Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Two kinds of careers

After getting books on Christmas plus some post-Christmas shopping, I should probably do another update to my reading list I started a few months ago. But first, something from one of the new books got my attention.

The book is The Conquest of Happiness by the great philosopher Bertrand Russell, and the passage jumped out at me because it elaborated on something I'd jotted down in a Moleskine notebook a little while ago.

So, here's my Moleskine entry, dated 10/30/08:

As I've observed myself and other young people trying to find their direction in life, one of the themes I've abstracted from people's individual situations is: there's a spectrum of work that expresses your own individuality vs. work that contributes to society. Some people have asked me why I went into law instead of a creative field -- "that seems to be what you're passionate about." Well, when you're an artist, you're struggling to have your voice stand out amid millions of other voices on the market. When you do a more society-oriented job, your voice still matters, but it's not the focus or the goal. The goal that's driving you is achieving the best results for the outside world. Adding your own personal touch is a detail at most. Also, there isn't an ongoing struggle to break through; once you're doing the job, what you're doing automatically matters.
Now here's Bertrand Russell,* published in 1930:
Pleasures of achievement demand difficulties such that beforehand success seems doubtful although in the end it is usually achieved. This is perhaps the chief reason why a modest estimate of one's own powers is a source of happiness. The man who underestimates himself is perpetually being surprised by success, whereas the man who overestimates himself is just as often surprised by failure. ...



[T]he man of science ... has an activity which utilizes his abilities to the full, and he achieves results which appear important not only to himself but to the general public, even when it cannot in the smallest degree understand them. In this he is more fortunate than the artist. When the public cannot understand a picture or a poem, they conclude that it is a bad picture or a bad poem. When they cannot understand the theory of relativity they conclude (rightly) that their education has been insufficient. Consequently Einstein is honored while the best painters are (or at least were) left to starve in garrets, and Einstein is happy while the painters are unhappy.


The man of science has no need of a coterie, since he is thought well of by everybody except his colleagues. The artist, on the contrary, is in the painful situation of having to choose between being despised and being despicable. If his powers are of the first order, he must incur one or the other of these misfortunes -- the former if he uses his powers, the latter if he does not. ...

[T]he most intelligent young people in Western countries tend to have that kind of unhappiness that comes of finding no adequate employment for their best talents. ... Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women ... results from the combination of comfort with powerlessness. Powerlessness makes people feel that nothing is worth doing, and comfort makes the painfulness of this feeling just endurable.

* This is from pp. 114-117 of the book. I've fiddled with the paragraph breaks for readability.

Monday, December 29, 2008

Bill Clinton for Senate, not Caroline Kennedy

Let's do this dynasty thing right.

The seat is supposed to be passed down within the same family as the resigning politician. So, isn't Bill Clinton the obvious best choice?

And having a Senator with actual merit would be nice.

Being a famous woman who was sired by a president of the appropriate party shouldn't count.

I'm a resident of New York state. We unfairly get just two Senators -- the same as states with less than a tenth of our population -- so we have a particular need and ability to get first-rate people for the job. If Governor Paterson chooses an inadequate Senator, it'll be an outrage. 

Yet smart liberals like Michael Kinsley are making a dumb argument for Caroline Kennedy: hey, we already have lots of Senators who got the job purely through nepotism. Well, if that's true, then that's bad too!

Let's say we grant that the US has a lot of unqualified lawmakers who were appointed based on nepotism (though he all but admits his own examples don't really support this claim). That still doesn't explain why we should be complacent about this state of affairs.

The only thing we should worry about is trying to do the right thing in the future, since that's the only thing we can change. Critiquing what's happened in the past is a convenient way to dodge our actual responsibility.

The issue of the day isn't whether the Wisconsin plutocrat Herb Kohl should be a Senator; he already is. The issue we're facing now is whether Caroline Kennedy should become a Senator now.

I have no idea what her true convictions are -- does anyone? She's certainly had a lot of solid liberals in her family. But to assume she doesn't have her own distinctive views that might be quite different from any of them is belittling and shamelessly anti-feminist. Based on everything I've heard about her, it sounds like she's coasted through life lending her name to utterly uncontroversial causes ("patriotism, poetry and public service") that shed no light on her privately held ideology.

Finally, we have no idea if she has what it takes to succeed in national politics, and the fact that this is an appointment prevents anyone, including her, from knowing beforehand. (This point has been made before.) It's a rough, sometimes brutal business; most people probably couldn't stomach it. It might make you feel good to praise her as a thoroughly decent and competent human being, but that's just not enough. The question is whether she has what it takes to excel at this specific job, and I haven't seen anything to remotely suggest that she does.

SIDE NOTE: The blog post I linked to in the first sentence is headed "Chelsea for Senate," and it goes on to suggest either Chelsea or Bill. I changed it to just Bill because Chelsea would be unconstitutional -- too young.

Friday, December 26, 2008

The best albums of 2008

No, I don't know what they are.

But I have some links to people who claim to know. And they say things like this:

If you would smile if someone called you 'twee', get this album immediately and get ready to dance around your living room in your bunny ears and vintage aprons because this is your freakin' theme song times a dozen, kiddo.
That's from Summer Anne's top 15 on her blog, Boingy Boingy. Her list is especially good because she has a YouTube clip for one song from each of the top 10 albums. (You might remember Summer from when I blogged her manifestos.)

That list and all the others are making me realize how little I know about the music of 2008, even though I feel like I'm really up-to-date on music. I'll never get through even half of these albums, but I'll try to get through a bunch, eventually.

Here's eMusic's top 88 albums of 2008 -- or, the top 88 albums that are available on eMusic (which doesn't carry major labels). I buy most of my music from eMusic, so this is the list I'll be using the most. They say the list was put together by the website's staff but informed by users' feedback. A nice feature is that they give a short phrase summing up each album (e.g. "Art rock that swoops and soars") in addition to the full-length blurbs. [UPDATE: They've now posted the readers' choices as a separate list.]

Letters Home from Camp has a few people's top 10 lists, with some embedded YouTube clips. This list is by my friend "Alex B."

Pitchfork has a reader poll of the top 25 albums (among other lists). #19 is Of Montreal's new album, which I trashed here.

And here's Metacritic's list of the top 30, which has the (dis?)advantage of being derived by simply averaging out actual reviews of the albums and letting the chips fall where they may, instead of having someone consciously put the whole thing in order. This list also differs from the others in that they tell you each album's score, so you can see whether an album was tied with the next one down or came out ahead by a significant margin.

And if you want to know my opinion (which, again, is of very little worth), the only 2008 album I can whole-heartedly endorse so far is Goldfrapp's Seventh Tree (previously blogged). I was shocked (not "shocked, shocked") to see that it wasn't on any of the lists I've linked to in this post. It wasn't eligible for the eMusic list because they don't sell it, so that's fine ... but what's everyone else's excuse for passing over this radiant gem of an album? It's hard to choose one highlight from an album where every song feels like a hit single, but here's "Caravan Girl":

As usual, you can't particularly hear the bass part in this YouTube clip, so you should definitely buy the album to hear the real music.

There are others I've enjoyed and would probably put on a "best of 2008" list if I made the necessary effort, but haven't sufficiently immersed myself in yet: My Brightest Diamond's A Thousand Shark's Teeth, Ratatat's LP3, Cut Copy's In Ghost Colors, Uh Huh Her's Common Reaction (previously), and the pianist Enrico Pieranunzi's album of Scarlattis sonatas mixed with improvisations.

UPDATE: Others I left out: Avishai Cohen Trio's Gently Disturbed, Jenny Lewis's Acid Tongue, MGMT's Oracular Spectacular.

Any thoughts? Please, comment away!

UPDATE: Here are people's lists on Metafilter, just a few months late.

Thursday, December 25, 2008

Sitting around the house on Christmas talking about a video game

"You have to kill all these penguins, but the goal of the game is just to save a penguin."

"I guess it's a special celebrity penguin."

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Christmas ...

... is just too costly.

That article's from 1990, so the figures are outdated, but most of the points still apply today. Samples:

Although for many years Christmas has been justified on the grounds that it is "merry,'' rigorous quantitative analysis establishes that the opposite is the case....

[U]p to a third of purchases may be ill-suited to their recipients. Christmas is really a throwback to all the inefficiencies of the barter economy, in which people have to match other people's wants to their offerings. Of course, money was invented precisely to solve this "double coincidence of wants" problem. ...

For parents, one especially exasperating aspect of Christmas is mindless toy fetishism.... What's more, toys are unusually hazardous consumer products....

Christmas increases congestion. At least in large urban areas, it is by far the most unpleasant time to shop, travel, dine out, or go to the bathroom in a mall. Just when stores are at their most crowded, shopping becomes mandatory; just when everyone else is making family visitations, they are de rigueur....

Christmas destroys the environment and innocent animals and birds.... This year, according to the Humane Society, at least 4 million foxes and minks will be butchered just to provide our Christmas furs. To stock our tables, the Department of Agriculture tells me, we'll also slaughter 22 million turkeys, 2 million pigs, and 2 million to 3 million cattle, plus a disproportionate fraction of the 6 billion chickens that the United States consumes each year. To anyone who has ever been to a turkey farm, Christmas and Thanksgiving take on a new and somewhat less cheerful meaning. Every single day during the run-up to these holidays, thousands of bewildered, debeaked, growth-hormone-saturated birds are hung upside down on assembly-line racks and given electric shocks. Then their throats are slit and they are dropped into boiling water....

Christmas leads to a sharp rise in absenteeism and a slump in labor productivity that is unlikely to be recaptured the rest of the year....


Christmas is one of the single most important contributors to obesity -- the average American consumes more than 3,500 calories at Christmas Day dinner alone. Naturally, January is the peak month for diet plans, many of which end up in failure and despair.

Perhaps most important of all, from a purely distributional standpoint, Christmas almost certainly aggravates inequality, since most gift-giving takes place within the family or the same social class, and doesn't reach the people who really need our help. Salvation Army drum-beating aside, Christmas almost certainly reduces our capacity for charity by draining us of wealth that we might otherwise give to the needy, and of our charitable impulses....

Christmas commercialism, of course, is a modern innovation. The ancient Christians did not even observe the holiday until the fifth century, medieval Christians observed it much more modestly, and the Puritans sensibly refused to celebrate it at all. Only in the last fifty years, with the perfection of mass-market advertising and the commercialization of religion in general, has it become such a command performance. Modern Christmas is like primitive Keynesianism, a short-run-oriented economic experiment that has been tried and found wanting. It is the flipside of the positive contribution the "Protestant ethic" once made to capitalism -- Christianity's high holiday now almost certainly makes us feel worse off.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Slightly poignant search terms that have led people to this blog

StatCounter keeps track of the words people have been searching for when they happened upon this blog. (So did SiteMeter, before I stopped using it.)

Every once in a while, they'll give you a glimpse of some random stranger's mind.

Here are some of the ones where, for one reason or other, the idea of someone sitting around trying to find whatever they're looking for with these words strikes me as vaguely touching:

i want to break a gender norm
uncaring husbands overwork wives
ways to lessen hatred towards gender
people who break rules, violate norms, or fail to meet the expectations of others
jazz is dead
extremely skinny
statistics on use of word nigger
attractive round faces
father and daughter talk
how to write a thank you letter to a previous employer for firing you
i want to stop thinking the worst outcome will happen

Monday, December 22, 2008

This blog has a new name.

I just changed the name of this blog from "Jac" to "Jaltcoh."

As I've said in the banner, though, "Jac" isn't gone -- it's "Jaltcoh, a.k.a. Jac." I did this for the general continuity of things, and particularly so those who've already linked to me using the old name won't suddenly be rendered mistaken.

Of course, making the change took just a few seconds of editing the blog template, so if this turns out to be a bad idea for some reason, I can just as painlessly change it back. If you feel strongly about it one way or another, feel free to speak out in the comments.




Here's what I'm talking about:

Click the link for the whole story.

Rejected Obama '08 (O8ama?) logos

Here are the images they didn't want you to see before November 4.

#1 is especially clever, but maybe too clever.

#2 makes you go "ooo..."

#5 is insane!

Nice presentation, starting with some of the less plausible ones and leading up to three "finalists." The last finalist looks so familiar you'd mistake it for the real thing. As explained in the post, though, something was a little off.

Includes commentary by Sol Sender, who was in charge of the Obama logo design team.

He says: "The strongest logos tell simple stories."

Friday, December 19, 2008

Music Friday: Elvis Presley, Blue Christmas

This may be my favorite performance of a Christmas song by anyone (and I say this having just heard the Johnny Cash version playing in a mall):

I love the: "without you, uh-without you ..."

And the way his voice almost-but-not-quite cracks on the "all right"!

If you're doing some late Christmas shopping for someone who enjoys good music, I recommend the 3-DVD set of Elvis's "'68 Comeback Special," which includes this performance and hours more like it.

CHRISTMAS FLASHBACK: "The greatness of Elvis really came through...."

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Why do we drive more than necessary even though it harms the planet?

It all has to do with the fundamental evil of human nature.

Or, to be more specific, the urge for power regardless of the costs.

Achenblog (Joel Achenbach) explains:







Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Why it's easier to understand opposition to gay rights "from outside religion"

Not that it's impossible to do it from within religion -- but it takes longer:

"You need a new revelation."

(That's Yale law professor Jack Balkin and University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse, a.k.a. my mom.)

Monday, December 15, 2008

IM on fatalism and time, ideas and plain language

An IM conversation (as always, this is quoted with permission from the other person):

what do you think of this sentence as an example of something in philosophy
can't send it
obviously it's pretty cryptic because of all the symbols.
yeah but do you suspect intentional screwy cryticness
or do you think it's expressed cryptically for a good reason
that's possible.
there's legitimate philosophy that uses symbols.
yeah and i think you'd need to see the whole thing... did he work up to that
but if it's any philosophy area other than logic,
that makes me wonder:

why exactly was it so important for you to express it like that...

when you must know that drastically
narrows your potential audience?
and you can apply the same observation to
garden-variety philosophical prose that's
less layperson-friendly than it could be.
it's an academic thesis written by David Foster Wallace when he was a student
well that explains it: he's trying to impress profs.
that they have no influence on the future?!
hard to see how that could be.
normally a fatalist thinks "human actions
and decisions" are entirely influenced by factors
that are determined by the
so if he committed suicide, his whole life was shaped by that
Well that's a good example...
since the paragraph you just
quoted is easily comprehensible,
why not just say it that way
instead of with the symbols?
the article-writer is making it comprehensible for us
same point.
maybe because when you say it plainly it sounds patently absurd
same thing whether it's a NYT writer
or the original thinker who's clarifying the point.
I've sometimes thought this in law... require people to write very clearly because it's a test of whether they are right
well, it sounds like he's basically
saying time is an illusion --
everything exists at once.
(or, not even "at once" since time is an illusion)
which is what my blog post was about:
if they can't or won't say it clearly,
suspect error or fraud
You'd be calling into question a lot of
academic scholarship with that principle.
I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether that would be a bad thing or a good thing.

IN THE COMMENTS: My dad turns up a trenchant on-point quote from an essay by John Kenneth Galbraith called "Writing, Typing, and Economics." It's about economics but is easily generalizable to philosophy and other esoteric fields. Here's a more extended passage:
Any specialist who ventures to write on money with a view to making himself intelligible works under a grave moral hazard. He will be accused of oversimplification. The charge will be made by his fellow professionals, however obtuse or incompetent. They will have a sympathetic hearing from the layman. That is because no layman really expects to understand about money, inflation, or the International Monetary Fund. If he does, he suspects that he is being fooled. One can have respect only for someone who is decently confusing.



I feel very strongly about all this.

UPDATE: Another variation on the theme.

Friday, December 12, 2008

Music Friday: John Lennon and Regina Spektor, Real Love

I love how she dramatically changes the chords and melody while staying true to the song:

Regina Spektor covered "Real Love" as part of a Lennon tribute album done as part of the "Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur."

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Relativism and liberalism -- an unfortunate pairing

After my dad's relativism post went up, my mom linked to it and asked:

Did RLC take a big lurch right yesterday?
His response:
I wish being a liberal who criticizes relativism didn't seem like a contradiction or a move to the "right."

I don't see anything inherently relativistic about liberalism. In practice, though, there's an unfortunate correlation: liberals are a lot more likely than conservatives to think of themselves as relativists.

But in fact, that's the real contradiction. The idea that no culture's values or principles are objectively better than any other culture's is the antithesis of "progressive."

If you want to see the contradiction on full display, just ask a self-proclaimed relativist how they feel about abortion laws or civil rights or the death penalty or _________. Somehow, the relativism vanishes and absolute principles take its place once the conversation turns to issues that actually matter in the real world.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Relativism ad absurdum

In response to my comments on his relativism post, my dad had this to say:

If you're right about relativists' thinking that objective aesthetic judgments are too self-centered, it certainly shows up a contradiction, because they're being equally self-centered, as you point out, in dictating relativism. I think their attitude comes from a desire on liberals' part to believe that they represent all that is nice and good and peaceful and all-accepting. (As Dylan said in 1964, "I'm liberal, to a degree/ I want everybody to be free/ But if you think I'm gonna let Barry Goldwater move in next door, marry my daughter/ You must be crazy.") They're blind to the passive aggression in that stance. And it flummoxes them when you point out that relativism must admit its opposite as a possible "take".

Fortunately, though, we're beating a dead horse. Postmodernism has been on its way out for a decade, and before long college students will be reviling their pomo professors as hidebound reactionaries and demanding to know why that crap has been shoved down their throats.

Another commenter added this, which I think is very problematic:
I guess I am a person who accepts the complexity of life, attitudes, points of view, beliefs. I hate the destruction of war and struggle against the oppressive patriarchal system we are all victims of - men and women. I am suspicious of "purism" and abhor labels.

So, as you describe it, I might be considered a "relativist," even though the term seems to cause me some discomfort.

It seems to me that that's just not getting at what "relativism" really means. By the same token, I don't see what my dad's support of affirmative action even if it's counter to his self-interest has to do with relativism.

The opposite of relativism is not "being selfish" or "being close-minded" or "not taking unfamiliar viewpoints into account" or "disrespecting other cultures."

In fact, the very fact that I do think it's vital to understand foreign cultures and appreciate the views of people who disagree with me is why I can't be a relativist. Relativism, taken seriously, is incompatible with the idea that someone in the United States should stop and think, "Hey, maybe certain values that are unpopular here but are prevalent in other countries are actually better than mine." If relativism is true, then the only value that matters is adhering to the values that are internal to your own culture/community (whether that's your country, locality, religion, etc.)

I'm not the first person to point this out: if you adhere to that principle, then you can't recognize the goodness of a society making transformative moral progress. And that means that the theory shouldn't count Harriet Tubman or Martin Luther King, Jr. as great Americans. After all, they were deviating from the prevailing values of their time and culture, so by the standards of relativism, weren't they acting wrongly? That's why I consider relativism "wrong" in both senses of the word: not just incorrect but also evil.

And I know that some people will think, "Oh, he's making a straw-man argument by just attacking a really extreme version of 'relativism' that's not what most relativists actually believe." Well, I know there are millions of people who would call themselves relativists but disagree with the conclusion that it's impossible for a society to make radical moral progress. But I simply think they're being internally inconsistent and should resolve the inconsistency in favor of making judgments based on standards that are universal/objective rather than local/relative.


Monday, December 8, 2008

December 8, John Lennon day




That's an excerpt from my dad's account — you can read the whole thing here.

And here's my mom's version — posted a few hours later, before either of them had seen the other's post.

(Notice my cameo appearance in the first paragraph of my dad's post and the last paragraph of my mom's post.)

Friday, December 5, 2008

Quote of the day

"At a time of great crisis with mortgage foreclosures and autos, [Obama] says we only have one president at a time. I'm afraid that overstates the number of presidents we have."

--Rep. Barney Frank (via)

Thursday, December 4, 2008

My problem with relativism












“Maybe because Mozart wrote better music?” I asked.





I responded in the comments section:








(Painting by Vermeer; file from Wikimedia Commons.)

Tuesday, December 2, 2008







Sunday, November 30, 2008

The reality of time and a doodle of me

My mom blogs our post-Thanksgiving trip to a Madison cafe:

Others may read about metaphysics. Me, I'm making a puppet out of the sugar packet drawing on the recycled-paper-brown napkins...
If you look at a closeup of the photo in that blog post, you can see a doodle she drew of me:

doodle of John Althouse Cohen by Ann Althouse

She adds:
The question arose: Is time not an illusion?
That was spinning off an essay I was reading called "Some Free Thinking About Time"* by the philosopher Arthur Norman Prior. He makes this pithy argument:
All attempts to deny the reality of time founder, so far as I can see, on the problem of explaining the appearance of time's passage: for appearing is itself something that occurs in time. Eddington once said that events don't happen, we merely come across them; but what is coming across an event but a happening?
That's why he "believe[s] in the reality of the distinction between past, present, and future" -- "that what we see as a progress of events is a progress of events, a coming to pass of one thing after another, and not just a timeless tapestry with everything stuck there for good and all."

That seems so trivially true -- why would anyone deny it? Well, certain scientific types will say that the theory of relativity shows that our common-sense view of time is simply mistaken. Prior has an elaborate response to this -- I can't get into the details of his argument here, but I'll just say I love how he concludes by cutting the Gordian knot:
We may say that the theory of relativity isn't about real space and time, in which the earlier-later relation is defined in terms of pastness, presentness, and futurity; the "time" which enters into the so-called space-time of relativity theory isn't this, but is just part of an artificial framework which scientists have constructed to link together observed facts in the simplest way possible, and from which those things which are systematically concealed from us are quite reasonably left out.
By the way, isn't Prior a perfect name for someone who thinks about these questions for a living? Reminds me of the scene in The Office where Michael reveals that Dwight was lying about having to leave work for a dentist appointment:
Michael: What’s his name?

Dwight: [long pause] Crentist.

Michael: Your dentist’s name is Crentist ... huh. Sounds a lot like dentist.

Dwight: Maybe that’s why he became a dentist?

* The essay is in the anthology Metaphysics: The Big Questions -- you can see it in the photo.

Friday, November 28, 2008

"Is there a God?" And what's wrong with punching a robot? And can an atheist truly enjoy Thanksgiving?

I agree with just about everything Robert Wright says in this excellent discussion of whether God exists:

That's Robert Wright -- whom I've blogged repeatedly -- and Joel Achenbach, who writes the Achenblog.

Here's a transcript of the whole conversation, via Bloggingheads.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Something to be thankful for: the looming prospect of an economic meltdown.

The law-and-economics jurist Richard Posner sees plenty of good in the impending depression:

The longer the world economy went without a depression, the worse the collapse would be when it finally, inevitably, came. The saving grace of catastrophes is averting worse catastrophes....

The fall in [oil prices] seems to have been due primarily to a worldwide reduction in demand for oil caused by the global depression. The combination of low prices with low demand is optimal from the standpoint of U.S. (and probably world) welfare. The low demand reduces the amount of carbon emissions, thus alleviating (though only to a slight extent) the problem of global warming. The fall in the price of oil has reduced the wealth of the oil-producing nations—a goal that should be central to U.S. foreign policy because of the hostility to us (Russia, Iran, Venezuela), or the political instability (Iraq, Nigeria, Algeria), of so many major oil-producing nations.

By undermining faith in free markets, the depression opens the door to more government intervention in the economy and eventually to higher taxes (though probably not until the economy improves). These are not necessarily bad things. Obviously neither the optimal amount of government intervention nor the optimal level of taxation is zero. There are compelling arguments for greater government intervention to deal with the threat of global warming, to improve transportation and other infrastructure, to reduce traffic congestion, and to protect biodiversity. Though in principle the money needed for such programs could be obtained from cutting wasteful government programs, that is politically infeasible.

So taxes will have to rise. Federal taxes as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product are no higher today than they were in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s—periods of healthy economic growth. The marginal income tax rate reached 94 percent in 1945 and did not decline to 70 percent until 1964 (it is 35 percent today). A modest increase in marginal rates from their present low level would increase tax revenues substantially, probably with little offset due to the distortions that any tax increase is bound to produce. Taxes should not be increased during a depression, but as we come out of it they can be raised modestly to finance infrastructure investments and other investments in public goods, such as reducing carbon emissions.*

The anxiety, reduced consumption, and reduced incomes during a depression are real costs and very heavy ones, but on the other hand the excessive borrowing that precipitated the depression enabled, for a period of years, higher consumption than the nation could actually afford. Thus the current drop in consumption is in part an offset to the abnormal level of consumption earlier. Indeed, since people loaded up with cars, fancy dresses, etc., while times were good (illusorily good because the nation was living beyond its means), the current reduction in the purchase of durables, while hard on sellers, may not be a great hardship to consumers. (Nevertheless, people quickly get habituated to a high level of consumption, and a decline from that level is very painful.)
And there's more...

* For the sake of transparency, I should point out that I fiddled with some of the paragraph breaks here to make it more readable.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

The Mumbai, India attacks of November 26, 2008

Right now, the top story on the New York Times homepage is, of course, about the attacks, which are still happening as I'm typing this:

Dozens Reported Dead in India Attacks
Terrorists Aim at Sites in Mumbai
Some reports set the death toll as high as 80 in coordinated terror attacks aimed at luxury hotels, a train station, a movie theater and a hospital.
Just to make sure their evil couldn't be denied, they attacked a hospital.

From the Washington Post:

Witnesses said the gunmen initially asked for British and American nationals. About 10 Americans and Britons were believed to be trapped in the Taj Mahal hotel late Wednesday.

A previously unknown group calling itself the "Deccan Mujaheddin" sent e-mails to news organizations claiming responsibility for the strikes. Intelligence officials said they had no information about the group, and it was not immediately possible to assess the validity of the claim. The purported group's name apparently refers to the Deccan Plateau, an area that spans eight Indian states and covers much of the central and southern part of the country.

Since May, a wave of bombings has rocked several Indian cities, killing more than 200 people. Some of the bombings were claimed by a group calling itself the Indian Mujaheddin. The term "mujaheddin" refers to Islamic holy warriors. ...

A 34-year businessman, Ashish Jain, said in a cellphone interview that he was having dinner with friends at the Taj Mahal hotel's rooftop restaurant when the attack began.

"When I paid the bill and tried to leave, the hotel staff said there were terrorists in the lobby and that we could not leave," Jain said. "There were 150 of us on the rooftop, including some foreign nationals. . . . It was really alarming to be trapped there for over four hours. We could feel the building shake with the explosions. We could see the smoke and the fire. People were panicking and crying. And finally the army and the police came and secured the fire escape exit and we could get out."

Among those barricaded inside the Taj Mahal hotel were several European lawmakers who were visiting Mumbai ahead of a summit meeting of European Union and Indian leaders.

"I was in the lobby . . . when gunmen came in and people starting running," one of the lawmakers, Sajjad Karim, told Britain's Press Association news agency by telephone from the basement of the hotel. "A gunman just stood there spraying bullets around, right next to me. I managed to turn away, and I ran into the hotel kitchen."

I was struck by the group of "European lawmakers ... visiting Mumbai ahead of a summit meeting of European Union and Indian leaders." It could easily be a coincidence, of course, but I wonder if the terrorists knew they were going to be there. 

I previously blogged Peter Beinart's important commentary from the aftermath of the September 11 attacks-- that the terrorists' goal is not "the Palestinians' right to a state or the Iraqis' right to medicine," but "a Muslim's right not to live with a non-Muslim." In other words, they're not militant proxies for Western liberals fueled by some trenchant critique of American foreign policy; they're morally opposed to the very idea of an increasingly interconnected world where people from different cultures happily live and work together. So whether or not it was actually intended, the symbolism of the European leaders getting ready to meet with Indian leaders would be perfect for the terrorists.

A few more quick points:

1. Most Americans probably weren't aware of India's earlier mass murders from the last couple years. Yet walking down the street in America this evening, you can hear people talking about the latest attacks, even though more people died before than have reportedly died tonight. How are the people dying in these attacks any more important than the people who died before?

2. It's often said that "there hasn't been another terrorist attack" since September 11, 2001, which shows that "Bush has kept us safe." I've always hated this formulation since it implies that "we," the Americans, are the only ones who matter in the supposedly "global" war on terrorism. But even those who think Americans are the only ones who matter can no longer say "we haven't had another terrorist attack."

Oh, "but not on American soil." Well, it's nice that our domestic security seems to have been pretty effective since 2001. But I thought terrorism was supposed to be a broad, global problem, not a narrow, domestic one.

More importantly, I doubt the American tourists in Mumbai who have been killed or held hostage tonight will be consoled to know that it's happening on insignificant "soil."

[UPDATE: A day after the attacks started -- they're still going on two days later, though they're apparently "winding down" -- Victor Davis Hanson gave an example of this kind of obliviousness: "As for Bush’s legacy, it will be left to future historians to weigh his responsibility for keeping us safe from another 9/11-like attack for seven year..." Even without knowing who was responsible for the Mumbai attacks, I don't see how it's not "another 9/11-like attack," unless you conveniently define "9/11-like" just narrowly enough not to include any of the terrorist attacks that have happened since 9/11.]

3. Cliff May writes:

Let's hope the incoming administration fully appreciates that.

Martha Stewart, Snoop Dogg, and Paul McCartney show you how to make mashed potatoes.

But not all together.

Snoop + Martha:

I hadn't thought about the "Parkay" voice in years.

(Via my mom, via Metafilter. My mom's tags: "cognac, Martha Stewart, potatoes, Snoop Dogg.")

Paul's are much healthier:

"...which isn't wonderful..."

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

2 sets of statistics that startled me

1. Obama's "army of small donors" was barely any change from 4 years ago:

[O]nly 26 percent of the money [Obama] collected through Aug. 31 during the primary and 24 percent of his money through Oct. 15 came from contributors whose total donations added up to $200 or less. ...

Those figures are actually in the same range as the 25 percent President Bush raised in 2004 from donors whose contributions aggregated to $200 or less, the 20 percent Senator John F. Kerry collected from such donors and Senator John McCain’s 21 percent from the same group. -- NYT

2. $700 billion has suddenly turned into $7 trillion:


Monday, November 24, 2008

Blacks and same-sex marriage

This is one of the most appallingly prejudiced things I've read in a while.

The author of that L.A. Times editorial, Jasmyne Cannick, is writing about the exit polls that provocatively revealed that "black voters in California voted against gay marriage by more than 2 to 1" -- in contrast with the electorate as a whole, which voted the same way (for Proposition 8) but only by 52%.

Her position: blacks have been right not to support same-sex marriage.

Now, she doesn't quite say she's against same-sex marriage; she carefully leaves open the possibility that she supports it but just sees it as such a low priority that it's not worth devoting any effort to. But she doesn't have a word to say in favor of it even in principle.

How does she justify blacks' role in undoing same-sex marriage in California? She says (a) there are just too many other problems facing black people, and (b) it's hard to see how same-sex marriage would help black people. 

A few points:

1. It's a very convenient excuse, anytime you don't want to take an issue seriously, to point out the existence of other problems that should be taken seriously. Apparently there's a pretty stringent limit to the number of issues we're allowed to think about.
2. Every paragraph of the article says basically the same thing: that blacks should see a clear dividing line between "white" and "black" in American society, and exclusively focus on the problems facing the black side. (As is so often the case, other races aren't even part of the discussion.)

Well, imagine if everyone decided to put that principle into practice. That is, everyone only cares about what's good for their own group. There's no loftier goal than securing benefits for your own side. Would that principle be good for blacks, in a democracy where they're only 12% of the population?
3. Some of her specific examples are inadvertently comical. She says: "The right to marry does nothing to address the problems faced by both black gays and black straights. Does someone who is ... suffering from HIV but has no healthcare ... really benefit from the right to marry someone of the same sex?"

Would someone who's suffering due to a lack of health care be helped by being able to marry the person they love? Um ... yes! Health care does have something to do with being allowed to legally marry!

Another one: "I don't see why the right to marry should be a priority for me or other black people. Gay marriage? Please. At a time when blacks are still more likely than whites to be pulled over for no reason ...." Actually, a lot of people would be more upset about losing the right to marry than they'd be about being randomly pulled over. It's far from clear that racial profiling is a more important issue than same-sex marriage; the idea that it's so dramatically more important than same-sex marriage that the former should somehow eliminate same-sex marriage from consideration is just nutty.
4. There's a meme out there that liberals need to "get religion" (literally) if they want to be politically successful -- that there needs to be a religious left to counteract the religious right. Excuse me if I'm not exactly gung-ho about this idea after reading something like this:

White gays often wonder aloud why blacks, of all people, won't support their civil rights. There is a real misunderstanding by the white gay community about the term. Proponents of gay marriage fling it around as if it is a one-size-fits-all catchphrase for issues of fairness.

But the black civil rights movement was essentially born out of and driven by the black church; social justice and religion are inextricably intertwined in the black community. To many blacks, civil rights are grounded in Christianity -- not something separate and apart from religion but synonymous with it. To the extent that the issue of gay marriage seemed to be pitted against the church, it was going to be a losing battle in my community.
5. A blog called The Republic of T. (which has the tagline, "Black. Gay. Father. Vegetarian. Buddhist. Liberal.") has an excellent response. Here's a brief sample (click through to the post if you're interested in his links to back up the facts):
Mikki Mozelle and Lisa Kebreau, a Black lesbian couple — among those for whom Cannick thinks marriage equality isn’t a priority — who were also one of the plaintiff couples in Maryland’s marriage lawsuit, spent upwards of $6,000 on legal documents to give their family a few protections, and with no guarantee that their documents will be recognized.

In the Maryland County where I live, a $55 application fee gets you a marriage license and the 1,049 benefits and protections that come with it. So heterosexuals pay about $0.05 per protection/benefit. Mozlle and Kebreau (and other Black gay couples) pay hundreds of times more than heterosexuals for less protection and fewer benefits....

Wesley Mercer, a gay Black man, died on September 11, 2001, while helping evacuate the World Trade Center. His partner of 26 years, Bill Randolph, also a Black gay man, struggled to get equal recognition for their relationship. Morgan Stanley, Mercer’s employer, gave him $700 to cover immediate expenses, and later a check for $10,000. Though Mercer supplied half the household income, Randolph does not receive Social Security benefits, workers’ compensation, or Mercer’s 25-year army pension. Only spouses are eligible.

Randolph has spoken up about what he faced as a gay, man losing a partner on 9/11, without the benefits and protections of marriage. I doubt he believes he or any of the Black gay couples who were plaintiffs in the state marriage lawsuits — Corey Davis & Andre LeJune (CA), Mikki Mozelle & Lisa Kebreau (MD), Alvin Williams & Nigel Simon (MD), Takia Foskey & Jo Rabb (MD), Alicia Heath-Toby & Saundra Toby-Heath (NJ) — would agree that that inequality is a “secondary issue.”

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Sarah Palin and the Thanksgiving turkey slaughter

My mom has a perfectly apt post about Palin giving an interview with slaughtering going on in the background. Here's the post in its entirety:

HuffPo is aghast that turkey-killing doesn't faze Sarah Palin.
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I followed her link to HuffingtonPost and noticed that the post has an amazing 4,000+ comments. And based on skimming through some of them, it looks like HuffPo's commenters are more intelligent than HuffPo's writers.

One good point from the comments section:
Newsflash: Farmers kill animals. Then they sell them. Grocery stores package them. Meat-eaters buy them and eat them. Apparently people in the Ivory Tower think meat just appears, much like manna from Heaven. This is odd, considering their general distaste for all things religious--especially Christian.

And here's one more (slightly edited):
You people don't understand Alaska.

If you've ever been there, it really is America's last frontier populated with rugged people.

Actually seeing the reality of the facts of life and death (whether human or animal) is NOT uncommon there as it is in the lower 48. I think this is mostly a good thing. Here in Brooklyn, there's lots of people who eat chicken every day, but have never seen a live chicken running around the yard. You just go buy it at the supermarket. Not good.

Sarah grew up in Alaska and is used to these things. I'll give her that. Alaskans probably laugh at the lower 48's squeamishness.

Friday, November 21, 2008

On women, men, and bodies











An aside: many liberals/feminists will rail against female genital mutilation — as well they should. But how many of them are upfront about the fact that it's primarily practiced by women? (One person who isn't upfront about this is Eve Ensler, who included a long piece in her famous play The Vagina Monologues about female genital mutilation, but oddly never mentioned who actually does it.)








Although, as I said, I make no moral judgment of men who are attracted to a relatively narrow range of body types, I do feel sorry for them, just as I feel sorry for women who insist on only dating men who are over 6 feet tall.

