The Bandar-log

"They boast and chatter and pretend that they are a great people about to do great affairs in the jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all is forgotten.”
Baloo warning Mowgli about the Bandar-log in “Kaa’s Hunting” from The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling

Yesterday afternoon I saw a very short teaser ad for one of the network news programs. I’m 99 and 44/100ths percent sure it was CBS. The teaser went something like this:

[Pictures of Donald Sterling and V. Stiviano on the screen]

Voiceover: Frank talk from the woman in the Sterling scandal

[Picture of Afghans moving rubble by hand on the screen]

A deadly earthquake hits Afghanistan

In what sane world is anything about the Donald Sterling matter considered as newsworthy as - based on placement, more newsworthy than - the death of hundreds of people in an earthquake?

Reality, sentiment, and savvy [Updated]

A while back, Grim posted and Cassandra linked to the Dove “Real Beauty” video that went viral. I watched the video, thought it was lovely, and wanted to send it along to a couple of (female) friends. Since those friends would probably fall down in a dead faint if exposed to the poem in Grim’s sidebar, I went looking for another source. When I did, I was amazed and kind of appalled at some of the reactions. There was a lot of hilarity, a lot of scorn, a lot of trashing of Dove’s parent company, and so on. I was taken aback and ended up not sending my friends a link to the video. I didn’t however, give the reactions serious thought until I read what Ace had to say about the ad:

Dove did an ad, intended to go viral, putting across the message "Hey Ladies, you're more beautiful than you think."

Now, think about this. Dove does not know any of these 30 million women. So Dove could not possibly say if these women are more beautiful than they believe themselves to be.
It's the equivalent of telling ten thousand randomly-drawn strangers: Remember, you're all above average in skating ability.

[snip]

And yet, thirty million views. Women are starved for this sort of positive messaging, even when, if you think about if for five seconds, 1, it doesn't make any sense that Dove could tell you this about yourself and 2, Dove is obviously a corporation attempting to get attention by peddling an embarrassingly-transparently cloying-ingratiating message to women in hopes they're so starved for a kind word they'll take it anyway.

In the same post, Ace linked to an essay on the ad by Virginia Postrel and I read that, too. After reading both of these, I began to wonder if I had watched the same ad. Here are the two things I think are going on.

First, Ace’s interpretation isn’t quite right. Dove isn’t telling women they’re above average in appearance; Dove is saying that women are more attractive than they give themselves credit for. It’s not like telling 10,000 random strangers that they’re above average in skating ability; it’s like telling 10,000 random strangers that they’re better skaters than they give themselves credit for.

Now, with skating ability there’s no reason to think that most people will underestimate (or overestimate) their skating ability. There is, however, good reason to think that most women underestimate their attractiveness. As Naomi Wolf points out in The Beauty Myth, advertisers usually sell to women by leveraging - or helping create - women’s unrealistically bad opinion of themselves:

The advertisers who make women’s mass culture possible depend on making women feel bad enough about their faces and bodies to spend more money on worthless or pain-inducing products than they would if they felt innately beautiful. (p. 84)

Dove is simply talking explicitly about the basis of most advertising to women: women focus on their flaws and that makes them easy prey. So, yes, it does make sense that Dove can tell us that about ourselves - as, I think, Ace’s comment that “[w]omen are starved for this kind of positive messaging” makes clear.

Similarly, there is Postrel’s statement that:

There are many reasons to choose some women and not others for the video, ranging from how well they speak to whether they were available for the big reveal. But it’s hard to imagine that the director didn’t try to make the most compelling movie possible, choosing the sketches that showed drastic contrasts. Few, if any, viewers realize they’re seeing only about a third of the subjects of the “social experiment.”

The point of the ad is not to sell women a particular idea of reality; it’s to evoke recognition. Most women know that their friends and loved ones see them as more attractive than they see themselves. The ad isn’t telling us that as if it’s a banner headline; the ad is simply talking about something we all know anyhow - and gently pointing out that it isn’t a very realistic way to go through life.

Postrel also says:

But the campaign also encourages the perception that it’s normal, if undesirable, for grown women to obsess about their imperfections.

My reading on this is very different. I think the ad recognizes that this is something grown women do; in other words, this is a normal (in the sense of “usual” or “commonplace”) activity. That’s very different from “encouraging the perception that it’s normal”. Again, the ad is not trying to create a reality; it is reporting on the reality that already exists.

The second thing I think is going on in much of the negative reaction to the Dove ad is a rejection of sentiment. That is, when something moves us, we look for a reason to short-circuit that emotion. Hence, Ace’s point 2, about Dove being a corporation, looking for attention, etc. And hence Postrel’s references to the ad’s cleverness, and her warnings about it being “highly selective” and about how the artist didn’t work as sketch artists usually do. These are ways of saying, “There we go. No reason to be moved after all. It’s all a trick.”

Yet, again, we are not moved to tears because the ad convinces us of something. We are moved to tears because of recognition of something we already know: we women are awfully hard on ourselves. What is wrong with feeling touched and relieved that someone is talking to us about that - even if that someone is a huge corporation trying to sell us something?

Perhaps the problem with being moved by an advertisement is the fear that we will not be able to interrupt the connection between being moved and buying the product. Thus, rather than say, “Great ad, doesn’t make me want to rush right out and buy Dove” we feel we have to say, “Bad ad” to stop ourselves from immediately maxing out our credit cards on bars of soap with one-quarter cleansing cream. It’s as if we are all terrified that our emotions will be used against us. Perhaps that’s what Postrel fears when she says:

However media-savvy we may be, we tend to believe that a “documentary” reflects reality -- even if it’s quite obviously an ad.

I think women are smarter than that. My own reaction, for example, is, “Great ad. Doesn’t make me want to rush right out and buy Dove. But when I do want to buy something and my choice is between a version made by Dove and a version made by someone else, I’ll choose the one made by Dove.”

It seems pretty savvy to me to prefer a product made by a company that’s trying to sell me by telling me I’m fine the way I am over a product made by a company telling me there’s something seriously wrong with me that only its product can fix.

*****

Reading:

Cassandra is writing along somewhat similar lines and is doing her usual outstanding job. A must-read - although I’m afraid my post may fall into her “overthinking” category.
[Update: Do definitely read the comments to Cassandra's post. As of 11:45am on May 1, the commenters there seem remarkably media-savvy.]

Say it ain't so

In my last post, I suggested that the Republicans step aside and let President Obama and the Democrats run the economy for a while; part of this suggestion included raising the debt limit - one last time - to $21.5 Trillion.

In the meantime, ‘Puter over at The Gormogons was making a different argument:

Let the Democrats spend whatever the heck they want, so long as they agree to pay for every penny spent in the year the funds are spent.  That's right.  Put the Balanced Budget Amendment or a similar piece of stopgap legislation back on the table. All current fiscal year expenditures must be matched by current fiscal year revenue, with no exceptions.

I think that’s a great idea but don’t see a way to actually do this, via Amendment or otherwise. I can’t imagine that the Senate will pass at all, much less by a two-thirds majority, a resolution calling for such an amendment. I also can’t imagine that two-thirds of the State legislatures will call for a Constitutional convention. Similarly, the Senate Democrats would never pass a piece of legislation enforceably calling for pay-as-we-go and, even if they did, President Obama would never sign it.

Perhaps, however, ‘Puter’s real argument is that putting a Balanced Budget Amendment front and center would force people to realize how much our current government costs and produce a revolt:

There's not enough money among current taxpayers to fund the government's expenditures, even if you took every penny.  Those who currently pay no taxes would have to pony up for their pet programs just like everyone else.

And there's the Democrats Achilles' heel.  Most Americans would refuse to pay the tax rates and amounts required to pay for our government's annual expenditures, and rightly so. Rather, Americans would insist government get rid of unnecessary programs, agencies and departments in favor of preserving the programs that are important.

This seems like a worthwhile exercise but it brings me back to a something I’ve wondered about ever since November: Why isn’t someone - the Republicans, a conservative interest group, the Tea Party - running ads pointing out stuff like this? The Right seems to hang around, being bad-mouthed by the Left, and then once the calendar hits a Presidential election year suddenly start running ads trying to dislodge those quick sound bites that have sunk in (“The rich should pay their fair share”) and replace them with ideas as foreign as Sanskrit (“There aren’t enough millionaires”). Why isn’t some organization spending money to present these ideas all year, every year, instead of waiting until the last minute?

I tend to think of print ads and TV ads (I’m old) which means spending money but of course there are other venues to explore that don’t require a cent. Perhaps a Twitter hashtag of “#88%” would be a nice place to start.

So if ‘Puter’s idea is about pointing out reality, I’m all for it. It would be more than helpful to tell people that the idea that we can get out of the financial hole we’re in by hand-waving and mumbling about the rich doesn’t add up. Someone other than just the rich is going to have to pay for it all the debt we’re racking up and maybe it will be harder for us to happily mortgage our kids future if we can’t keep lying to ourselves about exactly how big the bill will be.

Imagine

Imagine that a man who has brutally murdered several people, including children, is testifying at his own trial. Cameras are allowed in the courtroom and a television network is taping his testimony. The tape is played on the evening news.

When he see the news the murderer is incensed. The network, he claims, played only the part of the tape that showed him confessing to the killings. It edited out the part of the tape where he explained his very good reasons for doing so. The network, he claims, has materially misrepresented him.

I would not see media malpractice here. What the man did is so utterly unacceptable that his reasons for doing so are irrelevant. There is literally no reason for the network to broadcast them.


Now imagine that a major newspaper prints an article on child sexual abuse. The article praises the social workers who identify the abused children; the police and prosecutors who work to put the abusers in prison; and the counselors who help the victims have a chance at a normal life. They barely mention the abusers, except to express disgust that anyone would commit such an act.

After the article comes out, a pedophile advocacy organization protests that their side of the issue was not considered. No one interviewed them; the article’s author doesn’t even mention that such organizations exist. Perhaps, they acknowledge, the author of the article doesn’t agree with their position but he has an obligation to at least know what their arguments are, explain them honestly, and rebut them if he can.

I would not see media bias here. The advocacy organizations are not legitimate players in any public discourse. There is no need to take their views into account or even to acknowledge that anyone holds those views. They exist outside the realm of decent, serious society.


Perhaps what look like media malpractice and media bias to people on the Right; what look like deliberate decisions to deceptively edit and knowingly omit; what look like actions in service of an ideology and a goal; perhaps all that is simply a result of a mindset that defines certain people as existing outside the realm of decent, serious society and that believes no reason is sufficient to explain their utterly unacceptable ideas and policies.


*****

Related reading:

If It Will Save a Single Life, We Must Get Piers Morgan's Stupid Fat Face off the Television - The idea for this post has been running around my head for a while. Reading this over at Ace of Spades made me decide to write it:

This is the underlying assumption that they simply will not confess, for if they did confess it, it would be game over for them. All of their conclusions -- all of their bias, all of their double-standards -- flow from this premise, which they will not admit, but will only dance around.

The premise is simply that liberal speech is much more valuable than conservative speech and this is of course because liberal politics are much more valuable than conservative ones.

Perhaps it’s not that they “will not confess” so much as that they do not realize there is anything to confess.


Conservatives need to create powerful, “sticky” messages that lead the electorate to a tipping point - From Bookworm:

... for decades the Left had created an intellectual atmosphere in which it was easy for people to believe, all evidence to the contrary, that Romney was an evil, soulless man, and that a Republican America would be, as Ted Kennedy so memorably said about Robert Bork,

a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….

That none of this came to pass during any Republican ascendency is irrelevant. 

Obama’s Thunderdome - From the Wall Street Journal:

What is striking about the Obama technique is that it's not so much criticism as something closer to political obliteration, driving his opposition out of the political arena altogether.
After the inaugural speech, Obama communications director Dan Pfeiffer said that Democrats don't have "an opposition party worthy of the opportunity."

The problem with starting an alternative media on the right - From Neoneocon:

The much more basic problem with an alternative conservative media is that the media on the right has been so demonized—and any alternative media would be equally demonized—that Democrats and even many of those in the middle have been taught that it’s unreliable and will not watch it, and/or they automatically discount what it says.

So God Made a Fawner - Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. At the end of this piece, she writes:

... Mr. Kroft is a reporter whose job it is to be impartial and nonpartisan, and who works for a towering journalistic institution, "60 Minutes."

People like him are supposed to approach political figures with no fear or favor.

Their job is to grill. What are they afraid of?

I suspect the answer to that question can be found here:
In response to: The left is quite open about its intentions - From Breitbart (via Ace who is doing some interesting writing on media bias):

People don't want to be thought of as "extremist". No one wants to think their opinions are stupid, hateful or unpopular.

A bit too far

Stanley Fish (via JustOneMinute) is explaining why it’s okay to condemn Rush Limbaugh for calling Sandra Fluke a slut while giving Ed Schulz a pass for calling Laura Ingraham the same thing and giving Bill Maher a pass for calling Michele Bachmann a bimbo and Sarah Palin something Fish cannot mention (a “cunt” if you’re keeping score at home):

Rather than relaxing or soft-pedaling your convictions about what is right and wrong, stay with them, and treat people you see as morally different differently. Condemn Limbaugh and say that Schultz and Maher may have gone a bit too far but that they’re basically O.K. If you do that you will not be displaying a double standard; you will be affirming a single standard, and moreover it will be a moral one because you will be going with what you think is good rather than what you think is fair.

Why not? The only people vulnerable to this particular type of attack are women - and they’re fair game, right?

Just for the record

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters. - Albert Einstein

As you may know, Foster Friess, a generous financial supporter to Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign, appeared on Andrea Mitchell’s MSNBC show and made a widely-reported comment on birth control.

Here’s the exchange between Friess and Mitchell:

Mitchell: Do you have any concerns about some of his comments on social issues, contraception, about women in combat, and whether that would hurt his general election campaign would he be the nominee?

Friess: I get such a chuckle when these things come out. Here we have millions of our fellow Americans unemployed, we have jihadist camps being set up in Latin America, which Rick has been warning about, and people seem to be so preoccupied with sex. I think it says something about our culture. We maybe need a massive therapy session so we can concentrate on what the real issues are. And this contraceptive thing, my gosh, it's such inexpensive. Back in my day, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn't that costly.

Mitchell: Excuse me, I'm just trying to catch my breath from that, Mr. Friess, frankly.

That’s all I could find. Perhaps there’s a longer transcript available somewhere; if so, I’d like to read it. But that’s the exchange that’s being reported: my link is to the Wall Street Journal; the Journal’s link is to TalkingPointsMemo.

This past Sunday, David Gregory brought this comment up on Meet The Press; Andrea Mitchell was one of the panelists on the show. Here’s Gregory’s description of what Friess said (emphasis mine):

MR. GREGORY: This aspirin business, Foster Friess, who's a Santorum supporter, said to you on your program that the best means of birth control is putting a Bayer aspirin between your legs, which is kind of an old joke.

Here’s Mitchell correcting Gregory’s mischaracterization:

MS. MITCHELL: Yes.

Just for the record.

*****

Reading:

Re: Re: Bad Jokes - Michael Potemra, writing at The Corner. I like this post partly because Potemra is very clear on the problems with what Friess said, which is refreshing coming from someone writing from the Right.

I like this post even more because Potemra sees Friess as a living, breathing person, with all the complexity that entails, all the potential for missteps, all the potential for opening mouth and inserting foot, all the potential for reconsideration and apology. I’m very tired of people attributing earth-shattering - and always horrifying - significance to every word uttered by those with whom they disagree. It’s confirmation bias on steroids. People aren’t just cherry-picking facts to fit their preconceptions; they’re hypervigilant for incidents they can use to prove how terrible their opponents are. If someone who disagrees with them politically says a thousand decent things and one questionable one, they seize on the latter to prove that those who disagree with them are monsters.

Robert F. Kennedy said:

What is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.

It seems to me that our country - at least the part of it that pontificates about politics - today contains very few people who aren’t extremists. This state of affairs is scary; bodes ill for the future of the nation; and raises serious questions about the viability of our form of government. It’s also incredibly tiresome.

Fat-brained

No diet will remove all the fat from your body because the brain is entirely fat. Without a brain, you might look good, but all you could do is run for public office. - George Bernard Shaw

There are some articles popping up that claim Chris Christie’s weight makes him obviously unfit (heh) to be President. Elspeth Reeve’s has ably identified the goal of these articles and the tiresome, distasteful pattern they follow. Megan McArdle opens her discussion of the articles on Christie’s weight by announcing that she and Jonathan Chait are in agreement that:

... the argument that Chris Christie is somehow unqualified to be president because he is fat is absolutely ridiculous.

McArdle then does her usual good job of outlining - yet again, for all those who weren’t paying attention the first, second, whatever time - the state of research on weight:

The [weight] band that your body wants to occupy is no more a sign of virtue than the color of your eyes. Yet people who would be ashamed to argue that Barack Obama should be excluded from the presidency because of the amount of melanin his skin contains, feel no compunction at all in declaring that your genetic predisposition towards adiposity is an intolerable fault.

Chait focuses on the “moral panic” aspect of articles by Eugene Robinson and Michael Kinsley and concludes:

The only real reasoning I see here is that American elites view obesity with disgust, and they’re repulsed at the notion that a very fat guy could rise to a position of symbolic leadership. It’s not a very attractive sentiment.

All three - Reeve, McArdle, and Chait - are worth reading and I don’t have anything more to say about the aspects they address so well.

However, there are a couple of things that struck me in these articles. First, Eugene Robinson says, in quick succession:

1) He does not intend to blame Christie for his own obesity.
2) He is sure that Christie wants to live long enough to be around for his children’s milestones.
3) Christie should lead himself.
4) Christie claims he is overweight because he eats too much and the wrong things.
5) It’s not that simple because of genetics and psychological factors.
6) Gastric surgery is available.
7) People who lose weight and keep it off do so through proper diet and exercise.
8) Robinson’s sincere advice to Christie: “Eat a salad and take a walk.”

So, once again, which is it: Christie can and should lose weight by eating less and exercising more or Christie can’t lose weight unless he has gastric surgery? Or perhaps it’s that obesity is really hard to write about coherently when a writer is trying to score political points in the context of a topic about which he knows nothing except a series of sound bites.

Second, Michael Kinsley says:

Controlling what you eat and how much is not easy, and it’s harder for some people than for others. But it’s not as difficult as curing a chemical addiction.

Kinsley does not provide a link backing up this claim and perhaps he’s correct. However, I spent about 10 minutes using Google and I found the following recovery rate claims:

Alcoholism: perhaps as high as 35%

Heroin: perhaps as high as 32%

Meth: perhaps as high as 15%

Obesity: perhaps as high as 20% - if success is defined as “intentionally losing 10% of initial body weight and not regaining it”.

So if these numbers are anywhere near right, it looks to me like “[c]ontrolling what you eat and how much” is at least “as difficult as curing a chemical addiction”. And this is with a very, very low definition of recovery from obesity. How low? Well, if Chris Christie weighs 286 pounds (the minimum Robinson thinks he weighs), he would weigh 257 pounds if he “recovered” under this definition. Somehow I don’t think that would result in Robinson lauding Christie’s leadership or Kinsley okaying Christie’s “character” and “control”. (I can’t find decent numbers on people who start out obese, lose enough weight to be considered “normal” weight, and keep that weight off. The number usually tossed around is 1 to 2% which is far lower than the numbers for alcoholism, heroin, or meth.)

Same thing with that bariatric surgery Robinson recommends as a way off the “dieting roller coaster”. According to Weight Watchers (citations in original):

Results of Surgery
Patients lose an average of 50% of the excess weight with all bariatric procedures and this is usually achieved 12-18 months after the surgery and regain 10-15% over three to ten years.

So if Christie weighs 286 pounds and Robinson thinks he should weigh at most 214 pounds (to avoid falling into the “obese” category), Christie’s “excess weight” is 72 pounds. If he underwent bariatric surgery, he would lose 36 pounds which would bring him down to 250 pounds, then regain 7-11 pounds, leaving him between 257 and 261 pounds. Again, I don’t think either Robinson or Kinsley are going to decide that Christie’s weight is no longer an “issue” at 257 pounds.

People love to write about obesity. Especially people who aren’t obese. The fact that no one understands obesity is irrelevant to them; they are quite sure that their lack of obesity makes them experts on the subject.

Personally, I’d much rather have a fat President who can get done at least some of the things I believe need doing than a thin one can’t get anything constructive done at all. However, I suspect one reason Christie can do what he’s doing in New Jersey is because he understands State politics; I imagine he knows where the bodies are buried and may even have planted a few himself. So I’d prefer he stay where he is for now and spend the next four years continuing to fix New Jersey while getting himself plugged into national politics.

I’m pretty sure the country will still need Christie’s services in 2017. And maybe by then pundits will be less confused about what Christie’s obesity supposedly says about his character and more interested in what Christie’s track record actually says about his ability.

Creationism

Neoneocon is writing about a Russ Smith post which contains the following quote:

There are usual caveats: Of course Obama isn’t illiterate or Bush-dumb because as Jesse Louis Jackson once said, “God doesn’t make junk,” and the intelligence-challenged just aren’t allowed near Harvard, much less become editor of that university’s Law Review.

Neo is focusing on the fact that Bush also graduated from Harvard (and Yale). What struck me (other than Smith’s lousy writing) was the “God doesn’t make junk” part of the quote. Is Smith implying that while God made Obama, someone else made Bush? if so, who?

Punitive versus compensatory

Andrew Cohen at The Atlantic is writing about an HBO documentary called Hot Coffee. The documentary looks at four lawsuits; in his review, Cohen discusses two of these: the case of Stella Liebeck (the McDonald’s coffee suit) and the case of Colin Gourley, who “has ‘severe brain damage’ as a result of medical malpractice at his birth.” About the McDonald’s case, Cohen says:

... a jury of her peers ultimately awarded Liebeck $160,000 in compensatory damages (for medical bills and the like) and $2.7 million more assessed as punitive damages against McDonald's.

About the Gourley case, Cohen says:

When Gourley's parents sued, Nebraska law capped their damages at a total of $1.25 million, an arbitrary figure far short of the $6 million the family established it needed to take care of their son for the rest of his life. A jury, which was not told of the state cap, had awarded the family $5.6 million to help pay for Colin's care.

Cohen believes the award in the McDonald’s case was appropriate and that Gourley’s parents should have received the $5.6 million the jury awarded them to care for their son. But these cases are substantially different: punitive damages are not the same as compensatory damages.

In the McDonald’s case, the jury believed McDonald’s was acting irresponsibly and wanted to encourage them to behave better in the future. I might argue that such encouragement would better come in the form of legislation but even if we grant that juries should be assessing punitive damages, why do they go to the plaintiff? Compensatory damages, yes: the McDonald’s customer may well have deserved repayment for the costs she incurred from coffee McDonald’s knew was hot enough to cause severe burns. And I have no objection to her attorney getting some cut of the punitive damages; we want people like her to be able to find lawyers. But why should the plaintiff get any of the money being assessed to encourage McDonald’s?

It seems to me that when the public opposes “frivolous” lawsuits what they’re really opposing is plaintiffs being able to actually make money by suing. If we do away with the profit aspect, then lawsuits are simply about plaintiffs being repaid for money they are out due to bad behavior on the part of the defendant. (I can't actually figure out where the punitive damages should go instead. Every idea I come up with has bad incentives for someone.)

The Gourley case is utterly different. No legislature should be capping compensatory damages. That’s insane. If someone’s bad behavior results in a financial loss or burden then the bad actor should pay up. The plaintiff can present his financial evidence, the defendant can counter with his own, and then the jury can - as Cohen argues they should - decide on a number.

What about pain, suffering, loss of reputation? Well, loss of reputation can sometimes be quantified and, if so, it should be; it can then be treated as a matter of compensatory damages. Beyond that, I’d say cap compensatory damages for pain, suffering, and loss of reputation at some fixed number like $1 million. Is it heartless to put a dollar limit on, say, the loss of a beloved spouse or child? Perhaps, but if so the heartlessness arises from an attempt to assign a monetary value to such a loss in the first place.

*****

Reading:

Break In by Dick Francis - A cautionary tale about (in part) a system in which a plaintiff whose suit does not succeed must pay the defendant’s legal fees.

Savage

Dan Savage, a gay sex-advice columnist, had never really registered with me until he and Megan McArdle got into it - and I have to say I found him awfully unpleasant in that exchange. I’ve now read a New York Times Magazine piece on him (via Althouse) and his It Gets Better project sounds like a wonderful thing. My adolescence was stormy for reasons that had nothing to do with sexual orientation; I only survived because of my conviction that adulthood did not have to be miserable. That conviction grew out of the people I saw around me and the stories I read in books, both examples of people like me who had happy lives. I cannot imagine how miserable it must be to be without the kinds of role models who demonstrate what life after high school can be. The It Gets Better project provides those examples for gay high school students who may have nowhere else to look for people like them and Savage deserves high praise for starting it.

That said, I still find Savage pretty unpleasant. I had to laugh at this:

“The mistake that straight people made,” Savage told me, “was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous. Men had concubines, mistresses and access to prostitutes, until everybody decided marriage had to be egalitarian and fairsey ” In the feminist revolution, rather than extending to women “the same latitude and license and pressure-release valve that men had always enjoyed,” we extended to men the confines women had always endured. “And it’s been a disaster for marriage.”

My view would be more along the lines of:

Men were never expected to be monogamous because women had no recourse if they weren’t. Women pretty much had to get married - it was difficult for a woman to support herself, unacceptable for her to have children without being married, and very difficult for her to support any children she did have - and divorce was not an option. If a husband cheated, the wife had to suck it up and put up with it.

Thanks to the feminist revolution, women now have a choice about marriage and some of them - apparently the vast majority of them - expect marriage to mean monogamy. Men are free to not marry women who want monogamy but it’s pretty nervy of them to complain because they no longer have the hammer and are therefore required to consider the preferences of the women they claim to love.

More generally, the Savage attitude seems to me another argument for separating marriage into two distinct forms: civil and religious/traditional/vow-making. Let the government handle civil marriage as strictly a business relationship, a partnership formed for the purposes of property and children. I’d suggest we not call it marriage but rather fall back on a term like “civil union” or perhaps “marital partnership”.

Those for whom the state-imposed aspects of union are enough would do nothing beyond filling out the appropriate forms at the local courthouse. Those who prefer a union that includes making behavioral vows to supplement the legal obligations laid down by the state can have a religious ceremony or can exchange vows in front of whomever they please.

We would then end up with such entities as “Catholic marriage”, “Baptist marriage”, “non-religious traditional vow marriage”, “hand-fasted”, and so on. It would be messy but really no messier than what we have now (anybody but me remember “POSSLQ”) and it seems to me it would be far less messy than continuing to use the word “marriage” when we’ve gotten to the point where we don’t even agree on what it means with regard to something once upon a time as basic as monogamy.

I was also struck in the NYT Magazine article by this:

In their own marriage, Savage and Miller practice being what he calls “monogamish,” allowing occasional infidelities, which they are honest about. Miller was initially opposed to the idea. “You assume as a younger person that all relationships are monogamous and between two people, that love means nothing can come between you,” said Miller, who met Savage at a club in 1995, when he was 23 and Savage was 30. “Dan has taught me to be more realistic about that kind of stuff."

If Savage was male and Miller female, I would assume this is an example of a man pressuring a woman into the type of sex life the man prefers - regardless of what the woman is comfortable with - as the price of maintaining the relationship. As Kay S. Hymowitz put it, in a must-read essay on the sexual revolution and the movement for women’s rights:

But for most female mortals, the rules of the new regime were elusive at best. You kind of liked a guy you had just met, so what next? What did you do when he pressed, “Are you hung up or something?” The old order was built on guilt, shame, and inhibition; you sure didn’t want to go there.

I suppose it’s indicative of something that I make somewhat the same assumption about Savage and Miller, an assumption helped along by the fact that the article discusses how many extramarital affairs Savage has had but not Miller. The Savage approach appears to mean that the spouse with the most, um, unusual sexual preferences has the right to have an affair and, therefore, that the, shall we say, unadventurous spouse’s preference for a monogamous relationship must give way before the desires of his or her mate. The NYT Magazine article later discusses this in terms of men and women but I suspect the same dynamics may well be at work in at least some same-sex marriages (emphasis mine):

“Sometimes he [Savage] can shame women for not being into things that their male partners are into, if they have male partners,” Sady Doyle, a feminist blogger, told me. “The whole good-giving-and-game thing is something I actually agree with. I don’t think you should flip out on your partner if they share something sexual with you. But I think sometimes it’s much harder for women to say, ‘I’m not into that,’ or ‘Please, I don’t want to do that, let’s do something else,’ than it is to say, ‘Sure.’ Putting all the onus on the person who doesn’t have that fetish or desire, particularly if the person who doesn’t have that desire is the woman, really reproduces a lot of old structures and means of oppression for women.”

This, in turn, brings up another issue that intrigues me. I haven’t made an exhaustive study of the topic, but my general impression is that much of the discussion about whether gays’ views of monogamy in marriage differs from straights’ views of monogamy in marriage talks about gay marriage between two men. It will be interesting to see if there are significant differences in the types of marriages gay men create and the types of marriages gay women create.

*****

Notes:

* Just for the record, I think McArdle’s point in this dispute was valid but insufficient: the problem with Anthony Weiner’s behavior wasn’t that he was married; it was that he was creepy. Flasher in a raincoat on the street corner, guy in a raincoat sitting in the back of a porno movie house on Times Square creepy. Even if Weiner had been unmarried and uninvolved, he would have been creepy.

McArdle says:

To me, society can enforce norms about what constitutes acceptable sexual behavior--or it can enforce the norm that you and your partner(s) have to agree in advance upon what constitutes acceptable sexual behavior.

Looked at in those terms, at least in the Anthony Weiner case, I have norms about what constitutes acceptable sexual behavior that have nothing to do with what he and his partner have agreed on. Or as the wife of the author of the NYT magazine put it when he asked her:

which would upset her more: to learn that I was sending racy self-portraits to random women, Weiner-style, or to discover I was having an actual affair. She paused, scrunched up her mouth as if she had just bitten a particularly sour lemon and said: “An affair is at least a normal human thing. But tweeting a picture of your crotch is just weird.”

Yup.

*****

Reading:

Sex and the Empire State - An interview at National Review. The interview is interesting but two things about is are especially noteworthy. First, the link on page 5 to a downloadable version of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy article, “What Is Marriage?” I do not think the authors of the article have successfully made a compelling case that marriage must - regardless of religious considerations - be between a man and a woman but the essay is a good summary of issues and relates to my post in laying out the hope expressed by some who support gay marriage that it will be the just the first step in redefining marriage completely (see, for example, page 32 of the pdf).

Second, on page 3 the interviewee, a passionate and dedicated opponent of gay marriage, speaks of those on the other side in New York:

They are sincerely dedicated to their cause and filled with moral passion to advance what they deeply (albeit, in my view, mistakenly) believe is a civil-rights agenda. If I could choose opponents, I would choose different ones. Moreover, among them are people for whom I personally have great respect and even affection. They are good, patriotic people with whom I am proud to be allied in other very important struggles, and sad to be in political conflict with in this battle. I know how deeply they believe in their cause, and how determined they are to prevail. For some it is an intensely personal matter.

Would that everyone on both sides approached the fight with such civility.


Closing the book on open marriage - W. Bradford Wilcox at The Washington Post. Some sociological push-back outlining the problems of making non-monogamy the norm.


Future of Gay Marriage - Ross Douthat’s column:

There’s a lesson here. Institutions tend to be strongest when they make significant moral demands, and weaker when they pre-emptively accommodate themselves to human nature.

Dan Savage Versus Monogamy - Ross Douthat’s blog:

By stripping away any common definition of the proper relationship between sex and marriage, and asking every couple to essentially rebuild the institution from the ground up, he [Savage] would end up piling far more weight on the marital unit than any individual relationship can be reasonably expected to bear.

Douthat quotes at length from a brief but excellent Eve Tushnet piece:

But of course the whole weird premise of Savage's claim is that eros is so powerful and irrational, sexual fulfillment such an obvious non-negotiable, that... we should talk things out like rational adults before we get married and then stick to our rational rules and goals.

Tushnet in turn refers readers to “Rules of Misbehavior”, an essay in Washington Monthly that is a must-read on this subject:

If there is something to treasure in the old, traumatized ideal of lifelong monogamy, it’s not that it demeans sexual fulfillment. Rather, it’s that monogamy integrates sexual fulfillment with the other good things in life—having someone to pay bills and raise children with, having a refuge both emotional and physical from the rest of the world. It is an ideal that is powerful even when it is not fully realized (as it rarely, if ever, is), not a contract voided by nonperformance.

I don't know this place any longer

On Wednesday night, a Rutgers professor, Susan Feinberg, and her husband had dinner at a restaurant. At a nearby table sat Representative Paul Ryan and two companions. The Ryan table ordered wine. Feinberg consulted the restaurant’s wine list and found that the wine for the Ryan table cost $350 per bottle. Feinberg then took some pictures of the Ryan table. A second bottle of the same wine was delivered to the Ryan table later.

After Feinberg and her husband finished their meal and paid their check, Feinberg walked to Ryan’s table and asked him "how he could live with himself". Ryan’s two companions exchanged words with Feinberg. One of Ryan’s companions explained that “he had ordered the wine, was drinking it and paying for it”. Ryan’s only statement during this incident was, “Is that how much it was?" when someone mentioned the price of the wine.

Feinberg then asked Ryan’s companions whether they were lobbyists. One of them said, “F**k you.” Feinberg’s husband appears (this is unclear) to have come to her defense in some way, the waiter and the manager came to the table, and Feinberg left. She went home and emailed Talking Points Memo about what she had seen, heard, and done in the restaurant.

You can read the various interpretations of this exchange - I provide some links and commentary below. Those on the Left think this does or should totally discredit Ryan. Those on the Right think this is much ado about nothing. What appalls me is the sheer rudeness of Feinberg.* She snapped photos of a table of strangers and posted them on the Internet. She approached a total stranger who was having a private meal and conversation in order to berate him. She then proceeded to ask two other total strangers what they did for a living. And she eavesdropped - or at least claims to have done so - on their conversation and then gossiped about it. In what universe is this behavior even marginally socially acceptable, much less something to applaud?

*****

Notes:

* Yes, the man who said, “F**k you” to Feinberg was rude also. However, his rudeness arose from temper; it is normal rudeness, to which we all occasionally succumb and for which apologies were created. Feinberg’s rudeness was calculated rudeness, a deliberate decision to act in an unmannerly and inconsiderate way.

*****

Reading:

Paul Ryan’s $350 Bottle of Wine - Joshua Green at The Atlantic. This is where I first read this story. This is quite simply one of the sleaziest posts I’ve read in a very long time. First, Green deserves the Sullivan/Rubin Award for, shall we say, selective quoting from the Talking Points Memo story. He also deserves a Missing The Blindingly Obvious award for characterizing the restaurant in question as “the swanky Capitol Hill restaurant favored by lobbyists and other expense-account barons” but exhibiting no curiosity about what Feinberg was doing eating there when New Jersey taxpayers are staggering under the tax burden necessary to pay her salary. Nor did he wonder how much her meal or wine cost and who was paying for what she consumed.

He reports that Ryan “is in the habit of drinking $350-a-bottle wine” but provides no evidence that this is a habit; in fact, the stuff Green didn’t quote from TPM contradicts Green’s statement. He further characterizes Ryan’s attitude toward the results of implementing his financial plan as “nonchalance”, a claim for which there is no evidence I know of.

Green wraps his sleaze in an invocation of John Edwards’ $400 haircut, concluding that Ryan should get at least as much grief for the wine as Edwards got for the haircut. Cue the entry of:

Paul Ryan’s $350 Wine v. John Edwards’ $400 Haircut - James Joyner at Outside The Beltway. This post gives three reasons why the incidents are different. First, Ryan paid for the wine from his own pocket; Edwards paid for his haircut using campaign funds. Second, the haircut reinforced an existing image of Edwards as vain; the author sees no parallel image being reinforced here. Third, the haircut undercut Edwards’ everyman image; the wine gives rise to “that’s easy for you to say” but isn’t hypocritical unless the taxpayers are buying the wine.

In the third reason, Joyner comes closest to what I think is the primary difference but doesn’t quite get it. Edwards was running for President. That is, he was asking us to elect him to an office where he would use his judgment to make decisions that affect all of us. His words said that he was “one of us” and would make decisions accordingly; his haircut said otherwise.

Ryan, on the other hand, has proposed an idea, a plan, an approach. He is not asking us to trust his future judgments; he is asking us to approve of something he has already done. There is a huge difference.

This goes back to what I’ve written about before: ideas are not responsible for the people who hold them. If Ryan’s idea is good, then it’s good even if he is slugging down a three thousand dollar bottle of wine every night while chortling about throwing widows and orphans into the snow. If Ryan’s idea is bad, it is bad even if Ryan himself is more praiseworthy than Mother Teresa. If Feinberg and TPM and Green object to Ryan’s ideas, they are free to say so. One hopes they would also explain why and offer alternate suggestions. Feinberg, for example, is a business professor and “an economist by training”. Surely both TPM and The Atlantic would give as much house room to her professional analysis of Ryan’s proposals as they have to her attempts at character assassination.

The next time you find yourself wondering what on earth has happened to political discourse in this country, think about this incident. Once we substitute tabloid-style gossip for intelligent discussions of economics and policy, we’re sunk. No, the Left isn’t the only side that engages in this. But they have sunk to a new low.

Will the real President Obama please stand up?

I was amused to read two rather contradictory analyses of Obama’s acumen on the same day. According to Lexington Green at Chicago Boyz (via TigerHawk):

Obama has sent a budget to Congress. Obama’s budget makes no effort whatsoever to cut spending.

Obama is not “failing to lead” as some people are claiming. That is all wrong.

All suggestions to that effect are all wrong. Obama knows exactly what he is doing.

Obama is setting up a confrontation and he plans to win. [snip]

It is that serious. Obama’s brazen, no-cuts budget proposal is not a sign of weakness.

It is a bold chess move that demands a strong response.

Here we have the brilliant Obama, the Obama who is always three moves ahead of his opponents, the Obama who is always thinking, always has a plan, always knows what he’s doing.

According to Niall Ferguson at Newsweek, writing about Obama’s handling of the revolutionary wave in Egypt:

The consensus among the assembled experts on the Middle East? A colossal failure of American foreign policy.

This failure was not the result of bad luck. It was the predictable consequence of the Obama administration’s lack of any kind of coherent grand strategy, a deficit about which more than a few veterans of U.S. foreign policy making have long worried.[snip]

“This is what happens when you get caught by surprise,” an anonymous American official told The New York Times last week. “We’ve had endless strategy sessions for the past two years on Mideast peace, on containing Iran. And how many of them factored in the possibility that Egypt moves from stability to turmoil? None.”

I can think of no more damning indictment of the administration’s strategic thinking than this: it never once considered a scenario in which Mubarak faced a popular revolt. Yet the very essence of rigorous strategic thinking is to devise such a scenario and to think through the best responses to them, preferably two or three moves ahead of actual or potential adversaries.

This is quite a different Obama: not merely clueless but unaware clues even existed; not merely not three steps ahead but three steps behind; not merely not thinking but unaware there was anything to think about.

Is it possible that Obama is Lexington Green’s Grandmaster in domestic politics and Ferguson’s incompetent in foreign affairs? Sure. But I doubt it. As I’ve made clear, I don’t think Obama has a coherent world view of any kind:

Obama cannot be politically ideological because he lacks an integrated world view. His beliefs are simply items on lists, plucked out of the air around him and jotted down hastily. Obama has not thought about how these ideas tie together, how they might conflict with each other, what they say about how the world as a whole works or can work. He has no overarching ideology; he simply has lists.

So Ferguson’s analysis of Obama’s handling of Egypt rings true to me: he is simply working through items on his list, trying one after the other to see what kind of reaction he gets.

By contrast, Lexington Green’s analysis of Obama’s handling of the budget does not ring true to me. I don’t believe Obama has any grand scheme; he simply doesn’t have an item on his list that says, “Sometimes you have to reduce spending” and is thus literally unable to present a budget that makes any effort to cut spending.

Obama is not a brilliant strategist; he’s a liberal being mugged by reality.

*****

Notes:

This comment from Ferguson made me laugh:

The president himself is not wholly to blame. Although cosmopolitan by both birth and upbringing, Obama was an unusually parochial politician prior to his election, judging by his scant public pronouncements on foreign-policy issues.

Yet no president can be expected to be omniscient. That is what advisers are for. The real responsibility for the current strategic vacuum lies not with Obama himself, but with the National Security Council ...

I laugh because I remember Candidate Obama’s response to questions about what he wanted in a Vice-President:

Last night at a fundraiser in San Francisco, Barack Obama took a question on what he's looking for in a running mate. "I would like somebody who knows about a bunch of stuff that I'm not as expert on," he said, and then he was off and running. "I think a lot of people assume that might be some sort of military thing to make me look more Commander-in-Chief-like. Ironically, this is an area--foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Senator Clinton or Senator McCain."

And I laugh at the idea that a President who does not know what he does not know is somehow “not wholly to blame” when his lack of knowledge results in poor policy by his Administration. I would argue that if Obama was getting poor advice from his advisers that is absolutely his responsibility. Who would Ferguson hold responsible for picking the advisers, if not Obama himself?

Casual racism

Writing about where we go from here, Marc Ambinder said:

Eric Cantor, who won't escape the casual racism of being referred to as the "first Jewish majority leader," will appear as the voice of policy and conciliation.

Let’s leave aside the quibble that religion and race are two different things. As far as I know, “first Jewish majority leader” will be a truthful descriptive phrase, like “first Black President” or “first female Speaker” or (vaguely remembered from many years ago) “first male national officer of the Future Homemakers of America”. Perhaps Americans’ pride or happiness or gratification when positions of authority are attained by those who have historically found them difficult or impossible to achieve is a bit too artless for Ambinder but it’s hardly racist, casually or otherwise.

Fortune, fear, and reading comprehension

From Grim’s, I got to this article about Europe’s sense of being helpless in the face of the forces that control our destiny. Among other things - it’s well worth reading the entire article - the author says:

One of the most important ways in which today’s sense of diminished subjectivity is experienced is through the feeling that individuals are being manipulated and influenced by hidden powerful forces. [snip]

The crisis of causality means that the most important events are now seen as being shaped and determined by a hidden agenda. [snip]

In previous times, that kind of attitude was mainly held by right-wing populist movements, which saw the hand of a Jewish or a Masonic or a Communist conspiracy behind all major world events. Today, conspiracy theory has gone mainstream, and many of its most vociferous promoters can be found in radical protest movements and amongst the cultural left. Increasingly, important events are viewed as the products of a cover-up, as the search for the ‘hidden hand’ manipulating a particular story comes to dominate public life. [snip]

Some time later I was reading Anglachel. She was talking about what she refers to as David Broder’s “proposal” that President Obama use confrontation with Iran to come storming back in time for 2012.* Among other things, Anglachel says:

David Broder has put into words what is on the Collectively Wise Mind of the Very Serious People in DC [snip]

And Broder's proposal is being taken seriously by at least some people in the White House or it wouldn't have seen the light of day. [snip]

I find it all too plausible that the Very Serious People are in greater accord on this idea than we'd like to think.

I dunno. I’m pretty sure writers come out with all kinds of ideas no one in power takes seriously. After all, Paul Krugman complains endlessly that no one in power takes his ideas seriously.

*****

*Just for the record, characterizing Broder’s column as containing a “proposal” - that is, as calling for Obama to escalate tensions with Iran in order to win in 2012 - is a mischaracterization. Broder is not urging Obama to start a war with Iran or to cynically escalate tensions with Iran to pump up his chance of re-election. Rather Broder is convinced that over the course of the next two years the United States will have to “confront this threat and contain Iran's nuclear ambitions” because “Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century”. If Obama can “confront” and “contain” Iran then, says Broder:

he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.

In the process of doing this, Obama will bolster his own popularity both directly and, through the economic impact, indirectly. In other words, the situation with Iran gives Obama an opportunity to do well politically by doing the right thing substantively, an opportunity that will not be available to any of Obama’s opponents. Broder is being descriptive rather than prescriptive. Not necessarily correct - after all, Broder also says flatly that Obama “is much smarter than his challengers in either party” - but hardly urging war as a continuation of electoral politics by other means.

Hatchet job

I’ve seen some amazing selective quoting in the blogosphere. It’s not unheard of for bloggers to take phrases, sentences, whole paragraphs out of context and misrepresent what the original writer actually meant. Usually this is done to paint a writer the blogger doesn’t like as a rotten person or to make a writer with greater name recognition appear to agree with the blogger. That’s why my rule when I read something that doesn’t quite add up is “Always click on the link.”

Today I have seen possibly the most egregious such hatchet job I have ever encountered among respectable, reasonably mainstream blogs, certainly the worst from a respectable, reasonably mainstream blog on the Right.. Jennifer Rubin has written a post called “Smearing 68% of America” in which she cherry-picks quotes from Ross Douthat to prove Douthat has “suppress[ed] his harshest impulses toward the left and a great deal of his own critical faculties.” Words fail me in attempting to describe how badly she has misrepresented Douthat’s column. Suffice it to say that not only is Rubin’s presentation of Douthat’s thesis dishonest, it’s also stupid since - hello - Douthat is on the same side as Rubin in this argument. Read Douthat yourself. And if I ever cite Jennifer Rubin, be sure to ask me if I clicked on the link.

Last week and next week on This Week

I watched the first ABC News “This Week” show with Christiane Amanpour as the anchor. I have to admit I didn’t watch the interviews with Nancy Pelosi and Robert Gates. There’s nothing unusual in that: I rarely watch the interview segments on This Week preferring instead to watch the round table discussion and what follows.

I didn’t care for Amanpour. She seemed jerky and unfocused in the round table segment, reading from a list of prepared questions and not really responding to - or adjusting to - the answers she got. On the other hand, I wasn’t crazy about Jake Tapper when he first took over the anchor’s chair either and once he got his feet under him I liked him a lot. So, yes, I would like Tapper back but I’m willing to concede - however grudgingly - that it’s too soon for me to write Amanpour off. And I can’t help but think it would be awfully nice if one of the Sunday morning political shows had a woman as an anchor.

I did hate the new not-at-all-round table used for the round table segment. It’s not just that it’s awfully ugly; it’s that it looks like Amanpour is screaming “I’m In Charge Here.” The participants don’t face each other; they face her. I suspect I should be grateful that someone prevented whoever designed the new set from going with what I imagine their first impulse was: setting up a lectern for Amanpour and those cute little chair-and-desk in one student arrangements for her guests.

And speaking of chairs, if Amanpour is going to continue to have Paul Krugman as a guest she’s going to have to find one and the accompanying whip to keep him from talking over those with whom he disagrees. I’ve tended toward this opinion for quite a while now but watching Krugman uncaged (so to speak) has convinced me that while he is an intelligent man, he has long since passed the point at which his ability to think coherently has been fatally damaged by his ideology. I do not believe he is any longer capable of seeing any facts that contradict his world view.

Almost all of us suffer from this to some extent, of course: we see and hear information that supports our beliefs and filter out or denigrate information that doesn’t. I think Krugman has gotten to the point where he cannot perceive any facts that contradict his beliefs and, worse, if you pointed this out to him, his response would be that no such facts exist. We’re all lucky he’s not an engineer.

And then there’s Amanpour’s change to the “In Memoriam” segment. Under George Stephanopoulos and subsequent anchors, the notable dead would be reviewed and then the moderator would say:

This week, the Pentagon released the names of [however many] servicemembers [or soldiers and/or Marines] killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The names of the servicemembers who had died would then appear on the screen. (I want to sidetrack here and say that I deeply appreciated the fact that no servicemember’s name ever appeared on the screen by itself so long as there was more than one death. If there were nine deaths, we saw three screens of names with three names per screen. If there were ten deaths, we saw two screens of names with three names per screen, then two screens of names with two names per screen.)

Amanpour changed the lead-in to this:

We remember all of those who died in war this week, and the Pentagon released the names of [however many] U.S. servicemembers killed in Afghanistan.

The change in lead-in is jarring simply because it is a change. If there had been no segment referring to United States servicemembers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and Amanpour had started one using the lead-in she used, I doubt it would have caused a ripple. It’s the fact that she elected to change the lead-in that raises the questions: Why did she do that? What message is she trying to send? Is she not showing proper respect to United States servicemembers by lumping them in with all the dead from all the wars in the world?

Tom Shales is particularly unhappy with Amanpour’s change and asks:

Did she mean to suggest that our mourning extend to members of the Taliban?

I think Shales is reading way too much into the change, jarring though it was. Amanpour made her bones as an international correspondent and I imagine that maintaining a non-United States centric image is going to be part of her schtick. Referring to all the war dead is part of her “I see the whole world” persona. She needs a new writer, though: the “and” in her lead-in verges on dismissive. She would have done better to use a brief pause in place of the “and”.

A new segment called Amanpour’s “Picture of the Week” made me chuckle. It was introduced as images of people all over the world trying to escape a scorching summer brought to us courtesy of global warming. But the pictures didn’t look like people in dire straits due to an environmental disaster; they looked like people having a lot of fun with summer heat and various forms of water. If this segment was supposed to convince us we were facing a fiery crisis, it failed miserably.

Finally, to return to the round table, I thought this exchange between George Will and Paul Krugman suggested a possibility for Amanpour’s next show:

WILL: Lest it be thought that Paul and I agree on something, let me...

AMANPOUR: Well, you might. Maybe this is a rarity today.

WILL: No, this is not the case, because Paul thinks the government is dangerously frugal at this point, and I do not think so. I side with people like Kenneth Rogoff at Harvard who say there is time for austerity, and this is it.

KRUGMAN: Well, you know, we can...

AMANPOUR: That's happening in Europe, as you know...

(CROSSTALK)

KRUGMAN: That's -- yes, I think Ken Rogoff is doing some damage here with some pretty bad statistics. But...

If Amanpour is as smart as her fans believe she is, she’ll invite Kenneth Rogoff on the show next week. If she’s really smart, she’ll face him off against Krugman in the interview segment. Even I might watch that one.

Hitler was a vegetarian

There’s a lot of chatter about how people who oppose the new health care bills are doing terrible things. In response, there’s a growing amount of chatter about how people who support the new health care bills are doing terrible things. The Gormogons have a nice little round-up of just the reported window breaking incidents in which they label each incident as “True”, “Hoax”, or “Not what it seems”. To which my response is, “So what?”

Now, don’t get me wrong. If hordes of people on either side were rampaging through the streets destroying property and attacking people, I would consider this a phenomenon worth writing about and - even more - worth doing something about. But it’s not. It’s a handful of inarticulate, maladjusted fruitcakes doing what vandals always do when they can’t figure out an intelligent way to deal with reality: they break something. To claim - as those on both sides of the health care debate are doing - that such bad behavior somehow invalidates the ideas held by those so behaving is ridiculous.

Ideas are not responsible for the people who hold them. If the ideas of those who oppose the new health care bills are good ideas, valid ideas, realistic ideas, they are so even if everyone who holds those ideas throws a brick through the window of the nearest government office. If the ideas of those who oppose the new health care bills are bad ideas, invalid ideas, unrealistic ideas, they are so even if everyone who holds those ideas devotes his or her life to selfless charitable works. The same is true for those who support the new health care bills. People with good ideas can behave badly; people with bad ideas can behave well. Good people can hold bad ideas; bad people can hold good ideas.

Guilt by association for people has at least some validity. If Zeke seems like an okay guy but his best friend is Will who I know for sure is as dishonest as the day is long, it’s reasonable for me to think Zeke may not be exactly what he seems. After all, humans can hide their true nature and Zeke may be concealing the less desirable aspects of his personality from me.

Guilt by association for ideas has no validity. If Zeke’s idea is a good one then the fact that Will also likes the idea doesn’t suddenly make it a bad one. Ideas cannot hide their true nature; they have no deceit, no charming facade. We are all intelligent, reasoning beings capable of evaluating ideas for ourselves. The behavior of the people who hold those ideas is irrelevant.

The mess at Megan McArdle's

I read Megan McArdle’s blog at the Atlantic website daily. That’s “read” as in present tense. But I’m feeing annoyed enough that I may soon either be saying “read” as in past tense or changing “daily” to “when I can stomach it”. The Atlantic changed the format for her blog. Actually, they apparently changed the format for all the blogs. So what’s the problem with the new layout, you ask? Let me tell you.

1) I have to click through to read any article longer than a few lines. Since McArdle rarely writes anything short, I have to click through for everything.

2) Once I click through and read one article, there are no navigation features. That is, I cannot ask to read the previous article or the next article. So if I go to her site and she’s got four new things up, I go:

- click and read article 1
- back to main page
- click and read article 2
- back to main page
- click and ...

Well, you get the idea. James Fallows assures us that:

what tech-world people call "performance" -- how fast things happen on a site -- seems a lot better with this new system.

That’s not much consolation when any time saved by better performance is lost by the need to constantly manually move from page to page.

3) And speaking of improved speed: perhaps the system loads faster because we’re getting far, far less functionality. Less text, of course, since we’re not seeing whole posts but also we’ve lost the thing on the right side that tells us what each of the other Atlantic bloggers has last written about. Since I read no one but McArdle regularly, I loved this. If someone else’s blog title looked interesting, I’d click through. Now they could be writing about how to do cold fusion on my kitchen counter and I’d never know it. And I’m not interested enough in them often enough to make it worth my while to click over without some kind of lure. And the pictures - which are all we now see of the other bloggers - are not going to do it.

There are also no archives. That is, I can’t click on a month to see what McArdle was saying in, say, October 2008 when the financial system was melting down. I can see last week and I can see a particular day but that’s it.

4) Commenters lost their handles. They switched to a new comment system so everyone had to create a login on that system. If someone else somewhere else was already using your handle, too bad. I got caught with this (curse whoever decided “Elise” was now a somewhat popular name) and found it mildly annoying. I imagine people who have commented regularly for years found it maddening. At least this explains why they didn’t port over commenter logins: they couldn’t. Hearing that should have given someone pause about whether this was really a good idea.

5) If there are a lot of comments, they now run to multiple pages. Under the old system even a zillion comments just took up one page. And - at least with my computer - splitting them into multiple pages isn’t making displaying them go any faster.

6) A link to what McArdle has written for the magazine stays stickied at the top of the list of her posts. Since I’m mildly absent-minded, I’ve now clicked on that three times thinking it was something new. Minor but oh, so annoying.

7) This is the one that I really, really, really hate: I can’t figure out a way to search just through McArdle’s columns. Prior to the new design all her columns were grouped together under:

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com

If I wanted to find everything McArdle had to say on, for example, Toyota I could use Google’s advanced search to do so:

toyota site: http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com

Poof! Back would come all the McArdle posts that mentioned Toyota. Now McArdle’s posts are partitioned out into various categories: Business, Politics, Personal, whatever. McArdle’s writings on Toyota might be under Business (http://www.theatlantic.com/business), they might be under Politics (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics), they might even be under Personal (http://www.theatlantic.com/personal) if she owns a Toyota. If I search just the Business URL, I’ll miss anything she’s written about Toyota under the other categories.

Plus even if I do guess the correct category* and search, say, the Business URL for Toyota, I’ll get not only what McArdle has written but what other Atlantic contributors have written. I can narrow it down a little by adding McArdle as a search term but then I get her posts; pages that list her posts; and worst of all posts by other contributors where the name “McArdle” appears anywhere else on the page - like, say, under her picture next to the post.

So, I hate the design and I don’t think it’s just because I’m a curmudgeon who is cranky about change. I think it’s because I don’t read the Atlantic: I read McArdle. Imagine my horror at discovering that Andrew Sullivan - oh, no! - expressed my sentiments exactly:

a blog is inherently a live process and conversation and anyone who actually understands blogging's intimate relationship to its readership - and the critical importance of conversation to the endeavor - would never have dreamed of turning it into a series of headlines. That's what worries me deeply. Not the inevitable transitional glitches but the philosophy behind it.

Or, as a commenter as McArdle’s post announcing the changeover said after the event:

Worse, is how Megan herself seems to be diminished by the Atlantic. Her blog, which predates her arrival at the Atlantic. Has now become a mere collection of links to recent work.

The bottom line is that the redesign has made McArdle’s blog function like a magazine: a table of contents; go to page 37 to continue reading the article; pages have to be “turned” manually; she’s lumped in with everyone else in the “issue”; no consideration for people who want to read or write comments. I understand that the Atlantic has to make money and I gather than they believe this new design will increase revenue. Maybe they’re right and if the 345 comments on McArdle’s post about the health care summit and the 113 posts on her recent open thread are any indication, I’m the only person annoyed enough by the new design to cut back on my visits. (Although a quick skim indicates some people are using the open thread to complain about the re-design.)

And perhaps the Atlantic will put at least some of it back the way it was. The Fallows’ post I cited above is dated Friday, February 26. In it Fallows recognizes that the blogs don’t quite work in the new design: he does not like the click-through and believes the individuality of each blogger has been lost by the compressed, no picture, standardized format. He says that he will put up some posts over the weekend and will work with the tech team to see if the new layout can be modified. He concludes : “As ever, I am optimistic.”

A later update to that post says:

Update: I am optimistic that this will change, but find the new approach such a straitjacket that I won't even try to work within its constraints until it is fixed.

I’m with Fallows.

*****

* Interestingly, today I see that most recent post on Toyota - written before the conversion to the new system - is showing up twice on her main page, once under Business, once under Politics. I don’t remember noticing that a couple of days ago although I may just have missed it. All the comments are under only one of the posts, in this case the one in the Politics category. Two other recent posts are also under two categories with the comments under only one category. I guess this makes it more likely I’ll find the posts if I can guess right on any category when I do a search but this is some seriously ugly stuff.

Lord Action’s other dictum

Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity. - Lord Acton

CBS has scheduled an ad from Focus on the Family to air during the Super Bowl on February 7, 2010. The ad features 2007 Heisman Trophy winner, Tim Tebow (hereinafter “Tim”) and his mother, Pam Tebow (hereinafter “Mrs. Tebow”) who will:

share a personal story centered on the theme of "Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life."

Although no one outside FotF and CBS has seen the ad, it is expected that the ad will feature Mrs. Tebow talking about her decision to carry Tim to term despite advice from doctors that the pregnancy would almost certainly result in a stillbirth and would endanger her health.

Various women’s groups have objected to the ad including NOW, NARAL, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and the Women’s Media Center. These organizations make a number of arguments for not showing the ad, some tiresome, some interesting.

My guess - and it’s just a guess - is that this is going to prove to be a tempest in a teapot. According to Advertising Age:

[FotF’s] Super Bowl commercial is not polarizing and does not take an "anti" stance against any issue, according to a person familiar with the situation.

According to Gary Schneeberger, a Focus on the Family spokesman:

the message is likely to act ... as an offer of help, with the hope the commercial will generate awareness for the organization and its family services

Given these characterizations, I anticipate the Tebow ad is going to consist of several shots of Tim Tebow from childhood to athletic stardom, his mother saying something to the effect that she’s so glad she decided to go ahead and have him despite the worries about his health, Tim saying “Thanks, Mom”, and a voiceover reading something like, “Contact Focus on the Family for help in difficult times.”

Nonetheless, one of the arguments against running the ad caught my eye. It turned up in the letter to CBS from CPR (available as a pdf within this Salon post) and in a letter to CBS from Gloria Allred of the Women’s Equal Rights Legal Defense and Education Fund (available as a pdf within this RadarOnline post). The CPR’s letter is a sort of “concern troll” approach, worrying that CBS may be putting itself in a bad position if the ad is not accurate:

In recognition of its responsibility to operate the network in the public interest, CBS has long followed a policy requiring that all claims in advertisements be carefully and closely reviewed for accuracy.

CPR goes on to argue that the fact that abortion has been illegal in the Philippines since 1870:

raises questions about whether physicians in the Philippines would have urged a married pregnant woman to illegally terminate her pregnancy in 1987.

In other words, if Mrs. Tebow claims that her doctors in the Philippines urged her to have an abortion, she is lying.

Allred’s letter repeats this charge without any of the “concern troll” nonsense and ups the stakes considerably. You really should read the whole thing - “Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition” - but here’s the gist of it:

Will you still insist on running this anti-choice commercial if it turns out to be misleading advertising? [snip]

Was her choice to give birth an alternative chosen because it was more practical and less risky, (given the illegality of the abortion procedure) or was her choice simply a matter of faith? [snip]

I hope I never see this ad on CBS but if I do, I hope that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will be watching it and evaluating it for misleading advertising as well.

If this ad airs, and fails t disclose that abortions were illegal at the time that Ms. Tebow made her “choice”, then I intend to file a formal complaint of misleading advertising with those federal commissions.

Now Mrs. Tebow is not merely lying about being advised to get an abortion, she is lying about the reason she chose not to have one: she carried the pregnancy to term because having an illegal abortion in the Philippines would have been too dangerous.

I almost don’t know what to say about this type of attack on Mrs. Tebow. The people writing these letters have no evidence that she is lying; they merely have a set of circumstances they believe suggest the conclusion they prefer to draw. I can play that game myself and find circumstances I believe suggest the conclusion they would prefer not to draw: that Mrs. Tebow is telling the truth. CPR itself says:

Every year, more than 500,000 women in the country try to terminate their pregnancies. In 2008 alone, criminal abortions resulted in the deaths of at least 1000 women and 90,000 more suffered complications.

Someone must be performing those abortions and even if all 91,000 that went badly were performed by the women themselves, someone competent must have performed at least some of the remaining 409,000. I’m reasonably sure there are doctors in the Philippines performing abortions just as there were always doctors in the United States performing abortions even when the procedure was illegal.

Furthermore, Mrs. Tebow was an American. It’s entirely possible she consulted doctors in the United States via telephone. It would have been a trivial matter for her to get on a plane and fly to the nearest country in which abortion was legal. And even if no Philippine physician was willing to directly advise abortion, it’s fairly easy to imagine one telling Mrs. Tebow that her serious illness had probably irreparably damaged her child and presented a risk to her own health and she might want to consult with doctors back in the United States about what course was the best to pursue. After all, abortion in such a case is clearly the medically correct thing to do so any doctor worth his salt would surely have attempted to make sure his patient understood that. Right?

The simple fact is that no one except the people involved 23 years ago know exactly what happened. Yet in order to stop an ad they don’t like from airing, some women’s groups have no compunction about accusing Mrs. Tebow of lying about what she was told, lying about why she made the choice she did, and - who knows - perhaps lying about ever being sick at all. When did women become fair game for this type of slander - from other women?

I simply don’t understand what is so threatening about this ad. As Marjorie Dannenfelser of the Susan B. Anthony List said:

Shouldn't the ‘pro-choice’ position respect Pam Tebow's decision to choose Life? What is the worst case scenario in allowing the ad to air? Women are exposed to an example of sacrifice for the sake of an unborn child. NOW needs to explain where the harm and threat to women and children is here.

I have to agree with Dannenfelser that those criticizing the ad seem “[desperate] to keep full information from women.” If a pro-choice position is the correct position then allowing information about the other choice cannot possibly damage support for allowing women to choose abortions.

It seems to me that if pro-choice groups are so upset about the Tebow ad, the appropriate response is not censorship but rather presenting their own view of the matter. The Media Decoder blog at the New York Times points out that:

For many years, CBS had a policy against selling time to organizations expressing opinions on controversial topics in spots on any programming. [snip]

CBS, however, has changed its policy and has accepted issue ads in prime time on subjects like health care reform. The network has also run issue commercials from Al Gore and T. Boone Pickens.

A CBS spokesman has stated that:

The network follows a policy, he said, that “insures that all ads on all sides of an issue are appropriate for air.”

On Tuesday, he added that CBS “will continue to consider responsibly produced ads” from advocates on any issues for whatever commercial time was left during Super Bowl XLIV.

As the Media Decoder piece makes clear, this appears to open the door for those organizations who object to the Tebow ad to produce their own ads to air during the Super Bowl or, for that matter, during any of CBS’ primetime slots. The groups that oppose the Tebows’ message could produce an ad that features a woman who was advised as Mrs. Tebow was, followed her doctor’s advice, and is grateful to be alive to care for her other children. Or they could produce an ad featuring a man whose wife was advised as Mrs. Tebow was, did not take the advice, and died from complications of the pregnancy. The grieving husband could talk about the devastating effect his wife’s death had on their surviving children.

Or those who oppose the Tebows’ message could have gotten their message across for free by simply following the New York Times’ editorial advice:

The would-be censors are on the wrong track. Instead of trying to silence an opponent, advocates for allowing women to make their own decisions about whether to have a child should be using the Super Bowl spotlight to convey what their movement is all about: protecting the right of women like Pam Tebow to make their private reproductive choices.

Instead, those opposing the ad have put themselves in the position of looking like they’re terrified to have us hear anything that might make any woman think twice about having an abortion. The American people really aren’t stupid: it’s not going to take long for it to dawn on them that if people on the other side of the issue are so dangerous they must be censored, then maybe they’re saying something worth listening to.

Still, while I think the pro-choice groups’ arguments against the Tebow ad are dismaying and dangerous, I do admit to a great deal of sympathy for people like Gregg Doyel, a CBS.com columnist:

''If you're a sports fan, and I am, that's the holiest day of the year,'' he wrote. ''It's not a day to discuss abortion. For it, against it, I don't care what you are. On Super Sunday, I don't care what I am. Feb. 7 is simply not the day to have that discussion.''

Motes and beams

I’ve seen Arianna Huffington on ABC’s This Week a number of times and I’ve come to admire her, despite my general distaste for Huffington Post. I don’t agree with most of her political stances but she appears to have a clear set of beliefs and to stick to them rather than fudging them to accommodate herself to politicians on “her side”. Today, however, she lost a fair amount of ground with me. During the roundtable on This Week, she asked Roger Ailes, the President of Fox News, about Glenn Beck:

And aren't you concerned about the language that Glenn Beck is using, which is, after all, inciting the American people? There is a lot of suffering out there, as you know, and when he talks about people being slaughtered, about who is going to be the next in the killing spree... [snip]

It's about the fact that there is a tradition as the historian Richard [Hofstadter] said, in American politics, of the paranoid style. And the paranoid style is dangerous when there is real pain out there.

I hadn’t read Hofstadter’s ideas on the paranoid style before although I’ve encountered musings on them in various places. I’ve now skimmed his 1964 Harper’s Magazine version and I think it’s well worth a quick read, so Huffington gets points for bringing it up. However, I do have to wonder if she was reading her own Website during 2008. If she had been, she would have encountered nonsense like this - in the articles, not the comments:

Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah "Evita" Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state. [snip]

I believe the Rove-Cheney cabal is using Sarah Palin as a stalking horse, an Evita figure, to put a popular, populist face on the coming police state and be the talk show hostess for the end of elections as we know them. [snip]

Almost everyone I work with on projects related to this campaign for liberty has been experiencing computer harassment: emails are stripped, messages disappear. That's not all: people's bank accounts are being tampered with: wire transfers to banks vanish in midair. I personally keep opening bank accounts that are quickly corrupted by fraud. Money vanishes. Coworkers of mine have to keep opening new email accounts as old ones become infected. And most disturbingly to me personally is the mail tampering I have both heard of and experienced firsthand. My tax returns vanished from my mailbox. All my larger envelopes arrive ripped straight open apparently by hand. When I show the postman, he says "That's impossible." Horrifyingly to me is the impact on my family. My childrens' report cards are returned again and again though perfectly addressed; their invitations are turned back; and my daughters many letters from camp? Vanished. All of them. Not one arrived.

This type of thinking fits beautifully Hofstadter’s view of the (then) contemporary right wing paranoid style:

America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. [snip]

The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public ... for the shadowy international bankers of the monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public figures...

I have no idea what Glenn Beck is saying and don’t much care. Rabble-rousers are a long-standing American tradition and I believe most of us are smart enough to distinguish between truth and fantasy. If Arianna Huffington thinks differently and fears the paranoid style in American politics, then I suggest she look to her own media powerhouse before urging others to clean up theirs.