Month: January 2009

Just over a month after Israel’s first occupation of Gaza, Israeli military governors and Arab notables hold a ceremony commemorating the establishment of the local council December 20, 1956 in Deir el Balah in the Gaza Strip. In late October 1956, shortly before the British and French invasion of the Suez Canal Zone, Israeli troops seized the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip and used it as a springboard for its advance against the Egyptians in the Sinai Peninsula. On March 6, 1957 the United Nations Emergency Force replaced the Israeli troops, and Cairo regained control of the Gaza Strip. (Photo by GPO via Getty Images)    

Matt Welch dares to offend his ink-stained friends:

Blaming the customer is the second-to-last refuge of any crappy industry, business, or organization (the last refuge being asking for a handout on Capitol Hill). As my ex-L.A. Times colleague and current Reason magazine Contributing Editor Tim Cavanaugh has noted in our pages, the paper we both short-timed for was filled with people making jokes about whether we could just "fire our readers."

Over the recent holidays, an entire journalistic Festivus celebration of customer-blaming broke out over New Yorker finance columnist James Surowiecki’s lament that, "The real problem for newspapers…isn’t the Internet; it’s us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free." To extrapolate, if only us greedy human beings would realize that our very democracy was at stake, that we "are taking an active step in the formation of a country without a civic conscience," then we’d damned well volunteer to pay an unnecessary premium to keep our finest journalists in permanent six figures. Sounds precisely as convincing as the argument that enlightened voters will surely agree to pay extra taxes so that political campaigns can be financed through "clean" money.

At the risk of alienating what few old newspaper pals of mine still have jobs, the industry they (and I!) so cherish, which has suffered mind-blowing valuation losses and several dozen rounds of downsizing both in personnel and column inches, is still bloated after all these years, with costs that no publisher would dream of incurring if he was starting a newspaper from scratch in 2009.

Poulos asks a question about Oakeshott and violence:

I’m no follower of Schmitt, but I don’t imagine one has to be in order to ask: was Oakeshott too naive about our ability to domesticate or pacify politics? Call it what you want — cruelty, in Shklar’s terms; ‘the world’ or ‘the profane’ or ‘despair’ in more theological ones; simply ‘power’, in Foucauldian or pop-Thucydidean language. Isn’t the question the same?

This is, of course, one of the more trenchant criticisms of Oakeshott and an area where Rorty’s and Oakeshott’s flaws more obviously over-lap. It’s a long discussion, but my point was to clarify a problem within conservatism – the logic of power and the logic of freedom.

At some very deep level, the modern liberal state is, of course, founded on violence and the threat of it. All politics is, as Machiavelli and Hobbes explained. Understanding that is not to capitulate to some kind of fascism. But the ability to keep that violent basis for power hidden and to sustain habits of mind of soul and politics that keep it at bay is something Oakeshott viewed as a fragile but wondrous cultural achievement. So the introduction of raw political violence in the West in the 21st Century is an undermining of that achievement. Bin Laden is responsible first and foremost. But Dick Cheney’s zest to meet the Islamists on their level is something an Oakeshottian conservative will worry very deeply about. And it is something that should cause all conservatives to stop and think. It is not, to coin a phrase, a "no-brainer".

Is the logic of the Gaza offensive really going to be the lodestar of the West in the years ahead?

The Economist reports on how India is weathering the global recession:

To make a serious dent in poverty, India needs to keep up economic growth of around 8% a year. In the medium term that should not be too difficult. More impressive even than the success of India’s best companies is the zest for business shown by millions of Indians in dusty bazaars and slum-shack factories. They are truly entrepreneurs. It is no coincidence, as is often noted, that Indians have prospered everywhere outside India.

But India’s task remains daunting. Some 65% of Indians live on agriculture, which accounts for less than 18% of GDP. Shifting them to more productive livelihoods—and so reducing poverty—would be hard even if the number of people of working age was not growing so fast. Roughly 14m Indians are now being added to the labour market each year, and that number is rising. Half of India’s people are under 25 and 40% under 18 (see chart 2). They cannot all work for Infosys. Indeed, because of India’s historic underinvestment in education, many are not obviously skilled at anything. By one estimate, which may be optimistic, only 20% of job-seekers have had any sort of vocational training. If India cannot find employment for this lot, poverty will not be reduced and India may face serious instability.

Philip Cook makes the case for and against lowering the drinking age.

Polls are still open! You can vote for the Dish here. And surf any number of other blogs and vote for your favorites here. Thanks so much for the support.

Jonah Lehrer studies new research on city life:

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

Groix, France, 11 am.

A reader writes:

Frederick Buechner, who wrote "Wishful Thinking", is one of my favorite authors, and I don’t think even he would give credit to Tucker Carlson’s claim to hear the audible voice of God. Buechner writes, "chances are that this side of Paradise we will never hear his voice except in the depth of our own inner silence and in each other’s voices."

As for the phrase "Wishful Thinking," a bit of context helps:

"Christianity is mainly wishful thinking.  Even the part about Judgement and Hell reflects the wish that somewhere the score is being kept… Sometimes wishing is the wings the truth comes true on. Sometimes the truth is what sets us wishing for it."

A member of Berlin’s ice swimming club ‘Berliner Seehunde’ (Berlin seals) takes a dip in Orankesee lake on January 10, 2009 in Berlin, Germany. Around 120 ice swimmer nationwide celebrate the ‘Berliner Seehunde’ 25th anniversary. By Andreas Rentz/Getty.