Volpone

Ahem! A stranger / rather manages

2006-07-27T23:32:00.000-04:00

Paradise is a despair. Paradiso is nothing but arid soap.

Purgatory is an Arty Group. (Alternately, Purgatorio is a poor guitar.)

Inferno? You'll find no finer place.

Hink Pink

2006-07-25T12:08:00.000-04:00

In AP Physics in High School, I sat in the back doing crosswords. When a test happened, I'd just deduce all the identities I needed. Eventually, the crossword's more inspired answers led to word games. Now, I've been reminded of this by:

1) the discovery that this game has a name

and

2) the rediscovery of a few of these I wrote down.

Some examples:

a measurer of Ceres's distance - a Demeter odometer
brief poem about blindness - Magoo Haiku
reduced shine - dimmer glimmer
former up-and-downer - elevator abdicator
inflammable currency - expungible fungible
sight gag - visible risible
the cost of clothes - raiment payment
a ruler's taunter - Caesar teaser

See if you can get some of these:
public water
elementary dent
church musician who turns people to stone
spirited primate
brainwasher
snooped on Neptune
Grain-grinder's bane
seems like food
legendary imbiber
good-luck snacks
farmer's sign
internet access repair
chat about drums

Or come up with some of your own.

Speech Qua Speech

2006-07-25T12:04:00.000-04:00

The term "absolute" only harms my argument if my definition of freedom of speech does not already exclude the sorts of cases MotJuste and I agree should be punishable. My contention is that free speech can be reasonably construed in a way that does already exclude those cases. I think that the "absolute" issue is a red herring here. MotJuste responds to my argument about accidental impedement of speech:

The above all seems both obvious and irrelevent. How do they support the point
of your beleif in absolute speech, or the statement that "free speech does not
mean you can say whatever you want"? Unless your point is 'you can't say what
you want if you're mute/dead' which, duh. You also cannot say what you want if
you're too stupid to express it, or don't know the language you wish to speak
in, or are unconcious, or are a potted plant, etc. Irrelevent.

Perhaps I should have qualified the term and said I believe in absolute legal freedom of speech. (i.e. congress shall make no law...) I had assumed that we were using the term as shorthand for something like the 1st amendment.Anyhow, I hope an example will clear up what I mean by speech as speech.

MotJuste writes:

The will to perform a violent act is not punishable by law. It is the physical
action taken-- speech-- that is punished. Speech which is an incitement to
violence is a kind of speech and therefore if it is limited, speech is not
absolutely free.

This is false. Unless I've somehow missed the point. If I hold a large knife up to someone and say "I will kill you with this now," the law recognizes this as grounds for intervention. However, if a theater actor on stage says the exact same words to another actor, this is not grounds for intervention. But I can also be arrested for attempted murder if I swing a knife at someone and am stopped before it kills that person.Case 1: speech and punishmentCase 2: speech and no punishmentCase 3: punishment and no speechClearly, speech is not the criterion here. In case 1 and case 3, assuming no actual physical wound is made, what is being punished is clearly the will to act. If we somehow knew that the assailant meant to run up to someone with a knife, swing, and then stop the blade before it touched the other person, attempted murder would not be the appropriate charge. At the same time, freedom of speech does not protect us from actions that accidentally -- that is, with some other goal in mind -- impede speech.Otherwise, we could not punish people on the basis of confessions or guilty pleas.To put it simply, freedom of speech means that there must be no restriction that simply states "you may not say [x]."

2006-07-18T00:53:00.000-04:00

In response to Support Censorship by MotJuste:
MotJuste writes:

I don't believe in free speech. Anyone you ask will say they do and mostly they're lying, because free speech means anything, means you can say absolutely anything with no legal consequences, including slander, libel, plaigarism, etc. And people will then go "Well obviously not slander" but then, that's censorship. There's that famous Voltaire quote "I might not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." I disagree with that, but I admire him for it because he really understood the principle. Most people who advocate freedom of speech and no censorshipnhave no idea what they're talking about.

And then, oh, the artists. Censorship of art. I love artists and the arts and part of my censorship support is for them: I believe that people don't have the right to violate others' rights to life, liberty or property, and that it is possible to do so with words. Plaigarism is a violation of the victim's right to property. Lying about someone ina court of law can get them injustly imprisoned-- liberty. And if you have information about a te year old girl, where she lives, what her daily routine is, and you put that information up all over the web for any crazy to see along with easy step-by-step instructions on how to kidnap, rape and murder her, that's a violation of her right to life and it shouldn't be allowed.

These sound extreme and I know tha tthey're exceptions, not the rule. And usually I support freedom of speech, but any exception at all means I support censorship, so the standard goes like this:

"We have the right to freedom of speech, to be limited if and only if said speech constitutes a clear and present danger to the fundamnetal rights of others, is slander, plaigarism or libel, or would falsely incite a reasonable person to violence or panic."

It isn't perfectly worded, of course.

It's either that or I support total freedom of speech, in which the victim could retaliate by mailing detailed accounts of how to get into the perp's home to every psycho who might try it but honestly, I'd rather just have everyone protected.

And, there's a real life example.

There's a little college in Canada. Around the campus there were Missing Women posters. They detailed that these women were missing and had probably been abducted from the campus. Women were urged to watch out, be safe. This sort of thing isn't uncommon-- violent crimes against women are an unfortunate but very present reality in most modern womens' minds-- and a lot of people were very angry and afraid. A rally was organized, people met at a certain place and time to go looking for these women. But instead of going looking for them, the search party was lead to the concert of a new band. The posters had been a publicity stunt to raise buzz. The man who thought it up, named Edwin Booth, also directed the band's music video-- which pictured them abducting and beating their old ex-girlfriends and advocated those actions. Booth, when criticized, claimed that people were trying to censor him for his art. He claimed to be a supporter of total free speech. (Later he complained that people were slandering him.)

By my standards, Edwin Booth should go to jail.

By his standards, someone should be allowed to to find out all of his personal information. Where he lives, when he's home and when he isn't. What the easiest way is to break into his house. That person then finds out an easy way to kill Edwin Booth. Shooting him, say. This person then finds out places where you can buy guns, and how to get rid of one afterwards. How to cover forensic evidence and where to run to when you've finished. They then find someone-- say, a man, somewhat deranged, who's daughter was kidnapped and beaten, raped and killed, who is very angry and has nothing left to lose. They give this man this information. They sit down with him and convince him that Edwin Booth has to die. The man uses this information to kill Edwin Booth, get away with it, is never found. Or maybe he is found, or he dies in the process, or whatever. The person who provided him with the information is entirely public about doing so. Makes the public statement, "Edwin Booth deserved to die and I saw to it that he did. The only thing I didn't do was pull the trigger." That person can't be arrested.

Wherein lies justice?

Okay, here we go.

I believe in absolute freedom of speech.

I also agree that in the abuses MotJuste describes, people should be punished?

I can believe these two things because free speech does not mean you can say whatever you want. Other laws still apply.

It should be understood that free speech means freedom from government interference with speech. Obviously, owners of private property may make institute whatever rules they wish on their property.

Moreover, this does not empower people to say things that would otherwise be beyond their ability. Mutes and illiterates still have freedom of speech.

Finally, and crucially, freedom of speech does not affect laws with the accidental effect of supressing speech. A man who has been executed by the state for multiple murders can no longer speak. Yet this execution is not a violation of his right to freedom of speech. Why? Because speech was never the issue.

So when a constitution guarantees the right to freedom of speech, or freedom from governement laws infringing on freedom of speech, what it means is not that speech will not be impeded, but speech will never be punished as speech. You cannot simply ban a viewpoint. "Because I say so" ceases to be a justification. As a certain American lawyer argued against the Crown shortly before the revolution, truth is a defense against accusations of libel.

Freedom of speech does not conflict with laws against fraud -- you would be allowed to say those things, provided you were not being fraudulent about it too.

Freedom of speech does not conflict with laws against incitement to violence. The state is punishing the will to perform a violent act. In no way is this morally different from punishing physically attempted murder.

Violations of privacy are violations of property, or at least something strongly analogous to property.

The qualification "when no one's rights are violated" is a good sentiment, but at least in understanding the meaning of laws, the identity and extent of rights is bound to be highly controversial when you get down to more complicated specifics.

2006-07-18T00:51:00.000-04:00

Hooray. My two target piano skills have finally begun to materialize.

1) I can now improvise flexibly. It's not just set fingering exercises in the chords I'm playing anymore. I can integrate that with improvised tunes. I gues the goal is to ultimately be as good with the piano as I am with my own voice. That'll still take some time, as the piano involves chords, but I'm getting there.

2) Playing music fast enough to make it mostly coherent on the first read. Of course, this is far from sight reading, but I think I've turned the corner on this two.

What's weird is that these gains have come at a time when I haven't been practicing very intensely at all. Once or twice a week, 20 minutes or so at a time.

So there is some hope that I'll eventually get around to becoming a master pipe organist in my spare time. Of course, then I'll need to get a pipe organ, but that's a comparatively minor problem. Maybe I'll steal one? Sneak into a church and stuff the full pipe organ into my pocket?

Like that far side cartoon. If you know the one I mean, you get 2 cultural literacy points.

Why Think?

2006-06-18T11:42:00.000-04:00

So, I've just read The Birth of Tragedy, and I'm pretty sure now that Nietzsche poses, as I suspected, the only serious challenge to the examined life.

The difficulty is this:

It is not too hard, on the grounds of reason and truth, to commit oneself to the examined -- philosophic -- life. To value reason over faith, and logic over feelings as a source of knowledge.

But while we should value logic over emotions as a means of achieving the truth, it does not necessarily follow that we should value logic over emotions as a means of achieving happiness. The second, implied premise in the syllogism is that truth is always the best way to achieve happiness.

Of course, this ends up being true -- empirically, obviously true -- when we are talking about external goods. Truth is useful in getting stuff. But what about emotions? What about the value of believing certain things? It is conceivable that believing a true thing, while leading to external efficacy, could be so deeply disturbing as to not be worth it. Or believing a false thing might cause a good far greater than its practical harm.

For this reason, any way of thinking about the world, at its root, must have what Nietzsche calls an aesthetic justification. We need to be able to tell ourselves a compelling and appealing story about out worldview. This is not only a tool for self-deception. No, the man of reason cannot afford to ignore this need. If the life of reason is in fact the best, it too needs an aesthetic justification -- gods and myths of a sort.

This inquiry, of course, carries grave risks for rational philosophy. After all, we can't presuppose that our current way of life is correct when examining it. But all life carries risks.

We are surrounded by a thousand fates. Let us enter the fight. -Homer

There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya 'bout the raising of the wrist. -Monty Python

2005-08-06T00:52:00.000-04:00

Instapundit points out Michael Totten's photo-fisking of Juan Cole. Totten responds to Cole's assertion that "We are not at war" with a series of photographs of the awful deeds of the terrorists. But I think this misses the point. Cole was commenting not on the magnitude of the threat we face, but the kind of threat.

Cole writes:

You have to think about terrorists as units of hardware, on which software has
been installed. The software is a world-view, a set of premises about the world,
which then make sense of the terrorist's actions. How does the software get
installed? The potential terrorist meets the installer socially and falls under
his spell. The terrorists don't have a social background in common. They aren't
lumpen proletariat or working class or middle class or bourgeois. Or rather,
they have in their ranks persons from all these backgrounds.The terrorists don't
have an ethnicity in common. Richard Reid and Lindsey Germaine were Caribbean.
Others are Arabs. Some have been Somali or Eritrean or Tanzanian. Others have
been South Asia (India/Pakistan/Bangladesh). Still others have been
African-American or white Americans. They don't even have to start out Muslim.
Ayman al-Zawahiri was particularly proud of an al-Qaeda operative in Afghanistan
who had been an American Jew in a previous life. Ziad Jarrah, one of the
September 11 hijackers, appears to have been a relatively secular young man
right to the end. It isn't about religion, except insofar as religion is a basis
on which the recruiter can approach his victim. Islam as a religion forbids
terrorism. But then so does Christianity, and that doesn't stop there being
Christian terrorists. They are a fringe in both religions.If you try to
"profile" the terrorist using such social markers as class or ethnicity, maybe
even religious background, you will go badly astray.What then do they have in
common? They got the software installed in their minds. Why? Because they met
the installer, and were susceptible to his worldview. That's all they have in
common.

In other words, the threat is too amorphous to fight by war. After describing an allegedly typical situation in which a young Muslim man might be lured into the ideology of radical Islamist terrorism, Cole concludes:

So how do you fight this form of terror? You disrupt the installation of the
software in more and more minds. You adopt policies that make the story the
software tells implausible. And you reach out to make sure people hear the
implausibility.

The error he makes is not an error of degree. It is far more obvious than that, and I'm surprised that this wasn't Totten's primary objection as well. The fact is, the terrorists, in international organizations such as Al Qaeda, operate training camps -- they did in Afghanistan -- and coordinate their support activities under the protection of large nations, such as Iran and Syria.

The reason we are struggling to democratize the Middle East is not jsut a direct attempt to alleviate poverty and hopelessness; these aren't identical with terrorism. Rather, it stems from the realization that terrorism will always be in the interests of tyranny, and never in the interests of liberal democracy. To eliminate safe harbors for terrorists, we must eliminate the regimes that naturally wish to encourage or tolerate terrorism, and replace them with regimes that by nature oppose it.

Ah, but you see, those places of safe harbor and institutions of international coordination don't exist to Cole:

I can't figure out who they think they are fighting a war against. It sure
isn't the Muslim world. Morocco as a country couldn't be more friendly and
cooperative, and we have good trade relations with it. Algeria likewise.
Tunisia? A topflight relationship. Even Libya is coming around. Egypt? A
non-NATO ally. Palestine? We give them hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Jordan? A closer friend you couldn't find. Lebanon? Very friendly except for
Hizbullah and even they haven't hit American targets any time in the past
decade. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Yemen, Oman, Iraq, Turkey, Uzbekistan,
Afghanistan.

It is incredible how good the relations are between the United States and
almost all the countries of the Muslim world. They provide us with a NATO ally
(Turkey) and 4 of our five non-NATO allies! The only sour notes are Bashar
al-Asad in Syria (who hasn't done anything to us as far as I know) and Iran,
with which our relationship needn't be different from that with Venezuela under
Chavez (leaders of both countries badmouth the US, but don't seem actively to
harm us in ways that are visible to me). It will be argued that Iran is trying
to get a nuclear weapon. But a) we don't know that for sure; and b) even if it
were to succeed in doing so, how would it be different from the Soviet Union,
which hated us much more than Iran does and which had thousands of warheads
pointed at us? So far no two countries, both of which have nuclear weapons, have
fought a major war with one another, and the reason is clear. This is not to say
it could not happen, but it is unlikely. As for the Mad Cheney scenario whereby
a state gives nuclear weapons to terrorists to use on the US, puh- lease. Even
my five year old niece wouldn't believe that whopper. States don't share nuclear
bombs with terrorists; and it is not as if a bomb's provenance could not easily
be traced.

That we have acted as if friends to the Palestinian Authority in no way necessitates their acting in a friendly way towards us. To talk about Libya "coming around" without acknowledging the role the Iraq campaign had in that seems to me disingenuous. The idea that the Saudis are our friends -- which ones? How many? Certainly not all. Saudi Arabia does not have a unified government; it is clearly split between the terrorists' side and ours.

And as for the alleged reluctance of states to give terrorists nukes, it bears repeating that we are not fighting entirely sane and rational people right now.

2005-07-24T16:33:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago I was invited to giv a d'var Torah -- a little talk about a portion of the five books of Moses. The portion for that week was Numbers, ch. 13-15. Here it is, with slight modifications:

We approach the Bible with certain prejudices. Some see it as a historical document, stitched together from other accounts, a cul;tural text with no one author.

Mark Twain is supposed to have told a preacher he had just heard, "that was a fine speech,"

"Thank you," said the preacher.

"I have a book at home that contains every word of it," said Twain.

"That's quite impossible."

"I say that I have it."

"I should like to see it, then."

"I'll send it to you," said Twain.

A few days later, the preacher received in the mail a package containing an unabridged dictionary. So even if the torah were shown to be stitched together from previous sources, someone did the stitching. Moreover, it reads as if it were written with intention.

Others come to the study of the Torah with religious bias, certain philosophical, theological ideas about how God should be, and what He should say. God is omnipotent, omniscient, and good. He supports the virtues we value, and condemns what we consider vicious. and He always tells the truyth; indeed, He is truth.

The problem with the theological bias -- the philosophic religous approach to the Bible -- is that it is constantly under attack by a simple reading of the text.

"And the Lord spoke thus to Moses: Send for yourself men that they may scout out the land of Canaan..." (Numbers 13:1-2). Why? Is god unfamiliar with the terrain? Moses, the man who the torah tells us knew God best, sees this as military reconnaisance and strategic information-gathering. clearly, God is not simply acting as an omniscient, omnipotent commander. Moreover, if we unserstand this story at face value, it's a debacle. The Children of Israel refuse to enter the land, until God orders them to go back into the wilderness for 40 years, at which point they try to enter the land and ar vanquiched.

But perhaps this is not meant to be taken at face value. After all, the so-called spies or scouts are not selected on the basis of competence or willingness, but as distinguished leaders within each tribe, "heads of the Children of Israel" (13:2-3). Perhaps they were selected as twelve witnesses, to inform not God or Moses, but the Children of Israel.

Representation of each group in a society means two things in a modern context: deliberative assembly (cf. for instance the American Senate), and symbolic full participation, as at local events at which all community leaders, even those not directly involved, are present. Both apply here.

First, since each tribe is represented, all the tribes -- the tribes, not just the leadership -- are entitled to a report. Second, Israel functions as at least a partial democracy, or at least responsive to popular pressure: popular sentiment often is the impetus for an action. Soon, Korach's rebellion against the privileged elite almost wins, and is not put down by centrally organized force, but when the earth splits beneath him. In other words, he falls out of touch with his base of support.

Also, notice that the ten wicked spies are not wicked for spreading scurrilous, false rumors. They are punished though they tell the truth. The land is filled with milk and honey -- as they say. They did, in fact (the torah's fact) encounter the offspring of Giants -- as they say. And it is true that without some miracle, the children of Israel were at that time unable to contend with the Aamalekites and Canaanites, and got, in the Torah's word "pounded" -- as they correctly predicted.

So what was the problem?

(Aside: A friend later pointed out that part of the problem was that they attributed their own view of things to the giant's sons: they say, "we were like grasshoppers in our eyes, and in theirs. I don't have much to say about this, but it's worth pointing out.)

The problem is that they were being unhelpful in undermining Moses's and God's ability to lead effectively, while Joshua and Caleb, who understood what was expect3ed of them from their commander, accentuated the positive.

so far a literal understading will take us.

But if God shows us by His actions that it can be wrong for men to be forthoming, might He Himself dissemble, or at least likewise not tell the whole story?

The God of the Torah is not the God of philosophic truth, of theology. But it can't be wrong to talk about God in anthropomorphic terms, since this is God to us, i.e. how He affects our world. The God of the Torah gets angry, experiments, and is affected by and changes in response to our world. It is no accident that at the sea where the Egyptians drowned, horse and rider, the Israelites exclaimed not "Zeh Hael," "This is God," but "Zeh Eli," "This is my God." The Torah is a teaching text and its God is a teaching God.

God's command serves two purposes. First, Israel cannot successfully invade Canaan without a willingness to proceed even knowing the dangers ahead. Second, God shown what is expected of the subordinate, tribal leaders. They, not having been privy to God's thoughts, acted inappropriately in doing what they thought defied Him and Moses.

[MORE TO COME LATER]

Bylines Matter

2005-07-13T20:38:00.000-04:00

The New York Times's Sarah Boxer has written an atrociously condescending and snobbish attack on a beautiful statement against the terrorists, We're Not Afraid.

So I thought: Sarah Boxer? Where have I heard that name before? Something to do with Iraq... Oh, that's right, the one who wrote a condescending, snobbish, and outright irresponsible article about one of the bloggers at iraqthemodel, in which she insinuated that he might have been a CIA agent. That's right. She suggested that an Iraqi blogger, in the midst of a sea of terrorism and Islamofascist hysteria, might be a CIA agent. I don't know about you, but I sure appreciate it when reporters from the New York Times don't endanger my life. Oh, and she also failed to represent the facts accurately. But that almost goes without saying for the Mainstream Media.

More info on the past debacle at Jeff Jarvis, Chrenkoff and at iraqthemodel.

Speaking of CIA agents, y'know Judith Miller? The one who's in jail for refusing to reveal her source who may have outed "undercover" CIA agent Valerie Plame?

Well, the name rings a bell to me. You see, the woman has some history at the NYT.

She's famous for her enthusiastic coverage of WMD claims. Jack Shafer writes about this at Slate, here and here (and elsewhere).

But that's not all! The excitable and adventurous Ms. Miller allegedly commandeered the combat unit she was embedded with to serve her own agenda.

Actually, I think this is kind of neat. I feel like I'm getting to know the wacky cast of the New York Times Reporters. Sarah Boxer -- elitist snob. Judy Miller -- gung-ho gal. Nicholas Kristoff -- sane. Paul Krugman -- no Nick Kristoff.

Don't you just love the sense of community this small world allows?

But seriously, what kind of a circus is it at the New York Times, hat these people are still employed there? A poorly edited one, I say.

The Public Good is a Tyrant

2005-07-08T21:20:00.000-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/08/opinion/08krugman.html

Anyone who reads Krugman seriously and closely can see for himself how manifestly absurd most of his arguments are. But it's fun to point it out sometimes. Example:

In today's America, proposals to do something about rising obesity rates must contend with a public predisposed to believe that the market is always right and that the government always screws things up. You can see these predispositions at work in an article printed last month in Amber Waves, a magazine published by the Department of Agriculture. The article is titled "Obesity Policy and the Law of Unintended Consequences," suggesting that government efforts to combat obesity are likely to be counterproductive. But the authors don't actually provide any examples of how that might happen.
And the authors suggest, without quite asserting it, that because people freely choose obesity in a free market, it must be a good thing.
"Americans' rapid weight gain may have nothing to do with market failure," the article says. "It may be a rational response to changing technology and prices. ... If consumers willingly trade off increased adiposity for working indoors and spending less time in the kitchen as well as for manageable weight-related health problems, then markets are not failing."

I don't think anyone serious is arguing that obesity is, in itself good. If Krugman's quote is fairly representative, the authors clearly suggest, in fact, that it is a bad, calling taking obesity along with less physical labor a trade-off. In a tradeoff, something is lost for a greater good. (If Krugman's quote is unfair and stripped of important context, something I wouldn't put past him, then of course It's harder to tell. I'll read the article and update the post if there's any discrepancy worth pointing out.

The argument is actually quite simple: If people voluntarily do something, it's because they want to, you see.

How can medical experts who see obesity as a critical problem deal with an ideological landscape tilted in the direction of doing nothing?
One answer is to focus on the financial costs of obesity, and the fact that many of these costs fall on taxpayers and on the general insurance-buying public, rather than on the obese individuals themselves. (To their credit, the authors of the Amber Waves article do mention this issue, although they play it down.)

Do you see what's going on? The government took responsibility for -- i.e. saddled us with the responsibility for -- achunk of health care. Of course, it was supposed to be just economic control, the socialist fantasy. Government will fund universities -- but there will still be academic freedom. government will fund health care -- but not control Doctors' and patients' choices. Political campaigns will be publicly financed -- but the incumbents will somehow not use this to their advantage.

But then, you see, the choices you make become an economic matter affecting me -- because I'm paying for it, see. To fund museums, except when they display blasphemy, is to penalize blasphemy by means of the state; to punish it, in other words. To fund highways -- unless the drinking age is under 21 -- is to levy an extra tax on those states that shoose not to infantilize young adults.

And similarly, when government takes control of healthcare, it becomes clearly in the public interest to penalize people who spend public money on their vices, by doing unhealthy things and racking up big medical bills. With our corporatist (i.e. fascist) health care policy, other people pay for that, in the form of higher premiums.

So government money does mean government control, and there is no social freedom without economic freedom.

But why is freedom good? Because it lets people do what they want to. And that's what good is: it's what people want. "The good is that at which all actions aim." Aristotle said that thousands of years ago, in the beginning of the Nichomachean Ethics. It was the seed of liberty. Let's not let it die.

It is more important, however, to emphasize that there are situations in which "free to choose" is all wrong - and that this is one of them.

Oh. I see. How silly of me!

For one thing, the most rapid rise in obesity isn't taking place among adults, who, we hope, can understand the consequences of their decisions. It's taking place among children and adolescents.

Have you heard of "parents"? We entrust children to the care of their parents. This is due to parental, not governmental, neglect. But wait. Earlier in the column, Krugman wrote:

Public health activists were successful in taking on smoking in part because at the time corporations didn't know how to play the public opinion game. By today's standards, the political ineptitude of Big Tobacco was awe-inspiring. In a famous 1971 interview on "Face the Nation," the chairman of the board of Philip Morris, confronted with evidence that smoking by mothers leads to low birth weight, replied, "Some women would prefer having smaller babies."

In other words: If it makes you bigger -- it's bad. If it makes you smaller -- it's bad.

Some people have trouble controlling their weight without smoking. Krugman mentions the dramatic decline in smoking rates. But he ends his article by writing:

Above all, we need to put aside our anti-government prejudices and realize that the history of government interventions on behalf of public health, from the construction of sewer systems to the campaign against smoking, is one of consistent, life-enhancing success. Obesity is America's fastest-growing health problem; let's do something about it.

But isn't it possible that our obesity rate's increase is a part -- a necessary side effect -- of this "consistent, life-enhancing success"?

The real gem, though, is this:

And even if children weren't a big part of the problem, only a blind ideologue or an economist could argue with a straight face that Americans were rationally deciding to become obese. In fact, even many economists know better: the most widely cited recent economic analysis of obesity, a 2003 paper by David Cutler, Edward Glaeser and Jesse Shapiro of Harvard University, declares that "at least some food consumption is almost certainly not rational." It goes on to present evidence that even adults have clear problems with self-control.

We can't have freedom - people might do the wrong thing!

Of course people sometimes act irrationally. But I'm not people, and I'm not harmed by what other people do to themselves -- except when I'm forced to pay for it by socialists like Krugman.

Strauss

2005-05-30T15:24:00.000-04:00

The Waltz parties at St. John's College clearly reflect the Straussian influence.

Being a passable ballroom dancer, I am posting the first of several letters to my friend Ali Schwab on Leo Strauss's The City and Man in an attempt to summarize the argument. So far, it's worked well as a means of remembering and absorbing the book.

Dear Ali,

You asked me to give you the Cliff's Notes of Leo
Strauss's The City And Man, and I promised to do so as soon as I understood
it. Well, I've read the introduction, and the first of the three essays --
on Aristotle's Politics -- so here it is.

The main point of the
introduction is that it is proper and necessary to read ancient political
philosophers. This is because only by doing so can we achieve the proper
historical perspective, and also understand the presuppositions of modern social
science.

This is necessary, to Strauss, because the West is
in a crisis. This crisis comes from the lack of a clear thing the West
stands for, which is critical for the West because it is a culture that once
stood for universal enlightenment and freedom. But in the age of Communism
-- not a Western movement because it is combined with "Eastern despotism" --
however much of a universal standard the West claims, it must exist in practice
as one of two competing cultures. (Strauss compares this situation to
Christianity and Islam in time past.)

The problem is that social
science as understood now cannot make value judgments, because of the fact-value
distinction, the difference between empirical judgements about what is, which
are supposed to be universal and verifiable, and values, which are supposed to
be subjective. Because of this, science -- empirical knowledge -- cannot
say, alone, how man ought live.

Political philosophy, meanwhile,
has decayed into ideology,which is shown by the fact that the study of political
philosophy has been replaced by the study of the history of political
philosophy. Logic, claiming the place of political philosophy, enforces
the separation of facts from values.

The other part of political
philosophy has been coopted by political science, the study of man's political
behavior and the forming of universal laws to describe it. Here, though,
we must study many political climates, different times and places, to grasp the
universals common to all.

And political science must be concerned
not merely with institutions, but ideologies as well, insofar as they influence
the actions of men. And an important species of ideology is the teaching
of a political philosophy. The historian, then, must understand these
teachings to understand how they affect men. To do so, he must understand
them on their own terms, which comprises understanding his own presuppositions,
those of political science, and social science as a whole. So the history
of political philosophy is the discipline concerned with the presuppositions --
the modern ones -- at the root of modern social science.

And these
presupositions are the latest result of a history of thought originating in
classical political philosophy, modified into modern political philosophy, and
then into modern social science.

So we must approach
classical political philosophy tentatively but "seriously, i.e. without
squinting at our present predicament." Only we can answer our own,
contemporary problems, many of which are unknown to classical thinkers, but
classical thought might be a better starting-point.

Finally, just
as political science must understand classical thinkers on their own terms, and
not in modern terms, we must aproach political things in general with an
understanding of the citizen's and legislator's perspective, rather than the
scientist's, to understand them at all adequately. And Aristotle's
politics is to be examined especially because it is a complete and
conscious articulation of the common sense view of things. (Common
sense, though, is a modern term, contrasted with science, which, as Strauss will
argue, is foreign to Aristotle's conception of things, since he believes in
natural good.

Let me know how clear that is. If you'd like,
I'll continue with the Politics.

Ben

A is A and B is B, and not-always the twain shall coincide.

2004-10-13T15:36:00.000-04:00

Art is Art.
Beauty is Beauty.
Judgement is Judgement.
They are not the same, nor are they wholly different.

Yglesias writes -- here, here, and here, most recently -- that art has value distinct from its attitudes, that art is artful regardless of its creator's, or its own implicit, value judgments. The gist:

I'm simply trying to defend the idea that the aesthetic merits of a work are not
reducible to, or even necessarily related to, their political merits.

This is a point that I think people are clear on when it comes to things that are far removed from the issues of the day. Neither The Merchant of Venice nor any of Shakespeare's plays about the history of England say much that is admirable from a political point of view. One serious problem with Tom Clancy's more recent novels is that instead of being fun, though insubstantial, adventure stories about spies, they've become rather heavy-handed rightwing political propaganda. The problem here, though, is that they're heavy-handed rightwing political propaganda, which distracts from the fun and demonstrates a lack of artistry, not that they're rightwing political propaganda. Ezra Pound's Cantos or T.S. Eliot's "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" are good poems, their anti-semitism notwithstanding, just as Birth of a Nation really is a grounbreaking work of technical cinema, its racism notwithstanding.
It demonstrates a certain impoverished outlook -- as I wrote, a philistinism -- to not be able to see this. [...] No one can write about Checkpoint as a novel, instead everyone feels moved to denounce the idea of leftwingers plotting George W. Bush's
assassination. To be clear, I don't think anyone should plot George W. Bush's assassination. At the same time, it's easy to see how a person plotting Bush's assassination and a friend trying to talk him out of it without defending the Bush record could be the premise for a good novel. Or, if poorly written, it could be the premise of a bad novel. A worshipful portral of Che could be a good movie or it could be a bad one, whether or not you approve of what Che did in real life years later has very little to do with it.

Art is Art, right? Not quite. (Obviously, in a literal sense, the tautology is true.) On one hand, I recently saw a beautiful Chinese movie called Hero. The deliberately-paced story and beautiful, wholly necessary fight scenes and visual language -- better than a live-action Samurai Jack, I'd say -- made me reconsider my judgement of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. My reconsideration is this: Kill Bill is entertaining, but vapid, proper philosophic ending notwithstanding. The fight scenes are for their own sakes, a somewhat hollow goal. This sense of emptiness in the movie is only hidden by filling it with fights, something not done in the elegant and meaningful Hero.

I also approved of the movie's moral message -- fighting is properly for the sake of peace -- that I almost missed its political message. In short, Hero is a piece of blatant pro-unification Chinese propaganda. Of course, that will go right over American viewers' heads in most cases (I do not delude myself into thinking everyone has my interest in global politics), and rightly so. The movie is a beautiful piece of art, and makes a correct moral judgement.

Similarly, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray is a profoundly moral novel (despite Wilde's professed moral philosophy), depicting its judgement by unblinkingly recounting the consequences of Peter Keating-like Dorian's temptation and corruption by the despicable, Toohey-like Lord Henry "Harry" Wotton (With the artist helplessly watching, like a sort of proto-Fountainhead), ending in suicide and soul-death.

On the other hand, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Weiss's Marat/Sade are, though effective, profoundly evil works in my estimation. Both are effective and powerful art, perhaps even beautiful to those who share at least Dalloway's sensibilities, but Dalloway is essentially morally determinist (which I explicitly separate from metaphysical determinism and/or mechanism), a disempowering philosophy, and Marat/Sade says we must choose between mindless destructive hedonism and totalitarian collectivism, with no third option except corruption and petty bourgeois theft.

Art cannot be evaluated without taking into account at least its moral judgement. Of course, an artist can espouse what I take to be an incorrect opinion and still make not only effective but good and beneficial art, but political particulars are very high-level judgements, and can be hald in contradiction to one's other beliefs, when insufficiently examined. This does not mean that art's moral judgements must never be questioned. Rather, it is imperative that critics take into account the judgement the artist uses -- moral as well as aesthetic -- in evaluating art, for only in an art technique class is effective and right art no more valuable than effective and wrong art. After all, art does serve a purpose, or we wouldn't do or spectate it.

First Strike (a haiku)

2004-10-13T15:32:00.000-04:00

To remedy my long-winded and unoriginal post on Comedy and Tragedy, here is a highly original and brief post:

He made his first strike.
Second, too. He missed his third
strike, and hit the ball.

On Tragedy and Comedy

2004-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00

The categories Tragedy and Comedy do not encompass all drama, but they are still useful as concepts and ways of understanding much drama. Tragedy involves big people propelled by their situations into making big and irreconcilable choices, producing disaster. Comedy involves an initial deviation from the norm which produces many complications which are later resolved on technicality. Basically, Tragedy is Revolutionary, and Comedy is Conservative.

Tragedy challenges the status quo by dialectic means. Not metaphysical dialectic, as Hegel would have it. We need merely acknowledge that it is in the dialectic style, with a thesis -- the default view before the precipitating event -- the antithesis brought about by some sort of crisis, and the synthesis, hinted but not quite arrived at, for if society accepted the synthesis -- or, if you wish, the transcendence of an apparent contradiction/false dichotomy -- then the subject of the tragedy would be irrelevant.

Examples:

1) Macbeth -- preordained order vs. rule of the competent; prudence vs. seizing opportunity
2) Antigone -- Familial love/personal moral obligation vs. the public interest/the survival of society
3) Hamlet -- Filial duty/revenge/taking one's rightful place vs. justice/prudence

Never does the tragic hero sove the predicament, unless he solves it too late to do him any good. Macbeth achieves a grim acceptance. Antigone achieves introspection and self-doubt. Hamlet does begin to understand what is necessary to live a proper life, but only after he has inescapably alienated too many people.

Comedy also begins with the thesis of the current state of things. Often, this is the social order. There is also in Comedy a precipitating event that created an antithesis or many antitheses, as circumstance and preexisting rules combine to form seemingly irreconcilable conflicts. This is only solves through more machination, at which point the contradiction is solved. But rather than solving the issue by killing off the character representing the antithesis, the Comedy kills off the antithesis itself, completely closing the door on any sort of synthesis. In other words, it says that things are fine how they are. We laugh at the otherness of the situation, and are relieved when it is shown to be reconcilable with the past, and we are shown so too by implication, since in almost any good drama the audience identifies with the protagonists.

(NB Comedy is not the same as Funny Drama, but is rather in this writing a specialized term as defined above.)

This is why the social satires of the past now ring hollow: the other is us. We, as a society, have rejected the social structures Oscar Wilde (to name a prominent example) was poking fun at. When the protagonists are ejected from normal life, we not only empathize with them but approve, and don't see what's so irreconcilable. We don't hold as true the norms the play does. Instead, we watch it and laugh quite unselfconsciously at the past. Comedy has turned into ritualistic mockery, satire into farce.

There is, of course, still plenty of funniness around. Neil Simon, to name a prominent example, makes good art from examining character foibles or oddities, personality norms, and people forced to violate their personal customs. But without his particular brilliance in dialogue, his plays wouldn't be terribly funny. Because we're not the same.

The ideas that once were radical -- that different lifestyles should be tolarated and allowed to coexist, and that personal choice takes priority over tradition and the wishes of others -- now deeply permeate much of American society. This is not entirely a bad thing. But it is a bad thing to mislabel the alternative as conservative or establishment morality. Tolerance is now the conservative attitude. Drama that makes fun of intolerant people is funny now only in a look-at-those-freaks kind of way. Properly, any piece of art that seeks to (re)impose standards should be viewed as radical or dynamic, as change-seeking. This is where we need more tragedy.

Our culture's blind spot is comparatively benign. We don't know what our culture is. That's the blind spot. This is one of the reasons we need art. Of course, apart from our needing art, there are reasons I (and individuals in general) need art -- personal moral guidance. But I am discussing society here.

We need new comedies to reveal -- and reinforce -- our social norms. Show us -- in abstracted form -- what normal life is in the West, help us non-anthropoligists figure out what is truly expected of us. And expose our culture's flaws not with strident screeds, but with tragedy. Bot in anger, but in puzzlement and sorrow. And if you think you have solutions, suggest them. Art is not only or primarily a means to social change -- or social reinforcement. But it is foolish to deny the role it can and should play in the moral educaiton of our society.

Style vs. Technique

2004-07-22T13:13:00.000-04:00

Weinman responds to my previous post:

For the record, I don't accept the premise that Casablanca is "stylistically antiquated." In fact, the techniques it uses to tell the story -- the style of cutting, the choice of when to move the camera, the placement of the camera and the use of reaction shots -- remain standard throughout the film and television industry. Shoot a movie or TV show today the way Casablanca was shot and no one will consider you a fogey; heck, movies are shot like this all the time. And of course there are some respects in which Casablanca is more technically sophisticated than most movies being made today. The amount of care taken over the lighting, for example, is miles ahead of most movies now; lighting of Ingrid Bergman's face in close-ups is used not just to make her look good but to mirror changes in emotion and mood. I don't think, say, Spider-Man can match these older films in terms of lighting technique. In other words, if the style of Casablanca seems "antiquated" it's in part because it's better-made than most of today's movies, not worse-made.

The technology available to movies has improved, it's true, but the technique of movies, in my opinion, has not. In a previous post, I wrote about a tremendously long and complicated tracking shot in a number from Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). With today's superior technology you could move the camera around even more, and faster; the difficulty of moving the old technicolor camera is somewhat visible in Meet Me in St. Louis, if you care to look for signs of the difficulty. But what does it matter? Most movies today are notable for their over-reliance on cutting (harkening back to the movies of the late '20s or early '30s, before movies like Citizen Kane showed the advantages of long takes) and their avoidance of long takes, an avoidance stemming from various factors including, probably, a lack of rehearsal time. I certainly think that that shot in Meet Me in St. Louis is superior, in filmmaking technique, to anything in, say, Chicago.

Obviously, Casablanca is not wholly obsolete; otherwise it would be unwatchable. Also, I agree that Casablanca has some stylistic merits. When I wrote "style," I meant it in a broader sense than just the things you're describing. I meant the use of music as dramatic support (although there is an obvious exception within Casablanca). I meant the manner in which the story is told, the macro-style. I mean the way the actors are presented (stagy acting interspersed with brief periods of silence). I mean contiguity among scenes (the feel, not necessarily a literal perfectly timed sequence though that helps.)

Some of those are affected by technology, admittedly. But that's precisely my point. If a technology affects the way stories are told by adding a better possibility, then, insofar as that better option is used, the movie which uses it is stylistically better. The director may not be superior, he may just have more tools. But a video recording is often a better likeness than a painting, however skillful the painter may have been in his time. We still look at the painting because it is still objectively good, and the best thing they had at their disposal. That doesn't make it better.

What makes Casablanca objectively better than many other movies is not simply the fact that it did well with what it had, though. Casablanca is better because it uses the tools available to create a greater dramatic effect than is created by many modern movies. It would have been even better, no doubt, had more tools been available. It is stylistically admirable. But it is also, in parts, clearly a movie of the past.

I'm also generally skeptical that new visual techniques constitute an advance. Volpone mentions Samurai Jack as an advance over previous television shows, and he's not the only one; the reviewer Charles Solomon at amazon.com blasts the Batman animated series for not using stylized movement the way Samurai Jack does. But it tends to be the rule that stylization wears less well, over the years, than straightforward-looking stuff. The UPA cartoons of the '50s, which were considered the ne plus ultra in animation art at the time, now look rather dated compared to the straightforward Warner Brothers and MGM cartoons. Some of the things that became popular in the late '60s and early '70s fell out of favor again within a few years, such as the use of the zoom lens. In general, new options in visual storytelling tend to come and go, with the old options, the straightforward stuff, dominating.

I'm pretty sure I've been misread. The visual stylization of Samurai Jack is the least important element. The most important element is the structural stylization, the reliance on visual communication with very little speech. (The speech there is, though, is excellent.) That is the sort of thing I meant. I didn't mean that Samurai Jack looks more advanced. I meatn that at its core, it reflects a flexible attitude towards storytelling, whichcan tell stories visually without making the visual gag or image the point of the story, rather using images like a play uses dialogue.

The Style of Substance

2004-07-20T21:51:00.000-04:00

Jaime J. Weinman writes:

How many times have you heard someone -- a critic, whoever -- praise an old movie or book for being "ahead of its time?" Works of art are often praised on the basis of having broken new ground, or introduced new stylistic devices. But does that really speak to how good they were, or just how different they were at the time? I once took a course in silent films with a professor who frankly disliked D.W. Griffith. People often asked him, he said, "But what about Griffith's technique?" To which he would reply that any technical advances of Griffith's were part of history, and had no bearing on the evaluation of the films as films. I didn't agree with him about Griffith (not about Broken Blossoms or Orphans of the Storm anyway) but I thought he had a point in general: innovation is essentially a historical matter, not an artistic matter.

Not quite.

Mr. Weinman is perfectly right when he says that style must not be our primary criterion. But why have any style? In order to convey the story, characters, setting, and mood, which is the purpose of the movie. While style alone is not valuable, it does contribute to the quality of the movie experience.

I was speaking to an old friend -- Alex Russek -- who is to enter the NYU film school this fall. We agreed that most movies made now are much better than the ones made a few decades ago, if you match movies equivalent for their times. Druids is obviously not as good as The Ten Commandments; the former is terrible and the latter one of the greatest movies ever. But Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings is clearly a vastly superior movie. The reason for this is that the sophistication of directors and their crews has increased as pionehttp://imdb.com/title/tt0034583/ers have invented new ways of telling stories, or better ways of doing what is already done. Frankly, Casablanca is not very good.

Hold your horses! you cry. That's not fair! We have to evaluate the movie by the standards of its time! If modern style didn't exist, we can hardly fault Casablanca for not having it!

Exactly.

In fact, we can fault Casablanca for its style, as casual viewers. Nature, the ultimate casual viewer, did not care that modern medicine was not available to the Romans. They went on dying of diseases now easily preventable, even the ones with the best medicine of their time. That doesn't mean a study of Rome has nothing to offer us, or that medicine Rome wouldn't have been worth the effort. We can't -- or mustn't -- ignore the fact that Casablanca is a stylistically antiquated film. We can choose to accept that and look for those parts of it that still have merit.

Lileks writes about historicity of art, a related topic, here.

Innovation does not alone make a film important for the viewer. It does make the film important historically, important for study, even lacking other necessary virtues, if that innovation was useful and influential. In their fundamentals, movies are about as good or bad as they used to be -- a mixed bunch --, but the details have gotten a lot better. Don't sweat the small stuff. Just copy from the geniuses who sweated it/ Now make some good movies. There's no more excuses.

This, by the way, explains why Citizen Kane was so important. It's a bit shallow by modern standards -- by modern great movie standards, at least -- but it is stylistically tremendous. Don't believe me? Watch Kane. Then watch Casablanca. Then tell me what went wrong in the second but not the first. Then tell me that style doesn't affect a movie's merit. Just try to tell me.

By the way, if you want to see the future of movie style, take a look at Samurai Jack. Visually, it's an acquired taste. I was expecting a cartoon show, in which the visuals are flashy and cool-looking and the story is witty and GenndyTarantovskyesque. What I got is a new sort of visual entertainment, in which the visuals tell the story. (The best example of this is the story of the three mysterious archers. I won't go into the story here, except to say that it deals with Samurai Jack's cutting himself off from vision and attuning himself to sound. It tells this visually.

In fact, Samurai Jack is an almost entirely visual art form. The sound enhances the experience and is convenient for summarizing things pictures would take a long time to tell, but you know they could if they wanted to. It seems almost as if they meant to make a silent cartoon, but realized that that would seem weird to the casual viewer.

Since we already have the art of sound-storytelling perfected in the radio drama, now is the time to take advantage of the broad array of visual storytelling options we have to make a fully integrated artform. Samurai Jack is the first step towards that integration into efficient storytelling (rather than those stagey silent movies in the beginning of the 20th century), notwithstanding its deceptively abstract/minimalist visual style.

And for the record, I rather enjoyed Casablanca.

Some of My Best Friends are Girlie Men

2004-07-20T16:25:00.000-04:00

Arnold's in trouble among the parasite class for some recent comments he made calling them girlie men.

Schwarzenegger dished out the insult at a rally Saturday as he claimed Democrats were delaying the budget by catering to special interests. Democrats protested that the remark was sexist and homophobic.
"If they don't have the guts to come up here in front of you and say, 'I don't want to represent you, I want to represent those special interests, the unions, the trial lawyers ... if they don't have the guts, I call them girlie men," Schwarzenegger said to the cheering crowd at a mall food court in Ontario.
The governor lifted the term from a long-running "Saturday Night Live" skit in which two pompous, Schwarzenegger-worshipping weightlifters repeatedly use it to mock those who don't meet their standards of physical perfection.
Democrats said Schwarzenegger's remarks were insulting to women and gays and distracted from budget negotiations. State Sen. Sheila Kuehl said the governor had resorted to "blatant homophobia."

Fortunately, The Govinator isn't backing down for saying something un-PC. To the contrary, his folks are essentially saying "bring it on!"

At a rally Sunday in Stockton, the governor gave a speech almost identical to the one he delivered in Ontario but without the "girlie men" remark. Spokesman Rob Stutzman said the line was dropped because Schwarzenegger had already sent the message he wanted to send, not because he regretted his remarks.
"It's a forceful way of making the point to regular Californians that legislators are wimps when they let special interests push them around," Stutzman said. "If they complain too much about this, I guess they're making the governor's point."

Huh.

Seriously, though, I think that's the proper way to handle this. It's not a constructive way of talking, but it shouldn't be construed as an apology-necessitating offense.
Is Girly-man a synonym for Homosexual? If so, is it a derogatory one? I know a few girlie men, who are not gay. Several have girlfriends. Of course, I consider it derogatory, but because of its content -- becauseit is better for men to be masculine, my own (tentative) moral judgement --, not because of its connotation.
If an issue is made of this, though, Schwarzenegger has an easy out, I think, and a witty one two.

Schwarzenegger apologizes to "girly-men" for comparing them to legislators.

Today, California's governor apologized for comparing effeminate men with California politicians. "I am deeply sorry for any offense or pain my comments may have caused among the girly-man community," said Governor Schwarzenegger in a contrite televised speech from the governor's mansion. "I should not have compared them with the gutless slime in our state's legislature. I withdraw the comparison."
Several Gutless Slime Advocates would have protested, but could not due to a dearth of vital organs. And an overall slipperiness.

For a tangentially related discussion pertaining to effeminate heterosexuals, go here.

W Ketchup

2004-07-11T03:17:00.000-04:00

Iridesce Sent notes a new Ketchup product: W Ketchup. Oh, my.

Personally, I'd like to see someone marketing the old-fashioned fermented ketchup. I know from a reliable source, though, that Heinz Ketchup is a great gourmet ketchup and an "american treasure," others' opinions notwithstanding.

2004-07-11T03:15:00.000-04:00

Benquo

2004-07-11T03:09:00.000-04:00

To My Oldest Friend

2004-07-05T11:17:00.000-04:00

Two journeyed in a lifeless desert land
Remembering their safer greener past
From which they’d glimpsed bright lights across the sand.
They went to find these lights; each willed it so —
True friends share compasses – but they diverged,
Each thinking his the truest way to go.
But many times their choice-twinned paths recrossed
And each shared what he’d learnt since they’d met last.
Both still saw lights, and neither one was lost.
There were no farewell words, nor any greetings
(Companionship was present but submerged –
Their aim was shared between their place-shared meetings)
For good things never have a pleasant end.
And each is proud to call the other “friend.”

Biblical Illiteracy

2004-06-25T22:57:00.000-04:00

An AP article about Sen. Zell Miller (D-GA) endorsing Bush for President includes a reference to the story of Jacob and Esau:

"I think he has sold his soul for a mess of pottage," said [Democratic Rep. John] Lewis, in a reference to a speech Miller gave as a congressional candidate 40 years ago in which he argued that President Johnson was "a Southerner who sold his birthright for a mess of dark pottage" because of his support for the Civil Rights Act.

(I should note that, as the article says, Miller later changed his position on Civil Rights.)
The article proceeds to explain the "mess of pottage" allusion thus:
Pottage is defined as a thick soup or stew of vegetables.
Huh? How is that helpful at all? Those who are unfamiliar with the Hebrew Bible might not know that Esau, son of Isaac son of Abraham, sold his birthright (i.e. inheritance) to Jacob, his younger brother, for soup. Esau was tired from hunting, and, upon arriving home, asked Jacob for the soup he had made. Jacob replied, give me your birthright for the soup. Clearly, defining pottage (the King James Version's word for the soup) does not explicate the reference at all! Sadly, this is a typical, though relatively harmless, example of the media's futile and ignorant attempts to provide "context" without knowledge. (A more pernicious case is that of Israel reporting.)

Target Choice

2004-06-22T23:03:00.000-04:00

Yglesias writes:

I think folks who supported the war on these grounds (Tom Friedman, etc.) are suffering from a serious case of false consciousness. In other words, it's not the case that they have a big idea -- The Need for Reconstruction -- and then the small idea -- Invade Iraq -- follows logically from TNFR. Rather, they had a big idea -- TNFR -- and no real idea of what followed from it. At the same time, there were all these people out there saying "invade Iraq!" "invade Iraq!" "invade Iraq!" so they manaed to convince themselves that invading Iraq would be a good way to implement their big idea. But it isn't, and it wasn't.

I wouldn't put it exactly that way. I would say that other, only partially related factors -- for instance, the idea of "unfinished business," the unwieldy and expensive sanctions, Saddam's violation of the end-of-war terms and direct hostilities against the US (e.g. firing at our planes patrolling the no-fly zone) bumped Iraq to the top of the go-to-war list. The fact that the War on Terror is our primary reason doesn't mean we can't include all those other considerations.

However, I have to agree with Yglesias; Iraq was not the optimal target. I would have either gone after Syria (a clearer direct threat to a free people, and accessible from the sea, and also a stepping stone to Iraq if necessary) or Iran.

I still disagree with Yglesias on the specifics of what a better choice might have been. He seems to advocate using pressure -- with the leverage he says we have (or had before the Iraq War) withother Middle East countries to try to get Egypt to reform. My response is that we couldn't possibly have done that fast enough. We needed to invade somewhere beyond Afghanistan. The Middle East is a target-rich environment, and one country hardly makes a dent. We needed something that would make other dictators change to create a hostile environment for terrorists and open up to the west by introducing greater economic and solcial liberties, rather than just trying not to get caught like Afghanistan. If the US policy of invasion had stopped at Afghanistan, it would not have been a War on Terror. It would have been, essentially, a Clinton- (and pre-9/11 Bush-) style proportional retaliation. Instead, we have made it clear that we expect not merely no traceable offenses, but cooperation. And Qaddaffi, among others, seems to have gotten the message. Iraq may not have been the best country to invade. But something had to be done.

Second-guessing about which country to invade is unhelpful because I don't recall many Democrats proposing alternate invasion plans at the time with which we can now meaningfully contrast the Iraq invasion (with the exception of the usually unserious call to take on Saudi Arabia).

Two Reviews

2004-06-22T22:05:00.000-04:00

I saw The Terminal tonight. For a summary of the premise, the New York Times description suffices:

Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), on a long-anticipated visit to New York from the imaginary Eastern European republic of Krakozia, arrives at J.F.K. just as a military coup abolishes his country's government and renders him effectively stateless. A complicated (and somewhat implausible) web of bureaucratic glitches and regulations strands him at the airport, where he remains for nearly a year, unable to board a flight home or hop a cab into Manhattan but innocent of anything that would warrant his detention.

The Terminal is funny, but it is not a comedy. The chuckles it elicited were not at the degradation of the characters, but at the cleverness of the plot and the characters in it. One example: Navorski notices that the return of a Smarte Carte yields a reward of one quarter, so he finds SmarteCartes and brings them back to the rack, thus earning his food money.

The conclusion is inevitable, but that is not the point. Along the way, we find out about the characters (especially Navorski) and their real goals, which become the new plot, a subtle and seamless shift from the movie's rather mechanical opening plot.

The one problem I have with the movie is the issue of compassion. Compassion is talked up as a great virtue, and it is strongly implied that the director of airport security (the closest thing to a villain in this movie) should have just let Navorski through. I should think that after 9/11, people would have dropped this sort of dangerous frivolity. You can be compassionate all you want, but don't be compassionate -- don't be generous -- with my life! Mine! Do you hear me? I have the right -- the absolute right -- to life, regardless what some unfortunate foreigner has to endure at an airport. There is legitimate argument about whether our security measures are necessary and useful and efficient or not. But compassion has nothing to do with it. Security is the one job where you cannot, as the movie suggests, bend the rules.

There was an easy way to end this movie; the "villain" was clearly an honorable man, and it wouldn't have been implausible for his to sign the document. (no more details so I'm not a spoiler.) Indeed, in the beginning, he was elevated by preciesely the commitment to integrity, to following the rules (e.g. "I won't lie") that he is criticized for later. He refuses to lie to get Navorski out of the airport, at great inconvenience to himself.

Indeed, why was a villain necessary? Why couldn't it just have been a flaw in the system. Dramatic conflict does not require a personal villain, merely an obstacle. A villain is only necessary in tragedy, where he is also the hero.

(I might add that it is mainly this "compassion" business that separates me from our President; he has a right to be compassionate, but not with my or other taxpayers' money.)

I graduated from Stamford High School on Monday. It felt surprisingly short, I suppose, because I was participating in it.

There were several speeches of variable quality.

Our class president, Nitesh Banta (who will attend Harvard next year), gave a speech about giving a speech. Or, more precisely, he gave a speech about not giving a speech (i.e. "I could have spoken about [X] but you alrleady understand [X] in your doing [A]; I could have spoken about [Y] but you show your understanding of that by [B]; etc.)

A member of the Board of Education gave a speech about the Wizard of Oz, likening it somewhat inaptly to the journey of life. Apparently, I will journey on the yellow brick road toward my goals, meeting friends not entirely like Dorothy's. When it seems I have reached my goals, I will look behind the curtain and find it's not what I expected, and then continue journeying. Fortunately, the speech was stylistically okay, its length was unlengthy, and its insights avoided cliche, which I suppose was the motivation for the extended not-entirely-inapt-but-not-entirely-apt metaphor.
She selected a good poem: "The Guy in the Glass," by Dale Wimbrow. It seemed to me a cross between the styles of Rudyard Kipling and Dr. Seuss in its profound but simple moralisms. And I like, very much, both Dr. Seuss and Rudytard Kipling.

When you get what you want in your struggle for pelf,
And the world makes you King for a day,
Then go to the mirror and look at yourself,
And see what that guy has to say.

For it isn't your Father, or Mother, or Wife,
Who judgement upon you must pass.
The feller whose verdict counts most in your life
Is the guy staring back from the glass.

He's the feller to please, never mind all the rest,
For he's with you clear up to the end,
And you've passed your most dangerous, difficult test
If the guy in the glass is your friend.

You may be like Jack Horner and "chisel" a plum,
And think you're a wonderful guy,
But the man in the glass says you're only a bum
If you can't look him straight in the eye.

You can fool the whole world down the pathway of years,
And get pats on the back as you pass,
But your final reward will be heartaches and tears
If you've cheated the guy in the glass.

The sentiment is very much like Kipling, as is the very unremarkable meter and rhyme structure. The informalisms tilted my poemeter a bit towards Seuss.

Principal Suzanne Brown Koroshetz gave a brief speech which I don't remember much of. I remember that it wasn't bad.

Mayor Malloy gave a very politically safe speech, as if he were some sort of politician.

The commencement speaker, Jack Cavanaugh, was quite good. He spoke about doing what one loves (though, as he said, money doesn't hurt). He spoke about not feeling guilty about success, about giving back to the community, and about not winding up like the guy he knew who worked for 40 years at a job he hated because the money was good. He told us not to fix the world, but to enjoy ourselves, which I appreciated a lot. It's good to be reminded that life is about enjoying life.

Systematic Thinking

2004-06-21T21:57:00.000-04:00

Another Yglesias post intrigues me. The gist:

When the GOP sees a regime that's hostile to the United States and that it is within America's capacity to topple militarily, they say: "Go for it." A hostile state always might become an al-Qaeda sponsor, and Republicans think the possibility of state sponsorship of al-Qaeda is very, very, very bad, so it's worth going way out of our way to make sure it doesn't happen. Fundamentally, Republicans are eager to overthrow regimes [...] because they're very worried about state sponsorship.

The Democratic foreign policy establishment sees this very differently. Democrats worry about failed states. Democrats think al-Qaeda grows -- and grows powerful -- where institutions of governance break down. Iraq wasn't governed pleasantly, but it was governed. Hence, Democrats are loathe to destroy a regime unless they're prepared to put it back together. This makes Democrats more hesitant to overthrow regimes [...] because their collective nightmare is more failed states.

I commented twice on his site. I'll try to synthesize it here in more coherent form.

Yglesias views Republicans' and Democrats' views about Iraq in isolation from both current and past context.

Before the invasion, Iraq was part of the broader Middle East System. It alone may not have amounted to a threat on the level of Al Qaeda, but Al Qaeda itself, and 9/11, are products of the Middle East System. Autocratic authoritarian states stifle liberty, making radical Arab Traditionalism (to use Den Beste's term) the only palatable escape. Other or the same states provide a comparatively safe harbor for terrorists, and often support them and redirect their violence against the West, especially the Land of the Setting Sun itself (i.e. America). Alone, Saddam might have been better than the alternative. In the context of the broader system, though, it's worth taking a few risks -- even risking a failed state -- because we must keep trying, as fast and as hard as we can, until the Middle East System is radically reformed into liberality (and, if possible, Liberal Democracy.) Iraq supported terrorists by rewarding sucicide bombers' families. It threatened terror attacks against the US. It invaded a nonoffending neighboring country. It violated pretty much all the terms of the cease-fire. It pursued weapons of mass destruction, which (for all we knew) it might have had and given to terrorists almost untraceably. Alone, this might not have been an intolerable threat, but it's an important input into the Middle East System.

It is to change the Middle East System that we are in Iraq. It is to change Iraq, but also to change Libya, to pressure Syria and Iran, and to instigate a culture change across the Islamofascist world.

Am I ascribing too much to Republicans? (Leaving aside, of course, the fact that Republicans don't think with one mind, and often disagree.) To the contrary. A contradiction in Yglesias's reasoning its resolved by this.

Yglesias says that Republicans are for regime change, and Democrats are against it. Was this true during the Cold War? To the contrary, conservatives often supported vile non-Communist regimes for fear of something worse. In isolation, this might seem reprehensible. But in the context of the larger, Communist system, it made sense. It is a larger risk to allow regime change than to resist it, when Communism is actively seeking more member states. It is this systematic thinking that has also defined the present Administration's approach to the War on Terror.