Month: January 2009

Today is the anniversary of the day in 1945 that the Soviet army liberated Auschwitz.

George Saunders remembers:

A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did. I never had the pleasure of meeting him, but, as I expect is the case with many readers, I internalized him, and am a better person for the urbane, hopeful, articulate voice he put in my head.

Tom Mallon has a lovely grace-note here. You can read online archives of Updike’s work at The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Review Of Books, and The New Republic. I do not recall ever reading a bad Updike sentence.

Bart Wilson mulls over the term:

Did you know that fair is one-to-one untranslatable into any other language–that it is distinctly Anglo in origin? And a relatively new word at that? (Late 18th century, actually)…No matter how much we may feel that fairness is a pure principle, it’s really a regular social rule, a custom.   (Another surprisingly revealing word:  you have probably seen the words “customary rates” applied to gratuities and sales commissions).  Fairness really boils down to an issue of agreement: can we agree on what rules this particular context calls for?

James Joyner thinks it’s bull.

Meh.

More signs of collapse in Colorado.

The president’s evident attempt to find real common ground with Congressional Republicans on the stimulus package seems sincere to me. And why not? The question is whether the federal government really can spend enough to jolt the economy back to life fast enough – and whether the stimulus is too laden with generic longer term programs that are off-target. Yes, that contraceptives issue was easily demagogued – but some things are worth demagoguing. Ditto other spending proposals. I’m actually delighted that the GOP is back to what it does best: being an all-round grinch when it comes to spending. More power to them. They just have to be careful – and this is a pragmatic question – that they provide enough short-term demand to get us out of the ditch.

I’m struck by this too:

[O]fficials from both sides said it was the beginning of a dialogue between Congressional Republicans and the White House that did not exist even when George W. Bush was in the Oval Office.

Keep talking. And I like the sight of a president happy to walk the halls of Congress for the public good. Less ego; more accomplishment.

(Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama speaks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol after meeting with the House Republican caucus on January 27, 2009 in Washington, DC. By Jonathan Ernst/Getty Images)

A reader in Reykjavik writes:

A quick note – Icelanders don’t use family names. They don’t even have real family names – Sigurdardóttir means simply the daughter of Sigurdar; and Sigurdar really was the name of her father, so this does basically nothing to identify the specific person.

Any icelandic woman, whose father was called Sigurdar, is – by definition – ‘Sigurdardóttir.’ And they never use these except for most formal purposes and even then only in conjuncture with their first name. So strangely enough, the Iceland Reviews got it wrong; the title: "Sigurdardóttir ready to become Icelands PM" is just plain weird. She is simply Jóhanna and that’s pretty much it.

I’m just psyched we have Dish readers in Iceland.

It’s a chilling Weimar-style editorial. The editors describe waterboarding, a torture technique long recognized as such by every legal authority, domestic and international, thus:

the practice of making someone fearful he is about to drown in an effort to induce him to cooperate with interrogator.

They define what they believe is now allowed:

[techniques] that don’t involve maiming, mutilation and other legitimate torture…

The Times continues to argue that Geneva’s Common Article 3 does not apply to prisoners the president doesn’t want it to apply to. But the baseline standards for humane treatment – not POW status, but core human status – apply to all.

Derb takes aim at foreign aid:

It is now 40-odd years since Peter Bauer taught us that aid is “a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.” Nothing that’s happened in those years has contradicted his judgment. The influence of religion on government in these areas, as in the matter of immigration, has been entirely malign.

Talking of aid, William Easterly has a shiny new blog.