Month: August 2010

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

In contrast to your reader who felt like the poor kid in a very rich area, I was always teased as the rich kid in my rural Appalachian hometown.  The markers of our wealth?  A two-story house (a century old and under rolling renovation) and the fact that my brothers and I paid full price for school lunch, rather than free or reduced.  In a way, we were rich: our parents were college graduates, we had all the books we could ever want and all three of us are in the process of being highly educated.  But given my broader experience now, I know we were probably on the lower end of middle-class as self-employed farmers, in a county of the working poor.

Another reader:

When talking about cost of living difference between regions it seems that everyone becomes to focused on the highly variable costs like housing that they forget we live in an economy that is very much nationalized. An Ipod in San Francisco costs the exactly the same as it does in Idaho. This is true for cars, big macs, and a whole range of products that are marketed nationally. So even though $100,000 doesn't go as far in New York as it does in Tallahassee, in the national economy that $100,000 will still get you a lot of purchasing power.

Another:

Regarding privilege–today, if I wanted to, on a lark I could spin a globe, close my eyes, and point, and whatever country my finger landed on, eat fresh cuisine from that region at a restaurant within a bike ride of my home. My fiance has three living grandparents in their nineties. I know no one who has had measels, polio, or smallpox. Aside from my maternal grandfather (who was murdered in NYC almost ninety years ago for being a Jewish foreman on a Christian crew building an office on Park Avenue) and one or two freak heart-attacks, no one in two generations in my family has died before age 70. My political and personal freedom is all but absolute.
 
I own an inexpensive piece of electronics that can play for me nearly any work of music every composed, played by almost any musical cadre that has ever performed it, or at my whim instead play lectures by some of the preeminent teachers alive.
 
I could cut my salary (already below the median income) in half and all of this would still be true.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I am not a dog trainer, but I live with one and therefore know a good number of them. Since you mentioned Cesar Millan, I would like to mention that he is basically reviled in the animal behavior community.  His training methods are almost completely aversive and punishment based.  Scientific research has shown positive training techniques to be more effective and have fewer side effects.  Clicker training looks like the marine animal training you would see at Sea World.

The trainers I know do consider Cesar more skilled in his techniques than the other punishment trainers on TV.  But most of what he says is hokum.  For example, dominance as popularly understood is a myth. Some good criticisms of his technique can be found here, here, and here.  And this article on Ian Dunbar's lure-reward training covers some of the issues with Millan.

Cesar Milan is frustrating in his own right, but also seems part of a larger phenomenon where good science gets lost to good TV.

He did manage to tame Cartman.

1. Can China manage to transform itself from a producer-oriented economy to one driven more by organic, domestic consumption–or what economists call "rebalancing"? If not, would it just muddle through and eventually become a Japan that's beset by a dose of complacency, as Fallows recently found by returning to his former suburban home outside of Tokyo. 

2. Can China address the energy, environmental, and social/demographic burdens that are necessary to propel growth? Much of this could hinge on what China has in store for the next five-year plan through 2015. Some of the Chinese commentariat have repeatedly invoked FDR's New Deal in arguing for the kind of social policies that are necessary to sustain China's growth and heal social cleavages. 

3. Will China actually practice what its leaders preach on relying more on qualitative, rather than quantitative, growth? 

by Conor Friedersdorf

In order to offer a more persuasive defense of talk radio listeners, let me share some correspondence I've engaged in lately. Longtime readers are aware of my various arguments with talk radio's Mark Levin, who engages in ad hominem attacks, juvenile name-calling, and inaccurate statements about people who criticize him.

As it happens, I know a few of his radio listeners personally, and they're people for whom I couldn't have more respect. A recent experiment caused me to start contacting Mr. Levin's wider fan base via Facebook, and not at random either. When he'd attack me or someone else on the social networking site, I'd read followup comments of people who were expressing agreement with his tirade, and choose them — the toughest cases, at least for me — as my interlocutors.

The whole enterprise was grounded in the assumption that Internet commenters aren't always being real. That is to say, if you read an Internet comments section, and see content that seems like it couldn't have been written by a reasonable person, what's happening is often that whoever wrote the remark wasn't intending to stand behind the literal meaning expressed, so much as engaging in a sort of game where what you do is produce zingers or blow off steam.

It isn't an approach to politics that I like, and it exacts a cost on the rest of us who take a more earnest approach, but I'm paid to engage in political conversations. I tend to hold my colleagues in media to a lot higher standard than people who haven't spent a lot of time thinking about political discourse. They've got other jobs! (Sometimes when I write non-media professionals who've criticized me in particularly harsh terms, they seem genuinely surprised to find out there is actually a human being who writes the stuff that appears under my byline on the Internet.)

Engage the authors of these sorts of comments regularly and you'll find that they're actually a lot more reasonable than their Internet personalities at first suggest, and particularly worth speaking with because they're exactly the kinds of people who don't share my assumptions.

It's nevertheless unfortunate that certain media elites just tend to bring out the worst in their listeners, on the left and the right.

Don't take my word for it.

Go here to see one representative exchange, just posted online, with a Mark Levin Facebook fan. I wrote her after she called me an idiot. She offered some civil criticism. We had an enjoyable back and forth, a productive debate, and by the end of the exchange, she was writing Mr. Levin a rather critical letter… and being insulted herself on his Facebook page for dissenting. I've included our unabridged correspondence except for her name (though I'm confident that any reader of our exchange will come away thinking she is a very reasonable person indeed).

I've heard some harsh assessments of talk radio listeners, and I don't mean to suggest that how they respond to me is what matters, but I do think the exchange I link above, and others like it, demonstrate that those who listen to the less defensible stuff on talk radio shows and conclude that the kind of people who listen to them cannot be engaged are wrong. I'd say half of the Mark Levin listeners I've contacted responded positively — and remember, these aren't random fans, I've particularly selected the folks who responded favorably to a Levin attacks, often against me. (Most of the rest haven't responded, and a few have stood by their initial remarks, though a bit more politely.)

I've had a lot of positive exchanges like that in my life, dating back to my days covering the immigration debate, a subject rumored to be intractable, though I don't think that's right. I never cease to be amazed by how open even initially hostile people are to being engaged and even persuaded, so long as you reciprocate.

What's going on is that so much professional political discourse is cable news style shout-fests that people put it into a different mental category, where normal standards of intellectual honesty and basic decency don't apply. To a degree, I'm guilty of this myself sometimes, as are all of us who've lost our temper on the Internet, or fallen short of our own conversational standards. I think that if you listen to someone for an hour or two a day who does a lot of shouting, caricatures ideological opponents, engages in a lot of ad hominem, and regularly tries to humiliate callers, you start to imagine that those are "the rules of the game." It's a mistake similar to the one Caleb Howe made.

I know some people reading this post are very hostile to the talk radio right, others are as hostile to the left, and still others are hostile toward me. What I want to insist is that this enterprise of talking to one another is nevertheless worthwhile — conducted the right way, something none of us has a monopoly on, it can be productive indeed. America is our shared neighborhood, one where broken windows cause everyone to behave a bit more badly to one another, and certain talk radio hosts are Red America's half of the gang members going around smashing windows.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Dave Weigel, Ben Smith and Kevin Drum remember the Dubai Ports controversy, a 2006 kerfuffle when Democratic pols were playing on populist Islamophobia and invoking the memory of 9/11 victims for political gain.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

An interesting side note to the tenure discussion, and one you don't often read about, is tenured librarians. Many librarians working at academic institutions across the country have tenure just like professors do – and in many cases, with the same benefits and salary.

Avoiding the question of why this ever happened in the first place, the result is that they have jobs for life, take months off for sabbaticals (with nothing to show for it when they come back), and make the salary a full professor would (in the Midwest, where I am, this can mean $75,000-85,000 a year). And let us remember that most of them have only a master's degree – and do not teach classes!

All this at a time when they are struggling to even be relevant and find something to do with their time in this Google age. Library budgets are cut, staff let go, materials and collections trimmed, but the overpaid librarian stays – to do what?  Make lists, answer the occasional reference question, and attend meetings.

So, should tenure be abolished? For librarians, you betcha!

by Conor Friedersdorf

Apropos my earlier post about conservative elites and the Park 51 controversy, I want to address the general relationship between certain influential figures in the conservative movement — Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Andrew Breitbart, Sean Hannity, and others — and the rank-and-file conservatives who make up their audience.

As a frequent critics of those particular coastal media elites, I am often presumed to be antagonistic to rank-and-file members of the American right who listen to them. Actually, that is not the case. Within the conservative movement, there is an unspoken belief at places like National Review and The Claremont Institute that while certain intellectual standards are important parts of their own institution, it's necessary to look past intellectually dishonest propaganda and extremes in ugly rhetoric when it emanates from sufficiently popular entertainers on the right. The idea is that public discourse is a big game — or sometimes an ongoing war — and winning it requires behavior that can't be defended on the merits, but should be excused or at least ignored because it's popular, or the other side does it, or you can't attract a Rush Limbaugh sized audience without the kinds of tactics that he employs, or certain people are too important to the ideological coalition to forcefully criticize. 

One problem with this approach is that it treats the conservative rank-and-file as means to an end. They're the base, and they need riling up, and yeah, some of what they're fed can't really stand up to scrutiny, but politics is a dirty business. People who take this view tend to be sophisticated elites, and too often they forget that a lot of talk radio listeners aren't in on the joke — that is to say, when Rush Limbaugh says that in Barack Obama's America it's okay for black kids to beat up white kids on buses, their reaction isn't to roll their eyes, or to cheer the hyperbolic zinger, it's to worry about their grandkids.

It isn't that these people are stupid. They just aren't media savvy or cynical in the same way as Washington DC based magazine writers or Los Angeles County based think tank staffers. It is their quaint belief that radio hosts aren't breezily misleading them on a daily basis, or that their favorite television personality isn't willfully profiting by selling them gold at outrageous markups, or that videos they're shown aren't egregiously stripped of context, or that the conservative author whose book they're buying to better understand American politics does a fair job when offering a summary of its debates. Some of them, when they read The Claremont Review of Books, an exceptionally written and edited publication, get the wrong idea when The Claremont Institute fetes Rush Limbaugh with a statesmanship award, despite the fact that the talk radio host has made all sorts of remarks well beneath the intellectual and moral standards of that think tank. Does anyone imagine that a less highly rated talk show host who said all the same things as Limbaugh would receive a statesmanship award? He's lauded by conservative elites because he is effective. But that fact, so obvious to everyone "in the know," isn't transparent to the average person who doesn't pay close attention to political discourse, is it?

I don't mean to suggest that people who put unwarranted trust in certain media personalities are beyond reproach. When someone has a long record of regularly misleading their audience, whether deliberately or through intellectual negligence, the audience has a responsibility to seek information elsewhere. But I must dissent from the argument I've heard in some quarters that any attempt to engage the talk radio audience or the hard-core member of the conservative movement's rank-and-file is doomed. The vast majority of these people are decent Americans who want what's best for their country, and would be perfectly pleasant company if you met them in an airport lounge or a neighborhood bar. This is true even of some people whose worst impulses are played upon by the media elites they've chosen, as I'll demonstrate in a subsequent post.

by Patrick Appel

Robert Wood sums up the tax benefits of marriage and divorce:

A divorcing couple can divvy up property tax free. Again, there’s no limit. So if you jointly bought a house, you can transfer your interest to your ex without tax.

Not married? In that case, you’ll likely face income or gift taxes. If you give your half of the house to your ex-partner and receive nothing in exchange, you’ve made a taxable gift.

(Hat tip: Kincaid)

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I have worked in 100 Church Street for the past 11 years.  Here are my experiences of the day and the aftermath.

On 9/11, I bought my muffin from the Farmer's Market that set up outside of the WTC around 8:00 am and went to my office.  When the first plane hit, we looked out the windows and saw paper floating down from the sky.  So my co-workers and I went downstairs to West Broadway and saw the fire in the tower.  People were screaming and my co-worker said that people were jumping out of the building.  At that, they said I turned white. I went back to my office and put on the radio to see if I could find out what was going on.  The second plane hit and my whole buildng shook.  Everyone panicked and went to the emergency exits. Upon reaching Church Street, I saw a plane engine in the middle of the road.  At that point I assumed a lot of my work friends were dead from falling debris, as everyone had been milling around outside.  I remembered from the first terror attack stories that they had tried to topple the buildings into one another like dominoes, so for that reason I headed northeast up to Chinatown. From there I saw the exodus after the buildings collapsed.

By that point I was cursing Muslims and Arabs and I just wanted them to die or leave our country.  I got through the day and the days after, learning that no one in my office had died.  However, a fireman I knew was killed, and eventually my brother-in-law died of cancer that may have been caused by the time in the pit.

But you know, after a few days my hatred of Muslims/Arabs went away. 

I thought of my Muslim friends and the business owners I had come into contact with and the kind of people they are.  Maybe I've been lucky, but the Muslims I've known are the nicest, most "Christian" people I have ever met in my life.  Maybe also it's the way I grew up, going to a Catholic school where as a white guy I was the minority (mostly Spanish), then playing basketball with mostly African-Americans, and then working with gay people. I came to realize that individuals cannot be judged by the actions of a few and that most people are just trying to get through this life and provide for their family the best they can.

Back to the neighborhood.  Upon returning in March 2002, it was somber, but you went back to your old lunch spots and you were happy to see those people.  Economically they were hard hit, and you wanted to spend your money to help these businesses. And many of the establishments, vending carts, and shops are run by Arabs.  I don't think anyone ever asked what religion they were. We were all joined by this tragedy and just wanted to get through it by doing the only thing we new how to do: live.

The one thing that annoyed me and still does to this day are the hawkers of 9/11 porn, the guys who sell the picture books of 9/11 and the aftermath to tourists.  This to me is the real perversion of the area.  A buck being made off this tragedy and people wanting to flip through this book, as if it was any other tourist site, and then go through the things they purchased at Century 21 and J&R.

Anyone who thinks it is solemn down here has never been.  It is more like a circus, with tourists and their  cameras and their purchases.  I guess they come to honor those who died, but it doesn's seem that way.  There is a Catholic Church and a Christian (Episcopal?); how many people are stopping into them to prayer for the dead?  I'm sure it is a small fraction of those who go to Century 21 and J&R.

To me, and I believe to most NYers, Ground Zero is a work site.  I can go weeks without looking at it and then as with last week I was shocked at how tall the buildings had gotten.  I don't care what they do with the site put up a tower, a public memorial obviously but also something private for the families who lost loved ones seems appropriate.  I just don't want to see it commercialized (key chains, post cards, books).  That to me is what seems disrespectful.

But life goes on. This neighborhood has become yuppie heaven, with more people living here then ever before.  But the shops still struggle, there are still homeless, still bars serving the construction workers, still a strip club, still junk stores and still a mosque – two further blocks down from the planned Cordoba center.  And if you walk by before or after afternoon prayer, you will see the Muslims gathered outside -  government and business workers, shop owners, street vendors.  Just more Americans trying to get by as best they can in this life.

(Top photo by Zoe Strauss. Side photo from "Hot Chicks Smiling At Ground Zero".)

by Conor Friedersdorf

Apropos my complaint that Gary Johnson isn't taken seriously as a presidential candidate, Marc Ambinder has a sharp post that includes this nugget:

People vote for politicians who sparkle, or who harness their anger; politicians who make them proud to be Republicans… or proud to be Americans.  This political dimension is related in some fashion to the leadership qualities we expect from a president, although there is not always a correlation between the two.

This is accurate, and unfortunate. 

Americans complain a lot about our presidents, and our politicians generally. In a way, however, we get the politicians we deserve given our bad habit of selecting pols based on how likable they seem on television, and disqualifying others for lack of sparkle. Despite my differences with Republicans during the last election cycle, I started to get excited by the voices mocking candidate Obama for affecting the optics of a celebrity, if only because that kind of backlash is necessary before we start selecting candidates based on their experience, policy agenda, and ability to govern.

Then the Republican base embraced Sarah Palin, and all the same people who mocked Obama's celebrity enthused about her star quality. One step forward, three steps back. Gene Healy's book The Cult of the Presidency (magazine version here) is a great first step in pushing back against this trend. Unfortunately, I don't know what the right second step is.