Month: September 2009

Conor Friedersdorf, reacting to the Thatcher news from last week:

I’d say that every democratic people must navigate a strait that passes between twin dangers—on one side, credulity and leader-worship that blinds it to the machinations of duplicitous elected officials; and on the other side, paranoid lies whose unchecked spread threatens a polity’s health and sanity. The safest way to navigate that strait is to skeptically investigate conspiracy theories, and to dismiss them on two most devastating grounds of refutation: a dearth of evidence that they are true, and a preponderance of evidence that they are false.

James Joyner takes issue with this post:

Obama won for a whole variety of reasons.  Candidates say all manner of things on the campaign trail but winning does not necessarily confer a mandate for all of those programs.  A goodly number of the centrists, independents, and even conservatives who voted for Obama did so because they found him personally appealing, found John McCain less than inspiring, wanted to accelerate our withdrawal from Iraq, wanted a clean break from eight years of George W. Bush, or any of a hundred other things.  This does not translate into “this election was about universal health coverage,” any more than Bush’s victory of John Kerry in 2004 was about privatizing Social Security.

He also says that I am arguing that "the losing side in an election thereby loses the right to protest." Not true. They have every right to protest, as I wrote. But declaring this a power-grab or somehow unexpected is absurd. It was his priority in the campaign. It's not like, say, the Iraq war.

Another sign that "post-racial" America still needs work:

The primary election in August 2010 pits an unlikely officeholder — a Jew in a deeply Christian region, a middle-age white man known for fighting for blacks and women — against a prominent challenger. […] The black candidate, former Mayor Willie W. Herenton of Memphis, has argued that Tennessee needs a black voice in its currently all-white delegation. He is running a blistering campaign against Representative Steve Cohen, a fellow Democrat with a precarious hold on the majority black district. “To know Steve Cohen is to know that he really does not think very much of African-Americans,” Mr. Herenton said in a recent radio interview on KWAM. “He’s played the black community well.”

Cohen faced similar attacks last year, when opponent Nikki Tinker ran an ad linking him to the Ku Klux Klan. But black voters did not take the bait; he trounced her by 60 points. Candidate Obama condemned the ad at the time, and, as Mark Kleiman writes, "Here’s hoping [the president] will do a fundraiser - soon."

And sure to piss off Fußball fans (though the ad is from Germany):

(Hat tip: Copyranter)

A reader writes:

It's really much less complicated, and the answer is tucked neatly in the phrase, "I want my country back."  What that means is, the country that recognizes me  and people like me as the cultural core of the nation, deserving of disproportionate influence and income.  Race is the dominant theme — but running through the same current are appeals to religion and cultural values, including education, or lack of it.  While it might seem radical, even crazy, that a certain segment of the population strongly devalues education and educated people, it's part of the American experience.  That's why many hyper well-educated elected officials, including presidents, try to pretend that they are "just folks." 

Another writes:

That psychological interpretation was fantastic.

To take it one step further and incorporate some innate racist tendencies that many middle class whites may not even be aware of in themselves: for the United States to be called on the carpet, chastened for our collective excesses and asked to come to our senses by a black man now that decades of Great White Fathers and their laissez-faire spending and social awareness have failed us all – well, of course puny minds are blown.

Thanks so much for all the new subscriptions for the magazine. I really hope that the new media can also breathe new life into vital old media; you're proving it's possible. Meanwhile, a reader writes:

I'm glad you asked us to purchase the latest issue or a subscription to the Atlantic. I won't pick my subscription up until January, when I'm back in the States, but I will try to find this month's issue here in Madrid.

One thing you didn't mention, and I believe you should, is that there are wonderful poems in this issue by Mary Jo Salter and (be still my heart) Henri Cole. Though the Atlantic takes a lot of grief for not being the literary outlet it once was (especially with regards to fiction) , its dedication to literature for the largest part of its 150 years is something we can all appreciate, and should continue to support, alongside the more pressing issues of the day.

Subscribe here.

The NYT debates Mexico's decriminalization of various drugs. Tony Paya:

[D]ecriminalizing drug possession is in and of itself a change of, paradoxically, gigantic and modest proportions… In the end the United States may be left alone to fight a 40-year-old failed “war on drugs” or join the rest and craft a more nuanced strategy to consider other possibilities in dealing with psychotropic substances. Perhaps this time change will come from South to North, instead of North to South.

(Hat tip: Drug Warrant)

Johann Hari has another piece homing in, as is his wont, on subjects others fear to tackle with quite his clarity and panache:

Today, now, more than 100 million women are missing. They have vanished. In normal circumstances, women live longer than men—but China has 107 males for every 100 females in its overall population, India has 108, and Pakistan has 111. Where have these women gone? They have been killed or allowed to die. Medical treatment is often reserved for boys, while violence against women is routine. More girls are killed in this "gendercide" each decade than in all the genocides of the 20^th century. This year, another 2 million girls will "disappear."

TNC enters the discussion over the visceral nature of some Obama opponents:

If we concede, as most reasonable people do, that racism is a factor–not the factor but a factor–in resistance to Obama, then in fact, what we've seen this year is, by the very nature of an Obama presidency, unprecedented. Put simply, we've seen the crazy-tax, of which race is a portion, before. But we've never seen the crazy-tax intensified by race. We have not seen it accompanied by watermelon jokes, by Congressmen referring to him as boy, by clucking heads claiming that the president "has exposed himself as someone with a deep-seated hated of white people." We've never seen the whitey tape, before… Don't let the grinding familiarity of Obama blind you to the profound times we live in, and the work that's still left to do.

I agree. There are deeper forces at issue here than just healthcare. And all of them make me want Obama to succeed.

Thom Yorke in tilt-shift:

Thom Yorke, “Harrowdown Hill” from Bent Image Lab on Vimeo.