Anbruch

Andrew Sullivan Thinks Taxes Are Punishment

2009-02-28T08:50:00.003-06:00

I came from a modest background in another country and arrived in the US with barely a cent of my own money. I've worked hard and earned the American dream - and now have to work for the government for well over half the year (a government that still persecutes me for being an HIV-survivor). Obama will take more of my money - and much, much more in the future. Liberalism believes in punishing hard-working successful people in this manner - and the more you succeed, the more they will punish you.

Me, I always thought taxes were a responsibility. Thinking of taxes as punishment is just weird, and it distracts you from evaluating whether those taxes are being spent responsibly.

Product Placement

2009-02-28T08:39:00.003-06:00

Gail Collins on how advertising is beginning to infiltrate the content on TV:

Lines we never even bothered to think of as lines are being crossed. Last summer in Las Vegas, the anchors on the local Fox station started delivering the news with two prominently placed cups of McDonald’s iced coffee in front of them. A spokesperson called it a “nontraditional revenue source.”It’s only a matter of time before TV reporters conclude interviews with disaster victims by asking if they wouldn’t like a refreshing glass of V-8.

As Collins notes, this stuff has been going on in the movies for a good long time, and when we run around happily emblazoned with corporate advertising on t-shirts, hats and so forth, it's hard to get see the downfall of modern civilization in the display of two cups of McDonald's iced coffee. And really would offering a glass of V-8 be so much more tacky than asking the disaster victims how they felt...

Or You May Go Splat!

2009-02-24T17:00:00.003-06:00

Andrew Sullivan writes:

I will be candid and say my own fear is that the stimulus, although cushioning the worst, may also extend the pain by softening the landing. Sometimes, you get a bigger bounce from a hard landing.

Assuming the hard landing doesn't kill you.

Making the Grade

2009-02-18T07:35:00.005-06:00

The NY Times has an article on grade expectations. Key student quote:

If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.

To which I respond: perhaps you possess only average talent in the topic at hand. I think this is one of the great challenges we face: we as a culture apparently believe that people should be able to excel (rather than simply succeed) through hard work alone. It's a nice idea, with egalitarian roots, and work can in fact get you a long way (all the way to competence and success!), but I wonder if we do in fact want to conflate competency and excellence. For if we fail to make the distinction, merit has no place, and without merit, the choice among the competent is merely political: whoever has the influence (usually the money) will get the nod.

Our culture does have a realm where we make this distinction effortlessly, namely, athletics: everyone who has participated in sports knows that you can work your butt off, do everything the coach tells you to, and yet never be anything more than a mediocre performer. We might extend this analogy to the classroom, taking the teacher to be either a personal trainer or a coach. The teacher has two two primary responsibilities: (a) to facilitate your acquisition of knowledge and the development of your native talent in the area of the course content; and (b) to grade performance with respect to the standards of the discipline (competency) and with respect to your peers. As in sports, there will always be cases where native talent wins out over hard work.

The comparison to athletics is apt in another sense: as in sports, you have to do the work if you want to improve; the coach can tell you what to do, but he or she can't do the work for you.

Thrill Ride on Principle

2009-02-17T08:19:00.002-06:00

In both California and Kansas, the GOP seems willing to run the state off a cliff. I'm really fascinated by the politics of this and who is going to end up taking the blame. Of course, it's easy for me to be fascinated (rather than appalled) since I don't live in those states....

Rich Analogy

2009-02-14T20:56:00.001-06:00

I liked the analogy Frank Rich makes in this quote:

This G.O.P., a largely white Southern male party with talking points instead of ideas and talking heads instead of leaders, is not unlike those “zombie banks” that we’re being asked to bail out. It is in too much denial to acknowledge its own insolvency and toxic assets. Given the mess the country is in, it would be helpful to have an adult opposition that could pull its weight, but that’s not the hand America has been dealt.

Is Cheney Relevant?

2009-02-04T10:17:00.002-06:00

Sullivan on Cheney:

He hunkers down to play the Dolchstoss card, preparing to blame the next terror attack on the Obama administration's disavowal of his torture program. It seems to me that regardless of the merits or demerits of his view, it's a remarkable violation of civil norms for a vice-president just out of power to assault his successors and all-but declare them indifferent to public safety. It's deeply divisive, deeply partisan and utterly self-serving. In other words: as cheap as one would expect. And part of what ails conservatism. Yes, they seem to be rooting for failure at home and abroad, because it would help vindicate their own appalling record on both fronts.

Think of Cheney and Limbaugh as the two centers of gravity for the current GOP. A deeply unserious and deeply disturbing pincer movement against the democratic mandate of the new president.

My question: does anybody listen to Cheney any more? Even if something does happen, would any one give Cheney any credence now that he has no power? Personally, I doubt it. The problem: Cheney takes himself far too seriously. Limbaugh, on the other hand, is much more worrisome—even as he is also, as Andrew nicely puts it, "deeply unserious," which is also why he continues to have the power and leverage to matter.

Google Books

2009-02-02T13:15:00.002-06:00

Speaking of Google Books: I actually love the service, even if for many books not all of the pages are available. It was a definite boon when I was tracking down quotations for my latest project. I could just type in a representative portion of the quotation, and, voilà, in about 80% of the cases, the quotation would pop up. No need to run to the library; no need to run to my study!

Yes, of course, I should have kept notes as to where the quotations came from in the first place. But the nature of the project was such that at first it was not going to use citation by page number. Only later was it decided that we would in fact use regular citations, and that meant tracking down page numbers for something like 300 notes. I think Google Books cut the amount of time by at least a factor of 10.

On Being the Road

2009-02-02T12:20:00.001-06:00

Google wants to be it:

Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia and a free-culture advocate, puts it this way: if the fight over digitization of books is like horse-and-buggy makers against car manufacturers, Google wants to be the road.

Selling the Seat

2008-12-09T09:26:00.002-06:00

Talk about being brazen, and, well, not very smart.

Not exactly what the Democrats need at the moment...

lolcats essay

2008-11-20T09:06:00.009-06:00

Andrew Sullivan doesn't like this essay on lolcats, but I found it to be a worthwhile read. I think I see what Andrew finds objectionable in it: the bit he quotes on his blog — "the cheeseburger is not really a cheeseburger -- it's a symbol" — is almost a comically silly observation. ("Duh" doesn't even get to surface of what's wrong with it.) But I think that sentence is an anomaly in the essay, one that, to be sure, a decent editor should have caught and asked the author to rethink. If Andrew is right in calling the author on the carpet for it, he should have noted that its presence mars and undoes what might have been a really rather excellent essay on its topic. (That's why the passage is so devastatingly disappointing.) Instead, in just quoting it and labeling it with "Poseur Alert," Andrew suggests that the passage is representative of the essay and the thinking in it, which I don't believe it is.

Phenomena like lolcats are in need of this sort of contemplation (even if the letters to Salon suggest many find contemplation of such object intolerable), and if I don't believe that Dixit quite gets to what's culturally at stake in lolcats, his essay is a better attempt at making sense of their distinct appeal than I have yet seen.

update

Here is a good letter that addresses one of the more important aspects of lolcats not dealt with in Dixit's essay: the grammar:

Let's be clear: the language used in LOLcat captions isn't simply "mangled English". The deliberate misspellings and misuses of words like the verb "to be" reflect the ways in which White folks misunderstand the way Black folks talk in America. Dixit Jay's article may elide any discussion of race, but postings like this one (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_48pIyTbrm4A/Ruc4lWH0clI/AAAAAAAAADE/Xn7698M88ME/s1600-h/I+just+wishes+i+wuz+white..jpg) make it pretty clear that race is very much a factor in these posts.

I don't, in fact, find that the grammar of lolcats particularly resembles Black vernacular English, nor does it seem especially akin to the various entertainment versions thereof. The particular grammatical deformations of lolcats are, however, characteristics of pidgin language in general; the errors are also characteristic of the way children speak. I would argue that any resemblance to the Black English of the entertainment industry stems from the way in which the entertainment industry likewise juvenilized the dialect as part of its juvenilized representation of African Americans. And what lolcats grammar represents, I would contend, is this juvenile relationship to language.

Now, a more interesting point might be that the representations of lolcats are filling an analogous role for the cultural imagination as the representations of Black folks did in earlier generations. And a further question would be to what extent that otherness that is represented in the grammar is necessarily a racialized other and, if it is, to what effect.

But to me, many of these cartoons reflect an unconscious equation, in the mind of their creators, of Black people with animals, and of Black culture (as perceived, or mis-perceived, by people outside of it) as something to be ridiculed.

The author seems to assume that the representation of otherness is necessarily racialized. But it is not clear to me that this is the case; indeed the otherness of lolcats seems deployed as a mirror to reflect back an alienated image of ourselves where we can recognize aspects of ourselves not otherwise visible. This, I take it, is Dixit's point. And it is not necessary to demonize or ridicule the cats in order to see this reflection. Indeed, any ridicule in the humor usual rebounds to us. In any case, it's certainly true that the representation of the African American in the entertainment industry has similarly served this function, so to that extent the comparison of the letter writer is potentially valid. But the question remains as to whether the the representation of otherness must necessarily be racialized?

From another letter, which points to the juvenilizing effects of the language but also sees in that otherness an alienness that can speak truth to power:

I also enjoy the way the "mangling" follows very definite rules and has its own sound and rhythm, almost as if it were poetry, and the way it creates its own reality. Lolspeak plays into our view of cats as furry little anarchists, refusing to follow rules. It reinforces our feelings toward our pets as our "babies". It's playful. And play is a good thing. We don't get enough of it in our lives.

Bonus Stress

2008-11-20T08:03:00.003-06:00

The problem with this idea is that it presumes that executive bonuses are linked directly to performance. While in some cases this is undoubtedly the case, in others, bonuses seem to be more like a regular (albeit variable) aspect of the compensation. That is, many firms seem to give out large bonuses to their executives whether the company performs well or not. Usually the rationale is retention: the company needs to pay these bonuses in order to retain its best talent. But this factor calls into question the premise of the study: namely that high bonuses induce performance-debilitating stress. If high bonus is not directly related to performance, however, it's not clear how, if at all, the bonus might figure into the production of stress.

Help Wanted: A Smart Opposition

2008-11-16T07:53:00.002-06:00

Frank Rich notes that the Obama administration and the Democrats actually need a smart Republican opposition to keep themselves from doing stupid things:

The bad news for Democrats is that these are the exact circumstances that can make Obama cocky and Democrats sloppy. The worse news for the country is that at a time of genuine national peril we actually do need an opposition party that is not brain-dead.

Register the Pets!

2008-11-13T09:29:00.004-06:00

Gail Collins, who rose during the course of the election rose to being one of my favorite columnists:

Georgia has a Senate runoff Dec. 2, and the Democrats have dispatched tons of canvassers to help their candidate, Jim Martin. Martin is a long shot, but we should all be grateful that they’ve found something to do with the Obama campaign workers, who would otherwise have been set loose to wander the country, muttering about change and attempting to register household pets to vote.

All this energy, but no place to channel it effectively at the moment: I think this, not the high expectations per se, is going to pose the real challenge for the Obama administration.

How do you manage it for good?

Balance and the Newpaper Market

2008-11-03T19:56:00.002-06:00

Greenwald on WaPo's Ombudsman Deborah Howell's contention that the WaPo had tilted too far left in this election (as if):

In Howell's view, The Post shouldn't determine its news reporting based on what is factually true. Instead, it should shape its coverage to please this discredited, failed political movement -- in order to sell more papers.

As Greenwald notes, the placing of economics over fact is egregious (though there is no evidence I can see that a more rightward tilt would have sold any more newspapers). Even more troubling: this is the newspaper's ombudsman who is advocating making editorial decisions on the basis of economics rather than conformance to fact.

McCain Pulls a "Sad Grampa"

2008-11-02T08:36:00.002-06:00

Funny as hell, and it makes McCain seem human, but is this a winning strategy? I don't see it.

Obama in a Blowout

2008-11-01T17:27:00.003-05:00

Predictions:

55% Obama
42% McCain
3% Other

The undecideds will not break McCain's way; most of them will simply not vote. Indeed, the likely voter model will be found to have overestimated the likelihood that Republicans would vote.

The youth vote will be about what it was in 2004, but the high turn out among African Americans and general apathy among Republicans will make for the lopsided margin.

These are simply predictions, of course, but I remain convinced that McCain has a greater likelihood of underperforming his polling numbers than overperforming.

Communist Manipesto

2008-10-29T18:48:00.000-05:00

"It works for everything."

Up, because...

2008-10-28T21:44:00.002-05:00

Just because. Don't you love it when the market moves up by 10% and no one has much explanation except lame reasons such as "bargain hunting" and "expectations of a rate cute." As if that could account for a jump of this magnitude. Personally, I found Huffpo's SCREAMING HEADLINE the most honest:

Unpaid Blogging

2008-10-28T09:36:00.002-05:00

I'm with Andrew on this one. Lots of angry people with time on their hands--I don't see a deep recession cutting at all into the free blogging economy.

Circular Firing Squad

2008-10-24T23:54:00.002-05:00

Mark McKinnon, former McCain ad-man and advisor, who wisely sat out the campaign:

If you really want to see what ‘going negative’ is in politics, just watch the back-stabbing and blame game that we’re starting to see. And there’s one common theme: Everyone who wasn’t part of the campaign could have done better.

Wild Ride

2008-10-24T08:13:00.001-05:00

Looks like another wild ride on Wall Street today. Futures market hit its floor, foreign markets down around 8%. It's going to be ugly at the opening bell.

Dream Team

2008-10-22T21:30:00.001-05:00

Palin/Bachman 2012

I see that the GOP pulled their funding from Bachman and that her opponent has managed to raise over $1 million since the Outburst. I would so dearly love to see her lose.

Spinning the Wardrobe

2008-10-22T21:15:00.003-05:00

This one is good.

I saw the RNC statement on Gov. Palin’s $150,000 clothing bender on the RNC's tab. . . . some other possible spin lines for the RNC.

What you sneering critics in the liberal MSM fail to see here is… a Jobs Program! Saks floorwalkers, cashiers, a team of sweating porters to haul the merchandise from the store to the motorcade… chiropractors to treat those porters. Sarah Palin knows how to create jobs!

What’s the difference between a Pit Bull and a Hockey Mom? You can feed a pit-bull for 483 years with 150 grand.

Still cheaper than Mitt Romney’s hair products. We’re saving money here…

William Ayres is a terrorist!

New ad slogan: “Clothes for Gov. Palin? $150,000. Time machine to go back two months to late August and ask what the Hell were Schmidt and Davis thinking when they cooked up this idea and sold it to McCain? Priceless.”

Did we mention that William Ayres is a terrorist!

Oddly, given that Murphy is a GOP strategist, it doesn't have the feel of gallows humor. I don't sense that he is feeling at all sorry for his old boss.

Rx vs. OTC

2008-10-21T19:41:00.002-05:00

Thomas Edsell ends with this curious comparison:

The net effect will be that Obama's average on RCP will, in just a day, shoot up from a 5.7 point lead to an 8.1 point lead. Obama supporters will be able to put away, at least for now, their Rolaids, while McCainiacs will have to double their dosage of Wellbutrin, Paxil and Zoloft.