Year: 2003

I agree with most of Paul Krugman’s column on space exploration today. (I admit I read it mainly to see if he could manage to blame Bush. But he didn’t. What a let-down.) Money graf:

Does that mean people should never again go into space? Of course not. Technology marches on: someday we will have a cost-effective way to get people into orbit and back again. At that point it will be worth rethinking the uses of space. I’m not giving up on the dream of space colonization. But our current approach – using hugely expensive rockets to launch a handful of people into space, where they have nothing much to do – is a dead end.

Pity about that final phrase. But the rest makes sense. Charles Krauthammer is a useful book-end to Krugman. His solution: stop the risky ups and downs of the first 150 miles into space and aim much higher.

GERMANY AGAIN: The Times of London’s Michael Gove worries about Germany’s latest ideology – a kind of all purpose Green pacifism. Hmmm:

There has been a tendency among German elites over the past 200 years to invest the ruling ideology of the moment with the quasi-mystical quality of a political religion. Those thinkers who reacted against the French Enlightenment, such as Hegel and Herder, contributed to a romantic, anti-liberal, nationalist temper in 19th-century Germany. The Wilhelmine state which went to war in 1914 was deeply imbued with a mystical sense that its Kultur was superior to the desiccated, rationalist, mercantile outlook of the British and the Americans.
The anti-liberal beliefs which bewitched Germany in the past led to war. The ideology of the ’68 generation may seem altogether more admirable, because it finds expression in opposition to conflict. But it is, at root, just as anti-liberal, and similarly baleful for Germany’s future health. The freedom which the ’68ers oppose is the economic liberalism of America, and their hostility to the US is the animating force in their opposition to action against Iraq.

I actually disagree about Hegel. He was one of the great liberals. But the fact that the Germans completely misread him only furthers Gove’s point, I suppose.

“Kudos to you for not engaging in the irresponsible, almost unconscionable blather the mainstream media is producing regarding the space shuttle. Since September 11th, the flood of coverage has made journalism (especially the cable news channels) in this country into a pack of starved wolves, salivating over anything they can sensationalize. Sadly, the loss of the Columbia is the newest bloody feast.” – he’s particularly tough on Fox News. This and much more on the Letters Page.

WHAT’S WRONG HERE? The always readable Oxblog finds something fishy about this Washington Post piece about the marvels of Saddam’s food distribution program.

THE PIANIST: Easily the best movie I’ve seen in a while. It follows the arc of a classic Holocaust trajectory. We know where it ends. But the details of gratuitous Nazi savagery; the incidents of human goodness that prevail even in the worst form of hell; the first-person, endless, draining survival story that leaves you hopeless yet somehow relieved; the sheer randomness of fate; and the importance of war to deter evil: this film manages to convey all of it in a metaphor of soundless music.

I highly recommend Richard Posner’s excellent book, “Sex and Reason,” for a non-hysterical approach to the issues of safer-sex and reducing HIV transmission. The issue has been troubling me after the dumb Rolling Stone “bug-chaser” hysteria. One of the worst elements of that piece is that it sensationalized and polarized an important issue: how we manage to reduce HIV transmission in an era where an HIV diagnosis is nowhere near as scary as it used to be. The reason I admired Posner’s book is that he assumed that men seeking sex are actually rational beings. They measure costs and benefits and change behavior accordingly. Hence the amazing decline in HIV transmission in the mid 1980s. Hence also the slow shift back since. Or take a less fraught analogy. Let’s say that science found treatments that reduced the rate of fatality from lung cancer due to smoking by, say, 80 percent. Let’s also say that these treatments became progressively easier to tolerate. What would you predict would happen? More to the point: How would you conduct a public health message that still credibly warned against the risks of smoking? That’s the question we need to explore. And it’s not an easy one.

STAYING AFRAID: What to do? With HIV, insisting on abstinence for life is a non-starter for the vast majority of gay teens and adults. Falsely scaring them with empirically false statements about death rates is also counter-productive – it merely undermines the credibility of the authorities. Sexual segregation between HIV-positives and HIV-negatives has some advantages in creating a firewall between the two groups, but in time, it has apparently only further decreased fear of HIV. The pozzies look great, seem in good health and no longer live in terror of getting the disease. Some degree of “HIV-envy,” while not as pathological as “bug-chasing,” and if only because having it means you can’t be scared of getting it any more, is still a real issue. Again this problem strikes me as close to insoluble. I’ve been HIV-positive for ten years now, and my immune system is healthier now than when I got infected. I look better than I did when I was negative, have experienced deep spiritual and emotional growth as a result of my HIV experience, and live every day now with a vigor and gratitude I never felt before. I’m just one of thousands of productive, healthy people with HIV who are daily – albeit unconsciously – transmitting the message that an HIV diagnosis is no calamity. Having been a beneficiary of the solution to HIV, I am now unwittingly part of the problem.

THINKING POSITIVELY: Some structural changes would help, I think. Encouraging monogamous or more stable relationships through marriage rights would clearly have an effect, but probably only with time and in the next generation or two. (This is something, of course, that conservatives who say they want to reduce HIV infection admantly oppose.) Going around exposing people’s private failings and trying to stigmatize people with HIV may satisfy a few puritans on the right and left but I doubt it would make much difference as a whole. It also merely encourages gay men never to talk publicly about these issues for fear of being subjected to gross violations of privacy. (Tell me about it.) And then we have the simple and unavoidable fact that we are asking people to be extremely careful in a sphere of life where fantasy and passion rule. This isn’t just a gay issue. It’s a human issue. We have almost universal access to contraception, for example, and still sky-high numbers of unwanted pregnancies and abortions. Sex is messy and dangerous. But it’s also one the greatest and most exhilarating gifts our nature has given us – and free societies respect the freedom to explore it. Resolving that paradox is an impossibility as social policy, and always has been. But ameliorating it must be within our reach. So how? I wish I knew. Or do we have to get used to a certain level of HIV-infection the way we have become used to herpes, and every other sexual disease which has affected mankind, gay and straight, for millennia?

A few of you have taken me to task for not writing more about the Columbia tragedy. I was travelling that morning, alas. But more generally, I haven’t written much because I have nothing worthwhile to say, except, obviously, condolences for the families involved. Saying nothing is not the same as feeling nothing. But it seems to me that events like this – disasters, earthquakes, floods, explosions – are best dealt with by simple hard news reporting, which is not what this blog is or should be about. Finding ‘angles’ to these events, opining prematurely, hyper-ventilating about the meaning of it all – please turn elsewhere for these. I’m with Jonah Goldberg on this, feeling that the media has gone overboard. It is an awful event, and I will pray for those grieving. But I have nothing much to add to that sincere if banal observation.

“People need to stop whining about the Columbia shuttle tragedy. These were volunteers from the highest socioeconomic strata; they knew the risks they were undertaking. We’re talking about seven lives here, not the seven times seventy times seven hundred innocent lives that will be taken on our invasion of Iraq. If we’re going to treat the lives of the innocent Iraqi citizens and our disproportionately lower-class U.S. soldiers so callously, then we need to call a spade a spade and forget about the Columbia astronauts the way we have already forgotten about so many others.” – emailer from Bethesda, Maryland in a Washington Post online chat today with Joel Achenbach.

This from Punditwatch, the weekly blog round-up of the Sunday talk-shows:

The only scheduled guests to maintain their Sunday spots were Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn, on Face the Nation and Iraqi Ambassador to the UN Mohammed Aldouri on Fox. Frist was only asked about issues related to the Columbia tragedy and he was cautious discussing both the future of the space program and the level of investigation that the Senate might initiate.Aldouri was not the least bit conciliatory. He claimed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld knew Saddam Hussein better than he did and he thanked the New York Times for defending Iraq. Brit Hume called Aldouri’s responses “word salad.”

Sometimes a gaffe is just a gaffe. I wish I could find a transcript.
UPDATE: James Taranto has the transcript.

Schroder’s humiliating electoral defeat follows the European Eight op-ed diplomatic coup last week. Suddenly the French, having recently sided with the Germans unequivocally, seem to be edging back toward support of the U.N. and the U.S. If Chirac tilts back toward the London-Washington axis, Schroder’s isolation will be complete. As will Germany’s. The big winner? Blair. By siding with Washington, Blair has actually placed Britain in a central role in the New Europe. I can’t see the downside myself. Good analysis here in the IHT.

LIND AND BUSH: Michael Lind is an old friend of mine, and friendship should always pre-empt politics. Much that Michael has written about American society – from class to race and the American South – is as provocative as it is well-researched. But his passion does tend to get in the way sometimes. Check out Gary Rosen’s smart review of Lind’s latest book, “Made In Texas,” where Lind tries to portray the president as a crazed remnant of a racist and fundamentalist backwater. Even Bush’s choise of a location for a ranch is suspicious:

In picking a retreat so close to Waco, Lind informs us, Bush chose to associate himself with a city that was once “one of the centers of lynching in the United States” and “one of the national bases of the Ku Klux Klan,” a place where the Menckenesque satirist W.C. Brann was shot in the back in 1898 for ridiculing “Baptist hypocrisy,” where “local ayatollahs” burned “diabolical LP’s and books” in the 1970’s, and where, in 1993,”David Koresh and his cult” suffered their “apocalyptic immolation.”

Or maybe he just liked the countryside. Rosen homes in on another odd paragraph, attempting to explain the president’s affinity with Israel:

Like present-day Israel, Texas before the civil-rights revolution was a Herrenvolk (master-race) democracy, combining populism within the majority ethnic nation with the state-enforced subordination of ethnic minorities. It is no coincidence that the products of two similar Herrenvolk societies, George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon, appear to be most themselves when waging war on behalf of their tribes or relaxing on their ranches.

Oy.

Bush’s ratings have now begun a “Krugman soar”. Actually, they’ve bumped up a little since the State of the Union. But the significant jump in the numbers favoring war – even without U.N. sanction – strikes me as more than just a bounce. The French maneuvering has, I think, ticked off a lot of people. The Blix report was a huge victory for the administration; and Blair’s public support has helped reassure nervous unilateralists. But I also think the debate has now been raging for months now and we’re beginning to reach a consensus: reluctant engagement with an unavoidable problem. Key detail:

Taken together, nearly four in 10 respondents expected the conflict would be relatively long and relatively bloody. But even among those who most fear a high-cost war, a narrow majority – 52 percent – still favors taking military action against Iraq.

This is good news. I have a feeling the war will be much more difficult than some triumphalists are now arguing. And if our troops face chemical or biological weapons (which, of course, Saddam doesn’t have) then the anti-war forces will demand withdrawal before completion. All of which makes it all the more important that Americans have a sober and adult view of the risks involved. I think they do. Which is another reason they want a risky war now rather than an even risker war later.

BACK TO THE FUTURE: “‘We are happy that it broke up,’ Saddam government employee Abdul Jabbar al-Quraishi said. ‘God wants to show that his might is greater than the Americans. They have encroached on our country. God is avenging us,’ he said.” – Reuters, Saturday.

“The news of Roosevelt’s death on 12 April 1945 had stirred a flicker of optimism in the Berlin bunker… When Frederick the Great of Prussia faced defeat by the combined armies of Russia, Austria, and France in the Seven Years War, the tsarina Elisabeth had unexpectedly died, to be succeeded by a tsar who was Frederick’s admirer; the alliance then collapsed and Frederick’s Prussia survived. In April 1945, on hearing the news of the President’s passing, Goebbels exclaimed, ‘the tsarina is dead,’ and telephoned Hitler ‘in an ecstasy’ to ‘congratulate’ him. ‘It is the turning point,’ he said, ‘it is written in the stars.'” – from John Keegan’s “The Second World War.”

THE ECONOMICS OF MUNCHIES: Britain’s economy gets ready to deal with the economic and cultural consequences of legalized out-of-the-closet pot-smoking. Buy Doritos shares. And install dimmer switches in Starbucks.

SADDAM AND BOOZE: “A few weeks ago, on C-SPAN, I heard an Iraqi ex-pat and “Saddam expert” state that the leader of Iraq was formerly addicted to “Johnny Walker” scotch. Having been married to an honest to goodness alcoholic for 25 years, and having made a study of the subject ever since getting off that roller coaster, I found this remark revealing. At a stretch, it could explain a great deal about Saddam and his actions.” – more commentary on the Letters Page.

JULIE GETS IT: “If you really think it’s better for more people to die over decades under a tyrannical regime than for fewer people to die during a brief attack by an outside power, you’re really weird and nationalistic and not any sort of socialist that I recognise. And that’s where you link up with all those nasty rightwing columnists who are so opposed to fighting Iraq; they, too, believe that the lives of a thousand coloured chappies aren’t worth the death of one British soldier.” – Julie Burchill lashing into the incoherence and reactionaryism of the anti-war left. In the Guardian! The woman has guts.

THE CASE AGAINST THE SHUTTLE: A prescient and largely persuasive 1980 case against the Space Shuttle program. From the always-worth-reading Gregg Easterbrook.

THE NYT’S BEST: Just as a reminder of how good the paper can still be when it tries, here are two piece from Saturday’s paper that were smart, fair, engaging and nicely written: Brent Staples’ reflections on Condi Rice’s issues with affirmative action; and Ed Rothstein’s sharp view of Pepys as a precursor to blogging. Worth the buck alone.

BROOKS ON BLAIR: Poodle or bulldog? David Brooks cuts to the chase.

BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY: I’m writing this in Chicago, where I’m taking some quality time with the significant other. I’m still reeling. For well over a month I’ve been in near-seclusion, and for four months, I’ve been in a very little town. Since I got here, I’ve been almost giddy with social glee. Look, people! Starbucks! McDonalds! Gay bars with people I don’t know in them! I’m loving it – which is why the Dish is a little al dente this morning.

Big month for the site: 1,262,000 separate visits; 311,000 unique visitors; 1,772,000 page views. Our previous record was the election month of November, with 1,065,000 visits. Many thanks. Stay tuned for the email newsletter for subscribers beginning soon. It’s taken a while to set it up, but it’ll be worth it. One other thing: you’ll have noticed the Book Club in suspension. Until this war subsides again, I’m going to concentrate on the Dish. But the Book Club will return, when I get some more time and mental space.

The New York Times’ campaign against the war to disarm Saddam has been stepped up this morning. The three lead stories hammer away at the case for war. The first heralds an alleged split between Blair and Bush about getting a second U.N. resolution for invasion. What split? The Times does its best to find one – but even in the story, no such split is substantiated. Both Bush and Blair would welcome a second U.N. resolution endorsing the use of force. Both would go to war without one. Blair wants to redouble the efforts to get one. Bush is happy to try but holds out little hope. According to the Guardian, the president has allowed for up to six weeks to gain maximum traction for a broader coalition. An administration official tells the Times: “”We’re certainly not going to stand in the way, and we may even help in seeking a second resolution. But it’s not going to be a process in which we get mired down.” In other words, there is a small difference in emphasis in the desire for a second resolution. That’s a “split”? It’s more like a split-hair.

IT NEVER RAINES BUT IT POURS: The second anti-war piece informs us that “In two days of interviews [in Saddam City], there was no outward suggestion – not the subtlest arch of an eyebrow – of anything other than complete unanimity in support of Mr. Hussein.” Hmmm. I wonder why. That still doesn’t stop the Times from leading the piece with this inflammatory quote: “We are ready to confront the United States,” said Halima Nebi, 57. “We will use stones, bricks, guns, our own hands.” Yes, the piece acknowledges the presence of a police state that makes any interviews with ordinary Iraqis a farce. So why run the piece at all? Stupid question, of course. Finally, the Times tries a third angle: how the absence of reservists is affecting businesses and life back home. Here’s the spin:

All across the United States, the call-up of reservists and National Guard members is carving big holes in the towns and cities they leave behind. The heartache of families separating, a familiar ritual of military service, is being compounded by the community upheaval associated with a second major mobilization of citizen soldiers in as many years. Doctors. Nurses. Police officers. Firefighters. Lawyers. Teachers. Clerks. Cashiers. Mechanics. Truck drivers. Even mayors and school board members. All going or gone.

This war is just terrible isn’t it? The leaders are split; the enemy is determined to destroy us; and the homeland is bereft. Keep it coming, Howell. Only six weeks left.