You Are Where You Eat aka Linkfest

Via Ethicurian, U.S. Food Policy's Google Earth display of ten sites illustrative of US agriculture practices that you probably don't know about.
What I always find fascinating about these displays are the deep complexities in policy that arise over time, growing like an incredible organism until we arrive at the end point of an incomprehensible jumble of blinkered desire, or, to be a bit less polite, greed.

Linkfest, first of ?

I've decided that someone ought to get something out of my perusing the intertubes, and that might as we be you. So, the first in well, probably a lot of links:

Steven Colbert + Glenn Greenwald= Be still, my psyche!

In re: birthers. I have always been fond of Richard Hofstadter, and used to sit in his corner in Butler Library when reading. So I was pleased to find, via LGM this link to The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

Enjoy!

Notes From All Over

Hilzoy has decided to stop blogging. Sorry to see her go; I know of no one else who has been unfailingly rigorous in her attempts to deal with the distortions passed off as accurate in the blogosphere.

Like, no WAY!

CADIE rickrolled me.
OMG.

Meet the New Boss

Yeah, so this is a little obscure. My point is just that with the bailout of Fannie/Freddie (a) the US has to pay for it and (b) someone else called the shots. Ergo meet the new boss. Maybe it was like this in the Middle Ages, too: the king screws up so the peasants have to tithe more hay. Whee!
(video via Calculated Risk)

Post-Modernism Final Exam

Post-Modernism Final Exam

So apparently the GOP has decided to go all in on its post-modern vision of the US. I am continually impressed by the fervency that the Party displays in its message discipline and, really in The Message. The discipline perhaps comes more easily to everyone when you believe that there is no reality other than The Message, whatever it is these days.

Is this 1984? The Handmaid's Tale? Does it matter? I don't think so. The arch reason is that since it's all a construct, attempting to bind this nonsense to a static theory of anything is futile. The non-arch, and possibly the only non-trivial reason for not bothering with this overmuch is that because it is nothing more than whatever the reader chooses to read into it, it's not possible to make sense of it.

Another way to put this is that it is nothing but pure emotion. It doesn't play to anything other than a “narrative” that's already known. In other words, it's like telling a familiar story but with different names. Is a bedtime story with the names changed a different story? No, as anyone bored by the tale or a bored copyright lawyer can tell you. But it has one great great advantage over any other kind of story: we already know how it comes out. There's no worry, and we discount that at our peril.

And that is in a sense the genius of the GOP. They have managed to make the truly abnormal, the berserk fringe in American politics, the normal. It's a story that has been repeated so many times: “bad Democrats”, “someone is out to get us”, “they want to take something away”, “some nasty people are not like us”, ad nausem, that the only effort entailed in this is shoehorning the opposition into the right box. 2004 is perhaps the best example of this, as a pliable Democratic slate lacked the suppleness to evade categorization. My point is merely that like an old shoe this is a narrative that doesn't require much effort on the part of the narrator or reader.

There is one thing that it does require and here, I think, is the real GOP gamble. It requires credulousness on the part of the voter. Credulousness for authority. In 2000 the GOP was able to fool enough people into accepting an unknown. The situation is not quite the same in 2008 because the GOP has been in power since then and the current occupant of the White House is not loved. So the institutional authority that lends power to the narration (the deep voice, if you will) is missing. Thus we see the various efforts to create it out of whole cloth by incessant repetition of the Vietnam War, as if sitting in a cell in North Vietnam somehow confers … something. Again, my point is not that it confers judgement or experience. It's pretty obvious that in this case it does neither. But what it can do is provide a patina of respect, which can be jiggled a bit to look like authority. The point, again, is that if the narrative track is well-worn enough, it's only necessary to make it fit into the existing framework reasonably well. There are no calipers in the voting booth.

So we come to the point: can the GOP sustain a narrative when the facts that might otherwise sustain it point rather profoundly against the narrator? Success here requires both agility and luck, and IMO I think the franchise has run up against two real problems. The first is, as mentioned above, those pesky facts that seem to suggest that the narrator is not the benign all-powerful caretaker the weary anxious voter may take refuge under. The second problem is one the modern (post-Nixon) GOP has not encountered: an opponent who cannot be easily caricatured. Clinton, whatever his skills at oratory, could not resist giving the GOP a bottomless ammo dump. Obama is, in contrast, much more like the Teflon-coated Reagan so that there's really nothing that has stuck to him. Just as important is his grasp of the rhetorical niceties that had been the exclusive province of the GOP till now.

Faced with these perils, the GOP went all out for what it knows best: firming up its base whilst suggesting something else. Thus as any number of Important People have suggested the Palin selection was brilliant, though not for the reasons they have put forth. What I mean is that it was strategically (and, yes, tactically) brilliant in that it allows the GOP to tell the story it likes best—again. But whether it can do it with this particular pick and against this particular opponent at this particular point in time is a different question. Less than 172 hours after the news of the selection, Palin is dogged by stories that are generating friction with GOP efforts to fit her into the narrative. Can the friction be overcome? I doubt it, because all of Palin's problems are problems anyone can understand, and she cannot hide behind the White House. And if you cannot retell the narrative without someone interrupting all the time, then you've lost in the post-modern ring. The truly interesting question, of course, is whether the GOP is correct that politics in the US is, in the TV age, nothing more than a Punch and Judy show signifying nothing. It appears that's the case in good times. We are now entering a double-blind cognition test phase. Cognitive dissonance chin-ups, anyone?

The Nation's Open Letter

Here is a link to The Nation's open letter to Obama. Please take a look at it and if you agree, sign it or pass it on to someone. Thanks!


Update: Bad linky!

Caucus Of Course

Florida and Michigan should hold caucuses. Holding caucuses would give the vote back to these two states (and thus energize the Democratic voters in both states), and might—note might—eliminate a Clinton-Obama deadlock. There’s no guarantee that either contest would, but it is difficult to see what the downside of holding a caucus would be. Outside of Camp Clinton, no one seriously contends that either primary was representative, so it is difficult to argue that a do-over would be antidemocratic. Probably the biggest problem at this point would be the logistical issues, especially if the state parties are unwilling to take on the issue. Apparently the FDP is unwilling to hold a caucus; I leave to your imagination as to why that might be. Can the national Democrats get it together to hold a caucus in Florida and Michigan before the convention? Hard to say, though it looks as if there is no particular urgency on anyone’s part to make either caucus happen. It would be a nice reversal of fortune if these two states could have a role, given the closeness of the Democratic primary race.

History in the Making

It’s difficult to see turning points when they occur if they are not large events. Only later does the thread appear. But today might be different. Here’s some of what happened today:

The United States Senate proved unwilling to pass a measure restoring habeas corpus.
It also refused to articulate any direction regarding the tragedy in Iraq.
It did, however, manage to pass a resolution expressing unhappiness with a newspaper ad.

At the same time, the President held a news conference expressing confidence in the US economy.

While these events were transpiring, the US dollar fell to parity against the Canadian dollar.

For Sale:
One Country. Large, empty in spots. Cheap. Good views; some resources. Clowns included.

Meta-Paris

I confess: I was fascinated by visions of Paris this last Friday. More precisely, I was fascinated by the response to her physical return to the system. I thought at first it was just garden-variety schadenfreude but after a bit of reflection (such as it is) I think the episode speaks more to the importance the public attaches to an unspecified but deeply felt sense of fairness. I don’t think it’s that important, or even possible, to define exactly where this line lies; it’s probably not possible to do so, even if someone were foolish enough to try (hello?). But it does exist, and it’s dangerous to cross it, so I’m going to try to delineate its shape rather than its precise location.

We have three points this week for location purposes. First, we have Paris and the general outpouring of unhappiness at the idea that she would be released from jail before serving a certain number of days. I don’t think it matters whether its 23 days or 45 days; what matters is that it not be less than a week. In other words, her release triggered a sense of unfairness in that she should receive the same treatment as a similarly situated poor person might.

Point number two for the week was the defeat of the immigration bill. As recounted in the NYT a great number of “ordinary” people made their opposition to the immigration bill known, and the upshot was the bill’s defeat. For many people it seems that the question was one of fairness, as the story illustrates by quoting a woman who’d performed volunteer work but thought it was unfair to give out benefits to people who’d broken the rules. (Note to my three readers: I’m not taking a stance on a solution to the illegal immigration debacle here.)

Point number three is interesting because it comes from an unlikely source: a U.S. District Judge. I’m referring to the footnote where the judge, in the course of granting a motion for leave to file an amicus brief on behalf of Mr. Libby, suggests that the prominent conservative academics running to support Mr. Libby should also expect to be called upon to use their skills on behalf of less well-heeled defendants. Now, it’s true that strictly speaking, this is more snark than claim of fairness. But still, it makes its point by bluntly comparing the spectacle of these academics rushing to Libby’s defense with the lack of resources that other, poorer defendants face in the system. (There’s another take on the Paris-Scooter juxtaposition at Balkinization.)

Taking these three points together, what we have are three examples of an unwillingness to accept a degree of unfairness that seems beyond the norm. In other words, two of these events roused the general public, and the third roused a District Judge to protest elite “business as usual.” What’s my point? Just this: Americans will tolerate a great deal of structural unfairness, perhaps in the service of particular ideologies, preferences, or wants, but somewhere there’s a notion of fairness that kicks in when pressed hard enough. I know of no one who wouldn’t agree that one’s experience in the legal system is likely to be a better one if one has more money. Most people accept that, just as they accept a certain amount of imbalance in other aspects of their lives. At some point, however, the limit of tolerance is reached, and the cry of “unfair” goes up. Why does this matter? It matters because it’s useful to get a sense of where the bottom line in unfairness resides; it’s a fault line through American life. Perhaps all these episodes demonstrate is that the floor of unfairness is pretty low. Still, it’s reassuring to know that there’s some point beyond which even Americans resist the call of self-indulgence.

Things to Thank the Bush Administration For

Good Faith Matters.
Perhaps.

If there’s anything that may come of the various GOP attempts to destroy government at the Federal level, perhaps one of the most salient will be a recognition that institutions are more than just a collection of people operating under political authority. The Bush administration has operated government as if it is politics all the way down. A corollary of this kind of thinking is treating the unwritten norms of a government institution—EPA, DOJ, FEMA, for example—as if they had no effect or weight. This includes the apparently quaint notion that one holding a position of authority should act in good faith. The end result has been obvious but what I want to point out is not the obvious damage such as the raw incompetence, chicanery, fraud, self-dealing and theft this approach has brought about, but rather the insidious but more long-lasting harm to the mores of the institutions the Administration has assaulted. In other words, as Mr. Rove has repeatedly demonstrated, it’s possible to destroy an institution by refusing to accept good faith as a constraint on the exercise of power. Comey’s testimony this week demonstrates this doctrine in action: when you don’t get the answer you want, just try to game the system to achieve a different outcome. In this particular instance, apparently the gambit did not work but that was probably due to the threat of wholesale resignations. It is a sad but revealing comment on the decay of official Washington that it took a dramatic scene out of the Godfather movies to make at least a few official voices recognize that at least a few people in positions of power still believed that the government had some meaning independently of the individuals holding power at the moment. What the defenders of the status quo (e.g., what was called in an earlier day the Establishment) appear to have, finally, realized is that at the end of the day if the people in power simply refuse to act in good faith, no governmental body will be anything other than a Party apparatus. Time will tell whether it is possible to recover from this poisonous self-dealing.

I am of the opinion that if we as a country continue to exalt cleverness without compunction ("Yes, you're clever. Now sit down.") whatever democracy in the US is left will be destroyed. The remnant will be a shell—a nice marble façade, but a false front. Eventually the gap between pretense (accountable, democratic government) and reality (political power exercised without accountability) will be so great as to resemble the gap between the Soviet constitution and the Soviet state. I don't care to speculate on what kind of havoc that situation would


Here, and here are two of the most thoughtful posts I've seen on the Comey testimony and its implications.

Better Late Than Never

So I haven't written for a while. My bad, but I haven't had much to contribute to the ether of late, so it hasn't been a real loss. (This is where someone might insert an emoticon, if they so desired.) Generally, I don't post when someone I read has already said what I was thinking: I have plenty of ego, but I don't feel the need to be an echo chamber. I am making an exception now because I am finding only a few bloggers have made the following point.

It appears that the U.S. of A. (you know, us) is planning to attack Iran. There's plenty of chatter about it, and the administration has made a series of maneuvers that look as if they are designed to provide a rationale for an attack. I don't want to argue about those points. The greater problem, at least for me, is that the U.S. seems to have adopted the Bush Administration's argument in favor of wars of aggression without any serious discussion. In other words, while there are discussions about the validity of evidence regarding Iran's intentions, and the consequences of an attack on Iran, almost no one is making the point that the U.S. has no business attacking nations that have not attacked it. I find it astounding that there's no discussion on this point in the mainstream press; so far as I can tell, the discussions center on procedural details and policy questions about the effects of an attack. No one seems to question the notion that the U.S. can bomb another country that has not attacked it; the only issue is whether it's a good idea to do so. Have we all been so brainwashed that we don't even stop to think about what we are doing? Can we really have arrived at the point where our only concern about waging war is whether it's good for us?

So what to do? Well, if you think the U.S. should not be engaged in these kinds of actions then I encourage you to write to your representatives and let them know that you are opposed to making offensive war. Period. Don't give the game away by demanding that the U.S. require more evidence before engaging in more war. The question is whether the U.S. should wage offensive war. I would have thought the answer was no. It may well be no. We might be misguided enough to say yes (it's not as if we haven't done it before). But at least we ought to try to have a discussion about it, no?

Politics: for children only?

The Washington Post has an exceptionally silly editorial today about Gen. Pinochet. Aside from being disgenuous tripe that, as usual, attempts in an underhanded way to glorify authoritarianism, it throws in an even sillier attempt to claim that Jeanne Kirkpatrick was correct. Both claims are so wrong-headed as a factual matter that I find myself being once again puzzled by the willingness of "grownups" to write and publish material that belongs in a high school diary. As usual, I fall back on my theory that only narcissism explains this kind of silliness.

The Post had a great deal of credibility. Too bad they have decided to throw it away on conservative crack binging.

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.