Monday 15 March 2010
There’s a good reason why Rove’s memoir is titled “Courage and Consequence,” not “Truth or Consequences.” Its spin is so uninhibited that even “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!” is repackaged with an alibi. The book’s apolitical asides are as untrustworthy as its major events. For all Rove’s self-proclaimed expertise as a student of history, he writes that eight American presidents assumed office “as a result of the assassination or resignation of their predecessor.” (He’s off by only three.) After a peculiar early narrative detour to combat reports of his late adoptive father’s homosexuality, Rove burnishes his family values cred with repeated references to his own happy heterosexual domesticity. This, too, is a smoke screen: Readers learned months before the book was published that his marriage ended in divorce. Rove’s overall thesis on the misbegotten birth of the Iraq war is a stretch even by his standards. “Would the Iraq war have occurred without W.M.D.?” he writes. “I doubt it.” He claims that Bush would have looked for other ways “to constrain” Saddam Hussein had the intelligence not revealed Iraq’s “unique threat” to America’s security. Even if you buy Rove’s predictable (and easily refuted) claims that the White House neither hyped, manipulated nor cherry-picked the intelligence, his portrait of Bush as an apostle of containment is absurd. And morally offensive in light of the carnage that followed. Frank Rich ☀
As technologists, it’s easy to assume that optimizing a situation is always best. Yet, this tends to break necessary social rituals that help acquaint people with a particular social setting. We don’t go through the niceties of “Hi, How are you?” because it’s optimal for communication; we do it because to do otherwise is rude. In digital worlds, people need to be eased into a situation, to understand how to make sense of the setting. Years ago, a group of engineers realized that people frequently posted “A/S/L?” in chatrooms to elicit age, sex, and location. They noticed that most people responded to this query with information like 32/F/Austin. They thought they’d make people’s lives easier by inviting them to fill out a profile that included age, sex, and location. What they failed to realize was that A/S/L? wasn’t simply about information solicitation; it was an icebreaker. When I respond with 32/F/Austin, it’s entirely appropriate for you to ask, “Oh, do you happen to be at SXSW?” But there’s a big difference between this line of inquiry and you looking at my profile and saying, “So, I noticed you’re in Austin; do you happen to be at SXSW?” The latter feels really sketchy and my immediate thought is: “what are you doing looking at my profile? danah boyd ☀
When Martin Luther made the priesthood of believers one of the foundation stones in his work of reforming the church, he didn’t, as many other reformers have tried to do, intend to eliminate priesthood as such. He was democratizing a priesthood that had been debased into a religious bureaucracy. He was designating every one of us to responsibilities of being priests to one another: guiding, praying for, encouraging – but not taking over, not interfering. Stubborn and rampant consumerist individualism – everyone for himself, herself, and the devil take the hindmost – is alien to the Christian life. We need our brothers and sisters; our brothers and sisters need us, and they need us as men and women of God. That is the context in which Peter told his congregation that they were a “holy priesthood” (1 Peter 2:5,9). Jesus is our high priest. Jesus makes the sacrifice that establishes our intimate relationship with God but also in community with relationships with one another. No merely human priest is permitted to interfere with that intimacy (the magisterial letter to the Hebrews makes that clear). But neither are we permitted to assume that we can go it alone in the way of Jesus. Eugene Peterson ☀
Sugar, fat and salt make a food compelling. They stimulate neurons, cells that trigger the brain’s reward system and release dopamine, a chemical that motivates our behaviour and makes us want to eat more. Many of us have what’s called a “bliss point”, at which we get the greatest pleasure from sugar, fat or salt. Combined in the right way, they make a product indulgent, high in “hedonic value”. Obesity: The killer combination of salt, fat and sugar ☀
It’s come clear to me that the sequence of Bush and Obama has been very bad for the left side of the political spectrum. I’m not talking about hardcore types like me, who find the whole setup to be rotten. But I’m thinking of what we might call left-liberals—people who’d really like a more egalitarian and less violent world, and who don’t embrace market solutions to social problems and invading small countries in the name of human rights. During the Bush years, it got too easy to make fun of his illiteracy and idiot religiosity, too easy to make jokes about Dick Cheney’s aim with a shotgun or the man-sized safe in his office, too easy to blame plutocracy and bombing runs on a gang of Republican troglodytes. God knows they are troglodytes. But in a lot of ways, Obama is a more sinister leader. He’s charming, smooth, literate, and sophisticated, the opposite of a dope given the outbursts of rage like Bush. Yet he’s doing as much as Bush to coddle Wall Street and prosecute imperial wars. But do we see the kind of opposition to that agenda coming from the more respectable left that we saw in the Bush years? No. We see apologetics. Doug Henwood ☀
Sunday 14 March 2010
Did Obama win the Iraq War? ☀
Critics of Obama often charge him with failing to end the Iraq war. But there is no longer an Iraq war. There are U.S. bases in a country where indigenous forces are still fighting a set of low-intensity struggles, with little U.S. involvement. Obama is having his troops leave exactly as quickly as the Iraqi parliament asked him to. Most U.S. troops in Iraq seem mainly to be in the moving business now, shipping out 1.5 million pieces of equipment.
The filibuster votes, which once occurred perhaps seven or eight times a whole Congressional session, now happen more than 100 times a term. But this routine use of supermajority voting is, at worst, unconstitutional and, at best, at odds with the founders’ intent. Here’s why. First, the Constitution explicitly requires supermajorities only in a few special cases: ratifying treaties and constitutional amendments, overriding presidential vetoes, expelling members and for impeachments. With so many lawyers among them, the founders knew and operated under the maxim “expressio unius est exclusio alterius” — the express mention of one thing excludes all others. But one need not leave it at a maxim. In the Federalist Papers, every time Alexander Hamilton or John Jay defends a particular supermajority rule, he does so at length and with an obvious sense of guilt over his departure from majority rule. Thomas Geoghegan ☀
Banished! City forbids Bible studies in homes ☀
The city of Gilbert, Ariz., has ordered a group of seven adults to stop gathering for Bible studies in a private home because such meetings are forbidden by the city’s zoning codes.
The issue was brought to a head when city officials wrote a letter to a pastor and his wife informing them they had 10 days to quit having the meetings in their private home.
Ayn Rand in Uganda ☀
Would a pure “free market” resemble Stalinism? Is modern day America an example of the logical endpoint of libertarianism? Yes and no.
Libertarianism evolved as a revolt against socialism. The United States has never had anything approaching a “free market”, yet the myth of “rugged individualism” is essential to the American dream. If communism was the height of tyranny, then pure individualism would be the height of freedom. In the 20th century the American ethos was characterized by what Dr. King described as a “morbid fear of communism”. Thus did libertarianism evolve as the logical alternative. The problem isn’t free market philosophy, it’s not enough free market philosophy. The solution to the health care crisis isn’t that the government is failing to provide for its citizens, it’s that the government is involved in health care at all. The solution to the failure of privatization is more privatization. And so on.
What would such a society look? Since any “free market” would quickly produce monopoly and statism, we are only able to catch glimpses of Ayn Rand’s utopia. For example, Howard Zinn notes of Colorado mining towns at the turn of the century that:
“Each mining camp was a feudal dominion, with the company acting as lord and master. Every camp had a marshal, a law enforcement officer paid by the company. The ‘laws’ were the company’s rules. Curfews were imposed, ’suspicious’ strangers were not allowed to visit the homes, the company store had a monopoly on goods sold in the camp. The doctor was a company doctor, the schoolteachers hired by the company … Political power in Colorado rested in the hands of those who held economic power. This meant that the authority of Colorado Fuel & Iron and other mine operators was virtually supreme … Company officials were appointed as election judges. Company-dominated coroners and judges prevented injured employees from collecting damages.” [The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913-14, p. 9-11]
[What Hayek] does not see, or will not admit, [is] that a return to “free” competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. George Orwell ☀
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