Groupthink
This is pretty remarkable.
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July 2007 Archives
July 31, 2007
Are Progressives Progressive?
More on that subject, from Millman, Poulos, Larison and Feeney.
Here's an interesting bit from Feeney:
the question is whether today’s (don’t call them “liberals,” call them) “progressives” operate within [the Progressive] tradition, or whether, as Yglesias has it, it describes a coalition, not a coherent worldview. One obvious fact that contradicts Douthat and Levy is that among most prominent segments of the left (intellectual, bureaucratic, activist) you don’t find much truck with the idea of progress. The traditional engines of Enlightenment progress – western reason, science, trade – have some real enemies among the multicultural, environmentalist, and anti-globalization left. Yes there is some conspicuous impatience to remove issues from public debate in the name of (real or spurious) scientific consensus, and this smacks of the old progressivism, but in general it’s the neo-Reaganite right that fetishizes optimism, believes in things like destiny and in America as the advance guard of western democratic values, etc.
I think both American political coalitions include people who fetishize optimism and progress, actually: the neo-Reaganites are more likely to locate the vanguard of progress in the United States, and the Clintonians in a somewhat more nebulous global community, but both tend toward a "bridge to the twenty-first century" visions of steady upward ascent in human affairs that has roots in the Progressive Era. Meanwhile, both coalitions include skeptics of progress as well, your Robert Borks on the one hand and your Bill McKibbens on the other. This ought to make the current left-right alignment deeply unstable (how can McKibben vote for the same party as Larry Summers? etc.), but for reasons that belong to a longer blog post than this one it holds together better than you might expect.
What Is Eugenics?
Ezra writes that it's "very unfair" to apply the word "eugenics" to, say, the contemporary trend toward the elimination of Down's Syndrome by selective abortion, because "traditionally, the term has been used to denote efforts to direct or encourage breeding by high status, socially dominant individuals in order to select for their characteristics, and discourage breeding by low status individuals (criminals, the insane, blacks, etc) in order to wipe their characteristics from the gene pool. For Ross to conflate that with parents who decide to abort infants with medically disastrous genetic mutations is a real stretch."
First of all, Down's Syndrome is not a "medically disastrous" genetic mutation, unless you take an extremely broad definition of the term "disastrous." Second, while the means of "traditional eugenics" were obviously very different from what's emerging now - involving state power rather than parental choice, and selective breeding/sterilization rather than prenatal genetic screening and abortion - the ends were the same: the genetic improvement of the human species through the scientific management of the reproductive process. Obviously, the question of whether and when to apply the term is contested, since nobody wants to be associated with the way early-twentieth century eugenics was practiced in the United States. But the use of the word to describe the abortion of the genetically-disordered, and the possible long-term Gattacization of reproduction, is hardly a reductio ad Hitlerum; it's more of a reductio ad these guys. Moreover, the usage hardly unique to the political Right - see here and here and here and here and so on. (That guy Habermas: What a wingnut!) Indeed, many defenders of genetic enhancement through prenatal intervention - and by other means as they become available - have embraced the term "liberal eugenics" (to be contrasted with the old, authoritarian eugenics), rather than repudiating it. Which suggests that it's not all that "unfair" a word for conservatives to use to describes the practices and trends in question.
July 30, 2007
The Latin Mass (II)
Rod Dreher's thoughts are here. Among other things, he writes:
I don't understand how it is that the Latin mass can be something that nobody but the tiniest sliver of Catholics want, but it can also be a nuclear bomb that obliterates the Catholic Church. Benedict is making a slight accomodation to help a certain number of Catholics who have endured a lot of very, very difficult times, and who are in many cases making extraordinary sacrifices to keep the faith. I don't understand why making the Tridentine mass more widely available should be interpreted as a move designed to force non-traditionalists out of the Church. If the Pope were withdrawing the Paul VI mass and replacing it with the old mass, they'd have a point. But he's not; he's only offering more choices to the faithful, within the Church's continuing tradition. And that's wrong ... why?
Downes' point about the pope's latest move exacerbating the factionalizing of contemporary Catholicism is more on point, but it says more about Downes' lack of paying attention these past decades than it does about the pope. Many engaged Catholics of the left and the right already parish-shop. Everybody knows which parishes in a given diocese have the reputation for being orthodox, and which have the reputation for being progressive. It shouldn't be that way, I recognize, but that's how it's shaken out since the Council. The divisions Downes sees coming have been with us for some time now. True, most Catholics continue on at their parish, and probably don't get involved with the faith at the level of caring overmuch whether the pastor is orthodox or progressive. But is that a good thing? In most of the parishes I was involved in as a Catholic, peace was kept because the priests/deacons avoided talking about controversial aspects of Catholic teaching.
I agree with all of this, and - just to be clear - I don't think that the slight damage that may be done the tattered unity of American Catholicism outweighs the benefits of restoring a much-beloved liturgy that probably never should have been restricted in the first place, and that will enhance the religious devotion of many thousands of faithful Catholics, most of whom are not nutty Hutton Gibson types but sincere, ordinary believers who merely want to worship God in the most elevated manner they know. I just find myself very, very weary of the divisions in the American Catholic Church, of which the liturgical division is just one manifestation, and which make it so very hard to just be a ordinary Catholic, orthodox and American at the same time. (Not that Christianity is supposed to be easy, of course ...)
Jody Bottum wrote a long essay on Catholic culture in America last year, in which he suggested that "one can find at least hints that Catholicism has finally begun to leave the deadlocked past behind." I liked the essay and the sentiment, and I certainly hope that he's right, but I don't always see it. The post-Vatican II battle has cooled off, yes, but sometimes it feels like there's an awful lot of scorched earth left behind where nothing green is growing.
A Question of Motives
Matt, on the Pollack-O'Hanlon pro-surge op-ed:
... it's worth noting the incentives that O'Hanlon and Pollack face. If they bow to reality and say the US should move rapidly to start cutting our losses in Iraq, then they're people who advocated in favor of a disastrous policy and this'll be bad for their careers. If, by contrast, they say the surge is looking good, and then work together with Bush administration officials and The Weekly Standard to construct a stab in the back narrative about Iraq, then they can hope to salvage their professional reputations at the expense of liberals.
I think the professional incentives cut in precisely the opposite direction. O'Hanlon and Pollack's current reputations depend on their perceived status as centrist wise men who write for places like, well, the Atlantic. Associating themselves with the dwindling faction that still hopes for victory in Iraq, or with a "stab in the back" narrative once the war is over, might make them popular guests on the right-wing talk show circuit, but it's likely to undercut their current status in the D.C. commentariat, not enhance it. From a professional standpoint, it would be far safer for them to take a Peter Beinartesque route, apologize for their mistakes, and bash Bush whenever the subject of Iraq comes up than to associate themselves with a strategy that only Bill Kristol, Joe Lieberman and David Petraeus seem to think has any chance of succeeding. That's what the "serious" people and would-be wise men on the center-left are doing these days, so far as I can tell - backing a (very slow) withdrawal from Iraq, while concentrating their fire on both the precipitous-withdrawal crowd and the proponents of the surge. And besides, isn't a common complaint on the anti-war left (and right) that hawkish pundits who reverse course don't suffer, career-wise, for having "advocated in favor of a disastrous policy"?
There are personal incentives - the desire to be vindicated against all odds chief among them - that cut in favor of O'Hanlon and Pollack supporting the surge, to be sure. But unless they define professional success as a sinecure somewhere in the vast right-wing conspiracy, which I doubt, I don't think they can be accused of careerism.
Update: Jon Chait makes a similar point.
The Latin Mass
As a self-identified conservative Catholic who's regularly appalled by the state of the liturgy in the American Church, I'm generally sympathetic to those cheering the reinstatement (or, since it was never technically banned, the promotion) of the Tridentine Rite. However, the argument raised in this op-ed (via Andrew) speaks to some of my own fears:
It’s easy enough to see where this is going: same God, same church, but separate camps, each with an affinity for vernacular or Latin, John XXIII or Benedict XVI. Smart, devout, ambitious Catholics — ecclesial young Republicans, home-schoolers, seminarians and other shock troops of the faith — will have their Mass. The rest of us — a lumpy assortment of cafeteria Catholics, guilty parents, peace-’n’-justice lefties, stubborn Vatican II die-hards — will have ours. We’ll have to prod our snoozing pewmates when to sit and stand; they’ll have to rein in their zealots.
And we probably won’t see one another on Sunday mornings, if ever.
I suppose I would fall into the author's "smart, devout, ambitious Catholic" camp, but I also think that shifting to the vernacular was the right decision overall, however badly implemented; I think that the attempt to increase lay participation in the Mass, however dreadful many of its fruits, was a necessary and long-overdue step in a Church that still has a serious problem with clericalism; and I'm troubled by the self-marginalizing tendencies among many of the people who share my understanding of what Catholic orthodoxy is supposed to mean. I admire what home-schooling parents do, but I don't want to home-school my kids; I wish more people went to confession and fewer people went up to Communion, but I also want to attend a church where the lukewarm and the zealous can feel comfortable sitting side-by-side in the pews; I understand the impulse behind Ave Maria University and all the other redoubts of neo-orthodoxy, but I'm wary of the separatism they embody. And I hate the polarization in the Church that makes me feel like I have to choose between what the op-ed accurately describes as the listlessness of the typical suburban Mass on the one hand - thick with "parents sedating children with Cheerios; priests preaching refrigerator-magnet truisms; amateur guitar strumming that was lame in 1973" - and what often seems like a strident, more-Catholic-than-the-Pope zealotry on the other.
The Blame Game
Karl Rove, President Bush's political lieutenant, told a closed-door meeting of 2008 Republican House candidates and their aides Tuesday that it was less the war in Iraq than corruption in Congress that caused their party's defeat in the 2006 elections.
Rove's clear advice to the candidates is to distance themselves from the culture of Washington. Specifically, Republican candidates are urged to make clear they have no connection with disgraced congressmen such as Duke Cunningham and Mark Foley.
In effect, Rove was rebutting the complaint inside the party that George W. Bush is responsible for Republican miseries by invading Iraq.
Obviously I find this rebuttal less-than-convincing. (How many people, I wonder, have even heard of Duke Cunningham?) But while Rove is wrong, he isn't all wrong. The important thing to recognize is that all of the GOP's problems in '06 - Iraq, Katrina, and scandals in DC - reinforced one another, fitting easily into a single overarching narrative of misgovernment, incompetence, fecklessness and corruption. Or put another way, the Republican Party found itself on the ropes from '05 onward because of Iraq (and the rising appeal of a a new-model populism), and first the Katrina response and then the various Beltway scandals, from Abramoff to Foley, were the body blows that kept them there.
Going forward, though, the notion that Congressional Republicans need to mainly worry about distancing themselves from Capitol Hill corruption, rather than the Bush Administration's Iraq policy, is at best unpersuasive, at worst absurd. Sure, the lingering memory of scandal will probably play some role in the '08 race, but voters' memories are short, particularly once a party loses power. (The indictment of Dan Rostenkowski wasn't a big issue in the '96 and '98 elections, for instance.) At the very least, Foley and Abramoff and Cunningham won't be in the public's face in '08 the way they were in the midterms. Whereas Iraq will be.
Headquarters
If you're curious where Yuval Levin, Glenn Beck and I get our marching orders, well ...
Note the presence of (ahem) Rainier Wolfcastle.
A New Eugenics?
Kevin Drum, scoffing at the suggestion that contemporary progressives might be enabling eugenics:
Now, here's the thing: Glenn Beck, Yuval Levin, and Ross Douthat didn't come up with this stuff themselves. But it didn't just pop up out of nowhere either. It's way too abstruse for that. Rather, some bright boy or girl in the conservative movement dreamed this up and now it's being run up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes. If it gets some attention, it'll be rolled out to a wider audience.
So whose bright idea was this? Is there a proud parent out there who wants to take credit?
Leaving aside the hilarious idea that I, Yuval Levin, and Glenn Beck (!!) are all getting fed the same talking points from some Central Command deep in the Republican Noise Machine, has Kevin Drum ever, you know, read any right-of-center magazines in the last ten years or so? Or any magazines at all? Has he read any Leon Kass, or Francis Fukuyama? (Or Will Saletan, for that matter?) Conservatives - and not only conservatives - have been fretting about eugenic-ish tendencies in the contemporary West (and elsewhere) for as long as I've been following politics. And the trends that the Right dislikes find their defenders, or at least their enablers, in two camps: bio-libertarians who welcome our transhuman future, and progressives who, whether they welcome transhumanism or not, are committed to an unfettered right to abortion, with all the consequences that entails.
Now, look - I assume that Drum is untroubled by the scale of pre-natal eugenics around the globe. I assume that he thinks that the elimination of the genetically unfit in the womb isn't something we should be worried about, because the state isn't involved and anyway fetuses aren't human beings. I assume that he's on roughly the same page as Johann Hari, who makes the case for "liberal eugenics" here on the grounds that it is "entered into by parents and it is motivated by love." That's fine: Just say so, and spare me the "eugenics? what eugenics?" hand-waving, and the pretense that conservatives are just making up crazy fantasies to smear liberals. A difference of opinion about bioethics isn't a smear.
(Though yes, Glenn Beck is certainly crazy.)
July 29, 2007
Emoticons :)
Count me as a reluctant member of the pro-emoticon club. I really only use the :), and only when it seems absolutely necessary - but if you get past the fact that yes, emoticons seem intended for “naïve tweens on AOL Instant Messenger finding out after-school soccer practice is canceled,” they actually do serve an extremely useful signalling function, particularly for those of us who tend toward sarcasm and other ambiguities in our email conversations.
Image emoticons, however, are obviously beyond the pale.
July 28, 2007
The Right's "Science" Problem
Isaac Chotiner (and various commenters) seem to think it's self-evidently ridiculous for me to put quotation marks around the "Science" that liberals claim to be defending against conservatives, given that conservatives are, in fact, arrayed against the scientific consensus on several issues. By coincidence, I wrote a piece on roughly this subject in 2005, during the intelligent design debate, and here it is. It's behind the TNR firewell, so I've pulled out some excerpts below the fold.
Ron Paul Sells Out
Ramesh, from a few years back, on Frank Meyer:
The influence of fusionism has not been wholly positive. Meyer contributed to an unfortunate tendency among conservatives toward theoretical maximalism, as in his casual reference to “the totalitarian implications of the federal school lunch program.”
David Freddoso, yesterday, on a sense-of-the-House resolution to the effect that public schools should offer healthy lunches:
What to make of Ron Paul's "aye" vote? Is he selling out to win the presidential race?
A Paul staffer informs me: "It was a sense of Congress [resolution]. It was harmless. It didn't do anything." Also, he said, Dr. Paul figures that as long as there is a school lunch program, the least we can do is make sure it isn't doing too much damage to American children.
Well, okay. I would have still thought of this vote as a teachable moment for the American people. After all, it's not often that someone like Paul gets all this attention. The wave of interest in him as the anti-war Republican gives him a nice platform from which to explain to liberals why socialism is bad.
Indeed. I know that whenever I try to explain to my liberal friends why I'm not a socialist, I usually start with the case against healthy school lunches and work my way forward from there.
Photo by Flickr user Bookgrl used under a Creative Commons license.
July 27, 2007
Links on a Friday Afternoon
Josh Levin on the worst week in sports history. Robert Messenger on why fans want cyclists to cheat. Reihan on David Brooks. Matt on what the great Brooks debate tells us about the advantages of blogging. Matt and Ezra and Matt again on the future of newspapers. Marc on Joe Trippi. William Lind makes the case for a rapprochement with Iran; Noah Millman is skeptical.
Now do your patriotic duty - get out there and see The Simpsons Movie!
Harry Potter and the Progressive Scolds
Shorter Dana Goldstein: Because J.K. Rowling, in the course of writing a fantasy saga that takes as a central theme the evils of racism, chauvinism and sexism, and the importance of treating all sentient creatures with respect, did not also suggest that heredity and family lineage are completely meaningless, that women and men are completely identical in every respect, and that there are no ingrained cultural differences between different intelligent species, such as humans and goblins, she is a Tool of the Patriarchy.
Spinning the Cocoon
That would be Hugh Hewitt, offering an utterly unconvincing explanation for why the Republicans should skip the Youtube/CNN debate. Patrick Ruffini, on the other hand, gets it exactly right:
It's stuff like this that will set the GOP back an election cycle or more on the Internet. No matter the snazzy Web features and YouTube videos they may put up, if they're fundamentally uncomfortable with the idea of interacting with real people online, what's the point?
Having spent the better part of a decade working at the intersection of politics and the Web, I can't help but feel of a deep, deep sense of dismay that we're missing something so basic. This is EXACTLY why I am afraid that we will be outraised by $100 million or more in 2008.
Yes, some of the questions on Monday were trivial. Yes, they were partisan. (I expect many of the 9/17 questioners to be partisan Republicans.) Yes, they were messy. But so is democracy. And the fact that some place so much faith in the broken mainstream media over a benign format like this one says a lot about the difficult straits the Republicans are in right now.
Hewitt's response? That the GOP candidates shouldn't participate because the left-wing MSM types picking the YouTube questions might throw one in that asks Rudy Giuliani about his connection to a priest accused of sexual abuse, an old friend of Hizzoner who has worked for Giuliani Partners since being barred from active ministry five years ago. Because I'm sure that if Rudy skips the YouTube debate, his connections to various shady characters will never, ever become something that he needs to address while running for President. Just like when John Kerry tried to ignore the Swift Boat Veterans, the issue completely went away ...
The Best News You'll Hear All Day
I can't say I've been all that thrilled about the prospect of a post-Calista Flockhart Harrison Ford suiting up for Indiana Jones and the Retirement Home of Doom, but if they're bringing Marion Ravenwood back - the only Indy love interest worth a damn - then I might have to get excited about it.
David Brooks, Yet Again
In the course of a multi-post assault on David Brooks' column on neo-populism, Ezra Klein writes:
Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam are always telling me to cut David Brooks more slack, to extend the assumption of good faith, to listen to the interesting things he has to say. So I'd really like one of them to dissolve my current impression that Brooks' latest column -- which tries to make the argument that the economy really is in very good shape, save for some issues with inequality -- isn't a pack of lies and deceptions.
I don't know about "pack," since much of what Brooks has to say I agree with: The Hacker thesis about rising income volatility seems increasingly dubious; globalization has brought a host of benefits to middle-class Americans, in terms of lower prices and greater diversity of goods, that don't show up in wage growth figures; much of the growth in income inequality is the result of trends like performance pay, longer hours for upper-income workers, and the increasing value of major corporations, none of which are amenable to easy policy fixes; tax revenues are higher and the deficit is in better shape than most liberals predicted a few years ago; and so forth.
But yes, the first two assertions Brooks makes in his column are technically correct but misleading, and if Ezra thinks that makes him a liar than I doubt there's anything I can do to disabuse him of the notion. While critiquing the doom and gloom of the neopopulists, Brooks cites rising incomes for poor families over the last twenty-five years without noting that they've stagnated or fallen in the last five; he cites wage growth figures from last year without noting that they're down in the first six months of this year; and he uses "average" wages rather than "median" wages, when the latter tends to be a better tool for assessing how the typical worker is doing. Tyler Cowen mounts a defense of the latter two points here, noting, among other things, that the "average wage" measure in question excludes management-level wages (including the skyrocketing CEO salaries that can skew averages upward) and is therefore a more solid metric than Brooks' opponents argue. But overall, I think the liberal critics are right, and Brooks' use of the data in these two examples deserves criticism and correction.
Whether that justifies calling him a "liar," or whether it might be more appropriate to treat him the way I would assume Ezra would like to be treated himself - as a fallible pundit who is sometimes insufficiently skeptical about information that dovetails with his preconceptions, and who merits respectful disagreement in such cases rather sneering and name-calling - well, make up your own mind. I'm done arguing about David Brooks. I think he's an excellent columnist; I think his body of work speaks for itself; I think that liberals who demand that the Times sack him every time he gets a piece of data wrong or attacks a straw man or commits one of the hundreds of venial sins that every columnist commits (yes, even Paul Krugman) should get a grip. And that's where I'll leave it.
July 26, 2007
Mendozzzzzzza!!!!!!!!
I'm obviously looking forward to seeing The Simpsons Movie and all, but I'm a little baffled to hear that the plot involves "Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has been elected president of the United States." In The Simpsons alterna-verse, shouldn't that be President Rainier Wolfcastle?
Dept. of Pyrrhic Victories
Obviously, the political undesirability/demonization of the term "liberal," and the left-wing adoption of the term "progressive" instead, has been an epiphenomenon of a larger conservative ascendancy in American life, and as such it isn't something right-wingers can really complain about. Still, I don't think conservatives should consider it a great victory that the modern Democratic Party's leading candidate wants to associate herself with a political tradition that, insofar as it's philosophically distinct from liberalism (and obviously there are many historical complexities involved here), is from the conservative perspective more dangerously utopian as well. I take Matt's point that "Progressive" is basically just a useful umbrella term for a left-of-center coalition. On the other hand, I'm not so sure that it's a coincidence that the revival of progressivism as a political label has coincided with a more strident secularism/atheism, a greater obsession with the supposed right-wing threat to "science" (read: left-wing policy preferences on stem cell research, cloning, genetic engineering, etc.), and a greater sympathy for Darwinism-as-a-universal-theory among thinkers associated with the political left. In one sense, as I've argued elsewhere, conservatives should welcome the relabeling of liberalism as a blow for linguistic precision; at the same time, I think it's at least partially the reflection of trends within the left that conservatives should regard with suspicion, if not outright hostility.
Ask Not For Whom The Cat Purrs
He purrs for thee:
A US cat that is reportedly able to sense when a nursing home's residents are about to die is baffling doctors.
Oscar has a habit of curling up next to patients at the home in Providence, Rhode Island, in their final hours.
According to the author of a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the two-year-old cat has been observed to be correct in 25 cases so far.
Here's the NEJM piece. I'm sure this is grist for the great cats-dogs debate; I'm just not sure whose side it buttresses. (via Rod Dreher)
The Year of the Spouses
While putting Fred Thompson's bad week in context, Ambinder zeroes in on Mrs. Thompson's role in the campaign:
Campaigns at this stage often require a single puppet master. Good Ole' Fred has one: wife Jeri Kehn Thompson.
Thompson unwisely allowed tension to develop between his wife and the rest of the campaign staff. Ex-campaign-manager designate Tom Collamore did not mesh with Jeri Thompson and the friction between the two was evident to the rest of the staff. At times, Kehn Thompson would simply countermand Collamore's instructions. She has final hiring authority -- something that every campaign manager needs and Collamore never had. The Thompson presidential staff will be her staff more than Fred's. ...
Now -- the strong hand of Jeri Thompson is not necessarily a force for evil. Spouses can be good campaign managers: Jenny Sanford managed her husband Mark's four successful congressional and gubernatorial campaigns in South Carolina. But Thompson's press has been brutal and borderline sexist, a consequence of her many detractors speaking on background to reporters. Thompson has worked as a professional political consultant and knows the basics of putting a campaign together. And Fred Thompson trusts her to make decisions. Incoming staffers need to accept that Jeri is first among equals. It is unclear whether any adviser will rise as a counterweight to the spouse. Probably not: Michelle Obama, Elizabeth Edwards, Bill Clinton and Ann Romney are probably the most powerful quartet of spouses to exert influence in a presidential race ever.
Bush, of course, had something like this situation in '00, except that it was a work wife - Karen Hughes - running the show as Karl Rove's co-equal, not Laura herself. Combining the two positions seems risky: The Clintons pulled something like it off in '92, but not without an awful lot of bumps along the way. In any case, it will be fascinating to watch how this dynamic unfolds across multiple campaigns - particularly with Elizabeth Edwards' cancer finding its way into the race, or not - and there's probably a book or at least a long magazine article in here somewhere, for an enterprising reporter. (Marc?)
Boring!
No, Newt, don't do it! Don't endorse Fred Thompson - or at the very least, don't endorse him yet! Play hard to get! Demand the Vice-Presidential nod as the price of your support, and get it in writing! Keep flirting with jumping into the race! Look at the polls - even with Thompson in the mix, "none of the above" is still in the lead! This might be your hour after all!
Above all, ask yourself - What Would Charles De Gaulle Do? He wouldn't endorse Fred Thompson, that's for damn sure.
Dear Mr. Zemeckis ...
... They have this radical new technology. It's kind of like the motion-capture you used first in Polar Express, and now in Beowulf, in that you start out by filming actual live human actors. Only get this: You don't have to put them in "standard-issue bodysuits covered head-to-toe in tiny sensors"; you can just put them in costume. And you don't have to take their captured movements and place them into a computer-generated scene; you can just build a set and film them moving around in it. And best of all, your actors don't end up looking like characters in a video game, or a mediocre computer-animated kids movie - they look like (I know, this is hard to believe) real people. They call this cutting-edge, newer-than-new technology "live-action." Think about it.
Look, I can understand the appeal of motion-capture. It's done wonders for creating fantastic CGI creatures, from Gollum to King Kong, and at some point - maybe some point soon - it will give directors tremendous flexibility in how and what they film. And obviously, somebody has to be a pioneer and make films filled with glossy-looking, zombie-ish motion-captured characters (like, well, Polar Express) so that others can make better ones later.
But I want to see a good Beowulf movie, dammit, not one that's a technical leap forward but still looks, in its trailer at least, more like a high-end video game than any Old English epic ought to.
July 25, 2007
The Deathly Hallows
There have always been two critical camps on the Harry Potter phenomenon – the small band of haters, which includes Harold Bloom, A.S. Byatt, and lesser lights like Ron Charles, and the host of apologists, which includes more or less everybody else. I'm a card-carrying member of the latter group; I’m not a Potter obsessive by any stretch, having read each book only once, but I am a great admirer of Rowling’s work, and I’ve always thought that that her skill as a storyteller and world-builder outweighs her literary weaknesses. Reviewing The Half-Blood Prince for NR, I put the pro-Rowling case this way:
… the Potter saga succeeds as few fictions do, and proves, in the process, that there's more to writing than felicitous prose or perfect psychological realism. As with James Fenimore Cooper, or H. P. Lovecraft, or any of the host of novelists whose stories linger long after their stylistic blunderings are forgotten, it's in that mysterious more that Harry Potter's success resides: not in the telling, but in the tale.
I would still stand by this assessment overall – but Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I’m sorry to say, is grist for the haters. (Obviously, spoilers follow below.)
Stratification by Biology
In the Cato Unbound discussion of Brink Lindsey's (excellent) book, Julian Sanchez writes:
On the economic front, since everyone seems to be focused on healthcare, it's not entirely clear to me which way technological progress in the medical sector is going to push. It may be that ever-rising costs make clear that public provision of cutting-edge care for everyone is unsustainable. But, paradoxically, medical innovation might also undermine the sense that we live in a "post-scarcity" economy, even in the colloquial sense. Suppose, for instance, that Ray Kurzweil is right that cascading and accelerating development will soon entail that buying a few more years of life with current state-of-the art tech allows people to survive until the next innovation, which will give them enough of a boost to reach the next horizon, and so on indefinitely. It might become possible to radically extend the human lifespan, but only at massive cost. Would we countenance a situation where the very wealthy enjoyed a century or more of middle-aged vigor while the rest of us were stooped and grey after a mere 80 or 90 years? Or would our conception of what constitutes an acceptable amount of "survival" expand to fill the available space? This may sound like sci-fi speculation, but again, if we consider the scale at which Lindsey's argument works, if it works, we need to consider the kind of changes we should anticipate by midcentury, not the next midterms.
I'm currently involved in finishing up what aspires to be a very sober and serious book about the Republican Party and class politics, and sober and serious books don't, by definition, traffic in Kurzweil-style theories about the coming availability of radical life extension. Nonetheless, I have a strong suspicion that something like what Julian summons up - some form of radical transhumanish innovation that's available to the rich long before it trickles down to the middle-class and the poor - is going to radically change the landscape of Western politics at some point over the next century or three.
I, of course, will immediately seek a leadership position in the Butlerian Jihad when that moment arrives - which again, isn't really something that you can say in a sober and serious book about public policy. That's why they invented blogs, I guess.
Update: Just to be clear - yes, as Matt says, the Butlerian Jihad was directed against thinking machines, not transhuman genetic engineering projects. But I think the spirit of the Butlerian Jihad would apply equally well to both. Clearly, this makes me a theological liberal.
July 24, 2007
The Cocoon
The relaunched page for the Victory Caucus is intended to be "a one-stop-shop for anyone interested in learning about what's really going on in the war." To this end, it boasts two columns of links: One is headlined "Official US Sources," and includes releases from Centcom and DoD touting progress in Iraq; the other is headlined "Blogs and New Media," and includes links to military bloggers and freelancers like Michael Totten. There are exactly zero links to any of the media organizations that do the vast majority of on-the-ground reporting from the Middle East.
When the next generation of conservatives sits down to analyze where this generation of conservatives went wrong, they would do well to start with efforts like the Victory Caucus page, and the mentality it represents - not the traditional (and justified) right-wing belief that many establishment institutions aren't to be trusted, but the naive and ridiculous theory that they can be ignored entirely. As those noted pacifists and appeasers Rich Lowry and Max Boot have suggested, this delusion hasn't just cost conservatives their credibility and their majority; it's contributed mightily to America's struggles in Iraq.
TTWOU?
Is it just me, or is the Giuliani campaign's insistence on renaming the post-9/11 conflict with al Qaeda "the Terrorists' War on Us" easily the worst coinage of this election season? It doesn't just tie up the tongue; it makes it sound like America's in a defensive crouch and getting pummeled, which is hardly the image that Rudy's "peace through ass-kicking" candidacy is trying to project. The "War on Terror" is dumb for all kinds of reasons, but at least it's pro-active.
The Spoiler
Andrew's right: As the Libertarian Party's nominee for President, Ron Paul would be as formidable as any fringe-ish third party candidate could hope to be; depending on the general election matchup, he might be able to match Ralph Nader's 2000 influence, or even slightly exceed it. If Giuliani's the GOP nominee, Paul can woo the hard-core civil libertarians, the hard-core anti-immigration types, and the hard-core pro-lifers; if Hillary's the Democratic nominee, he can pick up some Nader voters who think she's insufficiently anti-war. As Chris Caldwell's profile makes clear, the Paul candidacy attracts more than its share of kooks and nutters, but that's no bar to him getting lots of media attention and enough votes to shake things up a bit.
Yes, he's said he won't leave the GOP, but he ran for president on the Libertarian ticket once before, so his party loyalty can't be all that strong. And as long as the internet fundraising keeps rolling in, you know an awful lot of people will be telling him to do it.
July 23, 2007
Nixon Redux?
Matt Continetti, making the case against the Rudy-as-Nixon argument, points out that Rudy's "economic program is pretty much in a separate galaxy from Nixon's" - that the Giuliani neocon-influenced foreign policy is likewise roughly the opposite of the detente-and-realism overseas vision of the Nixon-Kissinger years - and that Rudy is very unlikely to appoint the next Harry Blackmun, what with his Federalist Society legal advisors and his pledge to appoint strict constructionist judges. These are strong points; where Matt's case is weaker, I think, is when he tries to rebut Michael Gerson's suggestion that Giuliani is "a talented man without an ideological compass." Matt writes:
The only evidence for this that Gerson offers is Giuliani's endorsement of Democrat Mario Cuomo over George Pataki in the 1994 New York gubernatorial race. But Giuliani's (wrongheaded) decision had more to do with his longstanding rivalry with Pataki and Pataki's patron, former New York senator Alfonse D'Amato, than ideology.
Hmmm. I would say that a Republican politician's willingness to endorse a member of the opposition party - and not just any Democrat, but a lion of liberalism - suggests a weaker-than-average ideological compass, at the very least.
The Fanboy As Critic
Do you know what I really dislike? Extremely long critical essays that describe their subject, often in painstaking and florid detail, without bothering to interpret it. Like, for instance, this NYRB essay on The Sopranos: In more than 5,000 words, Geoffrey O'Brien manages to tell us almost nothing about the show that a reasonably literate viewer doesn't already know. This is the essay for you if you never noticed that on The Sopranos, "bad or misconstrued information bounced around in a world defined by random breaks, mostly unlucky," or that "any throwaway line could encapsulate a scarily decentered world," or that "a single episode could juxtapose a certain number of disparate elements, and the high pleasure was in the jarring elegance of the juxtaposition." Or if it interests you to learn that "Coppola's Godfather films and Scorsese's Goodfellas [were] crucial reference points for The Sopranos." Or if you need a critic to explain that "Chase's neatest trick was to make a show about the mob—a show that laid out in gratifying detail the workings of scams and hits, political connections and techniques of intimidation, internecine maneuverings and FBI infiltrations—that constantly suggested that the mob was not what the show was really about." The whole piece is a fan's letter, not a critic's analysis, thick with plot summary, favorite scenes and bits of dialogue, written in the pantingly verbose style of an overeducated version of Harry Knowles: "These Soprano women made iridescent the masculine monochrome of the gangster genre ... the mere sight of [Tony] padding yet again in white bathrobe toward the refrigerator evoked a disheveled Wotan worthy of a show whose capacity to extend and savor its transitions could seem Wagnerian." Gag me with a spoon.
Contrast O'Brien's vaporings, if you will, with Emily Nussbaum's justly-praised post-finale reading of the show. Nussbaum takes up some of the same concerns that O'Brien does, particularly the audience's complicated relationship with Chase's characters, but then actually advances an argument about that topic, in an essay that's a model of clarity and economy - two-thirds the length of O'Brien's, and eight times as interesting.
Potterdamerung
I've finished the book, but my thoughts will take a little while to sort themselves into proper criticism; for now, if you don't mind spoilers, start with Russell Arben Fox and Eve Tushnet and work your way deeper into the internets from there.
Update: It doesn't deal with Deathly Hallows, but I quite liked Megan McArdle's piece on the economics of Harry Potter, or "Why are the Weasleys poor?"
Should Vitter Resign?
Jonah leans that way, but with caveats; Jason Zengerle looks at Congress's recent anti-prostitution gestures; Ramesh writes that "maybe one reason that Vitter hasn't been more forcefully and widely condemned is that our law and culture don't treat prostitution as simply 'illegal,' like drug dealing ...You can't advertise for drug deals in the yellow pages, but you basically can for prostitution." He also asks "how far" we want to take Ruth Marcus' reasoning "that prostitution is different from adultery on moral as well as legal grounds," because, in her words, "One is demeaning to a particular woman, the second to all women."
I'm not sure how far I'd run with that particular way of phrasing it, but I think her basic suggestion is right. I'd put it this way: Adultery where you don't pay for sex is arguably a worse sin against your spouse than going to a prostitute, because you're cheating emotionally as well as physically; however, going to a prostitute is a worse sin against society, because it makes you an active participant in a industry that profits from a kind of large-scale degradation that goes far beyond the damage it does to a single marriage. (Similarly, using drugs might be a worse sin against people close to you than selling drugs, because their lives will be more damaged by your addiction than by your dealing - but selling drugs is a worse crime against society as a whole, and merits harsher penalties.) Adultery is a matter of private morality, in other words, whereas procuring a prostitute is a matter of public morality; that's why the latter is an appropriate target for criminal penalties, and why Vitter shouldn't be able to get away with claiming that his actions belong to the private sphere.
Yes, prostitution will always be with us, and it's possible for me to imagine a society where I would support the kind of Catholic libertarianism that this writer recommends, on the grounds that it's simply too pervasive and inevitable a vice to legislate against. But America in the twenty-first century isn't that society; we're rich enough and sexually permissiveness enough that both potential prostitutes and potential johns should be able to find other ways of getting what they need (income and sexual excitement, respectively). Ramesh is right that we tend to treat prostitution with a wink and a nod, which is why Vitter almost certainly won't have to resign. But the law is correct, the winking and nodding isn't, and if Vitter did what he appears to have done I think there's a strong case he should step down.
Meanwhile, Deborah Jeane Palfrey's lawyers are busy arguing that she's protected by Lawrence v. Texas ...
July 21, 2007
Political Fictions
It's not the Harry Potter reaction you all (okay, maybe just a few of you) are waiting for, but you can find my review of Sammy's House, by Kristin Gore, in this Sunday's Times.
July 20, 2007
Your Potter Roundup
Jonathan Last has all the predictions you'll need. Megan McArdle and Kieran Healy, meanwhile, remind me why Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - where the Lost-style "everybody acts like idiots" phenomenon they identify was at its worst - was far and away the most irritating book in the saga. Meanwhile, this old John Holbo post identifies the pastiche (actually, one of several pastiches) that's at the heart of the Potter mystique.
As for me, just like with The Sopranos finale, I'm going to be behind the pop-culture times: I'll be occupied all weekend and won't even get to start reading the book till Sunday night at the earliest. So expect blogging to be light till then, since I'll be on something of a media fast.
Dangerous Nation (II)
I am, however, in agreement with Robert Kagan when he argues that American predominance will persist long after the Iraq War:
... foreign policy failures do not necessarily undermine predominance. Some have suggested that failure in Iraq would mean the end of predominance and unipolarity. But a superpower can lose a war — in Vietnam or in Iraq — without ceasing to be a superpower if the fundamental international conditions continue to support its predominance. So long as the United States remains at the center of the international economy and the predominant military power, so long as the American public continues to support American predominance as it has consistently for six decades, and so long as potential challengers inspire more fear than sympathy among their neighbors, the structure of the international system should remain as the Chinese describe it: one superpower and many great powers.
One note of caution, though: Kagan persistently refers to our main potential challengers, China and Russia, as "autocratic" nations, which strikes me as a confusion of terms. And this confusion makes him less attuned than perhaps he should be to the possibility that the current Chinese model of government, in particular, might increasingly inspire sympathy (and emulation) as well as fear. I'm no China expert, obviously, but it seems to me that the People's Republic has moved steadily away from the autocratic model of Mao and Deng, and toward what might be described as a one-party meritocracy - a rule by the best and the brightest in which the path to power for a talented individual is open enough to co-opt precisely the kind of people who would ordinarily be leading agitators for democracy. Whether this model is sustainable in the long run remains to be seen, but if you're a developing nation looking for a path to modernization (or, perhaps, a particularly anti-populist EU bureaucrat), the Chinese system promises all the benefits of liberal democratic capitalism without the messiness of, well, democracy. I'm still enough of a Fukuyaman, even now, to suspect that China will eventually democratize, but in an unstable world with an interconnected global elite, I think we underestimate the ideological appeal of an undemocratic meritocracy at our peril.
Dangerous Nation (I)
Historians will long debate the decision to go to war in Iraq, but what they are least likely to conclude is that the intervention was wildly out of character for the United States. Since the end of World War II at least, American presidents of both parties have pursued a fairly consistent approach to the world. They have regarded the United States as the “indispensable nation” and the “locomotive at the head of mankind.” They have amassed power and influence and deployed them in ever-widening arcs around the globe on behalf of interests, ideals, and ambitions, both tangible and intangible. Since 1945 Americans have insisted on acquiring and maintaining military supremacy, a “preponderance of power” in the world rather than a balance of power with other nations. They have operated on the ideological conviction that liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of government and that other forms of government are not only illegitimate but transitory. They have declared their readiness to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation” by forces of oppression, to “pay any price, bear any burden” to defend freedom, to seek “democratic enlargement” in the world, and to work for the “end of tyranny.” They have been impatient with the status quo. They have seen America as a catalyst for change in human affairs, and they have employed the strategies and tactics of “maximalism,” seeking revolutionary rather than gradual solutions to problems. Therefore, they have often been at odds with the more cautious approaches of their allies.
This is true but deceptive. Yes, every American President since 1945, and several before it, have shared similar premises (at least publicly) and employed similar rhetoric about the United States' role in the world. But our chief executives have differed significantly in how they went about implementing the "indispensible nation" vision that Kagan limns in this passage. America's finest postwar Presidents, Eisenhower and Reagan, were distinguished by their restraint in the use of military force; they intervened frequently around the world, yes, but surgically rather than sweepingly, and they deliberately avoided investing large numbers of American soldiers to open-ended commitments in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Bush, by contrast, seems likely to be remembered as part of a tradition of American overreach that runs from the Phillipine-American War through Woodrow Wilson, the decision to drive to the Yalu in Korea, the disastrous slow-motion escalation in Vietnam, and now the attempt to democratize Iraq. If you abstract far enough upward, Bush is squarely in the post-WWII American foreign-policy tradition. But so is every President before him, which suggests that abstracting this far hides the distinctions that make all the difference.
Jon Lovitz, Andy Dick, and Phil Hartman
As celebrity altercations go, this one - and the backstory - is pretty remarkable.
A Modest Proposal
Via Larison, here's Jim Pinkerton:
... with all due respect to former Vice President Al Gore, we might as well just say it bluntly: Muslims with atomic weapons are a greater threat to America than global warming.
When kids see "Harry Potter," they should be thinking first about defending their country, and their civilization, against evildoers wielding weapons of mass destruction. After that's taken care of, they can then worry more about carbon dioxide.
Or perhaps left and right could agree that children should be brought up to live in fear of neither global warming nor weapons of mass destruction. Would that be too much to ask?
July 19, 2007
Resign, Senator
Ruth Marcus is right about David Vitter, and E.J. Dionne and David Ignatius are flat wrong: Making use of a prostitution ring isn't a private matter, and Vitter should not be sitting in the United States Senate while the "D.C. Madam" is facing up to 55 years in prison for selling what he was apparently interested in buying. I hope Deborah Jeane Palfrey does call him as a witness, so that he can explain how his phone number ended up on her call list, and whether the "very serious sin" he admits to committing includes, you know, breaking the law. Sure, maybe he only got a massage - you know, just like Ted Haggard - but at the very least his constituents have a right to hear him explain himself.
"What about the thousands of other people whose phone numbers are on the D.C. Madam's call list?" Ignatius asks. "Are they fair game?" Um, well, insofar as being on her call list suggests that they solicited sex for money, then the answer seems to me to be yes. If a politician were caught with his name on the "call list" of a prominent drug dealer, he wouldn't be able to wriggle out of it by admitting to a "serious sin" and leaving it at that. And unless prominent Republicans are prepared to join Matt in supporting the repeal of laws banning prostitution - which I certainly hope they aren't - then they shouldn't be backing Vitter's "it's a private matter" line. It isn't. It's a crime.