Month: December 2008

An interesting meeting, as reported by Juan Cole:

I was told that Warren’s friends among the MPAC Muslim community had urged him to call Melissa Etheridge Friday night in the run-up to their being (serially) on the same stage Saturday night, and that he did so and they talked for half an hour. During his address, Warren mentioned also seeing Etheridge backstage on Saturday.

Local television in Los Angeles showed a short clip of Etheridge after the event asking gay leaders to reach out to Warren, just as they wanted him to reach out to them.

This stance was big of her, since she and her partner had planned to marry but were prevented from doing so by the same Proposition 8 that Warren worked for, and she was so upset she suggested she would refuse to pay California taxes since she is obviously not considered a full citizen by her fellow Californians.

Cole was impressed with Warren. I join Melissa in seeking a way to begin a public dialogue with Warren on gay issues.

"The search for efficiency and the urge to consume has set us all up like a row of dominoes – there is no buffer, no resiliency. As one problem rises it causes another. As one solution is tried it drives another problem. We all pull back and the consumer economy stalls. The auto industry and credit firms feeds the media (40% of conventional advertising). Papers and TV and Radio networks, many subject to LBO’s will have to fail as per the Tribune. Every sector will be laying people off. Sales of all things fall off a cliff – driving more business failures and layoffs. Cities and states that depend on sales tax and property tax and the credit markets can rely on none of these. So they too will have to lay off millions – thus making all the problems worse. National governments will be asked to save us all and of course cannot. As States and Cities get squeezed and cannot borrow, they will too lay off millions – teachers, firemen police. No one will be safe," – Robert Patterson, surveying the year to come.

Kottke rounds up some unusual bibles.

Anthony Gottlieb on how people tend to adopt the religion they were born into:

If they want to spread their gospel, then, one might half-seriously conclude that atheists and agnostics ought to focus on having more children, to help overcome their demographic disadvantage. Unfortunately for secularists, this may not work even as a joke. Nobody knows exactly why religion and fertility tend to go together. Conventional wisdom says that female education, urbanisation, falling infant mortality, and the switch from agriculture to industry and services all tend to cause declines in both religiosity and birth rates. In other words, secularisation and smaller families are caused by the same things. Also, many religions enjoin believers to marry early, abjure abortion and sometimes even contraception, all of which leads to larger families. But there may be a quite different factor at work as well. Having a large family might itself sometimes make people more religious, or make them less likely to lose their religion. Perhaps religion and fertility are linked in several ways at the same time.

I have to say that Yuval Levin’s appreciation of "The Great Melody" expresses my feelings about that book entirely. It’s a very strange book – my mind associates it with Edmund Morris’s "Dutch" – but its strangeness captures the elusive, contradictory, Irish (and Whiggish) Toryism of Burke. The Telegraph’s obit, as usual, is the best:

Critics charged that he was more interested in exercising his intellectual   sinews than in resolving difficulties. But his recognition that the   divisions in Ireland were rooted in two irreconcilable traditions led to   increasing isolation within his own country, and required considerable moral   – and occasionally physical – courage.

Equally, his awareness that the problems of South Africa had no easy answers,   and his determined support for Israel, cut him off from the Left, with which   he had once been associated. Yet O’Brien never drifted, in the conventional   way, from Left to Right. Rather he remained consistently radical in his   willingness to bring a fresh mind to bear on issues normally treated with   entrenched prejudice.

A role model in many ways for all of us. I only met him once. He came to Harvard to speak about the essence of Irish culture and was completely shitfaced afterwards. Coming from a long line of ornery Micks, I appreciated that.

Not sure where this originated. But it’s on the money:

Vaughan sighs:

..it is not possible to be addicted to a medium of communication because the medium does not specify an activity. It’s like saying someone is a ‘language addict’ or is ‘addicted’ to transport. It just makes no sense. Unfortunately, none of the so-called diagnostic scales or indeed, researchers, actually get this point…

This is not to say that there aren’t people who use the internet excessively to the detriment of themselves and their families. But there are people who follow football in a similarly problematic way, and people who spend too much time going to folk concerts, and people who can’t tear themselves away from the stock market.

This doesn’t make them addicts and the sooner we stop trying to apply addiction to people as a clumsy way to trying to avoid the language of blame the quicker we can tackle their social and emotional difficulties in a more relevant and appropriate way.

Is it destroying literate discourse? Is it dumbing us all down? CJR has a fascinating interview with Clay Shirky:

What the Web does is that it does what all amateur increases do, which is it decreases the average quality of what’s available. It is exactly, precisely, the complaint made about the printing press. So, the only thing surprising about the Web, in a way, is that it’s been a long time since we’ve had a medium that increased the amount of production of written material this dramatically.

But people made the same complaint about comic books, they made the same complaint about paperbacks, and they made the same complaint about the vulgarity of the printing press.

Whenever you let more people in, things get vulgar by definition. And people who benefited under the old system or who dislike or distrust vulgarity as a process always have room to complain. But, the interesting thing is, when you say so many people believe this, in fact almost no one believes this, right? There’s a tiny, tiny slice of the chattering classes for whom “Life was better when I was younger” is an acceptable complaint to make, and they have these little conferences or whatever and agree with one another about that phenomenon. But when you look at the actual use of the Web, it is through the roof. And it has continued in an unbroken growth from the early ’90s until now. So, in fact, almost everybody thinks it’s a good idea because they’re embracing it and they’re experimenting with it and they don’t really care what we think.