Month: June 2010

The latest from the flotilla fiasco:

Reports in the Turkish press identified the American as Furkan Dogan, 19, who was born in the United States before returning to Turkey with his family as a young child. The Cihan news agency reported that Mr. Dogan had one bullet in the chest and four bullets fired into his head from close range. 

My italics. The brutality is described by a journalist eye-witness:

Al Jazeera's Jamal Elshayyal, who reported from the ship during the raid, confirmed that live ammunition had been used by Israeli commandos as they stormed the ship. He said that he witnessed some of the killings, and confirmed that at least "one person was shot through the top of the head from [the helicopter] above" …  "The first shots [coming from Israeli boats at sea] were tear gas, sound grenades and rubber coated steel bullets," said Eshayyal. "Live shots came five minutes after that. There was definitely live fire from the air and from the sea as well." He confirmed that some passengers took apart some of the ship's railings to defend themselves as they saw the Israeli soldiers approaching. "After the shooting and the first deaths, people put up white flags and signs in English and Hebrew," he said. "An Israeli [on the ship] asked the soldiers to take away the injured, but they did not and the injured died on the ship."

The full video taken by Israel will help clarify or rebut this. When do we get to see it?

Steinglass does a Western conservatism post mortem:

The individualist Western conservatism Mr Goldwater articulated is one of the great strands in American political thinking. It is quite distinct from Southern conservatism, and has less room for the politics of racial resentment. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when George Bush and John McCain supported immigration reform and Republicans were winning substantial Hispanic votes, it appeared that this brand of conservatism might achieve cross-racial appeal. But in the past five years, that promising trend has been crushed. And now, in many areas of the West where racial diversity is re-emerging, one sees Western conservatism becoming very focused on racial politics indeed.

It's always worth recalling that the Republican party's historic conservatism, from Lincoln to Eisenhower, was not based in the South. Nixon changed that. For a while, the fusionism worked, primarily under the sunny Californian, Ronald Reagan. But the South is so strong an identity, so powerful a cultural force, that it inevitably becomes the cuckoo in any nest. And the South is hard to comprehend without the racial politics which has defined it and thus contemporary Republicanism. This has proven fatal to a coherent governing conservatism, in my view. And it is deadly for conservatism's future as something other than cultural reaction and denial of the shifting nature of 21st century geo-politics.

A reader writes:

I notice you chose to spotlight a small protest in Tel Aviv (you can tell how small the group is – they're on a beach boardwalk) celebrating the flotilla raid outside the Turkish embassy. The hundred or so people assembled are clearly waving "Kach" signs, representing an extreme-right group that is banned in Israel. Imputing those views to the Israeli public is unfair and misleading. This is tantamount to showing the Westboro Baptist Church protesting outside a war hero's funeral and claiming "the American public is full of soldier-hating homophobes."  Of course, there have been plenty of protests against the Israeli government's action. The society's views on this are far more complex than a small right-wing protest.

The only poll I can find shows that 63 percent of Israelis preferred a different way of intercepting the flotilla, although the blockade of Gaza retains strong support.

(Israeli left-wing protesters demonstrate against Israel's deadly raid on an aid flotilla bound for the blockaded Gaza Strip on May 31, 2010 in Tel Aviv, Israel. By Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)

The day after the Lost finale, Megan noted that only 13.5 million people watched the episode, while 106 million watched MASH’s denouement. This prompted Rod Dreher to go all Alasdair Macintyre on us again. He was back at it yesterday:

The culture has fragmented, but it’s also easier to reach back in time and claim what was discarded… For those who have the creativity and the will, it is increasingly possible to live out in miniature a “Benedict Option” of one’s own, and reclaim, or attempt to reclaim, what was lost. We are condemned to be free to choose. But for those who wish to reacquaint themselves with the tradition that previous generations rejected, we are free to choose it in ways that we were not before. And that’s good.

But he gets the paradox:

The obvious objection to all this is: the moment you choose a tradition, it is no longer a tradition; what makes a tradition binding is the awareness that one doesn’t choose it, one submits to the prior claim it has on one’s loyalty. The moment you become aware that you have chosen tradition, its power over you, and therefore its power to sustain itself in time, weakens.

Welcome to the modern world, Rod. The kind of unthinking cohesion of the past, sustained by elite control of the media and by ancient accommodation to a world before contraception, advances in longevity, and the technological revolution, is indeed gone. We are all subcultures now. This is hard, bewildering for many, too much for some. The reason why Rod is worth reading is that he is not in denial about this – just a mild form of despair. But that the only intelligent response for a traditionalist is retreat into a faux traditionalism tells you something about the problem. It is insoluble. It is our reality. And conservatives adjust to reality; they do not assault it.

Who can say? I'd like to see a few executives in jail myself. Michael Coren examines the bill:

BP's legal strategy has yet to emerge. For now, it has set up a website to pay out immediate claims. One prediction is that BP will settle many of the outstanding costs as soon as possible, and allow bad press to recede for as long as 2 to 3 years, before attempting to fight any cases and paying out claims of pending lawsuits.  

For McRae, at the Cedar Point Fishing Pier in Coden, Alabama, his business may not survive to see the fight. Business is down 50 percent compared to last May. He's already submitted claims to BP for the loss in customers, but says he hasn't heard back and is not optimistic after attending a meeting with company officials in the neighboring town of Gulf Shores. An accountant at the meeting representing a local condominium development raised his hand to say that he submitted 1,700 pages documenting his losses, and BP replied requesting more information. "Does that tell you they are going to do the right thing?" asks McCrae. "They are not going to do the right thing."

(Image: Oil floats ashore at the Grand Isle East State Park May 27, 2010 on Grand Isle, Louisiana. By Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The editorial, which contained a veiled threat of violence, is withdrawn. Money quote:

In an effort to find a catchy ending, I was a bit too creative with the last paragraph. If I had it to do over again, I would have left off the last sentence of the editorial. It doesn’t add to my point, which was that there is nothing particularly newsworthy about someone moving in next door nor about a new fence going up to protect the privacy of neighbors. I certainly did not mean to suggest that McGinnis would or should be the victim of violence. For that matter, I didn’t mean to suggest the Palins would do such a thing. All of which points to the power of words. I misused them on Saturday. I’ll try to have more respect for that power next time around.

Avent dusts off the history books:

From a historical perspective the entire retirement concept it is relatively new. For most of civilisation the average person worked until they became too sick or feeble, or died. According to Dora Costa’s book on the history of retirement, in 1880's America more than three-quarters of men over 64 and half of 85-year olds still worked. When people did retire they had little wealth and often were dependent on relatives. The growth of retirement was driven by changes in the labour force (a move away from family farms and toward production and services), new social norms (which made retirement the expectation and created a critical mass of retirees), and financial incentives (income from state pensions and private pensions from employers). The introduction of state pensions was significant because it provided retirement income for everyone (including those too poor to save). This allowed elderly people to cease work and not be dependent on their families. To this day, many people rely on state benefits as their primary source of retirement income.

McArdle finds no easy solution. She is in favor of rising the retirement age. But:

I notice that it is a proposal espoused and endorsed by sedentary people who have interesting jobs as policy wonks.  Moving people off the social security rolls and onto the disability system is not a huge help. 

Moreover, this proposal will not do much good unless you also raise the early retirement age; seven out of ten retirees collect their benefits before age 65 (or now 66).  Keeping people in the workforce means more years of taxes to prop up the system.  Otherwise it's just a benefit cut by another name–and if you cut them far enough, you end up with the elderly on other forms of public assistance to make up the shortfall.

A few weeks ago MSNBC reported on a study that found the "percentage of food shoppers who are obese is almost 10 times higher at low-cost grocery stores compared with upscale markets." Pivoting off a post by Jamelle Bouie, Mike Konczal parses:

[W]hen you hear arguments that income inequality isn't so bad because consumption inequality is less than you'd think, it's important to be skeptical about what in fact is being consumed. Sometimes it is exactly what you think it is: less quality and worse long-term health outcomes. And the long-term consequences for the health and well-being of the working poor are exactly the type of information econometric stats obscure.

I had a dream last night that I was lost in Sarah Palin's garden. It was springtime, and there were bluebells everywhere. I suddenly realized where I was and tried to get out to the street. But there was just more garden …

More Intelligent Life posts the above video of YouTube user Peter Oakley and muses:

YouTube is sometimes hounded for being the natural product of all of our most craven instincts. Instead of watching quality programming on television, say, we are all narcissistically posting videos of our dancing babies and puking cats in the hopes of becoming famous. Though Joel Budd at The Economist makes a convincing case for television's sustained hegemony, it's clear that something more interesting is going on here. The promise of an audience is enough to motivate most anyone to take out a camera and capture something (Anne Trubek made a similar argument for blogging and writing). People are creating work and engaging with each other. The result is that everyone becomes a producer, not just a consumer—something that Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink consider in this insightful conversation in the latest issue of Wired.