Month: September 2010

by Patrick Appel

In response to Conor's post, many readers have written in to recommend PBS's Frontline documentary on the topic, which we linked to several months ago. A soldier writes:

I want to say that the soldiers on the ground know about this and know it is rampant. We used to call it “man love days.” We noted that attacks on our base did not occur during these events as all the men with money (Talibs) were engaging in this kind of activity. It is truly a disturbing sight to see something like this occurring and you can’t do anything about it. We were told it was a “cultural thing” and it wasn’t our business.

Another reader:

I was an aid worker in Afghanistan for a couple of years, so I certainly know the culture they are speaking about.

The bottom line is, women are off limits. You are going to see very few women once they reach the age of puberty, especially if you live in conservative parts of the country. And to mess with a woman is to risk your life: this is a part of the world that practices honor killings. So, you have an environment in which there are communities of men, with sexual urges, but who cannot have affairs with women. So what happens? The introduction of the "tea boy" (this is what I heard this position called in offices — a young boy who fetches tea, but also provides other services). Someone quoted to me part of a Pashtun song: "There is a boy across the river with an ass like a peach/ but alas, I cannot swim."

Another:

The Kite Runner, Charlie Wilson's War, and Where Men Win Glory: Pat Tillman Story all discuss this type of behavior. Just about every book I've ever read about Afghanistan has touched on the issue of boy lovers.

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

I'm currently a Ph.D. candidate in pure mathematics, and in my free time I like to think about how mathematics and mathematicians are portrayed in popular culture.  Usually, both are portrayed poorly.  For example, if everything you knew about a mathematician you learned from films like A Beautiful Mind or Pi, it would not be entirely unreasonably for you to assume that mathematicians are socially maladjusted and crazy.  Of course, the reality is much less dramatic: mathematicians are plenty of regular folks who study mathematics.  Of course, the media loves it when a mathematician does something strange, as when Grigori Perelman famously declined the Fields Medal in 2006 and the cash prize associated with his solution to the Poincare Conjecture, but such behavior is not so common, even among mathematicians.  On average we may be more eccentric than the general population, but it would be nice if we could claim some degree of normalcy in the way we are portrayed.

Of course, the fact that mathematicians are frequently portrayed as being somehow separate from the general population may have something to do with the way mathematics itself is represented.  For many people, math seems like an impenetrable subject that only a chosen few are able to understand, and it may therefore seem natural to ascribe to those chosen few certain characteristics that one can then point to as explaining why one person is good at math and another isn't.  Most people also don't have a very good idea of what exactly it is that a mathematician does (hint: it does not involve multiplying really big numbers together in one's head). 

Unfortunately, much of this can be attributed to the way mathematics is currently taught: by and large, students are taught a collection of algorithms for solving problems, but are rarely given insights into how these algorithms developed, what problems they were originally used to solve, or how different techniques are related.  Students learn to solve certain classes of problems by applying certain fixed steps (partially, I suppose, because such things are easier to test), but they are rarely given the opportunity to practice creative problem solving.  As a teacher, I have seen the results of this flawed system: when students become stuck on a problem, they are often too eager to throw up their hands in frustration, rather than buckle down and try to think creatively (in the words of Dan Meyer, students often lack patient problem solving skills).  Many students don't even think of mathematics as a subject that requires creativity, which is truly unfortunate. 

Anyway, these are issues I enjoy thinking about, and I explore them frequently on a website called Math Goes Pop!.  It is essentially a place where I can ruminate on the intersection between math and pop culture, and there my disdain for the way math and mathematicians are portrayed in popular culture is tackled in more detail.

by Patrick Appel

Jamelle Bouie reviews Kos's new book, American Taliban:

Like Liberal Fascism, American Taliban is another entry in the tired genre of "my political opponents are monsters." Indeed, Moulitsas begins the book with the Goldbergian declaration that "in their tactics and on the issues, our homegrown American Taliban are almost indistinguishable from the Afghan Taliban." And he fills the remaining 200-plus pages with similar accusations. In the chapter on power, Moulitsas writes that "the American Taliban seek a tyranny of the believers in which the popular will, the laws of the land, and all of secular society are surrendered to their clerics and ideologues." Which is, of course, why these American Taliban participate in the democratic system and hew to the outcomes of elections. Later in the chapter, Moulitsas argues that the right-wing hates democracy — they "openly dream of their own regressive brand of religious dictatorship" — loves war, fears sex, and openly despises women and gays. In the chapter on "war," Moulitsas calls Rep. Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota a "high priestess of the American Taliban" — a veritable Mullah Omar, it seems! — and in the final chapter on "truth," Moulitsas concludes by noting the foundational "kinship" between the two Talibans.

Serwer responds:

I think there's a big temptation for liberals to play the idiotic "you know who else liked sandwiches, Hitler!" game with conservatives, but it's a bit like trying to imitate Limbaugh-esque talk radio.

Kos unsuccessfully tries to rebut an old post by Andrew here. His main point:

America is blessed with a well-established system of norms and laws that hold most of the Right's violent tendencies in check. But that's a matter of government, not a matter of their innate desire to wage violence on people and ideas they deplore.

Kos uses a couple figures on the far right – such as Pat Robinson – to smear half of America. Calling political opponents terrorists is so disgusting and so obviously beyond the pale it hardly requires rebutting. Andrew's book The Conservative Soul is mostly about corrosive nature of fundamentalism and how the American right has been infected by it. The book was a serious attempt to wrestle with religious and ideological extremes. Kos accusing Andrew of not looking hard enough at the threat of religious intolerance is laughable. Here's how Kos describes the purpose of his book:

Conservatives will hate it, for obvious reasons. Weenie liberals will hate it, for obvious reasons. A bunch of "serious people" will tsk tsk the lack of civility in our discourse — now that a liberal is throwing the punches. And some people will appreciate that I'm throwing those punches.

Because look, this book, ultimately, is a big "fuck you" to every conservative who has ever accused us of wanting the terrorists to win. Why would we? The reasons I hate the crazy Right is the same reason I hate Jihadists — their fetishization of violence, their theocratic tendencies, their disrespect for women, their hatred of gays, their fear of the "other", their defiance of scientific progress and education, and their attempts to hijack popular culture.

I've no problem with pundits – liberal or conservative – coming out swinging. My problem with polemics like Liberal Fascism and American Taliban is they don't accomplish anything besides juicing book sales and temporarily riling up like-minded folk.

After wading though political opinion online for a couple years, I've come to the conclusion that you can't ever really "win" an argument online. No matter how sound your logic or forceful your writing someone, somewhere will continue to disagree. But you can arm your fellow travelers and opponents with better or worse argumentative ammunition. When Mark Levin calls all progressives "statists" or Kos labels conservatives "Taliban" they not merely pummeling straw-men, they are doing their readers and listeners a disservice. If someone wants to actually engage with the opposing side and try to change minds, blunt, hyperbolic labels are the among the flimsiest of rhetorical weapons. I agree entirely with Conor's earlier post:

I understand the financial incentives that cause authors and publishing houses to choose these kinds of titles. But I don't know why anyone thinking strategically about political impact cheers them. It's a marketing strategy that basically guarantees a book will never be read by anyone who disagrees with it. The emotional satisfaction some people get from extreme vitriol is an astonishingly powerful driver of counterproductive political behavior. It's a marketing strategy that basically guarantees a book will never be read by anyone who disagrees with it. The emotional satisfaction some people get from extreme vitriol is an astonishingly powerful driver of counterproductive political behavior.

by Patrick Appel

Nate Silver is in the same ballpark as Bernstein:

Health care dominated the political discourse for about nine months; it seems implausible that it hasn’t played some role. But [Jay Cost] hasn’t offered much in the way of proof — nor is there much of it to be had: overdetermined phenomena usually beget underdetermined attempts to explain them.

by Patrick Appel

A reader points me to this Cary Tennis post on engagement rings from several years back:

We all know that in spite of social progress men still make more money than women and thus wield more power. So requesting that he buy this ring, although it sounds old-fashioned, may also be her way of asking that he recognize this continuing social and economic inequality; the act of buying the ring is a symbolic giving up of his unfairly derived power, a laying himself bare. It is also a symbolic sacrifice, much as one might spill wine or burn the flesh of sheep or goats. It makes ethereal beauty of a gross material good, as it were, much as the pressure of the earth itself over millions of years makes diamond of coal. It is a kind of alchemy, if you will: The man willingly transforms some of his economic power into a thing of beauty to adorn the woman. This could be a deeply satisfying ritual. It doesn't have to be seen as a brazen and crass gold-digging.

by Chris Bodenner

Christopher Ryan lays into McArdle's critique of his book:

Got that? Humans aren't like bonobos because we're not like bonobos. No way! So there! Case closed.

In addition to this somewhat embarrassing "reasoning," it's pretty clear Ms. McArdle hasn't read even the first half of the book very closely. Pages 77 and 78 contain a table listing some of the major similarities between humans and bonobos, many of them unique to these two species. Hard to imagine how she managed to miss that. In the discussion of her article, she flatly states that chimps are genetically more closely related to humans than bonobos are, which is not only just plain wrong, it's something we explain very early in the book (along with a graph, no less, on p. 62).

Agree with our thesis or disagree with it, nobody who knows anything about primatology would argue that chimps are genetically closer to us than bonobos are (they're equidistant) or that humans and bonobos don't have a great deal in common—particularly in terms of our sexual behavior and anatomy.

(Hat tip: Savage)

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I'm not sure if you've covered anything other than Christian music here (I may have missed some other posts), but for many Jews, especially Jews from an Orthodox background (me included), a Matisyahu concert is a much more spiritual experience than a synagogue service. And his work stands on its own as excellent reggae as well.

Matisyahu talked about his faith with the A.V. Club in 2006:

AVC: Some have talked about your video for "Youth" and your live show as being pitched to the mainstream instead of focused on the Jewish community.

M: Well, it is. I would agree with that. I never aimed for the Jewish community. I aimed for a mainstream audience, because that's the world that I come out of. I spent 23 years in a secular lifestyle, going to Phish concerts and reggae shows and hip-hop shows and listening to that style of music. My focus has really been on the mainstream people: non-Jews and Jews who aren't necessarily religious. And while there are definitely a lot of religious Jews who get something out of it, they're not my main focus.

AVC: So instead of putting reggae into Jewish popular music, you're putting your own spiritual understanding into reggae.

M: Yes.

by Conor Friedersdorf

In my post on how professional elites are recruited and hired, the line I wrote that's getting the most attention is as follows:

Though it isn't defensible, it is unsurprising that a lot of people who eschew offers to work at these firms, favoring public sector work instead, imagine that they are making an enormous personal sacrifice by taking government work. The palpable sense of entitlement some of these public sector folks exude is owed partly to how few of 'our best and brightest' do eschew the big firm route (due partly to increasing debt levels among today's graduates, no doubt).

A reader writes:

Can you explain more about why it is not "defensible" for people who have turned down the big law/corporate route for government to feel some pride about it?  I mean, people who do that shouldn't be smug pricks about it, but if you're giving up money and professional standing for public service, you're not allowed to console yourself with just a little self-righteousness? Anonymous please, but I'm a Harvard law grad who was a summer associate and turned down all my offers for a government job that paid less than half the salary (which made my peers think I was defective in some way), and I'm still in Club Fed eight years later.  I made the right choice for me — decent hours, more substantive and interesting work and responsibility, usually on the side of good instead of evil, and my wife and I make enough in our govt jobs that we have to worry about the AMT.  But as my friends from law school, some of whom were idiots, make partner and sprint ahead in the money chase, am I showing a sense of entitlement if I feel a tinge of envy? The self-righteousness is what gets me out the door in the morning….

I am very sympathetic to this person, and I must concede that self-righteousness can be a good thing if it gets him out of the door in the morning. In my experience, however, an excess of this attitude causes some of the better compensated workers in DC and its environs (state capitals too, for that matter) to conceive of their very employment in the public sector as a favor to the taxpayer. The core of the problem is that rather than comparing themselves to their fellow Americans, appreciating that they're better compensated than the vast majority of them for doing relatively enjoyable work, and being cognizant of their privileged position and the special trust it entails, this subset of professionals compare themselves to a tiny elite, correctly judge that they're worse off, and justify all manner of behavior accordingly.

To wit, another reader writes:

What you completely left out of your rant about “elites” is their grades and the difficulty of those programs. Firms that wine and dine summer associates don’t just hire any schmuck who gets into Harvard and skates by with Cs because his dad is a senator. They’re wining and dining the top tier of honor students in some of the most difficult and renowned programs in the world. People who can get a 4.0 at Ivy League grad schools are people who can work seven days a week, twelve hours a day, for months on end, and not complain about it. Doing what these people do is so brutal that movies have been made about it. If you resent those elites, if you really can’t grasp why people will spend so much to have them on board, it’s because you don’t know what it’s like to work that hard nor do you know what those people are really capable of.

And for those elite people working in the public sector really is a huge sacrifice—not just financially, but mentally. They’re the best and brightest, and when they go into the public sector, everyone around them is not. They’re getting paid crap for putting up with the people who couldn’t hack it in the big firm jobs. Meanwhile they know their career advancement is limited because being in government keeps them from doing the fund-raising work that gets political appointees those really juicy jobs. And no matter where they go half the people they meet automatically assume they’re just lazy crooked asshole government workers. Why should people degrade themselves like that when they can work in the private sector and be celebrated?

One thing that's surprised me as I've watched folks in my age cohort move from college to professional schools to highly paid careers is how rapidly they shift their baseline for what is normal. People who were happily buying Natural Light and eating microwaved Maruchan Ramen a few years back earnestly insist that their $165,000 salary isn't so much when you think about it, what with taxes, the cost of living in their city, the expense of dry cleaning… and that they really need a doorman building ("Do you know how hard it is to get packages delivered when you work 80 hours a week!") and a fancy car ("I can't show up to work events in a Hyundai"). I am talking about people who haven't even had kids yet.

I understand how this blinkered assessment of reality happens, and how it spreads in social circles so that even law school friends who aren't making big money find themselves thinking of big firm salaries as normal. I also see how this unhealthy attitude helps explain the middle-aged DC lawyers who started out in politics to do good, congratulated themselves for forgoing big law firm salaries, and justified their eventual turn at the public trough by thinking, "I know how the game works, I've sacrificed more than most to do good work, and sure, my 26-year-old self would've considered what I'm about to do unethical, but I'm tired of being the only one who isn't playing the game, and now I've got a family to think about."

Below the fold, other reactions to that passage:

One reader writes:

Why the snide tone?  In fact, it is a sacrifice (for lawyers, and, frankly, for just about anyone) to work in the public sector, given, at least as a baseline, that my work hours are roughly equivalent to those of my colleagues in private practice, my salary a fraction of theirs, and my income-to-debt ratio inequitable by comparison.  I don't think I have a "palpable sense of entitlement," though given your analysis of the private sector, it stands to reason that I'd be entitled to one if I did.  (Not to mention that my work is constitutionally mandated, and so, along with United States postal workers, federal legislators, the federal judiciary, and the President, I think I have a decent foundation for the sense that what I do matters — regardless of what the kids over at Wachtell Lipton are up to.)

And yet another reader:

It is difficult to offer analysis without understanding what you mean: how is this "palpable sense of entitlement" exhibited, and are you suggesting that, even if such a sentiment exists, it somehow impairs the public sector work performed by these professionals?  How so?  And if you simply don't like what you perceive as the supposed attitude  of Ivy League graduates in the public sector, but that persona does not adversely affect the quality of their work, then what is your point?

I disagree with both your premises and your inferences.  First, I know few people who feel that "our best and our brightest" necessarily are represented by holders of Ivy League degrees.  Many of the "best and brightest" people I know went elsewhere for their degrees; some of them possess no post-secondary degree at all; and some just happen to have Ivy League degrees.  Among the latter cohort, I never have found it more typical to find a "palpable sense of entitlement" than among the others.     

And what exactly is your foundation for asserting that "no doubt" these supposedly entitled professionals are "eschew[ing] the big firm route" "due partly to increasing debt levels among today's graduates"? Can you  show that more of this "eschewing" is going on today, statistically, than, say, among the Harvard Law School graduates of 1985?   Due to aid that is structured as grants rather than loans, my children will graduate with less debt than either my husband or I did.  My progeny attending Ivy League schools have received by far the most generous grants compared to siblings attending other schools.  Are proportionally more Ivy League professional school graduates even choosing the law firm route than in years past?  Indeed, can you show that offers of employment both in big firms and in the public sector even are being sought by the same new graduates, let alone weighed equally in their minds?  Your assumption is that a new graduate will seek both types of employment, either foregoing public sector work merely for money or martyring herself thereafter by lording that "choice" over those who do not possess Ivy League degrees.  Even the personality type who is inclined thus to crow probably doesn't have either the audience or the time once engaged in real day-to-day professional practice on behalf of the government.      

I have been lucky.  I have been able to sustain a family and build my children's educational funds by doing what I love to do.  We have never possessed or wanted lavish things.  I did not "eschew the big firm route": I knew it was not for me, and I knew that government pay would be the price of my career calling. I never imagined I was "making an enormous personal sacrifice by taking government work"–which was, by the way, far more difficult for me to find, as a new law school graduate,  than a law firm job would have been.   It would have been an enormous personal sacrifice to do a kind of work I did not want to do, and in which I had no intellectual interest, for the sake of a bigger paycheck.   

I seriously considered only two career choices: joining the FBI as a Special Assistant, or working as a prosecutor.  Neither I nor any of the hundreds of public sector attorneys I have worked with has made a show of "eschew[ing] offers to work at these firms": as with many professional jobs in the public sector,  there exists no law firm cognate for what I wanted to do with my professional life.  Do you truly think Ivy League graduates–or anyone else in daily professional practice–make a habit of exuding "entitlement" as they carry on with their work?  Do you think anyone cares where I got my degrees?  In twenty-five years of practice, no one has even asked.    

Thanks to everyone who wrote in on this one, whether to agree or to set me straight.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Joel Brinkley writing in The San Francisco Chronicle:

Western forces fighting in southern Afghanistan had a problem. Too often, soldiers on patrol passed an older man walking hand-in-hand with a pretty young boy. Their behavior suggested he was not the boy's father. Then, British soldiers found that young Afghan men were actually trying to "touch and fondle them," military investigator AnnaMaria Cardinalli told me. "The soldiers didn't understand."

All of this was so disconcerting that the Defense Department hired Cardinalli, a social scientist, to examine this mystery. Her report, "Pashtun Sexuality," startled not even one Afghan. But Western forces were shocked – and repulsed. For centuries, Afghan men have taken boys, roughly 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. Some research suggests that half the Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and other southern towns are bacha baz, the term for an older man with a boy lover. Literally it means "boy player." The men like to boast about it. "Having a boy has become a custom for us," Enayatullah, a 42-year-old in Baghlan province, told a Reuters reporter. "Whoever wants to show off should have a boy."

…As for Karzai, an American who worked in and around his palace in an official capacity for many months told me that homosexual behavior "was rampant" among "soldiers and guys on the security detail. They talked about boys all the time." He added, "I didn't see Karzai with anyone. He was in his palace most of the time." He, too, declined to be identified.

In Kandahar, population about 500,000, and other towns, dance parties are a popular, often weekly, pastime. Young boys dress up as girls, wearing makeup and bells on their feet, and dance for a dozen or more leering middle-aged men who throw money at them and then take them home. A recent State Department report called "dancing boys" a "widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape."

Am I the only one who hasn't ever read about this?