by Patrick Appel
I have the same problem as Jonah Lehrer:
My conscious goal is to fall asleep, which then causes my unconscious to continually check up on whether or not I'm achieving my goal. And so, after passing out for 30 seconds, I'm woken up by my perverse brain. (Most animals lack such self-aware thoughts, which is why our pets never have trouble taking a nap.)
Today the Dish welcomed a third guest-blogger to the mix, Alex Massie. The Blighty-focused blogger sized up Cameron's chances, addressed the class cliquishness of his Tories, called out the dirty politics of Labour over civil liberties, and fretted over the UK economy.
Jonathan Bernstein countered Alter's optimism over the HCR summit, took a closer took at Obama's stagnant poll numbers, looked back at the political stalemate of the Reagan era, took a foray into Watergate, challenged Frum's take on the history of congressional reform, and reiterated his exasperation over filibuster talk. Graeme Wood highlighted a major political challenger to Mubarek, aired different approaches to writing, and touched upon the allure of older women.
Andrew popped in to comment more on the Atlantic redesign. Email of the day here on the subject.
In other Dish coverage, Ambinder summed up new numbers on media consumption, Megan thwacked Jim Bunning's recent antics, Tony Perkins got dissed by military chaplains, Palin got pwned by Alaskans, Cottle caught up with kids of celebrity politicians, McWhorter lauded Obama's approach to education, and Patrick went back and forth with Larison over the Leveretts.
Atheist bait here and here. More religion talk here. Readers chimed in here and here over computer-generated classical music. MHB here. And here is the weekend wrap if you still want it.
— C.B.
by Alex Massie
What kind of Prime Minister are voters looking for in hard times? Gordon Brown asks the public to take "a second look" at Labour and "a long, hard look" at the Conservatives. It's a good sound-bite, even if it implicitly concedes that voters are turned-off by Labour. But are they sufficiently disgusted to vote Tory? This is Gordon's attempt to play the part of Dirty Harry, asking the electorate if they're confident they feel lucky today.
Brown may well be a foul-mouthed bully who terrorises his staff and he may well bear much of the responsbility for the country's parlous economic situation, but he's asking voters to ignore the latter (focus on the future!) and consider the former proof of the Prime Minister's passion and willingness to get his hands dirty. Sure, he's "difficult" to work with, but this is no time for simpering angels in Downing Street.
It's an audacious gambit: Yes, you may hate me but when did I ever ask you to like me? I'm not Tony Blair, you know. Can he pull it off? I still doubt it. Heck, common sense demands that one doubt it. But…
In total contrast to Brown, David Cameron can occasionally seem as though he's the kind of Englishman that might be played by Hugh Grant. Decent, amiable, brightish, but, in some sense, lacking bottom. He even lives in Notting Hill. This is doubtless an unfair caricature, but there is a feeling that the Camerons live lives of such comfort and, yes, wealth, that they are insulated from the concerns of"ordinary hard-working families".
Rachel Sylvester, one of the smartest, best-connected columnists around, captures something of this in the Times today:
The narrowing in the Tory poll lead can, at least in part, be explained by the fact that Mr Cameron still too often gives the impression that he thinks he was “born to rule” rather than that he has to campaign to become Prime Minister with a clear idea of what he wants to do with the job.
It’s not just the well-scrubbed public schoolboy’s face, the slick, neatly brushed hair or the smart-enough- to-dress-down open-neck shirt. It’s not just the expenses claim for wisteria trimming or the organic veg patch or even the Eton and Bullingdon Club background.
The Notting Hill set that runs the Tory Party has managed to create a feeling that they are, as Sir Nicholas Winterton put it so memorably, a “different class of people”.
[…] When Mr Cameron describes the Conservatives as the “party of the poor” it conjures up a picture of the local grandee handing out food parcels to hungry villagers. When the Tory leader hugs huskies it looks a bit like Prince Charles hugging trees, an environmentalism rooted in a desire to conserve. The “broken society” is something theoretical and remote from the white stuccoed villas of West London or the white beaches of Belize.
This isn’t class war. There is a cliquishness to the Cameron circle that conveys the sense that its members are detached from the rest of the country. They are godparents to each others’ children, they share school runs and swap dinner parties. Unlike those around Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, key members of the inner group are bound together by friendship first and politics second. There is an incestuousness to a set that had rows and reconciliations, romances and rejections, way before it ever thought of seeking power.
But, as they come to an election, voters want to know whether the Conservative leader would be an effective Prime Minister, not whether he is a loyal friend. It’s not enough for Mr Cameron to think that he would be good at the job, or to believe, in a rather patrician way, that it is his duty to serve his country. He has to convince a sceptical electorate that he has a sense of mission about the kind of Britain he wants and a sense of purpose about how he would create it.
Again, this is not wholly fair and far from the whole story. But there's something to it. Cameron's life has not been trouble-free (he recently marked the anniversary of the death of his young, severely disabled, son Ivan) and Brown, however much he might pretend otherwise, has not worked his way up from some benighted housing project.
Nevertheless, the election is, on one level, a contest between hard and soft power. This actually extends to the candidates' political philosophies too: Brown is a "hard" centraliser, Cameron a "soft" distributist. The latter, though in keeping with the way we live our lives these days, may be a tougher sell – especially in rocky, fretful times.
Sure, common-sense demands that we laugh at any Brownite claim that Gordon is a "safe pair of hands" but that's what he's pitching. If you're bold and brassy enough perhaps you can get away with anything. Cameron's challenge, then, is not merely a question of reminding voters of Brown's failures, but of convincing them that he has the guts and the courage and the steel to really tackle the problems Britain faces.
But he must also be wary of falling into the trap of seeming too harsh, too judgemental, too de haut en bas. It's a tricky problem: how to convince voters that you're tough enough without also reminding them of the (perceived) harshness that has cost the Tories dearly in recent elections and helped Labour to three crushing victories. Brown might be able to get away with being the "Nasty Candidate", the Tories, in part because of the leadership's privileged backgrounds, cannot be seen again as the "Nasty Party".
by Jonathan Bernstein
Joe Klein wants to know why the Democrats didn't "bring out the cots" and force a "live" filibuster on Jim Bunning last week.
Asked and answered: because it wouldn't have done any good. In fact, this well-reported story by David Dayen (via one of Klein's commenters) explains exactly how this works…the Democrats could have defeated Bunning alone by attrition, but once other Republicans proved willing to support him, there was no longer any point to continuing except as a public relations maneuver.
Now, once we're at the level of public relations gimmicks — not legislative strategy — Klein might or might not be correct. In a comment, he refers to the Clinton/Gingrich government shut down, which certainly played well for the Dems. But that's not analogous to a live filibuster. In fact, the current Democratic strategy strikes me as essentially similar to Clinton's 1995-1996 strategy — let Republican obstructionism actually take away stuff that people like, then hope that it will turn people against the Republicans. In other words, no one paid attention to the Senate's late night session on Thursday as it was, and odds are that the reaction to a seventy-two hour session at the end of the week would have been a pox on both their houses, but as it was the Democrats were able to make a clean case that Jim Bunning and the Republicans took away people's benefits. So once it reached that point, I think the Democrats chose their best option.
At any rate, while the spin effects of various tactics are open to debate, the important thing to remember is that forcing a live filibuster doesn't work. It cannot beat a determined filibuster conducted by multiple Senators. That can only be beaten by a cloture vote or by cutting a deal.
by Alex Massie
There's one great advantage Labour has in this election: experience. Campaign experience, that is. Gordon Brown has been a tireless political bruiser for more than 30 years. Peter Mandelson is known as the "Prince of Darkness" for a reason, while Charlie Whelan, Brown's bovver-boy in the union movement, is a shameless propagandist only at home in the darker recesses of the political game. The Tories, by contrast, are young and inexperienced at this level.
So it's not a great surprise that Labour will play for keeps. Consider this passage from a speech Brown gave on crime today:
"Some argue that liberty dictates we should immediately wipe from the DNA database everyone who has been arrested but not convicted of an offence. But if we did this, some sickening crimes would have gone unsolved, and many dangerous criminals would have remained at large.
"Let me give you just one example. In May 1991, a woman confined to a wheelchair was attacked and raped by a man who tricked his way into her home. A DNA sample was recovered, but no suspect was found. In June 2007, South Yorkshire Police's 'cold case team' reinvestigated the case and the DNA sample was re-analysed using new techniques.
"A match was made with a profile from a man named Jeremiah Sheridan who had been arrested in 2005 in Cambridgeshire for a public order offence, but not convicted.
"It proved very difficult to trace Sheridan – but after the case was highlighted on 'Crimewatch' in 2008, South Yorkshire Police got several new leads including one that Sheridan was in Australia. He was arrested on his return at Heathrow airport and, last September, having pleaded guilty, he was sentenced to 16 and a half years."
[…]"The next time you hear somebody question the value of retaining DNA profiles from those who have been arrested but not convicted, remember Jeremiah Sheridan."
Yes, some of us do argue that liberty dictates that the state keep its paws off our DNA! Among those people: the Scottish Labour party who, in eight years in power at the devolved government in Edinburgh, refused to copy the DNA-farming approach favoured by the Labour party south of the border.
Sometimes, it is true, this will have unfortunate, even grisly, consequences, but this is one of the few areas in which the Tories approach to civil liberties has inspired some small measure of confidence. (Though even here many Tory MPs are less than enthusiastic about the leadership's approach to such matters of principle. As Henry Porter says, these are bleak times for liberty-minded folk in Britain.)
The chutzpah is, in its way, as magnificent as it is revolting. In a speech that, as Chicken Yoghurt points out, complained about the Tories exploiting fear of crime, the Prime Minister suggests that unless the state can maintain a comprehensive DNA database Britain may become a rapists' paradise.
Perhaps it's not quite a Willie Horton kind of affair but it's taken from the same playbook and shows both Labour's desperation and the levels to which it will sink.
And the logic of the government position is that everyone, regardless of police interest in their activities, should be on the DNA database. Otherwise the criminals will win. What next? Mandatory tracking chips to be implanted in all citizens? Why not? If it saves just one life then it will be worth it, as they say.
Except it won't. Because the general principle is, in this instance, more important than the particular cases the government chooses to highlight.
Sadly, however, we know live in Panopticon Britain so this kind of thing no longer comes as any surprise.
Bejamira Neira Zapata shows her sorrow at her doorstep after a tsunami and a massive 8.8 magnitude earthquake wrecked the village of Penca, Chile on March 1, 2010. The tsunami engulfed the normally placid Penco and neighboring villages, swallowing up homes here and washing away livelihoods. By Evaristo SA/AFP/Getty Image.
By Andrew Sullivan
Irony-deficiency alert.
by Patrick Appel
A reader writes:
Ah, something I can talk about intelligently, as a former grad student in AI and as a well-educated Mozart hound. I'm familiar with Cope and with Emmy, and a little bit with Hofstadter as well, from his Pulitzer-winning book on the subject of math, language, and music, Godel Escher Bach. And I dabbled with algorithmic composing back in the 80s, although on nothing like the scale of Cope. So I'm at least familiar with the controversies involved here.
It was one of the premises of Godel Escher Bach [GEB] that our minds recognize the formal language expressed in music. Music is a language, or at least a syntax without any definite semantic meaning. Poetry without words, if you prefer it that way. We are free to impose our own meaning on the language-like phrasings of music. All the tricks that are used to make music interesting, even simple things like repetition and symmetry and transposition, etc., engage the language processing parts of our minds.
Cope is playing an interesting game here. He feigns exasperation over the way conflicts that knowing his music is computer-generated creates in people, their unwillingness to judge it on the same basis as music they believe human-composed. But I think it's the reaction of these people that is most interesting, not the music itself. I don't condemn them, nor feel his exasperation. His real work of art here is in provoking this conflict, much more so than even the wonderful job he has done in algorithmically analyzing music.
I've wondered myself, too many times to count, why it is that this or that piece of music stirs me so much. I think, I'm being communicated with by a deep soul. Here is Mozart or Mahler or Beethoven speaking to me in a voice that I recognize, and it seems so clear that it must have some meaning. But if it is only notes, then there may not really be anything profound there at all, only my own projections. That's a very lonely thought.
Haven't you ever tried to share a piece of music with someone and felt frustrated by the experience? I have. I've given away CDs and dragged people to concerts, given little parlor lectures explaining how sonata form works, tried to transfer my enthusiasm about particular works to people so they would hear something the way I heard it. And yet, they usually don't. How can they react this way when I feel like I'm in the presence of God just listening to this music? And the answer is, the music itself is wonderful, but the feelings that I experience ARE my own projections. Most people may hear something sad and sweet when they listen to Mozart's Sinfonia K.364 second movement (youtube it) but they can't possibly hear it the way I hear it. We are trapped in our own private bubbles projecting feelings and meanings onto patterns of notes and sounds that remind us of things, that trigger feelings.
Music is like a Rorschach test, although a somewhat more reliable, perhaps, in that we assume the composer wanted to convey something that we might have picked up. Cope's programs have no assumption of such intent. That creates a problem for us. And when that music sounds just like something we are used to thinking of as the voice of God, wooWEE, it's cognitive dissonance salad time. You have to give Cope credit for this, whether you care for his music or not.
But now, let's go back to this wonderful question from the article:
"If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?"
Mozart and Beethoven followed a set of rules. Hat's off to Cope for analyzing them so well as to mimic them. But all the computer does is use the rules to create the music, while Mozart and Beethoven CHOSE the rules they used. A lot of it was plagiarism, that's true, although that is stretching the word a bit for sensational effect. The rules and devices of composition that Mozart and Beethoven chose for their compositions were chosen for what they hoped would create beautiful music rather than boring music. A human composer had to hear the music (or imagine it, in Beethoven's case) and decide whether it was effective or not based on what he projected into the music. Mozart's own Rorschach test projection of what the Jupiter Symphony means would be completely different from yours or mine, but he at least found it interesting enough to create THAT symphony rather than some other that followed the same rules.
I'm reminded of how, when I was a kid at the fair, they had booths with something called "Spin-Art." They gave you a cardboard canvas that you randomly squirted some paint onto, and then a machine whirled it at high speed, splattering it away from the center through centrifugal force. I was fascinated by it. After a while, I decided I liked some of them more than others. I took some home to show my Mom and told her the titles I had made up. This one is Battle of the Butterflies, or whatever. She thought I was terribly creative. What else would she think, she was my Mom, right?
But was it art? Was there "soul" in it? A f'ing machine just spun around in a circle for five seconds. Big whoopee. The laws of physics did all the work.
But there was still human input into it which affected the results. The process of choosing which spin-art to keep must have involved its own rules set, subliminal perhaps. I also remember that too much paint of too many different colors just created a big brown slushy mess, for instance, which wasn't very interesting at all. It's possible that with enough representative examples of the Spin-Art that I considered cool, a sophisticated program could determine a rule set that would reliably produce Spin-Art just as "cool" as what I created. Indistinguishable even. Nobody would win a prize for doing it, but I'm just saying, it could be done the same way Cope has analyzed classical music composition.
That program, like Cope's program, would follow rules that I created as a child for creating Spin-Art. It just wouldn't be CHOOSING good, better, best based on the kinds of projections that I made as a child. And it would never be able to grow to add new rules as the old rules became boring. And it would never get my Mom's approval at all.
by Jonathan Bernstein
David Frum has a long piece today blaming procedural reforms of the 1970s for gridlock. Bruce Bartlett and Matt Yglesias both point out that Frum's focus on the rules overlooks the importance of the demise of Southern Democrats, and they are correct as far as that goes.
However, there's something else wrong with Frum's analysis, which is that his timeframe of big important bills and Congressional reform is wrong, which in turn undermines his case pretty thoroughly. Frum posits a stable set of rules in the 1950s through the mid-1970s, and then another set of rules after "Congress underwent a revolution" in the mid 1970s. And, he believes, that was the turning point: "It’s hard to dispute: Congress just got a lot more done in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s than in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s."
But in fact, positing Congress with stable rules before and after a mid-1970s revolution doesn't get it right, and Frum's list of bills doesn't quite work, either.
Start with the Senate, because it's easier. Frum dates the Senate's problems to the reduction in votes needed for cloture, which he claims increased the number of filibusters. Greg Koger does find some support for this theory, but it is not the only or even the major factor in filibusters, which had already begun increasing early in the 1960s and would spike much later. In my view, the shift from "filibuster civil rights" to "filibuster a bunch of things" (going on in the 1960s and 1970s) to "filibuster all major things" (beginning in 1993) to "filibuster practically everything" (2009) is much more about the Republican Party, the incentives it provides for Senators, and the (in my view mistaken) general belief by everyone that "filibuster everything" is a successful electoral strategy. Whatever the causal relationship, however, the point is that the most important changes in the rules and norms of the Senate don't match up with Frum's productive period very well.
But really, Frum's case is in the House, and there he really misunderstands the reform process. Reform wasn't a one-shot deal in the mid-1970s; it was a process that began with the election of a very liberal Congress in 1958, and began to take effect with the destruction of the independent power of the Rules Committee beginning in 1961. Before that, the pre-reformed Congress was hardly the picture of efficiency that Frum supposes (and note that only one of Frum's example bills, the interstate highway system, is from the 1950s part of his 1950s, 1960s, 1970s "good years"). Indeed, liberals were up in arms about how backwards and ineffective Congress was, especially when it the liberal Congress elected in 1958 and then the unified Democrat government elected in 1960 failed to pass much of anything. There's a mythology that Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson would just sit down over a drink and resolve everything, but in reality Rayburn's Speakership was far weaker the modern Speakers, and no one in the House could control a committee chair who decided he didn't agree with what the rest of the Democrats wanted to do.
Frum's critique is a familiar one from, of all things, the Jimmy Carter years, when many believed that reform had created a Congress with too much openness and too much decentralization. Those early observers missed the other side of reform: centralization within the party (instead of the committee) structure. As Tip O'Neill, Nancy Pelosi, and every Speaker in between have realized, the House is far more efficient now than it was in the pre-reform era. Yes, it is also far more partisan. But partisan doesn't mean gridlock, and there's just no question but that the post-1975 House is much less gridlocked than the pre-1962 House was.
Frum is correct that there was a whole lot of major bills passed in a short period of time, but it's really a narrower period than he thought — roughly 1964 through 1976, after reform was well under way. And to the extent that Congressional procedures brought that to an and, it's very difficult to find evidence for it in the behavior of the House of Representatives. I happen to agree with some of Frum's preferences; I would like a campaign finance regime that frees candidates from spending a lot of time raising money, and I'm generally not one who believes that openness is an unambiguous virtue. But if there's a procedural problem in Congress today that's causing excessive gridlock — and given that I think health care reform is very likely to pass and that the Democrats were pretty productive last year, I'm not sure there is — it's the filibuster in the Senate, and that's not in any important direct way a consequence of 1970s reforms.
by Chris Bodenner
Two congressional candidates try to out-Hewitt one another at a debate sponsored by the Lynchburg Tea Party:
“Earlier, in response to a question about the No. 1 threat to national security, McKelvey got a round of cheers by saying, “The present administration is the biggest threat.” Verga said the biggest threat is the Americans who voted the Obama administration into office. “That was political correctness gone awry,” Verga said.
The district’s representative, Tom Perriello (D-VA), is clinging to one of the most vulnerable seats in the House.
The Dish 