Month: November 2010

David Frum's piece in the NYT magazine is well worth your time – about as elegant and as devastating a critique of current Republicanism as you can find in one place. This is where he challenges the most:

Too often, conservatives dupe themselves. They wrap themselves in closed information systems based upon pretend information. In this closed information system, banks can collapse without injuring the rest of the economy, tax cuts always pay for themselves and Congressional earmarks cause the federal budget deficit. Even the market collapse has not shaken some conservatives out of their closed information system. It enfolded them more closely within it.

This is how to understand the Glenn Beck phenomenon.

Every day, Beck offers alternative knowledge — an alternative history of the United States and the world, an alternative system of economics, an alternative reality. As corporate profits soar, the closed information system insists that the free-enterprise system is under assault. As prices slump, we are warned of imminent hyperinflation. As black Americans are crushed under Depression-level unemployment, the administration’s policies are condemned by some conservatives as an outburst of Kenyan racial revenge against the white overlord.

Meanwhile, Republican officeholders who want to explain why they acted to prevent the collapse of the U.S. banking system can get no hearing from voters seized with certainty that a bank collapse would have done no harm to ordinary people. Support for TARP has become a career-ender for Republican incumbents, and we shall see what it does to Mitt Romney, the one national Republican figure who still defends TARP.

Chait applauds.

Video courtesy of Sady Doyle, who marvels that "people will seriously not stop making sexy robot girls."

The fembot, and the weird but unignorable demand for it, so precisely encapsulates the worst fears of women that it's maybe inevitable that women are finding ways to rewrite and inhabit her. Donna Haraway crafted an entire feminist manifesto around it. We currently live in a Lady Robot Renaissance; from the conflicted, tragic, yet perhaps inevitably stripping-and-gymnastics-centric models of Blade Runner and the ugly-pretty, performative-gender-kills heroine of Tiptree's The Girl Who Was Plugged In, we seem to have evolved a whole matriculating class of politically aware, mechanically enabled girls. They're often scary, of course. Robots usually are.

Doyle describes Roxxxy the sex doll:

She has an expression like someone who's recently been hit in the face with a very surprising brick, five “personalities” and a backstory you cannot anticipate nor shield yourself from. Once you've read the phrase “inspiration for the sex robot sprang from the September 11, 2001 attacks,” you've turned a corner in your life.

Besides the scary robot voice, Roxxxy is nothing new.

Max Rodenbeck puts the country in perspective and argues that it needs policing, not massive military force:

Yemen is not a failed state in the manner of Somalia, and not quite yet a failing one like Afghanistan or Iraq. Al-Qaeda has built a strong base there, led by capable people who harbor the ambition to export destruction as far afield as possible.

But Yemen’s jihadists should be seen in perspective. They gained a firm toehold here precisely because the inattention of Mr. Saleh’s government allowed them to. Most likely, given proper tools and motivation, his men are capable of beating al-Qaeda back again.

Amanda Ripley explains just how badly the US is doing in education:

Even if we treat each state as its own country, not a single one makes it into the top dozen contenders on the list. The best performer is Massachusetts, ringing in at No. 17. Minnesota also makes it into the upper-middle tier, followed by Vermont, New Jersey, and Washington. And down it goes from there, all the way to Mississippi, whose students—by this measure at least—might as well be attending school in Thailand or Serbia. …

Kevin Drum wants to know what Massachusetts is doing right. And Ripley dispatches the false hope that rich kids fare better:

[E]ven these relatively privileged students do not compete favorably with average students in other well-off countries. On a percentage basis, New York state has fewer high performers among white kids than Poland has among kids overall. In Illinois, the percentage of kids with a college-educated parent who are highly skilled at math is lower than the percentage of such kids among all students in Iceland, France, Estonia, and Sweden.

While defending DADT, McCain complained that "we need a thorough and complete study of the effects-not how to implement a repeal, but the effects on morale and battle effectiveness." Adam Serwer pounces:

Good news for McCain: A study of that kind was already conducted in 1993 by the Rand Corporation. That study, which looked at the effect of allowing gays and lesbians to work as police, firefighters, and serve as soldiers in foreign militaries, found that there was no danger in allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly. The reason was that while gay and lesbian servicemembers serving openly might undermine "social cohesion," it wouldn't undermine "task cohesion," which is the only factor that impacts military effectiveness. In spite of the evidence, the politics and prevailing cultural prejudices of the time resulted in the "compromise" policy of allowing gays and lesbians to serve as long as they conceal their orientation. The truth is that we've known that this kind of social diversity doesn't hurt the military since the government studied integrated units during the Korean War in the 1950s.

When it comes to foxholes, bigotry is less common than atheism. 

Jay Rosen tries to get inside the heads of national security journalists:

"We try to get information on the record, oh, we try mightily. But there are some things our sources won't tell us unless we agree to keep their identities secret (on background) and there are other things they won't tell us unless we agree not to publish them at all (off the record.) It pains us, it's frustrating, and–again–we struggle against it daily, but… if it comes down to being left in the dark completely, or agreeing to these restrictions and seeing what the government has as evidence, a good reporter will take that risk because it's better to know than to be left clueless. If you know, then you have some context for interpreting what the government is saying, publicly. And that's ultimately our job, to give our listeners the context, not just the soundbite. It kills us that we can't go on the record with some of this stuff; and we fight to get as much of it as we can into our reports. But the national security beat is a tough beat, and you have to do a lot of things you don't really want to do…"

That's what they say to themselves. But what they should be saying to themselves is: Every single thing I know that I cannot tell the public is poisoning my relationship with the public and delivering me into the arms of the state.

No contest in my book. Vampires are so gay. James Poulos compares and contrasts:

Consider the theatrical contrast between zombies and vampires. (A few people have weighed in on this subject, but not quite in the following way.) Vampire drama draws its power perversely from the depths of human hope: beyond transgressive erotic titillation, there's the semi-secret fantasy that life as a vampire can, ultimately, be successfully negotiated within the structures of normal human life. Vampires are like celebrities — gaunt, exclusive, tormented — but they're also just like us! Because, after all, they're us plus: not just alive, but too alive.

Zombies, of course, aren't too alive. They're not dead enough. And where vampire drama plays devilishly on our all-too-human hopes, zombie drama plows straight through our fears to hit us where it really hurts: at the level of human despair. Good zombie drama lowers us to the bottom of hopelessness, only to let us — when the show's over — return to the real world, in all its ordinary graces, stingingly thankful for the decencies, great and small, of nature and nature's God.

I find myself instantly hooked on "The Walking Dead", btw. I'm not the only one. And it's great that these new zombies aren't as devastatingly fast as the post-28 Days Later ones. Gives you time to bob and weave. Which gives you time for more plot.

6.77 fricking seconds – and a video to prove it.

It takes the British media to point out the obvious. Score one for Levi:

She looks, to me, like a woman who is completely inexperienced at fishing, shooting, using a boat, rock-climbing, mountaineering, and all the other folksy pursuits she’s supposed to have mastered years ago.

When the full documentary airs, we could of course discover that the trailer is misleading and that Palin can cast a beautiful fly, is a lethal shot, and knows the Alaskan wilderness like the back of her hand. But on this evidence, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Meanwhile, we have photo evidence of an RV. But no evidence that she drove it from Wasilla to LA.

“I have taken money from the Daily Beast and enjoyed it. I like Tina Brown. I have never read an issue of Newsweek, not even at the dentist,” – Choire Sicha.