QUOTOMATIC SELECTOR SAY: "There are some occupations that are stereotypically gay, but mechanical engineering isn't one of them."
Saturday, November 24, 2007 AS YE SOW... Using the word "scream" for words on paper is usually a conservative trope, but I think we can fairly characterize thisNew York Post headline as a real screamer:
'BLAME U.S. FOR 9/11' IDIOTS IN MAJORITY 'PLOTS' THICKEN IN SHOCKING POLL By ANDY SOLTIS
November 24, 2007 -- Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government had warnings about 9/11 but decided to ignore them, a national survey found.
"Blame U.S. For 9/11"? Seen from a less hysterical angle, the poll result seems like a merely uncharitable reading of the findings of the 9/11 Commission ("'the system was blinking red' during the summer of 2001...")
"Ignore" is a strong word for the government's inaction. Maybe the poll respondents were insensitive to the difference between mishandling and ignoring. If so, this may be attributed to a growing lack of faith in the government -- as we have seen elsewhere.
Government isn't the only institution that's rapidly losing credibility, as the Scripps-Howard summary suggests:
At a time when the price of crude oil has neared $100 per barrel, 81 percent of Americans also said it was "somewhat likely" or "very likely" that oil companies conspire to keep the price of gasoline high.
"It shows that the oil companies are not trusted by a lot of people," said Tyson Slocum, director of the Energy Program of Public Citizen, the consumer watchdog organization founded by Ralph Nader.
Record-breaking quarterly profits stir the pot, too.
"People look at the huge profits and put two and two together," he said. "'Those high prices I'm paying are fueling those profits.'"
Why the decline in benefit-of-the-doubt? It's interesting to look at Scripps-Howard's 2006 summary of a poll that foreshadowed these trends:
The survey also found that people who regularly use the Internet but who do not regularly use so-called "mainstream" media are significantly more likely to believe in 9/11 conspiracies. People who regularly read daily newspapers or listen to radio newscasts were especially unlikely to believe in the conspiracies.
It is suggested that these malcontents are affected by truther websites. But that hardly explains the high oil, Kennedy assassination, and UFO conspiracy credulousness.
Of course, if you want to read about what rascals lead us, and how everything they tell us is bullshit, there are plenty of other popular web outlets that do the job.
I am usually unconvinced by triumphalist claims that online alternative media will trounce the MSM dinosaurs. But I am beginning to suspect these stupid things are at least having an effect -- that the daily internet hammering of institutions has in fact helped poison the outlook of many ordinary citizens who have heeded the call and unmoored themselves from the consensus wisdom of the Main Stream Media. But the Scripps-Howard poll suggests that this effect isn't taking the shape that the blogosphere's rightwing cheerleaders like to predict -- unless their purposes are even more sinister than my black little heart can conceive.
Of course you can look at it the other way, and say our institutions are so thoroughly rotten that bad faith is the only possible response.
Friday, November 23, 2007 COME ON, GOP CLASS-WARRIORS: WALK THE WALK! The Washington Times is spreading the word that the Democrats are "the party of the rich." The source is a "study" by Michael Franc of the Heritage Foundation -- though I can only find this, which seems to closely track Fred Siegel's Commentary rant, which was treated here earlier, and only works if you restrict yourself to the sort of "political demography" that shows rich people concentrated in blue states, and ignore the median incomes of Republican and Democratic voters. You can dig through the study that started it all, or see Tom Hilton for a good roundup of sources.
In other words, this WashTimes/Heritage thing is a con job, but still a tonic for the troops. Confederate Yankee whoops, "A bit hypocritical for them to label themselves the party of the poor as they carefully sip overpriced bistro coffee to keep from spilling it on the leather interior of their late-model European sedans." Way to class-war, comrade! Maybe he'll join the WashTimes in questioning the Dems' go-slow approach to tax reform:
A "stopgap" bill authored by Mr. Rangel to tax hedge-fund compensation at 35 percent as regular income rather than the current 15 percent capital-gains rate, which passed the House Nov. 9, appears to be going nowhere with Senate Democrats.
Here's a political opening if they're serious: Confederate Yankee and Sun Myung Moon can up the ante and call on Republican Presidential candidates to push the 35 percent rate. Then we'll see who's the party of the working man!
8:23 PM by roy edroso
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SCIENCE VS. POLITICAL SCIENCE. Having read the William Saletan articles about how black people have lower IQs than white people, and having noted the gleeful agreement of rightwing honkeys that black people have lower IQs than white people, I can say this:
I expect that the march of science will continue to uncover many wonders of the human mind, toward the end of improving all our lives, which is of course what science is for. That will lead along some thorny paths. For example, it looked for a while as if embryonic stem cells were the best way to go in solving a number of medical problems. Now it seems science may have found a less controversial alternative.
This has led some political types to complain that because science did not get there fast enough, its practitioners were bent on the destruction of human life. Such judgments are not surprising, considering the source, because in politics, history is only a series of anecdotes to be exploited for propaganda purposes, whereas science supposes a continuum of educational events, sometimes called experiments, to be used as building blocks toward a better life. There is such a thing as pseudo-science, but the free exercise of the scientific method over time obliterates such fallacies. Politics is much less reliably self-correcting. In fact, many political actors are deeply invested in sustaining ancient errors if they think it will help them retain power.
The historical record leads me to suppose that as cognitive scientists continue their work, they will sometimes come up with findings that politicians can exploit, but they will also learn things that do us all of us a great deal of good. So the IQ debates are a good thing as science. As politics, they are more or less useless except as fodder for racist cranks.
Which can also be a good thing. I am sneakily pleased to see conservatives excited by the current state of play, and encourage them to sing out loudly about it. Let them tell the world that their favored candidates' positions on race show that they agree that black people are less intelligent than white people. Let them tell the world that affirmative action is useless because black people are genetically incapable of benefiting from it. Eventually they will get around to discussing the genetic inheritances of Barack Obama. What a forum that will be, with Andrew Sullivan and John Derbyshire explaining that the most attractive features of Obama's platform come from the white side of his brain!
We may get a new government out of it, and conservatives can use their leisure to play with calipers and brains of varying races. Win-win, as far as I can see.
3:45 PM by roy edroso
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Gangster rap is crap. Yes, there are some interesting bits and pieces. Yes, there is buried amidst the steaming piles of rationalized b.s. a few trace elements of sociologically interesting ore. Sure, it takes some technical savvy to do it. Uh huh, right, right, right.
It's still crap. Here's how I put it last year in a column about Kanye West...
It's the holiday season so I'll spare you. Anyone who thinks "sociologically interesting ore" is any kind of reason to listen to music has a tin soul. Oh, he also gets around to the indecent dances young people are doing today.
The fracas is built around David Brooks bemoaning the passing of Led Zep and Ed Sullivan, and pimping a restoration via Little Steven platoons teaching Schools of Rock. A National Reviewcorrespondent cannot resist the call of the Konservetkult:
I think Brooks and Van Zandt are actually staking out a conservative position here: the importance of common culture, defining it and promoting it...
The problem is that America's cultural and political elites don't have the will, popular capital or sense of need to identify or promote any kind of Americal cultural canon in any area of liberal arts whatsoever.
But get those kids cranking "Born to Run" on the quad again, and Western Civ is saved.
This is the sort of thing that sends me back to the classics.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007 TO BRIGHTEN YOUR HOLIDAY. Courtesy of Dr. Helen, the mother of all awful-liberals yarns -- not told by one of those legendary taxi drivers, or even Alan Bromley, but in my judgment outstripping them all:
My sister and brother-in-law are D.C. area residents and wear their politics on their sleeves. I quit arguing with them some 20 years ago when they stated that Reagan was responsible for the Yellowstone Park forest fires. I realized then I could not have a rational discussion with them.
The problem I have with this stuff is that my brother-in-law starts yelling. Who wants to converse with someone who’s attracting attention from all the other diners in a restaurant. I finally decided that he doesn’t really want a reasoned conversation. He just wants to shout down anyone who disagrees with him, so why bother?
So far, so what, you may be thinking: we've seen better in any old Dr. Helen comments thread. But hang on -- the guy's just getting warmed up:
My dad is as mean as a snake. All 8 of his kids bear the scars and deal with them in different ways. The last time I saw him was 5 years ago at the rehearsal dinner for my younger brother’s wedding. He was picking on my niece, and she not being used to that treatment slapped him in the face. I told my Dad to knock it the f—k off. He took exception and we started a fistfight in the restaurant. My dad was so bent out of shape that somebody stood up to him that he didn’t show up for the wedding, and I gladly stood in for him, next to my Mom, in all of the wedding pics.
I cherish Christmas with my family: A day with the estrogen poisoned females of my clan; children yelling and grubbing for the bounty that comes with the crass commercialism of the holiday; the ever present fear that my brother, four Christmases banished from the family for alcohol related lunacy, will crash his drunken, six foot, four inch body through the front door and spray the room with lead. Ah, Christmas! I strap an Officer’s Compact Colt .45 into a pancake holster on my hip in case the door comes off its hinges at the party, pack up my hastily purchased gifts, and I wade into this thing called Christmas. Ho, ho, ho, who wouldn’t go?
And now the kicker:
Through the years of Republican bashing followed by Kumbaya sing alongs (I kid you not), I have found the best strategy is to simply keep my mouth shut.
Surely you see the genius of it. Instead of trying to seed little quotes and anecdotes throughout the story to preserve the political through-line, our author veers into seemingly unrelated tales of spectacular family violence, and at the climax, with a last sneer of contempt for the enemy, retreats into Norman Bates muteness...
Wait -- what? These paragraphs are separate anecdotes?
Well, maybe it's like Casy says -- maybe a Dr. Helen commenter ain't got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to every Dr. Helen commenter. Maybe the individual miseries of the poor wretches who come to Dr. Helen's door for a bowl of soup and maybe some rational emotive behavior therapy are hopeless by themselves, but together they gain stature, dignity, and hilarity.
May all of you enjoy a Thanksgiving free from fistfights, gunplay, and Kumbaya. Unless, of course, that's your idea of a good time.
UPDATE. "Guys," says commenter Craig, "that block quote from Dr. Helen is four different anecdodes from four different respondents. Don't try to mash them all up."
Admitted and addressed in the original post. (See the last three grafs.) And what's wrong with mash-ups? Larry Lessig would approve!
10:19 PM by roy edroso
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CONTEXTUAL READING.Ed Driscoll thinks you should stop reading the New York Times, but notes that he has just linked to two Times stories. Cognition doesn't get much more dissonant than that, even among fierce opponents of Blue Statism who nonetheless spend all their time in the bluest territories.
I read the New York Post most every day, largely because it is cheap and easy to read even before coffee. I would find it insulting to be told that I should give it up because I am bound to encounter writing in it with which I am inclined to disagree. That is all of its charm.
Driscoll quotes in defense of Times avoidance Rush Limbaugh, who says, "I found myself questioning the accuracy of the paper based on my own knowledge. I too often wondered, ‘Hmmm—is that true?’” Fancy being turned off by that! Just today I read the Post TV critic Linda Stasi in high dudgeon:
Speaking of changing the face of late-night TV and black men, in a move worthy of Michael Richards, in another skit, [Frank] Caliendo channels Charles Barkley but does so without changing his skin color or donning a wig! Every other character wears wigs and makeup. Caliendo has said on radio that TV stations freak out when they see a white man in black face. Talk about racist! Would they expect Eddie Murphy to play a white guy without changing his skin color? But here we've got poor Caliendo doing an exact impression of Barkley, but sitting there in his big, pasty face and beige hair. It's ludicrous and the worst type of reverse racism: politically correct racism!
Stasi's bizarre outrage over a lack of blackface ("worthy of Michael Richards"!) brightened my day, not because I agreed with it, but because it reminded me of the mad variety of human existence. That Stasi was declaiming it, not from a ward for the mentally ill, but in the pages of a popular newspaper, merely sweetened the jest.
You miss a lot by only reading things with which you may expect to agree.
9:16 PM by roy edroso
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Monday, November 19, 2007 THE GREAT ROCK 'N' REIHAN SWINDLE. Reihan Salam is very high (as is his colleague James Poulos*) on an essay by Kevin Barnes, a rock star who hit the jackpot, sees no need to apologize for it, and thus decrees that there is no such thing as selling out. I am somewhat in sympathy with Barnes, less so with the American Scenesters. The tradition of complaining about complaints that one is selling out is a venerable one that extends from time immemorial ("Better to be a rich man's dog than a poor man's saint") to Black Francis. Barnes is merely flicking off, with more style than most, some impediments to his enjoyment of success; he is not paid to be a deep thinker, and may be excused from that noxious responsibility.
Salam and Poulos*, though, are supposed to be some sort of intellectuals. Yet they take at face value, for example, the rock star's claim that "the pseudo-nihilistic punk rockers of the 70’s created an impossible code in which no one can actually live by." I guess it's possible that they have never read Emerson, but they might have phoned a friend; ambivalence about conformity goes a hell of a lot further back than 1977. Poulos* seems to misread his own subject, who states
It's impossible to be a sell out in a capitalist society. You're only a winner or a loser. Either you've found a way to crack the code or you are struggling to do so. To sell out in capitalism is basically to be too accommodating, to not get what you think you deserve. In capitalism, you don't get what you think you deserve though. You get what someone else thinks you deserve. So the trick is to make them think you are worth what you feel you deserve. You deserve a lot, but you'll only get it when you figure out how to manipulate the system.
This is not quite coherent (whence come the "too accommodating" sellouts if selling out is impossible?) but it at least hints at some awareness of the difficulties of making a living, which is admirable in a young rock star. Salam thinks it "an insightful meditation on the ethics of commercial life," and Poulos* reads this into it:
The smart today are those who can contextualize themselves as fleeting market actors without despairing, who can maintain, without resolving it, the contradiction between writing ‘authentic’ music and selling it obviously inauthentic corporations. The agony of resolving the contradiction on terms that sacrifice one or another benefit goes away, and Barnes’ manifesto seems to suggest that, with a little practice, we can more perfectly eliminate the big uptick in anxiety that has been our modern tradeoff for trying to minimize agony.
In both tone and content, this is much arty-fartier than what Barnes provides, and more evasive. What Barnes portrays as stark choices in an unsympathetic world -- "you're only a winner or a loser" -- Poulos* describes as a Jedi mind trick. He talks about minimizing "agony" and "despair," but doesn't explain how to do it if you don't have a big recording contract... or a prime slot on the punditocracy fast-track.
One of the advantages of youth is that it keeps the possibility of failure remote. It may be relatively easy for 20somethings to "contextualize themselves as fleeting market actors," assuming they have enough liberal arts education to comprehend those terms, because they are inclined to expect early returns on their generous self-assessment. But even for the young and confident, getting the market to agree is no snap. Though they may find the droopy-drawers non-conformity of ancient punks irrelevant, they may also find that the reality with which they are eager to conform is out of their reach. Despite the optimistic claims of the digerati, not everyone can be a rock star or a pundit; your MySpace music page or blog competes with thousands of others, and over time your may be forced to reckon with the odds.
History is not the only thing written by the winners. They write pop psychology, too. Salam's and Poulos'* concordances to Barnes' essay comprise a self-help tract for educated kids who, despite their natural vigor, are vaguely haunted by early warning signs that the future may not be all they have been trained to expect. These hauntings, Salam and Poulos* tell them, are a Marxist humbug; think positive. Contextualize yourself, eliminate the uptick in anxiety, and find your inner rock star. The possibilities are endless, not only for you but for America:
Because the world is profoundly unfair, those of us born into the US middle class are extraordinarily fortunate, and I tend to think we thus are almost obligated to task risks in pursuit of happiness. The very poor face different constraints, and my hope is that we one day construct the kind of enabling state that will give all Americans, and hopefully all people, the freedom to do the same.
Napoleon Hill couldn't have put it any better.
*UPDATE. Being insensitive to the singularities of their respective styles and new to the Safari "tabs" feature, I confused Salam' and Poulos' contributions in the original. Thanks to Mr. Porrofatto for the correction.
9:42 PM by roy edroso
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I’ve often wondered what it would take for MTV to clean up its act. Now, we know. The aging music network wants Middle Eastern eyeballs, and it’ll do anything to cater to its audience–including toning down raunchy content and covering up scantily-clad hostesses. If it were America, the libs in charge of MTV would consider this caving in to Neanderthal social conservatives. In the Middle East, it’s considered doing smart business and paying cultural respect...
No, no, no, Ms. Malkin, you don't understand how liberal subversion works. First we offer the sheeple a seemingly innocuous cultural product featuring bright lights, vivid personalities, and pretty colors. Then, once we have their eyes and ears, we sneak in calculated outrages. Social conservatives push back, but the battle is already lost; soon even the imams are getting with the program.
This is what's known in the business as Boiling the Camel. Before you know it, the Middle East is frigging and fruging and balling and all that -- their culture rotted away from the inside, their will to fight sapped, their dream of 72 virgins vitiated by random hook-ups and rampant materialism.
If liberal subversion brought our great nation to moral ruin, why should Arabia not also fall prey to its deceptions? Now that MTV has inveigled its Trojan Horse past the gates of Mecca, why should we not expect tits, swears, pimp rolls and phat beats to come tumbling out when the time is ripe, and to similarly disastrous effect? I'm beginning to think Malkin is losing her faith in culture war.
6:08 PM by roy edroso
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STOP THE PRESSES. In other top stories, Visine announced its intention to "get the red out," and Allstate declared that consumers of their insurance products would be in good hands.
The story is mainly about a Giuliani mailing and actually contains dissenting quotes from a 9/11 family group. Maybe Murdoch is sending the Giuliani camp a signal, and Judith Regan can expect Bernard Kerik to show up at her place with flowers and/or rubber gloves.
7:45 AM by roy edroso
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Sunday, November 18, 2007 CELEBRITY JOURNALISM. For their inaugural Newsweek columns, Markos Moulitsas and Karl Rove provide innocuous partisan rah-rah. Moulitsas tells us that the Party in power can be successfully attacked for their bad governance, and Rove tells us that Hillary Clinton can be beaten by a Republican who will "create a narrative that explains [his] life and commitments." Stop the presses!
Rove, of course, is not likely to give away strategic secrets for such small honoraria as Newsweek can provide, as his hilarious suggestion that the GOP nominee "aggressively campaign for the votes of America's minorities" makes clear. Moulitsas has far less of a king-making reputation to protect, and his simple litany of Bush failures, tied together with a familiar pro-government message ("If Americans want willfully ineffective government, they'll have a Republican Party desperate for their votes"), adds nothing to it.
If Newsweek is willing to waste money on talents outside their normal hiring pool, how I wish they had shown some of the foolhardy moxie of "60 Minutes" some years back, when the popular show brought aboard P.J. O'Rourke, Molly Ivins, and Stanley Crouch as commentators. This experiment, you may recall, was suspended after eight weeks following an outcry from viewers who felt that Andy Rooney was providing quite enough guff for one hour.
Why couldn't the magazine have picked, say, Gavin MacLeodMcNett* and Jeff Goldstein? After a few weeks of Gavin's investigative reports and Goldstein's semiotics, enraged mobs would be burning piles of Newsweek in the streets, and the victory of citizen journalism over the MSM would be that much closer.
No, they're too clever for that. If I have learned anything from the failure of Newsweek (and Time and U.S. News and World Reports and The Watchtower) to publish any of the hundreds of carefully hand-lettered essays I have submitted over the years, it is that the Main Stream Media is/are a crafty beast that will not cede power willingly. Our best hope is to continue ratcheting up the level of psychic violence on our blogs, poisoning the discourse sufficiently that by the 2012 election, the hot new thing will be columnists who stalk ex-girlfriends and use lots of swears.
Oh, who am I kidding? They'll just call the current columns "Dingleberries from the Turd Blossom" and "It's Kos, Kocksuckers!" thereby giving President Giuliani a media issue to help distract attention from his War in the Ukraine.
*UPDATE. He isn't the guy who played Murray on "The Love Boat"? Another week begins in bitter disappointment.
6:47 PM by roy edroso
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