May 2006

Just so Henry does not have to doing anything undignified, like remind you all again that he’s over at Firedoglake later today, discussing Perlstein’s Before the Storm [amazon] … well, now I’ve done it for him. And doesn’t it seem like it’s about time for some kind of anti-Perlstein backlash? (Don’t look at me. I don’t have an unkind word. Great book. No kidding.)

Here’s a fun bit from p. 372. It’s time for the Republican National Convention in 1964, at the Cow Palace, in SF:

Across town, at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets, a new kind of bohemia was taking shape, although many of its most flamboyant representatives were occupied with a cross-country trip on a bus called “Further,” whose riotous exterior decoration included a sign reading, “A VOTE FOR BARRY IS A VOTE FOR FUN!” A stop along the way was the commune of former Harvard professor Timothy Leary, whose The Psychedelic Experience had come out that year. These were Ken Kesey’s “Merry Pranksters,” later to be immortalized as the first hippies in a book by New York Herald Tribune writer Tom Wolfe. The delegates, mostly gray old factory owners and club women – the butt of cabbies’ jokes that San Francisco banks were running out of nickels and dimes – would have been altogether disgusted by the goings-on at the Haight, were they aware of them; but the folks who would fill the Cow’s spectator galleries – the YAFers and Young Republicans – might have been amused. They were packing North Beach nightclubs dancing the swim (some might have taken in the country’s first topless dancing act), snapping up comic books lampooning such trendy dances by inventing new ones like the “Eisenhower sway” (“sway back and forth. But end up in the dead center. Do not speak while performing this exercise.”, and heckling lefty comedian Dick Gregory at the hungry i when they weren’t laughing at his cracks at the expense of Scranton (“He reminds you of the guy who runs to John Wayne for help”). They did think a vote for Barry was a vote for fun. They exulted in each other, rejoiced, felt an electricity they would not experience again in their lives; it was their Woodstock.

I think it’s rather interesting the way conservatives – particularly movement conservatives – have gotten so adept at being both the party of fun and the party of traditional moral values; while managing to tar the left as both too relativistic and hedonistically permissive (take that, you big hippy!) and too morally authoritarian (politically correct). It’s a good trick when you can make the opposition carry the weight of your own contradictions, as it were.

Munster 23 — Biarritz 19.

_Later_: Here is “Stringer’s try.”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hMdc_RCyJg Superb.

Mark Steyn has a way with words. Particularly other people’s. (via Bitch PhD).

[For an earlier instance, scroll to the bottom of this post].

Friday fun: You’ll remember the “Sony Bravia Ad”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bb8P7dfjVw&search=bravia from a while back, with all the bouncing balls, melancholy José González music and sunny San Francisco streets. Well, Swansea is not San Francisco, and fruit doesn’t bounce all that well, but “apart from that it’s pretty close”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjHzS_twDVY. Local, uh, residents “spoke out in protest.”:http://www.swansea-res.org.uk/news.html (Note also the news of Fr Vincent’s departure at the bottom of that page.) Elsewhere there’s also “this”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl5Nv2hOkYE (somewhat less interesting) and “this effort”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjOgFRMobMk.

I’ll be at “Firedoglake”:http://www.firedoglake.com/ on Sunday, leading the discussion in the second part of their Rick Perlstein book club. If you’ve read my “previous post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/16/the-wager-won-by-losing/ on the topic, you’ll have some idea of what I’m going to say, although I hope to expand my argument, and also respond to “Brad DeLong’s critique”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/05/losing_by_losin.html. It should be a fun discussion – Rick himself will be participating in comments. I’ve said before that us more wonkish types need to be talking more to the netroots people – I’m hoping that this will be a good opportunity to help build that conversation.

Because I’ve managed to get myself a slot as a reviewer for “a local webzine”:http://www.decodemedia.com/tiki-index.php , I’ve managed to get to see a good number of gigs in the general area of america/alt.country/whatever in the past year. So I thought I do a little survey of what I’d been to and make some recommendations. Details below the fold since lots of you probably couldn’t care less!
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Any of you who wonder what we are going on about when we talk about the Eurovision Song Contest, can spend an hour learning about its complete history here (complete with an interview with the marvelous Dana).

I used to be homesick all the time. Now, it is only when I realise that I cannot watch the greatest living Irishman presenting Eurovision on TV.

From Rachel Aspden’s New Statesman review of Alain de Botton’s latest

None of this [pretentiousess] would matter so much were de Botton not selling the promise of taste. The Architecture of Happiness is being advertised on the Tube with a poster of flying-duck plaques – middle-class shorthand for “naff” – asking: “Is this your idea of good taste?” … If this is happiness, I’ll take the flying ducks any time.

Reading this in the kitchen, I naturally glanced up at the wall, which is adorned by a classic flight of flying ducks. I acquired them in my youth in a spirit of irony, but that has long since transmuted into genuine affection (if indeed, the irony was ever genuine). They used to be accompanied by a koala, masked and caped as a flying supermarsupial, but the wall wasn’t a safe place for such a unique item, and we’ve never found another.

So is it OK to like flying ducks? Or is this the crime against the holy spirit of Good Taste that can never be forgiven?

Wil Shipley, who writes the excellent “Delicious Monster”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/11/13/delicious-monster/ (BibTeX export and nice integration with “LibraryThing”:http://www.librarything.com/ in the next version, please please please) had his identity stolen recently. The story is the by-now standard one of “frustration and anger”:http://wilshipley.com/blog/2006/05/etheft-etrade.html, and is as yet unresolved. As Kevin Drum “has been saying”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0512.drum.html for some time, the law in this area is basically broken: the companies need to be responsible for fradulent accounts, just as banks and not customers are responsible if money gets robbed from the local branch’s safe.

Wil’s case is typical. He’s absorbing all the costs of getting his money back out of a frozen E-Trade account, because E-Trade could care less and has no incentive to bother helping him out. Until the law is changed, of course, Wil still has to deal with this himself. One of his commenters makes the following interesting suggestion about dealing with the company over the phone:

bq. Even more important, never hang up. Most call center personel are expressly forbidden from hanging up on you. Simply stay on the line until they think of a new solution.

Sounds plausible. My brother runs a call center that handles the North American traffic for a financial services company. I’ll have to ask him whether this is true. Howie Becker tells a similar story about dealing with recalcitrant call center staff. He had learned from a relative that, at his airline, difficult-to-manage customers were labeled “irates.” First the representative would try to fix the problem, but if the caller persisted they would get bumped up to a supervisor. The representative would tell the supervisor, “I have an irate here”, short for “irate customer.” Becker decides he might as well cut straight to the supervisor, so he calls the airline and says “Hi, I’m Howie Becker and I am an irate. Can you help me with this ticket?” The representative sputters, “How did you know that word?!”

I would like some “Koranic Tuna”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4995100.stm with my “BVM Toast”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4034787.stm, thanks. If I could talk Krishna into manifesting himself in some wasabi, lunch might get taken care of.

Tim Burke “reads through”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=201 the “ACTA”:http://www.goacta.org/ report, “‘How Many Ward Churchills'”:http://www.goacta.org/whats_new/How%20Many%20Ward%20Churchills.pdf, which — so far as I can see from skimming it — makes very strong claims (“Ward Churchill is Everywhere”; “professors are using their classrooms to push political agendas in the name of teaching students to think critically”) mainly on the basis of inferences from course descriptions that they’ve found on the web. ( Naturally, they find some doozies. Big deal. College is full of funny people with weird ideas, haven’t you heard?) There’s little effort on the part of the report to ascertain whether the course descriptions they’ve found are representative, or to quantify what proportion of courses they constitute, or assess whether there’s been any change over time. Moreover, the report obviously can’t address how the material they find so objectionable is actually covered in classrooms. Worst of all, ACTA blithely claim that “professors like Churchill are systematically promoted by colleges and universities across the country at the expense of academic standards and integrity.” The University of Colorado’s “investigation into Churchill’s work”:http://www.colorado.edu/news/reports/churchill/churchillreport051606.html, unanimously found evidence of fabrication, falsification and plagiarism. It seems that ACTA are happy to insinuate that if a faculty member has political views ACTA dislikes, then their work may be fraudulent and they have probably been promoted with little regard for academic standards. That’s quite a smear.

None of this stops ACTA from “claiming”:http://www.goactablog.org/blog/archives/2006/05/#a000174 the report is “documenting in exhaustive detail the kinds of course offerings that are becoming increasingly representative of today’s college curriculum.” Last time I checked, “exhaustive” was not a synonym for “impressionistic”, but who knows what they’re teaching conservative kids at home these days? Tim “has more detailed criticism”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=201. The bottom line is that this seems like one more iteration of the symbiotic relationship between organizations like ACTA and the likes of Ward Churchill. Those guys need each other.

For the sake of it, “here’s the syllabus”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/teaching/soc300-syllabus-f04.pdf for my undergraduate course on classical sociological theory. Oh no! Marx! And a French guy!

At the end of last week, I attended the conference on “Equality and the New Global Order” at the Kennedy School of Government that I had mentioned here. The extremely impressive list of speakers lived up to the high expectations. I have written up some fairly extensive notes below. However, they are based on my recollections and notes, not any recordings or transcripts, so please don’t quote from these or rely on their accuracy – if you’re interested in pursuing these issues, many of the papers are available here.
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And then the bard says: “I warrant you, mistress, thunder shall not so awake the beds of eels as my giving out her beauty stir up the lewdly-inclined. I’ll bring home some to-night.” And then the bawd says: “Come your ways, follow me.”

I think it means that I just realized this really great Eels track, “Jelly Dancers”, is available free here (mp3). It’s off Dimension Mix [amazon], which boasts some seriously ok earworms.

For example, here’s the Beck track. Someone did it up as a Monty Python video and everything.

The debate over the need for new ideas on the left isn’t confined to the US. Australia has also experienced a shift to the right, but the process and outcomes have been different, being much more similar to Britain and New Zealand. This post from my blog is about Australia but most of what follows applies to all three countries.

Andrew Norton at Catallaxy has an interesting piece responding to a claim by Dennis Glover that rightwing thinktanks in Australia are much better funded than their leftwing counterparts. He makes the contrary argument that the universities represent a left equivalent, a claim which I don’t think stands up to the close examination it gets at Larvatus Prodeo.

More interesting, though is Norton’s characterisation of the state of the debate

Since most of the institutions of the social democratic state are still in place, social democratic ideas are perhaps going to seem less exciting than those of their opponents on the right or the left. They are about adaptation and fine-tuning more than throwing it all out and starting again. …. The right doesn’t have ideas because it has think-tanks, it has think-tanks because it has ideas that need promoting

This was a pretty accurate description of the situation in the 1980s and early 1990s, but it has ceased to be so. The right hasn’t had any new ideas for some time, and the policy debate between social democrats and neoliberals has been a stalemate for most of the last decade.

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