Hope Springs Eternal

I took a peek at the Althouse site today.(My bad, but I was curious to see if I was right. Fortunately for yours truly, I was. Whew!) What I saw there gave me some hope, in a kinda perverse way. Instead of actually talking about something remotely resembling an election or issues, the posters there were discussing John Kerry. If, in a covertly rabid partisan blog you have to resort to bashing someone who isn't even running, well then maybe there's hope after all.

Also reading those wacky posts cleared out the bile from reading the WP's bit about how the President of the United States said this: "However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses."

No, I didn't make that up. The President of the United States actually said that about the opposition party. Why not just have them declared enemy combatants and be done with it?
At least the ugliness that is the GOP machine is finally out in the open. It's like a sci-fi story where the attractive human is revealed as horrible ugly monster. As the LAT pointed out the other day, even Nixon (Nixon!) never went this far. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/la-na-outlook29oct29,0,2375674.column

Maybe this is the right's version of the destructive mayhem of the early 1970s? Only, since they are already in power, they want to take all of us down with them.

The Althouse site itself also appears to be becoming a pallid imitation of Red State. Perhaps they could effect a civil union. The Red Staters can do the heavy thinking and Ann can do Styles. It'd be just like the NYT. How nice!

Forget? I hope not.

Via Altercation http://mediamatters.org/altercation/ I came across this parody:
http://www.thewarofthewords.net/

Quite well done. But I confess that my primary initial emotion ran more along the lines of "humans can be pretty scary" than anything else. Sometimes it seems like technology just gives us the power to be scary messianic idiots more quickly. And I do mean all of us.

Dis-enchantment

Despite having switched to Apple machines several years ago, I liked to think that I was not zealous about the product. I preferred it, true, but also recognized that as a closed system there were certain things you couldn't do with a mac that you could do with a pc. But those all seemed fair tradeoffs, as you were getting something more reliable both as to hardware and software.

I am here to report that it just ain't so. I have owned a powermac, an ibook, and now a macbook. The powermac has never given me a minute of trouble. The ibook was a great machine, except that it was one of those ibooks with a faulty logic board. Apple did replace the board each time it failed (3x!) but still, it would be better to not have a pervasive fault. But, ok, these things happen. So after Apple stopped covering the ibook, I bought a "refreshed" macbook. That failed after 48 hours. So after some hassles, Apple took that back without charging me. So I got a bright and shiny new macbook, and it has had continuous software issues since I updated it to 10.4.8. It's calmed down a bit after I erased the hard drive and started over, but just yesterday it crashed after installing Flash. The upshot of all of this is that while I still think the Apple products are pretty good--and am not planning to return to pc-ville--I will say that it's a mistake to think they will be problem free. Whether these problems are particular to me or whether they are indicative of growing pains with Apple only time will tell.

Evidence of Evidence?

So I was reading David Brooks' review of Andrew Sullivan's most recent book in the NYT today. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/books/review/Brooks.t.html?ref=books

And I come across this:
I have a rule, which has never failed me, that when a writer uses quotations from Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and the Left Behind series to capture the religious and political currents in modern America, then I know I can put that piece of writing down because the author either doesn’t know what he is talking about or is arguing in bad faith.

And then a bit further on there's this:
The people who are most destructively closed-minded in America are people like Donald Rumsfeld, Ann Coulter and Howard Dean, and they are not exactly religious nuts.

Now, there are any number of observations I could make here. I could, for example point out that there's only one political operative named here. Or that no one has actually explained why, precisely, Mr. Dean is "closed-minded." Perhaps its because he's a Democrat who thinks Democrats should win. In that case, I suppose it would be difficult to decide who on the Republican side should be chosen since, apparently, they all think just that same way. Or, if we are talking real (as in fatal) destructive closed-mindedness, why the President wasn't put on this list. But what fascinated me was the use of the same rhetorical maneuver of selective naming employed by the person who levelled the initial criticism of selective naming.

Admittedly, we could stop here, with a simple Bravo! But let's press on, shall we?
If, in light of the observations made about this particular listing, we apply the writer's own "rule," we can see that he is either (a) ill-informed or (b) "arguing in bad faith." Label (a), definitionally, cannot apply here, since the writer has made a living creating a pseudo-typology of American psychologies. So that leaves us with (b). I for one am encouraged to see a commentator so forthrightly display his blade. Reminds me of a charming post at Redstate, wherein the "values" folks attempted to extol the virtues of hypocrisy.

Reactionary

For some time now, I've been puzzled by the reaction to terrorism in the US. 9/11 was a horrible, frightening event (I was in Manhattan that day, though not downtown). But the responses in this country--assuming that every event is terrorism related, throwing out our legal system, a blank check for adventures abroad, and so on--seem wildly disproportionate. The US response seems especially over the top when you look at Europe. Europeans have had to deal with post 9/11 terrorism and other forms as well, especially in the 1970s and 80s, yet the have not upended their institutions as the US has. So what can account for this disproportionate response? I am not a psychologist by training, so my suggestions are just speculation, but I think it's worthwhile to at least raise them if only to broach the subject.

The first notion is that the response in the US is the reactionary expression of the arc of the baby boomer mind. This is of a piece with the notion that boomer liberalism of the 1960s was narcissistic indulgence rather than experimentation. That thread, which became easier to see in the 70s and 80s, suggests that the reaction today is disproportionate not because of actual fear, but because of the heightened response of a narcissist to a perceived threat. Because terrorism is an unknowable, it is a wild card, and thus difficult for a narcissist to sustain the illusion of control against it.

Second, the reaction might also be a function of a certain kind of atavism. The people running the show today grew up in the 50s, a time of repeated fear-mongering about nuclear war. Duck and cover was a popular idea then, even though in a real nuclear attack it would do no good for anyone near a targeted site. Perhaps terrorism evokes--unconsciously--this older fear from childhood, and the response today is really the response to the Soviet Union of the 1950s.

Thoughts?

Quitting Time

So I decided to stop reading and commenting at the Althouse blog today. I did this because the politics posts there have become indistinguishable from GOP talking points. When I started putting up comments I was under the impression that a variety of people read the points there. But I turned out to be wrong. There are a few thoughtful conservatives there, and once in a while a misguided person like me turns up, though most of the folks there are hard core GOP followers. But the main problem I have is with the owner, who prefers to be disingenuous than actually make a substantive point. What I mean by this is that there's never a direct engagement with an argument; instead, for example, there's a criticism of the form of criticism. Now, everyone in blogland is certainly entitled to say what they want. But that doesn't mean I have to play along with it. And after I saw the post yesterday about the NIE, I thought enough was enough. Why did that push me over the edge? Because it was a lift of a sentence that a fair reader would recognize as a selective mischaracterization, and used as the basis for a conclusion that was, literally, nonsense, in that it didn't follow. At some point, you realize that people are not interested in a good faith discussion, but only in playing games. To play Althouse games is to lose, since they are, almost without exception, rigged from the start, or simply distractions from the substantive issue at hand.

If, god forbid, someone actually reads this, I am not saying that the owner of that blog is actually a GOP shill. She may be, or not. Maybe she just wants blog traffic. I don't know. But I do know that there's a persistent pattern of playing games in a fashion that's very similar--though not identical--to the administration and the GOP, and that to go along with those games is, in a deep way, to falsify what little clear discourse is out there.

Dreams Die Hard

When I was younger and more of a naif than I am now, if that's possible, I believed in a few silly notions. I thought that while politicians might lie because they had to, that no one would start a war based on a lie. I turned out to be wrong about that.

Now I'm wrong about something else, too. I thought the US actually stood for something other than selfishness. Sure we're a bunch of materialistic buffoons, sometimes, but we're also fundamentally good-hearted and somewhere, deep inside the wallet, have aspirations of creating a government that, imperfect though it must be, at least strives for something other than self-preservation. No more. I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that Americans think it's ok to torture people. When you realize that most of the people in a position to know think that torture is a bad idea, then the little light bulb goes on. This isn't about results, or getting things done; it's just primal fear, and a desire to submit to authority. More fool I, for buying into the silly idea that we aren't as craven as the next country, clutching our possessions while we sell our souls. Maybe we are all just materialists, and that's all there is.

I always wondered what it might be like to live through a dark period in American history. Perhaps I'll live long enough to find out. But that, of course, requires us to come out of it. And maybe that's just another dream.

Unity

I am sick of the #$%%##@! baby boomers. First they were sure they were right in the 1960s. Lots of really bright ideas then. Now they are older and have the power levers. Guess what? They still think they're right, even though they seem to have changed their rigidity, from "left" to "right". Frankly it looks more like an exchange of one kind of vapidity for another. Perhaps the next generation will simply be pragmatic cynics. At least we can hope...

plagarism

Got curious today about the Washington Post/Red America/Domenench [sp] debacle, so I poked around a bit. Two observations: people with strongly held political beliefs are ready to believe all kinds of nonsense. At first the left thought it was a right-wing conspiracy, and now the right thinks the event was a setup by the Post to discredit it. Funny how we're all wired the same way--paranoid--regardless of our political beliefs. Probably time to revisit Hofstader's The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which I have a copy of but confess to not having read. [My bad.]

The other point is a bit different, but also a broad social one. Older people (anyone over say 50) I think doesn't really grasp how far this country has moved in its acceptance of cheating. Most research I've seen indicates that at least 30% of all resumes have fabricated material on them, which, if you think about it, is an astounding fact. Upwards of 80% of students think it's ok to cheat. My experience bears this out. When I taught two years ago, many of the students simply lifted material without attribution, and when I called them on it they acted offended. My point is that the notion of cheating as morally ok is so deeply entrenched today that it would be foolish for the old-line institutions such as the daily papers or any other entity where honesty still matters to not thouroughly vet their new hires. The cognitive dissonance in America (we all believe in heaven but cheating/stealing/etc. is ok) is rapidly becoming a roar. Boomers, ugh.

A small idea

If we are really enmeshed in a "war on terror" that is so serious as to require abrogration of rights in this country, shouldn't we bring back the draft first?

Narcissism

Have been reading (rereading, technically, but I confess to being unable to remember the first go-round) Lasch's Culture of Narcissism and found it an unsettlingly accurate preview of where we are today. Here is an assessment from the Hoover Institute: http://www.policyreview.org/oct05/rosen.html
This decline of self-reliance would explain our perpetual hysteria these days. I've been a bit surprised by the lack of resilience in the American grain. We've had many many faults, but to discover that lurking behind the SUV-ribbon-Bush chest-beaters is nothing other than anxiety is alarming. Alarming because when people are afraid they make bad policy choices. Retreating to a gated community and telling the rest of the planet to get lost is not, in the long term, a workable solution to anything.

apocryphal?

Heard the other day via the radio that 20% of the US population thinks the sun revolves around the earth. It appears that you CAN fool some of the people ALL the time.

Maureen Dowd

So what exactly does she want? Glamour? A nice guy? What?

My experience is that most successful women have a hard time finding guys for two reasons. First, like guys, they become too enamored of themselves. I suspect it is more difficult to find men who will put up with this. Women are a bit more savvy about human nature and recognize that putting up with a blowhard is a lesser evil than singledom. Second, unlike men, overachieving women are not willing to date down. I have no doubt, for example, that Ms Dowd would not date me, simply on the ground that I am not enough of a power figure. When powerful women are willing to drop their version of male modeling (needing a co-powerful partner) then they will be more likely to find a mate. Assuming they want one.

Some thoughts on going to law school

A few thoughts for those of you thinking about law school this fall. Somebody else can talk about strategy and how great it is to be a lawyer. I'm going to make a few observations about the realities of taking that path. I'm not saying "don't go." I am saying "be sure you know what you and 40,000+ people per year are getting into."

DISCLAIMER: What follows are some observations about the daily life of a lawyer.
IT IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE AND IT IS NOT ACADEMIC ADVICE. [can you tell I went to law school?]

1. Assuming you will get rich is dangerous. A few lawyers make a lot of money (more than a million dollars a year); a greater proportion make a fair amount of money (somewhere between 100,000 and a million), some others make a bit less, and many lawyers earn around the median income. Unless you are a very good lawyer or entrepreneur, chances are you aren't going to make that much money. Some law school graduates find themselves unable to pay off their law school loans. "But what about those 150k starting salary jobs", you may be thinking. The truth is that there aren't that many of those, and there are many many lawyers graduating from law schools each year. It's a numbers game: Unless you are attending a first tier law school or do well (top third of the class, for example) you probably are not going to get one of those jobs. You may not even get interviews for those jobs. So law school is not necessarily a great investment, at least as a moneymaking strategy.

2. Law school is not a good general education. The subject matter is of no use to you outside of law. Nobody besides other lawyers will care about your knowledge of civil procedure. Skills? Law school teaches—and rewards—a very narrow set of skills: reading comprehension, technical writing, and legal advocacy. Because of the peculiarities of law teaching, none of these skills are taught in a way that has much utility outside the field of law. There are some non-lawyer jobs where a JD might be useful, or even required, but generally speaking it's not necessary. If you want to go into business, do so and hire a lawyer to tell you what the rules are.

3. Being a lawyer is, usually, not particularly exciting. This observation is the one you may have encountered before. It needs to be repeated, over and over. Much legal work is clerical, detail work, and this is true of both litigation and non-litigation work. If you do non-litigation work, you will be endlessly redrafting documents for other people. If you do litigation, you will be drafting documents for courts, wading through mountains of paper and your adversary's incomprehensible papers. The vast majority of cases settle so there is precious little opportunity for actual courtroom work. Even then, good courtroom work is the product of months of painstaking attention to detail. Don't do it unless you love detail work.

4. Lawyers don't change the world. An unfortunate misconception to the contrary apparently arose in the 1970s at the high water mark of public interest litigation. That notion--that lawyers do change the world--has stubbornly and unfortunately resisted dying. Law is a deeply conservative practice. It's difficult to argue with that proposition; after all, if law was unstable, an orderly society would be much more difficult to maintain. Lawyers may, sometimes, address or alleviate a grievance or injustice, but that is a world away from changing society. Ask someone who works in public interest law--not a law teacher--about this.

5. The law is a jealous mistress. The phrase is useful, if a bit dated and sexist. All it means is that law is time-consuming and not conducive to doing other things. A full-time legal job will usually require more hours than another full-time job that may pay equally. Do not assume you can do other things in your off hours, because you may not have any off hours. Also, if you practice law, ethics rules may preclude involvement in other activities, moneymaking or otherwise.

Now, if you've looked at these observations and still want to go, more power to you. I STRONGLY encourage you to talk to a lawyer in whichever field you are interested in. There are many great legal jobs, and many people who practice law are quite happy doing just that. Make sure you're one of them. Good luck!

C. Hitchens & Justifications for Iraq

A few thoughts, in no particular order. I should note that I usually post only when I have something to say that hasn't already been said somewhere else. Or so I'd like to believe.

1. C. Hitchens. I can't say that I understand the man, or that I agree with him all that much. Still, I think he at least has the courage of his convictions, which is more than can be said for many of us. But, I find I have difficulties with some of his recent pronouncements, such as the Weekly Standard piece, or his performance last month on The Daily Show (Jon Stewart's show). Here's my first problem with his arguments about Iraq. He may well be right that dethroning Hussein was the right thing to do. But the problem with his approach is that while it may be morally superior, in that it is really a humanitarian argument, it ignores the unpleasant fact that the Bush people did not use that argument as a justification for invading the country. And this, I think, is the reason that so many people would like to leave the affair. Since we were sold a bill of goods, why should we continue to put up with being there? It's all well and good to point out how bad the Baathists were—and I am willing to accept everything Hitchens says on that point. But that's not the reason the US government gave as the reason for the invasion, probably for the simple reason that we wouldn't have gone there, any more than we would have invaded Bosnia or Rwanda. A war started under a false pretext that bogs down will necessarily run into problems, just as this one has done, because it would not have started but for the enabling lies (use inaccuracies if you think that word is too strong—the result is the same). This is another way of saying words do matter.

So at the end, then, we are left with an awkward variation of the ends justifies the means: it's ok that we fibbed our way into this war because it was for a good cause. There may be some scenarios where it's ok, even necessary to lie to achieve a policy. I don't think war should be one of them, as there is something troubling about killing people, ours or theirs, in the service of a rationale that we know is incorrect. And, as we see, once the original, unsustainable rationale is exposed as hollow, the will to see the fight through, which was inextricably linked to that rationale, evaporates, leaving the promoters of the war in an untenable position. Put more rhetorically, we can convince people to fight, kill, and die for certain ideas, but it's dangerous to ask them to fight for something that is demonstrably false.

A related problem with Hitchens' argument is his specific justification for the Iraq war. So far as I can tell, he seems to be suggesting that we saved lives by going in when we did. The problem with that idea is that it too is a switch, though a different kind of switch than the rationale switch. Here, he's adopted a utilitarian justification for an action that is a moral action. There are countries that pose demonstrably greater risks to the US than Iraq did: North Korea, for example. So Iraq was a moral imperative rather than a utilitarian imperative. That's fine, but he's adopted, at least implicitly, a utilitarian argument—means justifies ends—in the service of a moral good. This seems to be a deeply incoherent form of thinking. Since invading Iraq is a moral rather than a utilitarian exercise, the justification should be of the same kind. It is deeply incoherent to justify a moral act (invading Iraq) through a utilitarian strategy (it's ok to mislead people if that gets us into the war). It may well be that there are times when the ends justify the means, or it is either morally acceptable or otherwise useful to mislead the citizenry. War does not appear to fit into those categories as a general proposition (that is not to say that it doesn't happen), and this particular conflict seems an excellent example of the danger of employing mix and match rationales.

My second quarrel involves his "test" of when it's ok to invade a country. The problem with his four conditions is that most countries would probably flunk them. The US certainly would. So should we invade ourselves?

Problematic but brilliant or is it the converse?

I must hand it to the White House. They once again have managed to make a bad situation at least appear to look good for themselves. I am referring to the recent announcement that Social Security should be more explicitly labeled--and rejiggered--as a progressive benefits program. Social Security has always had a progressive, that is, redistributive, component to it, but that bit of information is not, I think, widely known. I didn't know it until I took a course dealing with Social Security. The genius in making the pitch explicit is this: first, it creates a wedge amongst the Democrats and those who prefer to see the program continue to have a redistributive element to it. So it looks like Democrats and others who oppose the White House are somehow against helping poor people. Second, and here's the more important long-term point: it cuts the cord that FDR used to ensure that Social Security would not be ended. The original genius of Social Security was its inclusiveness. Everyone shared in a piece of the pie, so that no one cared that much about the sizes that were doled out. Making Social Security explicitly a means-tested program will destroy its universal support. Why would the middle class support a program that doesn't benefit it? So, down the road, the program will wither--probably not die, but wither so that it is not the all-encompassing success it is perceived of today. Krugman makes a similar point in today's NYT. In other words, the objective is to kill indirectly what can't be done directly. This method is consistent with other White House stratagems--always make your real objective look like something else. This allows you (a) to bamboozle most people and (b) to mischaracterize the opposition and (c) to frame the debate, since most people can't be bothered, don't have the time, or aren't inclined to dig into this kind of issue.

Oh, by the way, there are two reasons this ploy is just that--a ploy. The first is this administration's resolute hostility to means-tested programs. There is no reason to think that this hostility, which is, after all, ideological, not pragmatic, has somehow disappeared. After all, if that were the case, the administration could simply push the point it floated in the past: raise payroll taxes on the richest Americans and leave the benefit structure intact. Second, the timing here is fishy. Only after it became quite obvious that the administration plan was not going to fly did this divide and conquer strategy float to the surface. This administration is quite adept at setting ideological goals, but oddly awkward about responding to changed events, whether those events are 9/11, Terry Schaivo or, to use last week's example, higher gas prices.

Question for the Administration: if people are in fact capable of choosing the best path for themselves, which, as you observed last November, included more votes for your guy, why is it that you, as avatars of a wonderful ideology, find it necessary to cloak your goals in misleading rhetoric? If these ideas are as great as you think they are, why can't they stand on their own?