by Henry Farrell on January 21, 2004
Patrick Nielsen Hayden “says”:http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/004559.html#004559 about this NYT “story”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/magazine/18POOR.html?ex=1389762000&en=ac9ac775c3fc94c3&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND
bq. State of the union. The great feminist science fiction author Joanna Russ once remarked to me, “Homophobia isn’t there to keep homosexuals in line. Homophobia is there to keep everyone else in line.”
bq. Caroline Payne is in her condition in order to keep the rest of us in line.
What he said. I feel angry and ashamed.
Update: via Kip of “Long Story Short Pier”:http://www.longstoryshortpier.com/ in comments, comes this “charming response”:http://www.iwf.org/inkwell/default.asp?archiveID=135 from the so-called “Independent Women’s Forum.”
bq. I must have a heart made of granite, but I just can’t feel sorry for Caroline Payne, the off-and-on welfare mother/credit-card binger who’s supposed to an example of our nation’s beleaguered working poor, the “millions at the bottom of the labor force who contribute to the country’s prosperity” but don’t get anything back, as writer David K. Shipler puts it in “A Poor Cousin of the Middle Class,” this week’s sob story in Sunday’s NYT magazine—in which Caroline whines about her $6.80-an-hour job at a convenience store.
bq. From the way I read Caroline’s saga, it’s prosperous America that’s been handing out tens of thousands of dollars worth of freebies to Caroline over the years (Shipley is coy about her age), and Caroline who’s given very little back. One big reason that Caroline hasn’t moved up the economic ladder looks pretty simple to me: She refuses to wear her (free, Medicaid-supplied) dentures (check the photo). Sorry, Caroline (and oh-so-politically correct Shipler, who remarks sarcastically that Caroline is “missing that radiant, tooth-filled smile that Americans have been taught to prize as highly as their right to vote”). This may sound harsh, but if you want a job that entails interacting with the public or supervising employees, you gotta have teeth. Ask George Washington
This doesn’t leave me angry or ashamed. It leaves me disgusted. There’s something vicious and depraved (in the strongest sense of the word) in the unwillingness of many US conservatives and libertarians to admit that people can get screwed by the market through no fault of their own. D-squared is fond of quoting Galbraith’s dictum that “the project of the conservative throughout the ages is the search for a higher moral justification for selfishness” – this seems appropriate here. I still think that a principled conservatism is possible in theory – I just don’t see much evidence of it in the US today. A little, but not much.
by Chris Bertram on January 21, 2004
“This is getting ridiculous”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3416091.stm :
bq. A proposed ban on religious symbols in French state schools could include a ban on beards, according to the French education minister. Luc Ferry said the law, which will be debated in parliament next month, could ban headscarves, bandannas and beards if they are considered a sign of faith.
UPDATE: “According to Le Monde”:http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3224,36-349896,0.html , Ferry invoked Saussure’s principle of the “arbitrary nature of the sign” in defence of the policy. We’re not going to hear any think like _that_ from a minister in London or Washington any time soon!
by Chris Bertram on January 21, 2004
Brian has “a post on his other blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002462.html which I think ought to get wider circulation: it is a discussion of and reproduction of a Times interview/profile of cuddly, charming, self-effacing philosopher Colin McGinn.
by Chris Bertram on January 21, 2004
The story of the true origins of Monopoly, which I covered “here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001119.html the other day, gets “recounted in today’s Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1127421,00.html in the course of an article on the highly dubious game “Ghettopoly” of which the object is “to become the richest playa through stealing, cheating and fencing stolen properties.” Hasbro, the current owners (or should that be “owners”?) of the rights to Monopoly are threatening legal action.
by Chris Bertram on January 21, 2004
No sooner have I “mentioned”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001180.html 1960s expectations of what the future would be like — “future cities in which we’d all be whizzing about in our personal aeroplanes” — than I read “John Kay in the Financial Times”:http://www.johnkay.com/trends/318 doubting whether our age is, as commonly supposed, one of unprecedented technological advance:
bq. I began to doubt the conventional wisdom when I discovered a Hudson Institute report from the mid-1960s that predicted technological changes from then till 2000. Its prognostications about information technology were impressively accurate – it foresaw mobile phones, fax machines and large-scale data processing.
bq. But in other areas the Hudson Institute was wide of the mark. Where are the personal flying platforms, the space colonies, the artificial moons to light our cities, the drugs that make weight reduction a painless process? Progress in IT has fully matched the expectations of three or four decades ago. But advance in other areas has, by historic standards, been disappointing.
Worth a glance.
by Kieran Healy on January 21, 2004
Tina Fetner waxes Tocquevillian about her participation in the Iowa Caucuses:
bq. Well, I did it. I participated in the glorious process that is the Iowa Caucus. It was my first time, and I was so excited about this down-home version of participatory democracy. What a pile of crap it turned out to be.
by Chris Bertram on January 21, 2004
I watched “North By Northwest”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053125/ again last night and was struck more than I had been before by the boldly modernist style the film projects. The texture of the film is wonderful: the future we were promised and never had. The opening title-sequence in which the titles are aligned with the straight lines of an international-style skyscraper with New York taxis reflected in the windows is really striking (the Seagram building?). And Roger O. Thornhill and Eve Kendall (Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint) throughout project a thoroughly enviable lifestyle that is sharply at variance with other images of the 1950s. In fact the whole film (1959) has a taste of the optimistic side of the 1960s about it: the NASA–Expo 67–white-heat-of-technology–007 side. That optimistic image of the future is something I grew up with: children’s comics like Look-and-Learn painted a picture of future cities in which we’d all be whizzing about in our personal aeroplanes (those who weren’t travelling by monorail of course). That isn’t exactly what is happening in North by Northwest, but rather a projection of of what the future might be like if the world of North by Northwest were the present (a TV in every hotel room in 1959!). Architecture and design do the work: from that opening sequence, through the United Nations (clean, sharp lines) through the exquisite train ride from New York to Chicago, through the scene in the cafe at Mt Rushmore (such a clean Scandinavian feel) to the Frank Lloyd Wright-style house at the end. Fantastic.
by Micah on January 21, 2004
Patrick Belton, over at “OxBlog”:http://oxblog.blogspot.com/, has this “analysis”:http://oxblog.blogspot.com/2004_01_18_oxblog_archive.html#107465452760080391 of President Bush’s State of the Union address:
bq. If the amount of time given over to a single idea reflects its relative importance in the State of the Union speech (a reasonable assumption), then the most important themes in tonight’s speech, in descending order, are: the need to commit adequate resources to the military for the war on terror (87 seconds); that government will act against single-sex marriage (84 seconds); the administration’s commitment to strengthening families and religious communities, and to combat juvenile use of drugs (78 seconds); the government’s commitment to education and excellence for each child in America (72 seconds); that the world without Saddam is a better and safer place (69 seconds). The closing matter took 78 seconds, centered around the idea that we are living in historic times.
So, at least on this view, what we should take away from Bush’s speech is roughly: we live in historic times in which our major priorities are fighting terrorists, gays and atheists. And who says there’s no culture war in America?
UPDATE: While I’m at it, the funniest moment in the speech had to be when Bush said:
bq. Key provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire next year.
bq. (APPLAUSE)
A big bonus for the speechwriter who left a fat pause after that sentence!
by Henry Farrell on January 20, 2004
The competition among Weblog competitions is heating up; in the last two months, we’ve had Wizbang’s “Weblog Awards”:http://wizbangblog.com/poll.php#BGB poll; the “Warblogger”:http://www.rightwingnews.com/special/warblogger2003.php awards, the Koufax awards at “Wampum”:http://wampum.wabanaki.net/ and now the “Bloggies”:http://www.fairvue.com/?feature=awards2004. It’s all very confusing: which competition should you be paying attention to? To help answer that question, I’m proposing the Best ‘Best Weblog of 2003 Competition’ Competition. I’m sure that y’all can come up with appropriate categories and nominees – in order to start the ball rolling …
*Most egregious award decision*
The winner by a mile: Wizbang’s “Best Overall Blog” award for _Little Green Footballs_. In fairness, this isn’t Wizbang’s fault; I imagine that thousands of slavering trolls from LGF’s comment section were clambering over each other in their frenzied efforts to cast their vote for the Dark Lord. Like a scene from the siege of Minas Tirith. If LGF were really the best overall blog on the Internet, I’d want to give up, right away.
*Vote early, vote often award*
A number of hot contenders for this one – lots of fishy business of one kind or another in various competitions. “Dive into Mark”:http://diveintomark.org/ at the very least deserves special mention for his script ensuring that anyone who clicked on the Wizbang awards from his site would find themselves willy-nilly “voting for him”:http://wizbangblog.com/archives/001268.php.
*Awards competition that is most likely to be any use*
A tie between the Koufax awards, and the Warblogger awards, I reckon. Given the vast diversity of blogs, it makes much more sense to concentrate on a limited section of the blogging community than to try to cover the whole gamut. Readers are more likely to find new blogs that are of interest to them among the nominees, which is presumably the point of the exercise.
*Most glaring omission*
Why the hell has “The Poor Man”:http://www.thepoorman.net/ not gotten a nomination in any of the broader competitions?
Update: Andrew Northrup does a perfect blog-post on the State of the Union speech within moments of its ending, “as if to prove my point …”:http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/002291.html#002291http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/002291.html#002291
by Harry on January 20, 2004
The US administration defends the rights of its citizens to be untroubled by discomforting information. Why? Do they think people will listen to WHO? Question for those who know more about this than I do: does obesity cost governments money all things considered, or does it save them money by causing earlier death resulting in lower claims on social security/pensions etc?
by Maria on January 20, 2004
Just by way of a quick follow up to a post from last November, today’s Guardian reports that US Pharma is still pushing hard to label and defeat as protectionist the bulk drugs buying power of the Australian government. Worryingly, it sounds as if Australian PM John Howard may blink.
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by Henry Farrell on January 20, 2004
Michael Crichton has made millions by writing mass market thrillers that either regurgitate partially understood scientific factoids, or pander to the nasty little revenge fantasies of male white middle-managers. He’s not averse to spicing his novels up with a hefty pinch of racism (the ‘Fu Manchu’ in a three-piece suit Japan bashing in _Rising Sun_) or sexism (in the rather revolting Disclosure). All in all, it’s rather surprising that Caltech should have asked him to deliver a prestigious lecture. The content and tone of that “lecture”:http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote04.html, however, aren’t surprising at all. The speech – which argues that global warming is pseudo-science – is as specious a bit of argumentation as I’ve seen in a while.
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by Chris Bertram on January 20, 2004
“The Colloquium in Legal and Social Philosophy”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/spp/seminars/seminars_2004.php at University College London’s School of Public Policy looks very interesting this spring, with papers from Frances Kamm, G. A. Cohen, Jo Wolff, Cass Sunstein and others. (And the papers are downloadable too). First up is Frances Kamm (NYU) on ‘Failures of Just War Theory and Terrorism’.
by Chris Bertram on January 20, 2004
The “African Cup of Nations”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/africa/default.stm kicks off on Saturday with the host nation Tunisia taking on Rwanda. Most of the groups look fairly predictable, with Tunisia set to top A, Senegal B, Cameroon C and Nigeria D. Having said that, if there is a “group of death” then D is it, with Nigeria, Morocco and South Africa all battling it out. I’ll be rooting for Senegal in the hope that El-Hadji Diouf and Salif Diao recapture their form and bring it back to Merseyside (well you never know). What a great sport, where some of the world’s poorest nations are better than some of the wealthier ones.
by Maria on January 20, 2004
is another man’s freedom fighter. Today’s New York Times carries a gushing apologia for Gerry Adams, in the form of a book review, and a more obsequious or dishonest piece of selective memory I have not seen in a long time.
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