Lawrence O'Donnell is Wrong

Look, I like Lawrence O'Donnell. Sure, he's a slow talker and occasionally a bit repetitive, hammering home on issues whose relevance seems dubious at best, but I like him. He reminds me of a grandfather—a grandfather who tells me about the issues of the day and beats up (in very grandfatherly way) on people who generally deserve it. I think I even like him more than Keith Olbermann, with whom I had a very complicated relationship (call me, Keith, you handsome devil).

But last night (or this morning, when I watched the video online), he made the curious pronouncement that Rand Paul's position on Libya was incoherent. In general, when I hear that Republican X's position on issue Y is incoherent, I say something to the effect of, no shit. (Deficits are bad; let's cut taxes! Freedom is good, unless you're a woman, or gay, or me! The middle class is in trouble; let's shovel money into the mouths of corporations and the really, really, really rich! I could do this all day.)

Rand Paul is confused about a lot of things, but his position on Libya—roughly, we should have intervened, but President Obama's action was unconstitutional as it didn't get a declaration or war or authorization of military force from congress—is not only understandable, but true.

(Before I continue, I should probably tell you that Rand Paul is something of an ass, and please God let this be the only time I find myself defending him.)

If you've been reading my blog (hi, mom!), then you know that I've had my doubts about Libya. But despite the thorny issues involved, our intervention there was morally necessary. If you're a deontologist, then to you I say good for you. Also, I say that the principle that the United States should try to prevent massacre is applicable in Libya. If you're a consequentialist, then to you I say good luck with that. Also, I say that the moral mathematics worked out for intervention in Libya.

I say this, and I also say that Congress abdicated its duty, and President Obama abdicated his, when we went to war—and this is a war—limited (relatively) though it may be—in Libya.

Now, Lawrence O'Donnell brought up SR 85, a resolution condemning Gadhfi, advocating regime change, and expressing the hope that someone would intervene, specifically in the form of a No-Fly Zone. And O'Donnell mentioned that Senator Paul voted for SR 85, saying,

He voted for everything—everything—President Obama has said he is in favor of doing, and everything President Obama decided to do. And he voted for it weeks before President Obama decided to do it.

This is the basis for O'Donnell's belief that Paul—and, I'm assuming folks like me—are holding being incoherent. At first blush, that seems like a reasonable critique. We support an objective and a means, but when someone takes those means to achieve that objective, we cry foul.

But, alas, things are not that simple. One of those means, one of the ways in which we would achieve the very noble objective of preventing a massacre in Libya, is that we would do it within the strict confines of the law. Meaning that before the Executive branch takes acts to achieve a good objective, it gets the go-ahead from Congress.

President Obama didn't. Even if you think he didn't have time—if you believe that the weeks he spent getting international support (a good—perhaps even necessary—thing, by the by) didn't afford enough time to get congressional approval—nothing has precluded him from getting approval for continued operations in Libya now.

And by the President's own lights, he didn't even try or think it necessary to do that. He talks about consultation, not approval, as if Congress is a friend you go to when you need advice and not a check on Executive power.

So Senator Paul and I are not being incoherent; our position is clear: Intervene in Libya, and do it the right way.

Perhaps I'm being to hard on the President, though. He did, for the most part, do it the right way. He was prudent and careful; he's got the support of the international community—including the Libyan people. He didn't lie to the public (man, Bush really set that bar low). He's keeping our footprint small. He is, in short, allowing this to by Libya's revolution, not America's occupation.

What's more, it's not as if Congress has been doing its job, either. They haven't been serious about their constitutional obligations regarding military force in decades. Members of congress are too concerned, if I can assign a motive, with keeping their political options open, being able to weasel out of a vote if things go bad, to acutely do their jobs. They fear, I imagine, falling victim to the trap set by Republicans during the 2004 election. Senator Kerry, you'll remember voted to authorize the use of military force in Iraq, and then, when Bush bungled the job, Kerry attacked the war. And what did Republicans do? They called him a flip-flopper.

(Of course, Iraq is very different then Libya, and though I disagree with Kerry's vote, I don't think he's "flip-flopping" for saying that he supported the objective, but disagreed with the means.)

So, where does this leave us? We have a congress that is afraid the American people are too stupid to tell the difference between means and ends, a President that—like all Presidents—wants to preserve Executive power, and people like Rand Paul and me (did I really just write that?) who aren't all that pleased with the idea that presidents can pretty much do what they want when it comes to war.

So, can we blame Lawrence O'Donnell for being mistaking Rand Paul's nuance for hypocrisy? I think yes, with an important caveat. The modern GOP—pretty much since Nixon, have claimed the mantle of libertarianism while behaving like statists. They've been such hypocrites for so long that when one of them might be principled, it's hard to take it at face value. Further, the "principled" positions of conservative libertarians (all five of them) are so abhorrent that it's easy want to hit them with everything you can.

And, I'm not going to say—as one big-eared Congressman did—that this is an impeachable offense. It's not. It would be if Congress had said no and then the President did it anyway. He didn't. Congress has done such a thorough job of not doing its job that it's almost necessary for Presidents to take that power for themselves—almost.

But as for the critiques of nuance, let's not forget, Mr. O'Donnell, that liberals champion nuance. Let's not forget that, more often then not, complicated and tough problems require complicated and tough thinking, and we considering the utter lack of thought in what passes for today's bawdy politic, we could now use a little nuance more then ever.

Tea and Sympathy

No! ne'er was mingled such a draught In palace, hall, or arbor, As freemen brewed and tyrants quaffed That night in Boston Harbor! -Oliver Wendell Holmes, “A Ballad of the Boston Tea Party”

On December 16, 1773, men got dressed up as Indians and threw tea into Boston Harbor. It’s strange to think that such a weighty moment—a turning point in the birth of our nation—would sound so like a night of drunken, teenage revelry. But it was, I am told, for more than that: It was a matter of principle. Oliver Wendell Holmes, before reading his “A Ballad of the Boston Tea Party” proclaimed,

The tax on tea, which was considered so odious … was but a small matter, only twopence in the pound. But it involved a principle of taxation, to which the Colonies would not submit. Their objection was not to the amount, but the claim.

I should have learned that lesson, I suppose, but what stuck with me was a little different.

“I have never gotten over,” writes Garret Keizer in Harper’s, “the notion that the history of the United States begins with an act of masquerade.” Nor have I. I can’t get the image of George Hewes—a Boston shoemaker—out of my head. I see him putting on “the costume of an Indian, equipped with a small hatchet, which [he] and [his] associates denominated the tomahawk.” I see him carefully smearing his “face and hands with coal dust in the shop of a blacksmith.” I imagine Hewes, and I can’t help but think how much fun it must have been.

I have the same—if somewhat tempered thought—as a new generation of Tea Partiers dons its tricornes and picks up the fife and drum, as the masquerade that began with men in Mohawk costumes finds new life in the trappings of pre-Revolutionary Americana. Tea Partiers flock to historical Williamsburg, the Washington Post reports, to gain insight into the minds of the founders. They cheer as some pretend Patrick Henry cries, “Give me Liberty or give me death!” They pepper the ersatz George Washington with questions about what we ought to do now.

And the dance continues. Like a political Mandelbrot set, the Tea Party creates a fractal structure of masquerade. The billionaire Koch brothers’ groups, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, pour money into—and the ceaselessly self-satirizing, fair and balanced Fox News Network actively promotes—the “grassroots” Tea Party. A rouge and a rodeo clown, leaders of a leaderless movement, paint themselves part-prophets and part-Average Joes—all without, apparently, any sense of self-awareness or shame. That Glenn Beck would dream that he is akin to Martin Luther King, Jr. or that Sarah Palin would make herself up as representative of Real America stretches irony to its breaking point, but the show must go on.

Largely older and male, and overwhelmingly white and Republican, they are, in demographics and ideology, from the same set that wanted austerity in thirties, wrote paeans to the imagined Leave it to Beaver fifties, and hippie-punched their way though the sixties. “We the people,” their manifestos read, yet they speak for but a sliver of the America. ’Twas ever thus.

But the rage is real—real and raw and born of bereavement for a wished-for America, nursed with fear and perceived persecution. That rage brought them to the Washington Mall to hear Beck take up the mantle of the persecuted prophet. It brought them to the polls this last November to vote in the most reactionary, xenophobic, and mean-spirited congress in years. And, they imagine, it brought Hewes and his cohort to Boston Harbor that fateful night, dressed as Mohawks, wielding hatchets.

On September 29, 2010, firefighters watched a man’s home burn to the ground. Gene Cranick, who lived just outside South Fulton, Tennessee, forgot to pay the 75 dollar fee that the South Fulton fire department required for those living outside the city limits. Fireighters arrived at the scene, but not to put out the flames licking from the Cranicks’ house; they arrived to insure the fire didn’t spread to a neighbor’s house—a neighbor who did pay the fee. Cranick offered to pay anything, if they would just put out the fire. They refused, under strict orders to let the Cranick place burn—and burn it did.

Reportedly, some of the firemen became ill. Some wept. The Cranicks’ son, Timothy, was arrested after he attacked the Fulton fire chief.

Glenn Beck had no tears for the Cranicks, having spent them already, weeping for “the voiceless” in America, for those who feel alone, for his fear of the communist, Marxist, Maoist, Nazi president in the White House. For the Cranicks, Beck had a stern lesson. Behind Beck, as he lectured America about moral hazard and railed against the Cranicks’ attempt to “sponge” off his neighbors, was mounted a picture of Benjamin Franklin, beneath whose face was written, in bold letters, CHARITY.

The policy of the South Fulton Fire Department is that, if one lives outside the city limits, then in order to receive fire protection, one must pay a fee to cover the cost. Otherwise, they are receiving services for which they do not pay. They would be, to use Beck’s word, sponging off their neighbors. (It’s worth noting here that Gene Cranick offered on the spot to pay the fee, a fee that—as he told numerous news outlets—he paid in the past.) And it’s not an altogether uncommon policy: rural towns, without the population densities and tax bases of large cities, can’t afford to pay to extend their fire services to outlying areas—areas that don’t pay taxes. So the Cranick’s house burned.

One might think that another government entity might come into play here. Perhaps the county or state might extend the same protections to its rural citizens that it does to nearly all of us who expect that when we call 911, the men and women who come will do more than stand and watch. One might think that the just as we view charity—just as Ben Franklin and Glenn Beck view charity, apparently—as a noble trait among men, we might view charity in our governments as a good thing, too.

But no, we don’t—or at least the Tea Partiers don’t. If they have a unifying message, it would be that government is doing too much. Government, as Gorver Noquest put it out to be small enough to “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” And long gone are the days that we might dispute that desire; now we spend most of our time bickering about the size of the bathtub. Too bad Cranick’s home couldn’t fit.

I called my parents a few nights after the Cranick’s home burned, and we talked about their plight. There was, in my father’s voice, a thin strand of pain, “People don’t care about the collective good anymore.” My father cried during the finale of M*A*S*H, my sister told me, and I remember once, as a child, watching a movie—I don’t remember what it was now—and being shocked to see tears in his eyes. That phone call hit me the same way. He told me about the cuts in Minnesota’s—my home state—budgets, that the homeless were dying of exposure, that their deaths were on all our hands. We the people, through our inaction, through our governmental representatives’ inaction, were causing the deaths of men in Minneapolis that night.

It’s hard to square the Cranick’s shell of a home or the exposure deaths of the most vulnerable in Minnesota with the idea that government does too much. Already, when our fellow citizens turn to government, government—the embodiment of we the people—as often as not, stands and watches. And so, when the Tea Partiers get together and dress up as revolutionaries, it’s hard to call that anything other than mere masquerade.

On February 14, 2011, thousands gathered in Wisconsin’s state capitol to stand up for the rights of their fellows. The America for which they were fighting—for which they still fight—is one of safety, security, and agency for its citizens. The America for which a Boston shoemaker struck a blow was one of self-determination for its people. And here’s the kicker: the America for which the Tea Partiers pine and hope is one and the same—safety, security, agency, and reasons to hope. But Glenn Beck called the Wisconsin protesters communist tools.

The greatest masquerade in which the Tea Parties dance has no pageantry—no revolutionary regalia, no drums and fifes. It is a dance so subtle, the dancers do its moves without knowing the tune. These are men and women, patriots and concerned citizens who have been taken in by wolves in sheep’s clothing. Beck and Palin, Bachmann and Walker, they play their populist song and all the while dismantle the very things that Americans—union “thugs” and Tea Partiers alike—want America to be.

I’ve learned my lesson, I think: the tea party had nothing to do with taxes; it was a masquerade.

Slouching Toward War

God, I hope that the combined efforts of the United States, France, Britain, and a host of other Western countries are able to do some good in Libya—and thank God I'm not the one who had to make the decision either to allow a brutal, insane megalomaniac to massacre his own people while we sit on our hands or to get the US involved in yet another war in the Middle East. It's an incredibly tough decision, with fair and good arguments for both sides, and if I were in the Oval Office today, I have no idea what I would do.

But there is this, from Et tu, Mr. Destructo?'s article "Slouching from Benghazi" by General Rehavam Ze'evi (note: not actually the assasinated Israeli general who described Palestinians as a "cancer" whom Israelis should deal with "the same way you get rid of lice." Also, please note, Mr. Destructo is not actually run by Mobutu Sese Seko...):

Gaddafi has spent the past fifteen years ingratiating himself with the "good guys," flipping over small-fry terrorist schemers, churning the oil, scrapping his two-bit nuke program. This is a pretty impressive feat for a guy who made his name sponsoring full-throated bloody murder against American and British civilians. Those governments might not give a shit about anyone else in the world, but killing their people is sure as fuck off-limits. Gaddafi nearly killed Margaret Thatcher herself through his IRA support, hit U.S. servicemen several times in Europe, and downed Pan Am Flight 103, at a cost of two hundred and seventy Brits and Yanks. We live in a world where Obama's kaffeeklatch with toothless ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers was a major campaign issue, yet Gaddafi — a man so radically unhinged and pathologically vainglorious that he makes Saddam look like Thomas Pynchon — was embraced by a startling coalition of Western elites. The difference was that he could buy them. These supplicants pocketed blood money ripped from the heart of Libya. The darkest stain, the damn spot that won't come out for decades, came from Gaddafi's billfold, crumpled and stuffed into the pockets of owl-eyed trans-Atlantic mediocrities dispatched to Tripoli with all the dignity of a bachelor party stripper van. Gaddafi has spent the last two decades buying respectability, and my, what a bargain it is when you know the right people. They deserve to be hounded into suicides for this, to never live this down. So let's name names.

Ze'evi then proceeds to detail the reprehensible Western involvement in Gaddafi's kiss-and-make-up tour—or, as Ke'evi puts it, "The Magical Monied Muammar's Comeback Tour, or: 'The Most Disgusting Story Ever Told.'"

And then there's the ever-delightful Republican inability to decide if Obama's a war-monger or a pussy. All the while, their favorite, bloated, fat-assed nephew—and America's very own merchant of death—is about to get another handout from good ol' Uncle Sam. As Andrew Exum notes (via Ezra Klein, in a would-be-funny-because-of-the-understatement titled post, "Bombing people costs money."):

A Tomahawk Missile cost $569,000 in FY99, so if my calculations are correct, they cost a little over $736,000 today assuming they are the same make and model. The United States fired 110 missiles yesterday, which adds up to a cost of around $81 million. That's twice the size of the annual budget of USIP, which the House of Representatives wants to de-fund, and is about 33 times the amount of money National Public Radio receives in grants each year from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which the House of Representatives also wants to de-fund in the name of austerity measures.

Thank god for military contractors! I assume that eighty-one million dollars will be put to good use, like more making more canisters of tear gas that the repressive governments can use on their own citizens or something. Also, this: as Jon Stewart said last night, "You can't simultaneously fire teacher and Tomahawk missiles."

Stewart is wrong, though: a government can, and ours does, which is to say nothing of the hundreds of millions of dollars that we've spent on the great American misadventures in the Middle East (and Africa. and Latin America. etc.) simultaneously in the name of propping up brutal strong-men and for America's watchword, freedom (which is to say, freedom elect governments that will support America's further experimentation Over There).

Make no mistake, the upshot of the Military-Industrial complex using the Middle East as a playground is that our government gives them a giant wad of blood-drenched money for their even-increasing allowance. And then they call for austerity measures at home. It's regressive redistribution of wealth, and the beneficiaries of it now get to spend their hard-earned government bling on electing ever-more redistributionist elected officials.

As Rachel Maddow might say, it's not about the budget. These calls for austerity? They lead to cuts for teachers and new Tomahawk missiles.

I seem to have lost sight of the point of all of this, which is Libya. Libya, where rebels are fighting and dying. Libya, which has just become the West's next war in the Middle East. Libya, that great exemplar of the ambiguities of a region so long dealt with in absolute terms.

I suppose it will be worth it—the missiles, the money, and most importantly, the bloodshed—if this lets the Libyan people evict the Mad Dog. If we can help stop the inevitable atrocities that would follow if Gaddafi gets his hands on Bengahzi. That would be worth it.

But given our track record in the Middle East, can anyone blame us if we have our doubts?

A Crazy Thought

If you've been able to tear yourself away from the coverage of the uprising in Egypt (it's been hard for me), then you might have heard about the newly-minted Republican House of Representatives trying to define rape down. From Mother Jones (via Pandagon):

Rape is only really rape if it involves force. So says the new House Republican majority as it now moves to change abortion law.

For years, federal laws restricting the use of government funds to pay for abortions have included exemptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. (Another exemption covers pregnancies that could endanger the life of the woman.) But the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act," a bill with 173 mostly Republican co-sponsors that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has dubbed a top priority in the new Congress, contains a provision that would rewrite the rules to limit drastically the definition of rape and incest in these cases.

With this legislation, which was introduced last week by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Republicans propose that the rape exemption be limited to "forcible rape." This would rule out federal assistance for abortions in many rape cases, including instances of statutory rape, many of which are non-forcible. For example: If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion. (Smith's spokesman did not respond to a call and an email requesting comment.)

Given that the bill also would forbid the use of tax benefits to pay for abortions, that 13-year-old's parents wouldn't be allowed to use money from a tax-exempt health savings account (HSA) to pay for the procedure. They also wouldn't be able to deduct the cost of the abortion or the cost of any insurance that paid for it as a medical expense.

That sickening provision was removed, leaving yet another horrible bill that would make it harder for poor women to get access to abortions. Here's Digby on the subject:

[T]he Republicans are saying over and over again that they are just codifying existing practice. Nothing to see here folks. Let's just dot the is and cross the ts. Except, of course, that's a lie. These bills go much further that anything we've seen and have the result of pretty much taking abortion out of the health insurance system altogether. And why in the world should anyone who says they believe in women's rights allow that to happen? This is, until further notice, a constitutional right we're talking about.

How does it go further than the already-odious Hyde Amendment? My understanding is that instead of simply denying direct federal dollars to women seeking abortions, it denies the use of any federal dollars. So, no matter how far down the chain it is from the federal government, that money can't be used. i.e., did your health care provider get a tax break or credit? Then no abortion. (RH Reality Check has more.)

Here's my crazy thought: Democrats fight--not only to defeat this travesty of a bill--but also to make it easier for all people to access to the healthcare they need.

In other words, fuck H.R. 3; let's repeal the Hyde Act.

Doomed, I say. Doomed.

Yeah... Bill Ayers and The Weather Underground are responsible for the unrest in Egypt... or something...

I'll let Adam Serwer at the American Prospect take this one:

I tend to think this would be more frightening if it were comprehensible, but it's a symptom of a basic problem which is that several basic heuristics conservatives use for slotting things into "good" and "bad" categories are clashing with each other. So democracy is supposed to be good, but Muslims are bad, liberals are bad, and if Muslims are bad and liberals are bad, then the protests must be some kind of combined Marxist-Islamist conspiracy that will lead to Islamists and Marxists splitting the globe between each other.
This all reminds me somewhat about that old joke about the German Jew reading the Nazi newspaper. His friend asks him why he's reading that anti-Semitic trash, and the guy reading the newspaper responds that he doesn't understand how he could read anything else, since it's all good news: Jews control the banks, Jews control the government...Anyway point is that no one has a higher opinion of their enemies than Beck and the conspiracy-minded conservatives he speaks for. If there are any religious extremists concerned that peaceful resolution of the protests in the Middle East might make their extremism obsolete, they should just watch Fox News, where they're actually on the verge of establishing a modern caliphate that extends from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean.

Egypt

From top to bottom: "Made in USA. Teargas.", January 28, 2011; "Untitled", January 30, 2011; "Untitled", January 30, 2011; "'The people want the regime to fall'", January 30, 2011.

All photographs by Sara Carr, from her Flickr page. Reposted here under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License.

I don't know who Sarah Carr (the woman who took these pictures) is, but I encourage you to check out her photos.

I can't say I'm much of an expert--or even keen observer--of Egyptian politics. So I'll refer you to someone who knows a little more than I. Says one former Obie living in Egypt (though he's not there now):

Much of the organization and mobilization may have taken place on Facebook via the We Are All Khaled Said group (through which 90,000 people said they planned to attend demonstrations), but the turnout seems like it was much more diverse than the usual web-savvy crowd. I’ve been to a number of pro-democracy demonstrations in Cairo and it’s typical to see the same handful of activists at each. Yesterday seemed to attract a different crowd. A friend in Cairo who was in Tahrir Square yesterday, the site of the main protest, put it this way in a Gchat conversation: “you can find cooperation between youth with beard and girls wearing foreign clothes.”

Go, read.

My only real thought is that our support for Mubarak and the unrest in Egypt brings attention to one of the U.S.'s historical problems, viz., our government supporting tyrants and strongmen as a bulwark against (what our government perceives to be) worse tyrants and strongmen.

This is, of course, case in point: the U.S. government supports Mubarak, whom the Egyptian people seem to despise, because it fears that the Egyptian people, if free, might choose to be ruled by those who would threaten the U.S.'s security (or, the security of the U.S.'s closest ally in the Middle East, Israel.

This is nothing new. The rather sordid history of U.S. involvement in South America springs to mind. We helped to engineer a coup against Chile's Allende, and provided weapons and money for the kidnapping-turned-assination of a pro-constitution Chilean General. Why? Because as Kissinger put it in a meeting shortly after the 1973 coup:

But I think we should understand our policy--that however unpleasant [referring to the thousands of summary executions following the coup], the [Pinochet] government is better for us than Allende was.

But I don't want to dwell on U.S.-backed atrocities in South America; it's enough to know that our government, regardless of party or ideology, has supported ruthless dictators at the expense of the freedoms of the impoverished and downtrodden around the world.

Of course, that's only part of the story. The U.S. supports freedom, too, and on balance, my gut tells me we've done more to help than hinder. But if we want to be known as principled supporters of freedom and liberty, then we have to actually be principled.

Indeed, we might have less to fear from the emergence of Middle Eastern democracies if we were.

Morning Update XXXV: The Nice Poster Edition

(1) What with all the big papers getting a little WikiLeaks action, I thought I might too. So here, from WikiLeaks-released diplomatic cables on the problem of what to do with the 174 remaining Guantanamo detainees (via the February 2011 issue of Harper's--no link) is proof that politicians can be clever even behind closed doors:

"I've just thought of something," the king [Abdullah of Saudi Arabia] added, and proposed implanting detainees with an electronic hip containing information about them and allowing their movements to be tracked with Bluetooth. This was done with horses and falcons, the king said. [White House adviser John] Brennen replied, "Horses don't have good lawyers."] -U.S. Embassy Riyadh

Brennen might have also noted that the Government of the United States of America, should, as a general rule, avoid treating people in its custody like horses and falcons...

(2) And speaking of laughs, let's turn to the Republican National Committee. Though Michael Steele and his off the hook, lesbian bondage fiasco-style politics are gone, there is at least one reason to keep an eye on the RNC: the fascinating intonation of new RNC Chairman Reince Priebus. As Mark Liberman at Language Log notes:

In the tradition of English intonational description that goes back to Henry Sweet, Harold Palmer, and Roger Kingdon, the contours of the tonic syllables of tone-units have come to be called "nuclear tones". There are various inventories and taxonomies of these patterns — thus David Crystal ("The analysis of nuclear tones", in L.R. Waugh & C.H. Van Schooneveld, Eds.,, The melody of language: intonation and prosody, 1979) discusses seven ("Low fall", "High fall", "Low rise", "High rise", "Level", "Rise-fall", and "Fall-rise"), and alludes to others (e.g. "fall-level", "rise-fall-rise"). The question of how to characterize these patterns remains a subject for debate: What are the tonal "atoms" that make up these contours, and how do they combine? What are their dimensions of quantitative variation? For example, American linguists since Pike have generally preferred to decompose rises and falls into sequences of level targets. Other recent approaches have decomposed local regions of pitch contours via orthogonal polynomials or functional principal components analysis. In any system, it's natural to wonder whether the "high" and "low" variants of rises and falls are really qualitatively distinct patterns or just parts of a pitch-range continuum. The most important difficulty is the lack of any intonational equivalent of psychological "word constancy". If you promise a class of elementary-school kids that the first one to raise a hand when you next say "chickadee" will get a dollar, you can expect some arguments about whose hand went up first, but not about whether you said the word; in contrast, if you offer a reward for flagging your next "high rising nuclear tone" (of course exemplifying it rather than naming it), you'll get confused looks at first, eventually replaced by plenty of arguments about whether you produced one or not. For similar reasons, it's hard to trust phonetic studies of intonational categories whose data is produced by asking laboratory subjects to pronounce particular contours. But the distribution of English intonational patterns in natural speech seems to be roughly as non-uniform as the distribution of words; and so some contours are less studied than others just because they're usually less common. This is where Mr. Priebus comes in. Judging from his remarks after being elected the new chair of the Republican National Committee, he's a reliable source of the "level" nuclear tone, which is otherwise somewhat difficult to find.

If you know what the hell Liberman is talking about, then I'm sure you're very excited (and smarter than I am). There are examples of Priebus's fascinating intonation at Language Log.

Thank God, I guess, that someone is studying these sorts of things.

(3)The following are excerpts from the forum, "A Super Bowl Spot for Uncle Sam," a transcript of which appeared in the February 2011 issue of Harper's (no link). The premise of the forum is this:

During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, polls showed that more than 70 percent of Americans trusted the federal government, purveyor of such beloved products as the interstate highway system, the G.I. Bill, and the Social Security check. Then, abruptly, in 1966, the government's favorability ratings began to fall, and fall. Last September, when pollsters at Gallup asked Americans to "describe the federal government in one word or phrase," 72 percent of the responses were pejorative. ... We may be more politically polarized than ever, but when it comes to the federal government, we stand united in our disgust. One often hears that we should run government like a business. What would a business do if it saw brand loyalty give way to such brand hostility? Wouldn't its executives summon the alchemists of advertising? The day after last November's midterm elections, Harper's Magazine gathered creatives from four ad agencies and assigned them a daunting task: to develop a television spot for the federal government. And not just any television spot. We wanted one both memorable enough and entertaining enough to compete in the most expensive televised-marketing event of the year--the Super Bowl.

So, best. premise. ever. right? Some choice moments:

Perry Fair: The train station I use has a huge sign saying, THIS RENOVATION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE STIMULUS PACKAGE. I'm like, "By who?" There's no branding. I walk away all, like, "Thank you, that's nice." This is the worst print ad I've ever fucking seen.

And,

Thomas Frank: As far as government advertising goes, we're not aiming for anything dishonest. That's what the Soviets did. If the Soviets said it, it was propaganda.

Mark Fitzloff:They had some really nice posters, though.

And,

Fitzloff: Let's mate a donkey and an elephant and have their offspring talk. Perry Fair: A donkephant. A green donkephant. Sobier: Green's to polarizing. Hohn: All the colors are taken! Fitzloff: Purple. Hohn: No, purple's got some problems.

And, from a storyboard of an ad

The Supreme Court justices dance onstage in a Rockettes Kick line. A surprisingly nimble Ruth Bader Ginsburg breaks the line to do a high to-touch jump, landing in a split.

I must say, I like the idea of "branding" the government, but I'm not sure a superbowl ad is necessary. How about better "print ads" for construction problems? How about a receipt for your taxes (Ezra Klein links to a couple of examples)? More effective, I would think--though far less funny.

Morning Update XXXIV: The "Tu Croque" Edition

Meena Hasan, here.

(1) It's Sunday, blah-blah Sunday here in Oberlin; sounds like a good day for a morning update!

From a post entitled "Modern conservative debate strategies, such as they are" by Scott Kaufmann over at Acephalous:

As you know, the classic tu quoque works like this:

Person X: It should be illegal to put babies on spikes.
Person Y: But I just saw you put a baby on a spike!

In this example, Person Y tries to undermine the argument of Person X by calling him a hypocrite. This is, obviously, a fallacy. But in a world in which people stand by SASQUATCH ISRAEL, the only way to improve a fallacious argument is, it seems, to double down on it. The reverse tu quoque, then, goes something like this:

Person X: It should be illegal to put babies on spikes.
Person Y: (putting a baby on a spike) But I just saw you put a baby on a spike!

Here's the example made more concrete (by me!)

(Some) Democrats: We should decrease the deficit.
Republicans: (railing about the need to extend the Bush tax cuts on the top income bracket) But in the past, you've supported things that would increase the deficit!

It would be funny if, you know, they weren't serious.

(2) Apparently, no one really like unions anymore--especially teachers' unions. Indeed, even many on the left have soured on unions in general and, to a greater degree, teachers' unions.

Now there are, I suppose, a number of good and interesting debates that one could have about teachers' unions, but there's something odd about people on the technocratic left--who believe, by and large, that merit pay would be a good way of increasing student test scores--beating up on teachers' unions, whose express purpose is to provide increased pay and benefits for teachers.

Ezra Klein half makes this point:

A lot of the people who think money is important for teachers also hate teacher's unions. Those unions, of course, make teaching a more attractive job with better wages and conditions, and that should increase the quality of the talent. Now, it so happens that teaching isn't incredibly lucrative, but that's a question that more about the pay level than about whether unions impose too much pay equality.

If I'm reading that right, then Ezra Klein--a member of the technocratic left if ever there was one--is making my point for me. Ad to this Mayor Fenty's (who, by the by, was an Oberlin grad) crushing defeat in D.C., and maybe there's something of a sea change coming.

Or maybe not. And even though I'm deeply skeptical of the sort of reforms pushed by the technocratic left, I'm equally wary of doing nothing.

I'll let Nicholas Lemann (who wrote the "comment" on school reform in the latest New Yorker take me out:

Large-scale, decentralized democratic societies are not very adept at generating neat, rational solutions to messy situations. The story line on education, at this ill-tempered moment in American life, expresses what might be called the Noah's Ark view of life: a vast territory looks so impossibly corrupted that it must be washed away, so that we can begin its activities anew, on finer, higher, firmer principles. One should treat any perception that something so large is so so completely awry with suspicion, and consider that it might not be true--especially before acting on it.

(3) This semester, I'm the Writing Associate for a First-Year Seminar (an FYSP in the Oberlin parlance). It's fun. I've been a writing tutor for the last three years, but before now, I've always worked in the Writing Center. This is the first time I've spent my time working for just one class, which has certain advantages (and disadvantages).

One of the advantages this time around is that I've been able to see firsthand the obsession that first-years seem to have with the driest kind of five paragraph essay: a fractal structure in which each paragraph includes five sentences that follow the same structure as the essay itself.

This group of freshmen seem to care--at the expense of most anything else--about the structure of the paragraph. You end up with a disjointed essay with five very discrete and unconnected units.

What's more, the theses themselves are timid, and the essays that follow aren't so much arguing something as pointing something out. When pressed, my first-years have claimed that this is what college-level academic essays should be, something that, in my experience, just isn't true.

In contrast, their informal essays are fearless and flowing; the ease with which they talk about themselves and their feelings on a given subject is amazing.

Questions: @Bubblegum Aesthetics: Am I crazy, or have you noticed this too? @Word Savvy: Can I blame standardized tests? @No One In Particular: Might the perceived yawning gap between informal and formal essays--and the facility with the former and the difficulty with the latter--come from the rise of "informal" modes of writing (viz. blogs, texts, tweets, Facebook updates, emails, etc.), modes of writing that used to fall under the providence of orality?

Of course, I should note that I do it too. That is: I blog. I email. I often write fractal and dry essays.

This is, I suppose, the "Tu Croque" Edition.

Reasons I'm a Capitalist

In the most recent issue of Harper's (October 2010), Patrick Symmes writes about the thirty days he spent in Cuba. Thirty days he spent living on the wages of an official Cuban intellectual--$15 a month.

Now, here are some illustrative quotes and reasons I'm a capitalist: (1)

"Some money?"

"I don't have any."

"But foreigners always have so much money."

"Yes, in my country I have money. But here, I live like a Cuban."

"Give me a peso?"

I can't. I'm playing a game, my dear. I'm pretending to be broke. I'm living like your parents for a while. I haven't eaten in nine hours. In the past eleven days I've missed 12,000 calories of my normal diet. My teeth hurt so badly.

Or, in Spanish, "No."

(2)

This was no island for amateur thieves.

(3)

Unlike most Cuban functionaries, Leal [Spengler, the city historian] had actually made a difference in people's lives. He rebuilt the old hotels; my friends took 540 pounds of cement for their new tourist bungalow. He restored a museum; they looted tin sheeting for roofs. He sent trucks of lumber into the neighborhood; they made half the wood vanish.

The State owned all. The people appropriated all. A ration system in reverse.

(4)

I used to say that 10 percent of everything was stolen in Cuba, to be resold or repurposed. Now I think the real figure is 50 percent. Crime is the system.

(5)

I worked hard and often at my own projects--I hauled cement and shoveled gravel for food, and wrote a lot--but it was not state labor, not the kind of work that is counted in the columns of official Cuba, where more than 90 percent of people are state employees. Why should I get a job? Nobody else took theirs seriously, and the oldest joke in Havana is still the best: They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.

(6)

"It's impossible," she said of my attempt to be officially Cuban. For survival, everyone had to have "an extra," some income outside the system. Her husband rented a room to a Norwegian sex tourist. Her neighbor sold lunches to the workers who'd recently lost their canteen meals. Her own mother wandered the streets with pitchers of coffee and a cup, selling jots of caffeine. Her friend around the corner stole the cooking oil and resold it for 20 pesos a pint. Another neighbor stole the ground chicken and resold it for 15 pesos a pound. ("Good quality, a very good price, you should get some," and I did.)

(7)

[Says Oswaldo Paya, "one of Cuba's most important dissidents"] We're all worse off than the guy who sells dogs in the gas station on the corner" ... "I don't say everything in Cuba is bad, or terrible. That's because we have distribution schemes to feed the poor, to give benefits. But that's another way of domination, keeping peiple eternally poor. Free my hands, I'll start a business and feed myself."

There it is. I'm reading this not in the way that conservatives in the Senate do. That is, I'm not reading this as "feeding the poor makes them lazy," but, rather as, "look at these people; they are already running businesses. Let's let them actually do it."

It's important to note, the "capitalism" I'm talking about here is about as close to that dream of Americana capitalism: small businesses, family businesses, entrepreneurship; I'm not talking about bloated multinationals.

Indeed, the current system of Cuban rationing and State labor seems little different than the almost-feudal system of massive corporations and company towns.

Well, let's remember that I said this next time someone calls me a socialist. And let's not remember that I said this next time I'm talking to an OSCA-ite Obie.

Morning Update XXXIII: The Last Word Edition

Zak Smith

"...Jessica at the roadside struggling prettily with a busted bicycle..." (page 39 of Gravity's Rainbow

here

(1) First things first. There's something off with the numbering of the "morning updates." I believe that this is correctly numbered XXXIII, and I've adjusted the others to follow suit. Here's the thing: Including this one, only 29 are tagged, which means I'm missing two. It's a puzzler. If any enterprising reader wants a free Ich Bin Ein Oberliner mug, then go through the archive and see if you can't figure out what's going on. First (correct) one wins.

The last word? Unless someone gets back to me with the correct answer and documentation on the number of "morning update" posts, then I will never ever speak of this again. How's that for a tie in!?

(2) Second things second. I didn't really want to write or deal with the controversy over the proposed Islamic cultural center in New York. I really didn't. But, like a moth to a flame, I am drawn to teh stupid.

I know that most--if not all--who regularly read this blog probably think the conservative hubbub over the "Ground Zero Mosque" is not only stupid but bigoted and crazy to boot. I feel the same way. What more is there to say?

Well, a few things, I guess. Here we go, and may I never write about this again.

(3) Ezra Klein on the evolution of the controversy:

You get a lot of these mini-manias in the 24-hour news cycle, and it's always hard to say which you should take seriously and which you should ignore. After all, if you jump on everything that cable news makes into a big deal, you've become part of the problem, because you're helping the story along. But you don't want to just dismiss everything, either. The test I try to use is this: Could I imagine a world in which this thing was happening but no one ever thought to comment on it?

Well, yes. I can't imagine that world for unemployment, or financial-regulation reform, or the Afghanistan Wikileaks. But it absolutely could've been the case that Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf decided to build an Islamic community center and no one really noticed, or cared, and maybe a few local politicians from both parties showed up to help cut the ribbon. As it happened, a few opportunists went after it, which brought it to the attention of a few sensationalistic media outlets, and then some opportunistic politicians jumped on board, and then their colleagues felt compelled to comment, and then more legitimate media outlets had something to cover, and on and on. The story is a story because of the incentives of the people making it a story, not because there's something about an Islamic community center a few blocks from Ground Zero that just screams out for national attention.

(4) It's fair to say that few of the actors involved in this mess have any self-awareness at all. Glenn Beck never did, and that's no surprise; the media often doesn't, which somehow still surprises me; and the Democrats can't seem to understand why no one takes them seriously when they go around to the base and claim to have anything resembling a back bone.

Klein is close to something, but a little too dismissive. He's correct, of course, that:

You get a lot of these mini-manias in the 24-hour news cycle, and it's always hard to say which you should take seriously and which you should ignore. After all, if you jump on everything that cable news makes into a big deal, you've become part of the problem, because you're helping the story along. But you don't want to just dismiss everything, either.

But his test isn't doesn't catch 'em all. There's something about this story and the way in which it arrived that's important. It's important, not only because it encapsulates what's wrong with both parties (one's crazy, and one's spineless), but also because it's emblematic of an ailing media (and I don't just mean that it's susceptible to right-wing pollutants).

Consider the headline in today's Minneapolis Star Tribune:

POLITICS OF THE MOSQUE DEBATE

First, while it is a debate over a "mosque," it really should be a debate over a community center that includes prayer space. But I guess that really isn't the point now is it.

The truth is that the "politics" of this debate are shaped by the media coverage of this debate, which seems to be lost (or at least only tacitly recognized) by the media actors involved. One of the upshots of the entwining of commentary and journalism is that you end up with journalism that can masquerade as commentary and commentary that can masquerade as journalism.

That, all too often, is happening here. And of course, Fox News practically invented the modern incarnation of this effect, but that normative wolf in positive clothing is not limited to Fox. When Newt Gingrich says that we wouldn't allow the Nazis to have signs in front of the Holocaust museum, and the "journalist" merely nods and asks some Democrat to respond, that journalist is (1) creating false equivalence and (2) ignoring the facts--Nazis are perfectly within their rights to have signs in front of the Holocaust museum.

By acting as though this is just another two-sided debate--like always--the media is endorsing the idea that both sides have equal standing. But they don't, and the media shouldn't act like they do. After all, it's not the "Ground Zero Mosque," despite what it has been dubbed; you can't see Ground Zero from the damn community center. The hubbub over the "radical" imam is ginned up; President Bush and he worked together. I could go on.

And so, with the media's blessing, the story floats along in this strange context-less bubble, and instead of popping the damn thing, they report on it, and it grows ever-larger and swallows up ever-more of the already small space American's have that isn't devoted to watching people lose weight and sing shitty pop songs.

I'm reminded of what Roger Hodge wrote in Harper's:

The disease manifested itself almost everywhere at once, but the superficial effects were most spectacular in our national mirror: the Media, which absorbed and digested the once proud opposition of the Press and made of it a mere legitimizer of horrors. The self-refuting absurdity of the Bush presidency, with its pretensions to manufacture an imperial reality, parallels the rise of the aggressively oxymoronic genre of “Reality Television,” with all its unintentional ironies. Among so-called news programming, Fox’s “Fair and Balanced: We Report, You Decide” is of a piece with Anderson Cooper’s “Keeping Them Honest” and, to give an extreme and perhaps gratuitous example, CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. More perniciously, the self-importance with which the quality newspapers fawned on George W. Bush and his retainers in the decisive years after September 11, 2001, particularly in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, bears comparison with the bitter satires of G. K. Chesterton and Evelyn Waugh.

The disorder from which we suffer—known among its close observers as Self-Satirizing Syndrome, or SSS—is a cruel one. Not only have we been made to witness the betrayal of almost every promise made by our Founding Fathers, and seen their direst prophesies confirmed, we must also suffer the indignity of seeing our constitutional ideal turned into a shabby mockery of itself. Somehow, by a trick of dialectical cunning, the United States of America has vaulted over the tragic phase of history in favor of a relentless pursuit of historical farce.

It's endlessly fascinating--though perhaps not all that surprising--that The Daily Show's takedown of both the controversy itself and the media's reaction to it remains one of the best I've seen.

Fascinating because The Daily Show is in a sense utterly ajournalistic and yet on occasion it gets at the truth--an ever more elusive specter in these times--better than journalists. Not surprising because what the media lacks, self-awareness, The Daily Show has in spades--albeit in the form of a healthy dose of ironic distance.

I'll let Hodge play me out:

The medicinal literature I have in mind is not fiction, though fiction can serve in this role as well, but the literature of fact, a variety of narrative journalism (of a provenance far too ancient to be called “new”) that has long sought to place a strong bulwark of wit between the reader and history’s perpetual invitation to despair. Today that protective coating has become a medical necessity. In times such as these, healthy citizenship requires the insertion of a human proxy into the stream of historical happenstance. What we need is an experimental subject, an “I” sufficiently armed with narrative powers both literary and historical, gifts of irony and indirection, and the soothing balms of description and implication, to go forth and find stories that might counteract the unhappy effects of our disorder. What distinguishes such dispatches is what might be called the radical first person: the individual consciousness of the writer becomes paramount. The reader is thereby privy to the writer’s experience and receives direct confirmation of its truth value. What results is not mere consumable opinion, the mystical commodity of mediated capitalism, but the raw material of a considered judgment, whether aesthetic, political, or ethical. In that judgment lies the cure for our affliction.

The Freebooters

"(The word “filibuster” comes from vrijbuiter—old Dutch for 'looter.')"

George Packer for The New Yorker, here

Since all the cool kids are linking to George Packer's article on the myriad maladies of the senate, I thought that I would too.

It's a fascinating look at the Senate, and Packer manages to find every synonym for the word opaque out there (labyrinthine, byzantine, etc.).

The first takeaway is that the filibuster, despite its notoriety, is not really the biggest problem with senate procedures. Republicans have been experts in using holds--secret or otherwise--and the constant need for unanimous consent to undertake even the most basic housekeeping measures to slow the pace of governing to a crawl. As Packer writes,

Like investment bankers on Wall Street, senators these days direct much of their creative energy toward the manipulation of arcane rules and loopholes, scoring short-term successes while magnifying their institution’s broader dysfunction. [...]

“The Senate, by its nature, is a place where consensus reigns and personal relationships are paramount,” Lamar Alexander said. “And that’s not changed.” Which is exactly the problem: it’s a self-governing body that depends on the reasonableness of its members to function. Sarah Binder, a congressional scholar at George Washington University, said, “To have a chamber that rules by unanimous consent—it’s nutty! Especially when you’ve got Jim Bunning to please.”

Of course, the Senate has both had these rules and been able to function. The new ingredient in the mix is ever-growing crazy faction within te Republican caucus.

You have Senator McCain, who championed the idea of "cap and trade," turning around, and deriding it as the second coming of Marx and calling it "cap and tax." You have Senator Grassley, who put forward a number of the proposals in the Obamacare bill saying that it would "pull the plug on grandma." You've got a world in which ideas that are moderate at best and conservative at worst are being called socialism by members of the Senate. You want to see socialism? Give me single-payer and nationalize the banks. But, no, any regulation is now a "takeover," any tax is now a "shakedown," and stimulus is a "bailout," and everything--everything--is somehow not only a socialist plot, but a communist, Marxist, Maoist, Nazi plot as well--never mind that those last three are mutually exclusive.

And the problems with the crazy caucus don't stop there. There's something deeply unsettling about having people who actually hate government--who want to "drown it in a bathtub," to use Grover Norquist's now-infamous phrase--in positions of power in government. After all, the Tea people aren't the "I just want goverment to be smaller" Republicans; they're the "all government is tyranny people." (Of course, they're also the "government should be big enough to urine test all welfare recipients" people, which is just a little bizarre, but I digress...)

As much as I wish it, I don't think that all those obstructionist Republican senators will be either voted out or have a change of heart, which leaves finding the root cause of the problems in the Senate. The one I like the most is the never-ending need to fund-raise, and, thus, the absenteeism in the Senate.

First, let's be glib; Packer writes:

[T]he goal was to finish the bill by the end of the evening, so that senators wouldn’t miss a day of their spring recess—apparently, the only thing worse than a government takeover of the health-care system.

And then the serious:

While senators are in Washington, their days are scheduled in fifteen-minute intervals: staff meetings, interviews, visits from lobbyists and home-state groups, caucus lunches, committee hearings, briefing books, floor votes, fund-raisers. Each senator sits on three or four committees and even more subcommittees, most of which meet during the same morning hours, which helps explain why committee tables are often nearly empty, and why senators drifting into a hearing can barely sustain a coherent line of questioning. All this activity is crammed into a three-day week, for it’s an unwritten rule of the modern Senate that votes are almost never scheduled for Mondays or Fridays, which allows senators to spend four days away from the capital. Senators now, unlike those of several decades ago, often keep their families in their home states, where they return most weekends, even if it’s to Alaska or Idaho—a concession to endless fund-raising, and to the populist anti-Washington mood of recent years. (When Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House, in 1995, he told new Republican members not to move their families to the capital.) Tom Daschle, the former Democratic leader, said, “When we scheduled votes, the only day where we could be absolutely certain we had all one hundred senators there was Wednesday afternoon.”

Nothing dominates the life of a senator more than raising money. Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat, said, “Of any free time you have, I would say fifty per cent, maybe even more,” is spent on fund-raising. In addition to financing their own campaigns, senators participate at least once a week in the Power Hour, during which they make obligatory calls on behalf of the Party (in the Democrats’ case, from a three-story town house across Constitution Avenue from the Senate office buildings, since they’re barred from using their own offices to raise money). Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican, insisted that the donations are never sufficient to actually buy a vote, but he added, “It sucks up time that a senator ought to be spending getting to know other senators, working on issues.”

Holds could be broken, things could get out of committee, if senators were actually in the Senate. Perhaps real debates could take place on the floor of the Senate. Perhaps more could get done if, instead of a three-day senate week, we had a five- (or even six- or seven-) day week. Perhaps some of the comity and camaraderie (or whatever) could return if Senators were forced to actually spend time talking.

Plus all of this could lead to the civic bonus of actual discussion of issues, actual debates of problems--substance and not just process.

The trouble is, there's no easy way to get this done. You can't wave a magic wand and make term limits disappear (unpopular and potentially quality-killing, plus there's no guarantee that they won't just end up running for something else...); you can't just snap your fingers and make a constitutional amendment for purely public financing; you can't--and who would want to?--revert the world back to when state legislatures just appointed people.

Packer ends on a rather depressing, but probably true, note:

The two lasting achievements of this Senate, financial regulation and health care, required a year and a half of legislative warfare that nearly destroyed the body. They depended on a set of circumstances—a large majority of Democrats, a charismatic President with an electoral mandate, and a national crisis—that will not last long or be repeated anytime soon. Two days after financial reform became law, Harry Reid announced that the Senate would not take up comprehensive energy-reform legislation for the rest of the year. And so climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing. Already, you can feel the Senate slipping back into stagnant waters.

Of course, the consiquence of this, as Ezra Klein has pointed out again and again, is that the legislative branch becomes less and less relevant, as the executive and judicial branches actually do things.

Unoriginal, Nearly-deep Thoughts

Because I'm lazy, and because I haven't thought through most of these things, here are some unoriginal, nearly-deep thoughts.

Let's go.

(1) This is epistemic closure:

Most of us think we can always enlarge our knowledge base by accepting things that are entailed by (or logically implied by) things we know. The set of things we know is closed under entailment (or under deduction or logical implication), which means that we know that a given claim is true upon recognizing, and accepting thereby, that it follows from what we know. However, some theorists deny that knowledge is closed under entailment, and the issue remains controversial.

This is not epistemic closure:

The phrase is being used as shorthand by some prominent conservatives for a kind of closed-mindedness in the movement, a development they see as debasing modern conservatism’s proud intellectual history. First used in this context by Julian Sanchez of the libertarian Cato Institute, the phrase “epistemic closure” has been ricocheting among conservative publications and blogs as a high-toned abbreviation for ideological intolerance and misinformation.

Also, New York Times:

(Mr. Sanchez said he probably fished “epistemic closure” out of his subconscious from an undergraduate course in philosophy, where it has a technical meaning in the realm of logic.)

Sure, except it has a technical term in epistemology.

Seriously, guys, skepticism about closure has serious implications for ability to know. That's scary. Let's not trivialize it by using it as an overwrought term for conservative intellectual suckage.

In the end, I expect this term to go the way of "begging the question," which means the next generation of philosophy students will have yet another thing about which they can be smug.

Now, to be fair, I've only read some of Lowell's letter, and though I find them fascinating, that's one long-ass book, and I doubt I'll ever finish the beast.

Similarly, I haven't finished The Archivist, though for entirely different reasons. It started well, but the middle is dragging on, and I may have to abandon it. The reason I put it here is that the plot revolves around a number of T.S. Elliot's letter, which, in the fictional universe, have yet to be read.

I had a thought while reading this: If any contemporary writers make it into the canon 100 years from now, scholars probably won't find any letters to read. Everything moves faster now, so the Lowell-Bishop (or Jefferson-Adams, if you prefer) kind of correspondence has fallen by the wayside.

And I don't know about your emails, but mine tend to lack any kind of brilliance; I can't imagine I'd--or anyone else--would want them read.

Here's the question: What will future scholars use to get into the minds of contemporary writers/thinkers/whatever? Blogs and twitter? Facebook updates? Anyone? Beuller?

Enhancing the Land

Rand Paul, who's running for Senate in Kentucky, has no problem with Mountaintop Removal, the most devastating form of strip mining. From a profile in Details (via TPM):

Rules, control—just what Rand Paul abhors most, what chafes him about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Americans With Disabilities Act, and about environmentalists taking aim at Appalachia's coal industry for a practice known as mountaintop removal. The process involves blasting off the tops of mountains to get at the coal seams inside, then filling stream valleys with the resulting rubble and debris. Scientists and environmentalists say its effects are devastating, that it buries feeder streams, razes ecosystems, leaves toxic sludge pits and decapitated, denuded forests in its wake. "Mountaintop-removal coal mining," Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the chief prosecuting attorney for the eco-watchdog group Riverkeeper, recently wrote, "is the greatest environmental tragedy ever to befall our nation."

Paul believes mountaintop removal just needs a little rebranding. "I think they should name it something better," he says. "The top ends up flatter, but we're not talking about Mount Everest. We're talking about these little knobby hills that are everywhere out here. And I've seen the reclaimed lands. One of them is 800 acres, with a sports complex on it, elk roaming, covered in grass." Most people, he continues, "would say the land is of enhanced value, because now you can build on it."

"Let's let you decide what to do with your land," he says. "Really, it's a private-property issue." This is a gentler, more academic variation on a line he used the evening before, during his speech at the Harlan Center: "If you don't live here, it's none of your business."

Sure.

The top of Kayford Mountain. Photo by Mike McGee, from Wilder Voice, vol. 5, iss. 9., here.

Anatomy of a WTF

Well, Greater Wingnuttia is in an uproar over the revelation that there was an private email list, “JournoList,” of 400-or-so liberal bloggers, reporters, writers, editors, and academics. I’m in an uproar, too. Surely, I’m an important media figure, what with a blog that reaches about ten people a day and an editor at two news outfits in Collegeville Bumfuck, Ohio.

So, what gives? Seriously, Ezra Klein started the damn thing, and I link to him ALL THE TIME. JournoList is gone now, but surely JournoList’s new incarnation “CabaList” (great name, btw) could include me. I await your email, Mr. Klein.

In all seriousness, though, I feel like Will Ferrel’s character in Zoolander. Have I been taking crazy pills? I honestly don’t understand the hubbub over this list, which, if you’ve been reading conservative blogs (and why would you do that?), you’d think is a cross a Marxist political rally and the cabal from The X-Files. Says Jonathan Strong at The Daily Caller:

In 2007, when Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein founded Journolist, an online gathering place for several hundred liberal journalists, academics and political activists, he imagined a discussion group that would connect young writers to top sources.

But in the heat of a bitter presidential campaign in 2008, the list’s discussions veered into collusion and coordination at key political moments, documents
revealed this week by The Daily Caller show.

In a key episode, Journolist members openly plotted to bury attention on then-candidate Barack Obama’s controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman, for instance, suggested an effective tactic to distract from the issue would be to pick one of Obama’s critics, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

Conservative critics of Washington’s journalistic establishment have long charged the media with a striking liberal bias. But those critics have also said the problem was mostly unintentional, the result of a press corps made up mostly of Democratic-leaning scribes.

Yet Journolist’s discussions show an influential left-wing faction of the media participating in a far more intentional sort of liberal bias.

Journolist’s members included dozens of straight-news reporters from major news organizations, including Time, Newsweek, The Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Politico, Bloomberg, Huffington Post, PBS and a large NPR affiliate in California.

I guess that's supposed to be shocking and/or freightening. It's certainly supposed to be evidence for Strong's claim that "an influential left-wing faction of the media [is] participating in a far more intentional sort of liberal bias."

Of course, it's none of those things. It's Spencer Ackerman, who is a liberal blogger, bitching about the Jerimiah Wright coverage to a bunch of other liberal bloggers and reporters, which isn't that strange.

And as best I can tell, the "open plotting" and "collusion" involved a few (not all 400, not even close) bitching about how they would like to change the coverage of the Wright scandal. Indeed, by Strong's own lights, we're talking about, at most a dozen-or-so well-known liberal columnists and bloggers discussing ways to change the narrative.

What does Strong think? Does he honestly believe that Ezra frickin' Klein is giving marching orders to 400 journalists? that after hearing Ackerman's master strategy, the entire media changed course? I've yet to see a shred of evidence indicating that it went any further than a few people bitching.

And then there's the charge that JournoList is somehow in cahoots with the Obama administration, even though there is--by these guys' own lights!--no indication that anyone actually employed by the Obama administration was active in the list at the time they were employed--one of Klein's rules for JournoList.

There are, I guess, a number of emails on the list that included strident defenses of Obama, and urged others to defend him too--which is exactly what a lot of liberals do all the time. Indeed, Obama sends me emails encouraging me to support him. It's a conspiracy I suppose. Think of all those press releases! Finally, proof of a liberal media conspiracy!

All the hubbub, all the utterly bizarre demands that all JournoList members and their associates ought to be named and shamed is really, at it's core, incredulity on the part of conservatives that liberals talk to each other and bitch to each other like normal people.

Indeed, it seems to me that, even if the "straight" journalists (i.e. people whose writing is actually supposed to be neutral) were writing about their support for Obama--and there's no evidence that they were--that's not exactly a big deal. Except for the inevitable question-raising, I haven't seen--despite a couple hours of paging through the swamp that is the conservative blogosphere--any evidence that their journalism was actually affected by their evil email list.

Are we supposed to somehow prevent journalists from having and discussing their private opinions? Perhaps they should be required to publicly post their dinner-time conversations, so that we are sure that they're not saying mean things and discussing politics with their families.

Amanda Marcotte agrees it's high time that we ensure liberals have no opinions:

The fundamental argument justifying the fit is that liberal journalists don’t have a right to speak to each other in confidence, a right that conservatives apparently get to enjoy on the grounds that they’re specialer than us. I imagine that if this all works out for them, they’ll be delighted to know they have a new line of attack on liberals. It’s way more than listservs, after all. Liberals communicate with each other in private in all sorts of ways. Now that they’ve managed to make this fact controversial, there’s no end to the possible scandals. I’ve made a list of what we can expect next, in terms of created controversy.

Scandal will erupt when it’s discovered:

*Many liberals are married to or dating other liberals, which often includes actual sexual congress going on behind closed doors.
*Liberal homes are often installed with telephones, and most phones made from them go unrecorded.
*To make this worse, most liberals nowadays carry their phones with them. At any point in time, they have access to confidential conversations with other people who are often also liberal. And just to add to the wickedness of it all, many also employ text messaging.
*Liberals are permitted to enter restaurants that serve dinner to people without recording their conversations. No doubt many of these liberal take advantage of this to discuss politics over dinner with other liberals.
*Did you know there’s no law against liberals having cocktail parties?
*To make it even worse, many liberals working in media or politics have offices where they work with other liberals, and therefore have unfettered access to unrecorded conversations with each other.
*But it turns out even those who don’t work in physical proximity with other liberals often use instant messaging services to conduct conversations with each other as if they worked together. Not only does instant messaging create a scandalous veil of privacy over these communications, but it’s also rumored that they use improper grammar and spelling.
*Liberals are permitted to both purchase books written by other liberals or check them out of the library. Either way, they brazenly read those books quietly, and enjoy thoughts about them that they aren’t forced to share with other people.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the only form of communication we’ll be allowed is blogging, but only if every reader reports their thoughts straightaway in comments. Maybe also Facebook, but only if all the privacy controls are turned off. And then they’ll have to create new rules to explain why it’s scandalous to allow us even this.

I'm not sure why I'm writing so much about this. The only thing I can think of is that it's just so fucking crazy that I can't take my eyes off of it.

I mean here's a list of the "known JournoListas" and their associations. Including links that demonstrate that some of them are work for "maoist" publications (the evidence? A House Committee on Unamerican Activities report that calls The Guardian an arm of the Soviet Union. Of course that would make the communists or maybe even Marxists, but certainly not Maoists. Whatever.)

Then there's the utterly bizarre, quasi-anti-semetic stuff:

What’s so funny, in a sick, sad way, is that, looking at the Journolist, it really does seem as if there is Jewish domination of the media — except that the Jews doing the so-called domination are completely in sync politically with Oliver Stone. They’re all left, left and more left. They’re just all too dumb to realize that, when you get as far Left as Stone, the antisemitism stops being coy little references to capitalism, Israeli imperialism and Palestinian victimhood. Instead, it becomes the active antisemitism that travels from Chavez’s attacks on Jewish businesses, to Stalin’s periodic kangaroo court purges and suppression of religion, to Hitler’s final solution. (And I mention those three Leftist antisemites here because Stone specifically speaks of them as either admirable or misunderstood, or both.)

If you want to get away from “Jewish domination” and get into a more balanced media, with representatives of all sectors in American society you have to go to the conservative media. There, you’ll find as mixed a bunch of people as you can ever hope for: Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, Hindu, Jewish, Atheist, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Muslim (a few), male, female, gay, straight, and some I know I’ve forgotten or haven’t even imagined.

I do analytic philosophy. I'm supposed to be able to parse arguments, and I have no idea what this guy's point is.

Of course, the whole thing is ludicrously hypocritical. The conservative media is well-known for their "collusion," which is really just message discipline. It's not that nefarious; it's just that conservatives are really good at hammering on certain issues and talking points at the same time. If you want to read more about that, read this of this.

One conservative actually calls this bullshit out, which is nice to see:

Everyone who has reason to be embarrassed by a direct quote in the Daily Caller's series on Journolist is an openly opinionated commentator. (The one partial exception is Jeffrey Toobin, who presents himself as a middle-of-the-road analyst on CNN, but his weaselly nature has always been pretty obvious.) Everyone who has been shown to have their work influenced by conversations on Journolist is, likewise, a commentator. That Chris Hayes tries to get perspective from other liberals before he goes on TV to opine on a topic, or that Joe Klein incorporates ideas from off-the-record exchanges into his blog posts, is not exactly earthshaking news. Commentators on the right do exactly the same thing -- it's just our emails don't get leaked because we're smart enough not to conduct these exchanges on listservs where we let the audience expand to include 400 people. This practice is a double-edged sword -- you get the benefit of idea-sharing, but you have to be careful not to get sucked into groupthink. Liberals seem more prone to the latter failing, but that's more a problem for them than for anyone else, and it's not much of a scandal.

The straight-news reporters who were on Journolist are being accused of being complicit in the partisan hackery they observed (even if they didn't participate in the discussions), but the charge doesn't really wash unless you can look at their work and point out how it is skewed by exposure to liberal conversations. Orrin Judd provides some useful perspective:

[O]ur friend Rick Perlstein was on the list and, in the meantime, he also had his own list of pet conservatives from whom he'd gather the opposing viewpoints. So there's nothing wrong with the list per se. Nor does this seem like a conspiracy to shape the news, no matter how much a few participants might have wished it to be one.

I guess I'll take the knocks in here, as long as I get to take the fact that all the "hyperventilating" on the right is just hypocritical, logic-free, nonsense, which, I suppose, is a pretty good description of the conservative blogosphere.

Links with Little to No Annotation, Part 1 of n

Because I recently went through a week's worth of unread posts in my RSS reader, I now have 20 or so starred items. Starred items mean, I should write about this. Well, instead of writing about them, why don't I just link to them and start to get my diigo (yeah, I didn't know what it was either) skills a-workin'.

Ready, set, go!

Links!

(1) Ta-Nehisi Coates says:

The more I think about this, the more I am faced with the kind of question I feel naive and stupid for asking--What kind of human being writes a 4,000 word article to prove that someone's long-dead relative wasn't lynched because he was beaten to death? Callousness is scary. Stupidity is scary. When you combine the two....I mean seriously, What the fuck? It's the worst of everything.

Intrigued? Go, read.

(2) Via Digby at Hullabaloo, this (from Pew) is great journalism. Awesome job, guys!

Thirty-seven governorships are up for grabs in November, along with all 435 seats in the House and 37 in the Senate. And only a handful of the more hotly contested races will get significant national media coverage from now through Election Day.

So it’s a little surprising that the national press is now lavishing the most attention on a candidate who cable pundits and political analysts expect to lose big in November: Alvin Greene.

The South Carolina Democrat has been the lead newsmaker in 2010 coverage since coming out of nowhere to win the June 8 Senate primary. Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism crunched the numbers and provided The Upshot with its internal analysis of media coverage across 52 major news outlets, from South Carolina’s primary day through July 18.

Intrigued? Go, read.

(3) There's a new model of the universe that doesn't include the big bang--or dark energy. Can I have just the latter and not the former? Don't worry; it's still preliminary (via Tyler Cowan)

Intrigued? Go, read.

(4) Sara Mayeux says:

A professor of mine, asked why he teaches history, replied that he wants his students, whatever profession they go into, not to be "prisoners of the present." That is, to understand (not just abstractly to know) that the way we live now is not the only way humans can live, or ever have. That's a lesson you don't have to go very far back in time to learn—in a sense, I wonder if Ta-Nehisi's frustration that America "is too ignorant of itself" doesn't have something to do with the tendency of Americans to imprison themselves in the present. Thus race has always been the subject of mere "conversations," marriage has been a man and a woman in love for time eternal.

Intrigued? Go, read.

(5) But I say to Ben Zimmer of Language Log, "what the hell is an obscenicon, and where can I get one?"

Intrigued? Go, read.

The Almost Meta-post

Who has two thumbs and doesn't deserve a column? This guy! Public Domain image courtesy of Wikipedia, here.

I'm thinking of adding a new tag to this blog, viz., "David Brooks Doesn't Deserve a Column." God knows I've written enough about David Brooks.

Some might think that petty, or call me jealous. I suppose would be fair critiques. It is a cheap shot, and I am a little jealous that someone who pretty much just vomits out 500-odd words of bullshit gets a job at The Times. I do that all the time, and the best I get is a position with the Oberlin Communications Dept. (for which, of course, I'm very grateful).

I'm not going to talk about the most recent column, which was not only wrongheaded but obnoxiously written (repetition is fine when it serves a purpose, but all that "green jacket" shit was just a patently transparent, and ineffective, framing device that did little except add column inches to what was essentially a two-paragraph and inane collection of faux-centrist talking points).

I'm going, instead, to give you this gem from a bit back:

When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era. It is not a liberal era–when government intervenes to seize wealth and power and distribute to the have-nots…. It’s a progressive era, based on the faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems.

Eric, over at The Edge of the American West (which I believe is written by a group of professors at some college or other) has this to say in response.

So to be clear, according to Brooks, the progressive era, which saw Congress and the state legislatures adopt constitutional amendments for the direct election of senators, an income tax, and the enfranchisement of women, wasn’t a time when government redistributed wealth and power to the have-nots. This seems obviously wrong in a way that would earn an undergraduate an F.

Eric, more charitable than I, goes on to say something almost nice about Brooks, which is sweet.

Intrigued? Go, read.