Month: August 2010

by Conor Friedersdorf

Paige knows what makes no sense to her:

The rat race. Society at large glorifies it, most people engage in it. Those who don't are labeled marginal, antisocial and excluded. It permeates everything. And yet, it is the rat race, in its more extreme manifestations, that is probably responsible for the over-consumption that is resulting in the destruction of the planet. It also dehumanizes people and the way they view other people. It removes principle in favor of advancement, etc., etc. Problem is that it appears to be genetically ingrained, part of the process for determining who is the fittest member of the herd, the alpha dog of the moment, if you will.

A corollary is cars as status signal. I've never understood that one, though at least a luxury automobile has more utilitarian value than a diamond, the ultimate sucker's purchase. (There are competitors. Lots of them.)

Brian has an eccentric pet peeve:

Hula Hooping.  Not the standard twirling it around ones waist, mind you. But taking the time for learning to swing one around your neck, arms, or forehead is amazingly irrational, absolutely absurd, closing in on offensive, definitely silly and nonsensical, utterly counterproductive, and, potentially, morally wrong.

This I cannot abide. My friend Anjuli traveled around India paying her way partly by drilling holes in a larger than average hula hoop, pouring in paint, and hooping it out on canvas that surrounded her on three sides. It looked pretty cool, and it paid. (I am terrible at hula hooping.)

An anonymous reader writes:

I enjoy parties, discussion, and raising my wineglass in a toast to friendship and good health, but I can't stand the wine. After trying multitudes of beer and wine, and a bit of the harder stuff, everything that people say about taste still doesn't make a damn bit of sense. I just can't enjoy putting such a nasty taste in my mouth.

And for that matter, why do people willingly ingest a mind-altering substance when they go to an important business or social dinner? It boggles my mind.

Excessive inhibition can hurt your performance in a business meeting.

Patrick somehow manages this one without sounding like The Grinch:

I've got one, and I've felt this way since I was a little kid…and I have honestly never found a kindred soul regarding it: Christmas trees. I'm not a hippie tree-hugger, or anti-religious, or a contrarian hipster, or a hater; I'm really just a regular random person.

Ever since I was a little kid, I thought the idea of chopping down – killing – a tree just to cover it with garish decorations and then unceremoniously dump it a week after Dec 25th just seemed like such an incredible waste of a perfectly nice little tree. It's essentially a very negative act ("treeicide?") perpetuated on the grandest of scales, annually. The site of a brown, discarded Christmas tree just lying on someone's kerb still gives me a pang of sadness.

Wouldn't it be much nicer if instead everybody bought a little tree and kept it alive in a pot, decorated and celebrated it, then after christmas (in the springtime, obviously) they planted that little tree somewhere. Imagine if every community had a tree farm that received hundreds, thousands of little trees every year…or other plants, different species of trees, etc. They obviously don't all have to be the same little evergreens. People could celebrate with all manner of trees, etc.

Imagine if you could return every year to the plot and identify certain trees that represented Christmas' Past. Doesn't that seem like a positive idea? Plus who knows, maybe if we planted 100 million trees and plants every year instead of chopping them down, we might influence the planets bio-sphere in a better way…

Bloody hell: maybe I am a hippie tree-hugger!

by Chris Bodenner

Hopefully not a sign of things to come.

by Patrick Appel

Ambinder draws some lessons from last night:

When it comes to the Tea Party factor, remember: about issues it ain't. Bill McCollum was one of the attorneys general who filed a lawsuit against Obama's health care reform bill. He is as conservative as a Blackberry at an Apple convention.  But he has ties to the state's now-discredited Republican establishment (think of the indictment of the former party chairman) and his avuncular, amiable, comfortable-as-a-leather shoe style just doesn't fit with the times.  Rick Scott didn't need the money, but the Tea Party Express helped him build a volunteer base. In Alaska, the same group ponied up $500,000 to help Miller (probably) defeat an incumbent U.S. senator.

Weigel watches turnout numbers.

Detroit, Michigan, 9 am

by Conor Friedersdorf

Police and firefighter compensation are the subjects of an excellent piece that Dan Foster has published at National Review. The short version of his argument is that they cost way too much, especially when their pensions are factored into the equation.

Early in my career, I served as beat reporter for a city where the firefighters' union wielded more power than any other lobby (with the possible exception of a commercial and residential real estate company — it was the height of the housing boom). Especially in the years after 9/11, what city councilman was going to stand up to firefighters during contract negotiations when, come election time, the whole crew could go door to door, all clean cut, telling swooning women, "Yeah, we're really concerned about keeping the families of this city safe, and the leaders we have now are making choices that are going to cost innocent lives if they're not overturned. The candidate we're backing served with us for 20 years — in fact, he's the one who saved that baby girl in the Oak Street fire last year. We're not usually very political, ma'am, but we know where this guy's priorities are. Can we count on your support?" 

In the piece, Mr. Foster reports that "average total compensation for an officer in Oakland — a city in which the median family earns $47,000 — is $162,000 per year." It must be historically unusual for a police officer to earn more than three times as much as the average family in his jurisdiction.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

You’ll probably get this a thousand times, but anything by the Mountain Goats is pretty hip religious music.  And the brain behind the band, John Darnielle, has described himself as a regular churchgoer.  They also count Stephen Colbert as a fan, so not really sure how much more hip you can get. That, and on their most recent album, The Life of the World to Come, all the song names are biblical verses.

Darnielle talked about his faith with the Stranger in 2008:

I consider myself religious—I'm Catholic, both by blood and by tendency, and I mean "religious" in the sense of the word that occasionally makes Protestants uncomfortable: I like ritual and repetitive prayers, and I think a communal relationship with God is many orders of magnitude more important than "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ." I prefer being told what to do and how to pray. I don't think I'm smart enough or eloquent enough to write prayers that are worth God's time.

At the same time, though, I'm in the same boat that everybody else is in: In my heart, I doubt there's a God at all. Most of what most religions teach is utterly ridiculous, and besides, I'm a pro-choice feminist, so the Church that I love and which I'll never fully be able to leave is also my enemy.

I stopped going to church years ago and hardly ever go these days, and I won't take Communion when I do, because those are the rules. I'm as likely to pray the Hare Krishna mahamantra as I am the rosary. But I do pray, as devoutly as I can, even though I suspect we're just animals crawling on the surface of a godless earth. I do it because it gives me comfort and peace, even if that's illusory, and because I think that a prayerful mood is a powerful thing in the world and can be a real force for good.

I'd recommended the song "No Children".  (It's not religious, just soul-crushingly beautiful.)

by Conor Friedersdorf

Jessica Belt: "Dear Facebook: I am writing to ask that you stop suggesting I have a baby." It seems that targeted advertising is the new "when are you going to give us some grandkids?" 

by Patrick Appel

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowsk is trailing Joe Miller, a Palin-endorsed Senate candidate with tea party roots. Weigel is all over the story:

The Palin endorsement got him uncritical national media attention. The Tea Party Express bought $500,000 in ads for Miller, which was the largest single buy in the state. Perhaps most importantly, the Measure 2 anti-abortion proposition was bringing out conservative voters.

Bernstein zooms out:

[T]hese primaries are sending a very strong message to GOP pols about the dangers of ever allowing any space to develop between themselves and movement conservatives. … [T]he interpretation everyone's going to hear and believe is that ideological deviation, even very mild deviation, is extremely dangerous to one's electoral health.  Whether it's the New START treaty, or a compromise deal on the budget if the GOP controls at least one House of Congress next year, or any other issue, you can be sure that Republican pols who have to cast tough votes are going to remember Bob Bennett and Lisa Murkowski (and Arlen Specter, for that matter). 

by Conor Friedersdorf

Over at National Review, David Pryce-Jones recounts the shameful way that Canadian authorities have treated Mark Steyn, a writer whose right to publish whatever he wants without getting hauled before a tribunal ought to be sacrosanct, full stop. (In fact, I wonder if a defense fund could be set up so that anyone brought up on charges in Canada could draw on it.)

This part of the post jumped out at me:

Mark Steyn is a humorous writer, but he has a serious purpose, namely to point out that the Western world has Islamist enemies who wish it ill. We could deal with those Islamists except for one thing: A large segment of our fashionable opinion-makers, so to speak the Burumas of this world, think that Islamists aren’t as bad as all that; and if they are, then we are still worse, and what we stand for isn’t really worth defending. So the public doesn’t know what to think, and a few self-appointed custodians push them into all manner of doubt and guilt by accusing anyone who criticizes, or — horrors! — laughs at Islamists of Islamophobia, racism, fascism, etc. etc.

This doesn't describe America as I observe it. I very much doubt an employee of The New York Times or The Washington Post or The New Yorker can be found who denies the proposition that "the Western world has Islamist enemies who wish it ill." I doubt a single CNN talking head has ever asserted that America isn't superior to al Qaeda or the Taliban, or that our lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness aren't really worth defending. Where does this large segment of fashionable opinion makers write or broadcast? What is the evidence that "the public" doesn't know what to think about radical Islamists? I find it hard to imagine satisfactory answers.

Islamist radicals are a threat. Our values are worth defending against theirs. This is what the vast majority of Americans, including the vast majority of opinion-makers, agree on entirely, and writing as if this consensus doesn't exist merely distracts from the questions that divide Americans. How grave is the Islamist threat? How common is radicalism among the world's Muslims? What does the existence of groups like Al Qaeda imply about our foreign policy? Is it better for American interests to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Does the threat of terrorism justify a reduction in civil liberties? What is the fairest way to treat Muslim Americans? These questions, and dozens of others, are what require debate, and it can proceed most productively if it's built upon the common ground we already enjoy as rational citizens in a liberal democratic republic.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Dan Drezner writes:

As I think about it, here are the Millennials' foundational foreign policy experiences: 

1)  An early childhood of peace and prosperity — a.k.a., the Nineties;

2)  The September 11th attacks;

3)  Two Very Long Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq;

4)  One Financial Panic/Great Recession;

5)  The ascent of China under the shadow of U.S. hegemony. 

From these experiences, I would have to conclude that this generation should be anti-interventionist to the point of isolationism. Then again, I'm looking at this through my own irony-drenched Gen-X eyes. 

I'm curious to hear from twentysomethings in the comments — what are the foreign policy lessons that you can draw from your upbringing? I'm also curious what lessons twentysomethings in other countries can draw from their own formative experiences.  

Interesting. I wonder what role, if any, that globalization, changes in media, and the absence of a draft or the threat of one has on these attitudes. For prior generations, war meant a lot more even to people who weren't fighting than it does today.

(Mr. Drezner tells us what he is reading this August here.)