Month: January 2011

I guess it's what the Interwebs are for. But I will be afraid to sleep tonight.

A reader watching Palin's "blood libel" video, for some reason, thought of this. Yes, she does what she wants. And in a free country, she can keep on doing it.

A reader writes:

What I found to be the most brilliant part of Obama's speech was when he spoke of how we all react when a member of our own family dies unexpectedly and we start to question ourselves and our behavior before the person died, asking for example whether we were kind enough to that person or showed sufficient love. I think it was his way of saying that those of us who have been asking the same questions but about our society are doing something entirely appropriate and having nothing to be ashamed of.

It was almost like what great creative artists often do in repressive regimes, which is to convey their ideas through allegory so that they cannot be accused of addressing a prohibited political topic or making a prohibited political point. Obama used our reflexive self-questioning in the face of personal family tragedy to bless our doing the same in the face of a social tragedy.

Civil and honest. The lies must end along with the demonization.

The spirit of John Waters lives:

Baltimore police say a man dressed as a woman has been impersonating an officer and conducting traffic stops. The most recent bogus stop was on Sunday, when police say the man stopped a woman and made off with her driver’s license. Police say the man was wearing knee-high boots and a shoulder-length black wig…

Erin Hartz tells The Baltimore Sun that she was pulled over by the man last month. She says he looked at her driver’s license and registration and warned her not to speed. Hartz says the man was wearing a ginger bob-style wig, an oversized police hat and pleated pants that “poofed” at the hips.

Know hope.

Conor Williams grasps the theological-political core of Obama's speech. The strangest feature of the far right's belief that Obama is a Muslim is that his speeches over the past three years have been arguably the most consistently Christian of any recent president. To see the permanence of evil and the resilience of hope at the same time is, well, audacious. And very Christian.

A reader submits a somewhat NSFW video:

You jumped on this song as a MHB when it first came out, and I know it's been overplayed since then, but this is excellent.

Greg Mankiw has produced a provocative paper on economic theory:

Let me propose the following principle: People should get what they deserve. A person who contributes more to society deserves a higher income that reflects those greater contributions.

Society permits him that higher income not just to incentivize him, as it does according to utilitarian theory, but because that income is rightfully his. This perspective is, I believe, what Robert Nozick, Milton Friedman, and other classically liberal writers have in mind. We might call it the Just Deserts Theory.

I am drawn to this approach in part by reflecting on some of the public anger that we see over some very high incomes. My sense is that people are rarely outraged when high incomes go to those who obviously earned them. When we see Steven Spielberg make blockbuster movies, Steve Jobs introduce the iPod, David Letterman crack funny jokes, and J.K Rowling excite countless young readers with her Harry Potter books, we don’t object to the many millions of dollars they earn in the process. The high incomes that generate anger are those that come from manipulating the system. The CEO who pads the corporate board with his cronies and the banker whose firm survives only by virtue of a government bailout do not seem to deserve their multimillion dollar bonuses. The public perceives them (correctly or incorrectly) as getting more than they contributed to society. 

He concludes that "we should focus not on the marginal utility of different individuals but on the congruence between their contributions and their compensation." In a dissent, Yglesias notes that the successful people Mankiw cites depend on a particular type of copyright law to maintain their wealth, and notes that "intuitions about desert aren’t very conservative economisty. Normal people are always talking about how professional baseball players don’t deserve to get paid more than teachers." Karl Smith objects too.

Me less so. I think what Mankiw is driving at is that great wealth is not necessarily unjust, that it can represent simply greater talent or hard work or innovation – and that this should be celebrated, not regarded as inherently suspicious. On all those counts I'm with him. The problem is that the market doesn't measure justice, it measures how successfully someone supplies a demand. And I'm loath to conflate entirely that kind of success with some kind of "justice".

The benefit of the doubt should go to the successful. But that is not saying success and desert are always the same thing, even when no shenanigans are involved.

Like the Dish, Serwer finds it "kind of mystifying that homophobia remains enough of a litmus test for the Republican presidential nomination that Pawlenty would feel obligated to say he supports putting DADT back in place." Furthermore:

[T]here's no possible way to justify reinstating DADT using the reasons many opposed repeal, such as preventing chaos or distractions in the military during wartime. Could anything be more chaotic than repealing DADT for a couple of years, than abruptly reinstating it? All those servicemembers who had revealed their sexual orientation would have to be ejected.

Roger Ebert picks 'em. Of those he notes and I've seen, "Joan Rivers: Piece of Work" was the most chilling. Rarely has the hollowness of modern life been portrayed as vividly. In some ways, one feels for those destroyed by celebrity more than those, like Rivers, whose lives seem meaningless without it. She terrifies me.