Tom Bartlett at the _Chronicle_ sat down Michael Bérubé and David Horowitz for lunch a couple of weeks ago. The results are “here”:http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i16/16a00801.htm. It’s interesting and enjoyable; Horowitz clearly doesn’t have much of an idea of how to deal with an interlocutor who doesn’t take him Very Seriously. All in all, Horowitz doesn’t seem particularly bright.
From the monthly archives:
December 2006
Josh Marshall links to a Michael Novak piece in the Standard – a piece that is surely the apotheosis of Green Lantern foreign policy (well, until next week); complete with vulnerability to the hideous yellow streak that is the MSM.
It begins … horribly:
Today, the purpose of war is sharply political, not military; psychological, not physical. The main purpose of war is to dominate the way the enemy imagines and thinks about the war.
Read those two sentence again.
Other bits (in which our author is pretending to speak in the voice of an Islamist terrorist/insurgent, but I think he’s just being bashful):
The weaker political will yielded to the stronger will …
Yet, as always, will followed storyline. First comes narrative, then the acts that give it flesh in history …
In such wars … whichever party maintains the stronger will, along the most durable storyline, always wins …
I really don’t know what to say. War is a continuation of punditry by other means? Have I got that right? It’s looking increasingly like sheer intellectual inconsistency on the part of the neocons and warbloggers that they have not marched on – and levitated by force of will – the New York Times building. What’s stopping them?
For background reading I suppose you could try Mailer’s Armies of the Night
Two interesting arguments about the press and the 1960’s backlash against civil rights.
First, David Greenberg in a book review in _The American Prospect._
If the civil-rights movement represented one of American journalism’s finest hours, it carried a cost. It’s a shame that Roberts and Klibanoff don’t explicitly state the conclusion that much of their evidence suggests: Today’s right-wing bogeyman of “the liberal media” originated in this struggle. Coverage of the movement convinced much of the white South that the networks, papers like the Times, and magazines like Time and Newsweek were hostile and biased interlopers that told only one side of the story. … Roberts and Klibanoff also detail more subtle ways in which hostility toward the national media was voiced. In one fascinating section, they relate a conspiracy hatched among white Southern editors who belonged to the Associated Press to try to force the wire service to write about crimes by blacks in the North as avidly as it spotlighted the violence of the white South. Ultimately, politicians — notably Alabama Governor George Wallace — capitalized on this resentment. Wallace cited journalists alongside pointy-headed intellectuals and the Supreme Court in his litany of elitist villains who were screwing the little guy. Richard Nixon, too, picked up the strategy, which he bequeathed to men like Roger Ailes and Karl Rove.
Second, “Rick Perlstein”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w061127&s=perlstein112906 (free reg required) in _TNR._
Since the late ’60s, however–not coincidentally, around the time Kevin Phillips rose to fame–a new, unspoken set of rules evolved. It happened in a moment of trauma. After the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, all the top news executives sent a wire to Mayor Richard J. Daley protesting the way their employees “were repeatedly singled out by policemen and deliberately beaten.” Such was their presumption of cultural authority they couldn’t imagine how anyone could disagree. Then Mayor Daley went on Walter Cronkite’s show and shocked the media establishment by refusing to apologize to the beaten reporters: “Many of them are hippies themselves. They’re part of this movement.” Polls revealed 60 percent of Americans agreed with Daley. For the press, it triggered a dark night of the soul. In an enormously influential column, the pundit Joseph Kraft, shaken, wrote, “Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communication field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans–in Middle America.” That air of alienation–that helpless feeling that we have no idea what’s going on out there–has structured elite discourse about the rest of the country ever since. A set of constructs about what “the great mass of ordinary Americans” supposedly believes–much more conservative things than any media elitist would believe, basically–became reified. Pundits like Kraft–a social class that spends much of their time among people like themselves, inside the Beltway–learned to bend over backward to be fair, lest they advertise their own alienation from everyone else. On subjects that chafed them–say, the relevance of certain ugly folkways of the South in electoral politics–they just had to bend harder. Or ignore the matter altogether.
Now the historical origins of a set of institutions and practices don’t necessarily dictate their current content. Much of the discourse around social welfare in the 1930’s had an unpleasant racist edge. But there does seem to be some continuity between what Greenberg and Perlstein (both of whom are excellent historians who are intimately familiar with their source material) document, and the ways that journalists tiptoe around the political importance of racism in the South today. Comments?
I don’t know anything about the Dutch show “Kinderen voor Kinderen”, but it seems like it could be fairly mainstream and have a sizeable audience. I also don’t know what, if any, reactions this video received, but it’s a good example of how you can socialize kids to be inclusive and understanding of diverse family arrangements. It’s interesting (and sad) to ponder how differently people would react in various places.
Via Legal Theory Bookworm I see that Samuel Freeman’s book Justice and the Social Contract
After several months and an embarrrassing number of comments sometimes from strangers about the absence of a faculty page for me, I’ve finally entered the 21st century with a webpage of my own. It’s here. It contains a lot of the normal information, a page with links to some papers on the web (all but one of them by me), and a page with links to various of my journalistic pieces as well as my favourite CT pieces (again of my own). Each page has a not-completely-out-of-date photo of me (that was my wife’s idea, she being responsible for most of the layout and design). I can’t imagine I’ll update it for a while, but if anyone has useful suggestions (which have to be implementable by a Luddite with limited command of Dreamweaver) go ahead…
Shopping with a 5-year old on one arm, 2-year old on the other, saw a sale VCD of “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas”, snagged it (don’t ask with what appendage). When we got home I was surprised to discover it was a minimal 1992 production, with Walter Matthau narrating. Walter Matthau as Cindy Lou Who is a hoot. Animation-wise, it’s just barely. Mostly just shots of the original Seuss illustrations with eyes that roll and horns that toot and a cut-out grinch who creeps along to a snow-crunching sound. (But done tastefully and appreciatively, as cut-out grinches go.) It comes packaged with a similarly minimal “If I Ran The Zoo” narrated by some kid who does sound as though he gets Gerald McGrew’s motivation. I sort of like this style. Camera-crawls over a kid’s book, with good voice-over. There’s a lot to love in the plain old Seuss drawings. Of course, it’s a bit hard to keep Karloff out of the back of your head. But I think my scaredy 5-year old and 2-year old might not be quite ready for the classic 1966 version – superior though it unquestionably is. Walter Matthau completists can get this strange version
People interested in the Litvinenko affair should take a look at today’s Guardian/Observer. First off, there’s an extraordinary photograph of Litvinenko taken to celebrate his citizenship of the UK. He’s standing in front of the Union Jack, wearing a Scottish bonnet, and wielding Chechen swords and KGB gauntlets. The story is about Litvinenko’s alleged intent to use KGB/FSB documents about Yukos to blackmail unnamed individuals, working with a US-based ex-KGB and associate of Berezovsky. This information is courtesy of a Russian graduate student at the University of Westminster.
And the Italian angle is developing, via UKIP MEP, Gerard Batten, who says Litvinenko told him that ‘Sokolov’, a 1970s Russian agent, “was the key link between senior Italian politicians and the KGB.”
Either the plot is thickening or this story has been news-free just long enough for the disinformation to begin.
iTunes coughed up a thing and I think to myself: what is this? Mötley Crüe? Turns out to be Soul Asylum. Which, back in 1993, still sounded to me like, you know, they were related to the Replacements or something. Alt-rock, y’know. Then next another thing I don’t immediately recognize and I’m thinking: this sounds like Wham! But it turned out to be Aztec Camera – “Everybody is Number One”, from their Love album. Which, back in 1987 sounded to me, like, I dunno, alt-rock.
And then Belle finally went and signed us up for the iTunes store and downloaded the greatest song ever, which we’ve been missing for 6 years in Singapore. And do you know what the greatest song in the world is: that’s right, it’s Todd Rundgren, “Couldn’t I just tell you”. Greatest. Power pop. Ever. Plus it has the cool/fool rhyme. You really can’t go wrong with that.
I’m lying. In between Soul Asylum and Aztec Camera iTunes coughed up an MP3 of this Delta ad in ebonics (don’t know how that got in there), which was disorienting.
There are some just terrible videos of Rundgren singing his greatest song on YouTube. Here, for instance. But there’s an absolutely fabulous video of him singing “Hello it’s me” on some variety show. He’s got butterfly wings glued to his eyebrows as he sits at the white piano. Elton John would blush. But “Hello it’s me” just isn’t that good, frankly.
There’s a neat Nazz video as well. “Open My Eyes”. Very “The President’s Analyst”. Did you know that the bass player for the Nazz, Carson Van Osten, gave up bass-playing to be a cartoonist for Disney? You can see some of his work here, at a blog I read not infrequently.
Speaking of butterfly wings … (Oh, I’ll try to get to that tomorrow.)
That sure didn’t take long….Word of Scott Eric Kaufman’s meme experiment has reached Wired News, which just ran a story on it. Well, sort of a story. It manages to avoid discussing what Kaufman was actually trying to do. Seems like the kind of factual point you’d want to nail down.
[click to continue…]
Norman Geras pulls out one of the oldest moves in the Cold War playbook, saying
There are some clever people about who will tell you that responsibility isn’t zero sum: Bush and Blair bear responsibility for what’s now happening in Iraq even if others do too. They only fail to follow through on the ‘others do too’ part of this idea, reserving all their blame, all their ire, all their passion, for… Bush and Blair.
He’s aiming mostly at Chris, but since I’ve made exactly the same argument, and Geras is using the plural, I’ll respond.
Of course, I’ve never posted a condemnation of terror attacks, noted successes in the struggle against terrorism or matched condemnation of Bush and Blair with the observation that whatever evil has been done in our names, our terrorist enemies have shown that they can and will do worse. Well, only here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and so on.
But this is unlikely to worry Geras. As he would know from his days on the left (and from the parallel experiences of dissidents on the other side of the Iron Curtain), the point being made here is that, unless every criticism of our own government is matched by a ritualistic denunciation of our enemies, taking up at least as much space as the original criticism, it is obvious that you are on the wrong side.
And having made this point, it’s not necessary to examine your own support for policies that have brought death and disaster on hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
Today is “World Aids Day”:http://www.worldaidsday.org/default.asp, and “UN AIDS”:http://www.unaids.org/en/ “reports”:http://www.unaids.org/en/GetStarted/UNFamily.asp that another 14.000 children, women and men will become infected with HIV today. This year is 25 years ago that the first case was reported. In those 25 years, there has been a gigantic difference in the impact of HIV/AIDS on the affluent societies versus the poor societies, especially in sub-Saharan African. The life expectancy in some African countries such as Botswana and Swaziland is now well below 35 years. And even these statistics do not reveal the grim reality of children who are growing up without adults, in what social scientists now call ‘childheaded households’. How can a 12 year old girl feed her younger siblings? If there are no neighbours or organisations supporting them, it is likely that her only short-term survival option is prostitution. Long-term survival is something these children simply cannot contemplate.
The theme of this World Aids Day is accountability – not only of individuals who are having unsafe sex (especially those who are infecting others through unwanted sex), but also of religious leaders “discouraging the use and promotion of condoms”:http://www.thebody.com/cdc/news_updates_archive/2003/may27_03/malawi_condoms.html, political leaders of rich societies “who don’t give enough money”:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/19/health/main1913718.shtml to fight the epidemic, and political leaders in severely HIV/AIDS-affected countries, such as “Doctor Beetroot”:http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/healthnews.php?newsid=49983, who are misinforming the population. But World Aids Day is also the day when we should thank the many men and women who are fighting this ugly disease, from grassroots awareness activities up to diplomatic action at the highest level, often in difficult circumstances.
An important aspect of scientific research is that others should be able to reproduce the work. This is significant partly, because it serves as a check on the system, but also, because it allows others to build on previous achievements. Replication is not trivial to achieve, however, given that studies often rely on complex methodologies. There is rarely enough room in journal articles or books to devote sufficiently detailed descriptions of how data were collected and procedures administered. Moreover, even with adequate space for text, many actions are hard to explain without visuals.
This is where recently launched JoVE comes to the rescue. The Journal of Visual Experiments publishes short videos of procedures used in biology labs. Former Princeton graduate student Moshe Pritsker created the peer-reviewed online journal with Nikita Bernstein. The inspiration came back in his graduate school days when he had often been frustrated in the lab while trying to conduct experiments based on others’ descriptions of the necessary methods. The goal of the journal is to assist others with such tasks. The publication has an editorial board and submissions are reviewed before a decision is made about publication.
What a great use of the Web for dissemination of material that would otherwise be difficult to get to relevant parties.
[Thanks to Mark Brady for pointing me to the Nature article – that is now behind subscription wall – about JoVE. That piece served as the source for some of the above.]