into a kind of human logo, that corporations pay him immense amounts to attach to their products. They find it profitable to do so because of the preposterous yet very widespread idea that athletic excellence somehow reflects well on a person's character and general value as a human being. Tiger Woods alleged adultery has nothing to do with his ability to excel on the golf course, but has everything to do with his ability to market himself as some kind of exemplary person, whose putative preferences in regard to cars and accounting firms and watches should influence your view of these products, and the corporations that produce them.
On one level I do feel sorry for Woods, in that his father was a certifiable lunatic, whose ambitions in regard to his son went far beyond turning him into the greatest golfer in the world. Consider this quote from Earl Woods, from a 1996 Sports Illustrated profile, written when Woods was all of 21 years old, and had yet to win a major golf tournament, let alone transform the course of human history:
Tiger will win because of God's mind. Can't you see the pattern? Earl Woods asks. Can't you see the signs? "Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity," Earl says.
Sports history, Mr. Woods? Do you mean more than Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, more than Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe? "More than any of them because he's more charismatic, more educated, more prepared for this than anyone."
Anyone, Mr. Woods? Your son will have more impact than Nelson Mandela, more than Gandhi, more than Buddha?
"Yes, because he has a larger forum than any of them. Because he's playing a sport that's international. Because he's qualified through his ethnicity to accomplish miracles. He's the bridge between the East and the West. There is no limit because he has the guidance. I don't know yet exactly what form this will take. But he is the Chosen One. He'll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations. The world is just getting a taste of his power."
The craziest part of all this is that Eldrick "Tiger" Woods probably on some level believes it -- and very little in his life experience within a media-saturated and celebrity-crazed culture has contradicted this belief.
Hooray for Baltimore!
Baltimore displays some guts:
The Baltimore City Council went where no local government has gone before, it seems, in telling crisis pregnancy centers in the city this week that they have to put up signs saying they don't provide abortion or birth control....
In the end, the Baltimore city council's vote protects consumers from false and misleading advertising. That's a position governments often take, and there's a whole branch of law, commercial speech, to explain why false advertising gets less First Amendment protection. The council decided to treat the crisis pregnancy centers differently than other groups because they're pretending to be something they're not (and then lying about the risks of abortion once they've gotten clients in the door). Eliot Spitzer similarly went after the centers for false advertising when he was New York attorney general. He investigated 24 of them and issued subpoenas to 11, saying they were violating a 1995 consent decree in which they'd promised not to misrepresent the services they offered.
The ordinance has not yet been signed by Mayor Dixon, but it strikes me as a no-brainer; if you can't go after these charlatans in Baltimore, then where can you go after them?
Bailing on Bin Laden
I should hope that the absurdity of conservative commentary on Afghanistan is self-evident, but to summarize briefly, the Obama administration is currently under wingnut fire for a) under-resourcing the Afghanistan mission, and b) failing to do exactly what Stanley McChrystal wants (even as it, apparently, does pretty much exactly what Stanley McChrystal wants). The patent stupidity of these arguments is manifest, as the Bush administration evidently under-resourced the Afghanistan mission for some seven years before Greater Wingnuttia noticed what was happening, and the Bush administration further overrode the authority of local commanders when those commanders had unpleasant things to say, generally to the loud applause of aforementioned Wingnuttia (see, for example, the Bush administration's decision to push forward with the Surge, in spite of the resistance of the larger US military establishment). There's some risk, of course, in making it All About Bush, but then I suspect we're not yet close to accounting for the lasting damage that the Bush administration (and its cheerleaders) did to US security.
The latest cause for re-examination comes with the utterly unsurprising news that the Bush administration completely botched the hunt for Osama Bin Laden in 2001 and 2002 by failing to deploy sufficient forces to Tora Bora, and by relying on Afghan proxies to fight Al Qaeda forces. The administration was abetted in its ineptitude by Tommy Franks, who apparently didn't believe that capturing or killing the man responsible for murdering 3000+ Americans was very interesting or worthwhile. Franks "genius" went down the memory hole around the same time that Donald Rumsfeld became persona non grata among the Wingnutty, but it bears recollection that Franks was, for a while, the Greatest American Hero Evah for Destroying the Mighty Legions of Saddam Hussein. I actually think that Franks' execution of the early weeks of the Iraq War was more capable than the retrospective judgment allows, but nevertheless it's fair to say that his inclusion in the pantheon didn't last very long.
Jules Crittenden, Standard Bearer of the Knights of Wingnuttia, seizes the opportunity to blame this all on .... John Kerry. Rather than denying the now-consensus position that the Bush administration developed and pursued an utterly disastrous Afghanistan policy (and really, this holds regardless of your larger attitudes about the Afghanistan War), Jules describes examination of the failure in the following terms:
So, eight years later, what’s the point?
The horse is still out, and going forward, the vaguely hinted-at suggestion is that it’s important to stay focused on barn door open-closed operations.
Indeed. It's never worth taking time to examine massive government failures.
Beyond the insinuation that calling the Vietnam War a mistake is somehow similar in criminal degree to the failure to catch Osama Bin Laden, Crittenden also provides this gem:
Give your highly experienced field commanders what they ask for, a counterinsurgency plan to aimed at winning, rather than some fraction of a counterinsurgency plan aimed at exiting ASAP
Right. Maybe I'm crazy, but it seems that the relevant cliche here doesn't involve a horse and a barn door, but rather a pot and a kettle. But then there's always the memory hole...
Here's Some Unhappy...
Some interesting bits in this Telegraph report from last week:
Top British commanders angrily described in the documents how they were not even told, let alone consulted, about major changes to US policy which had significant implications for them and their men.
When the Americans decided, in March 2004, to arrest a key lieutenant of the Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr – an event that triggered an uprising throughout the British sector – “it was not co-ordinated with us and no-one [was] told that it was going to happen,” said the senior British field commander at the time, Brigadier Nick Carter.
“Had we known, we would at least have been able to prepare the ground.” Instead, “the consequence [was] that my whole area of operations went up in smoke… as a result of coalition operations that were outwith my control or knowledge and proved to be the single most awkward event of my tour.”
Among the most outspoken officers was Col Tanner, who served as chief of staff to General Stewart and of the entire British division during Operation Telic 3, from November 2003 to May 2004.
He said: “The whole system was appalling. We experienced real difficulty in dealing with American military and civilian organisations who, partly through arrogance and partly through bureaucracy, dictate that there is only one way: the American way.
“I now realise that I am a European, not an American. We managed to get on better…with our European partners and at times with the Arabs than with the Americans. Europeans chat to each other, whereas dialogue is alien to the US military… dealing with them corporately is akin to dealing with a group of Martians.
“If it isn’t on the PowerPoint slide, then it doesn’t happen.”
Broadly speaking, the pendulum of opinion on British participation in Iraq has swung back and forth during the conflict. At the beginning of the insurgency, the British had a (perhaps undeserved) reputation for capability in counter-insurgency conflicts. Senior British officers were not shy about criticizing what they believed to be the incompetence and cultural insensitivity of their American allies. However, as time went by there seemed to be little indication that the British Army was doing any better in its sectors than the Americans were doing in the rest of the country. During the Surge, it became widely believed that the British were having serious problems holding onto what should have been a relatively easy sector. The Iraqi Army offensive into Basra of spring 2008, supported by the United States, embarrassed a British contingent that had essentially conceded the city to a variety of militia groups.
And so these leaks can be read as after-action bitterness on the part of an organization that saw its reputation for counter-insurgency success crushed in Iraq. On the other hand, it's difficult to run competent COIN in one sector while the rest of the country is falling apart, and it's really difficult to do so when directives from HQ are contradictory, incompetent, or simply absent. We know that some of the critiques leveled by the British are undoubtedly true; Sanchez did a poor job of communicating with his own commanders, Americans did display arrogance and cultural insensitivity in the first years of the war, and so forth. The difficulties of communication (PowerPoint and all that) are to be expected when any two organizations work together, and probably shouldn't be blamed on either side. However, I'm not sure that these can fully explain the situation that held in Basra in early 2008.
I'm Enjoying This
Senator Lindsey Graham is censured by the mighty Charleston County Republican Party for -- shock and horrors! -- compromising with the opposition on Cap and Trade.
Now, I thought that's what was supposed to happen in legislative bodies -- compromise. Not for the Angry Republicans however. They prefer ideological purity and dictatorial governance.
Where did we last see something like that?
But don't worry, the moderate wing of the Republican Party isn't interested in compromising on their conservative credentials, if Marvin Rogers, 33, is representative at all:
“I’m not asking anyone to be any less conservative — please don’t,” Mr. Rogers said. “But be more civil in communicating that conservative message. Don’t get on TV talking about ‘The president’s a racist.’ Don’t get on the radio talking about Waterloos.”Civility. A civil right wing in the U.S. Now that would be something.
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