Month: February 2011

by Zoe Pollock

Malise Ruthven looks at why cartoons of Muhammad are still inciting violence, but takes it with a grain of salt:

While it may be true that traditional notions of free speech or expression, as displayed in material media such as paint, ink, canvas, and paper are under threat from militants insistent on denying the variegated richness of the Islamic artistic heritage, the dangers should not be exaggerated. The electronic word and image are not easily suppressed—especially if authors and artists choose to remain anonymous. The liveliest depictions of Muhammad currently available are on the “Jesus and Mo” website, an online comic strip about religion that has until now attracted little criticism or vitriol: no artist signature, no terrorist target.

by Zoe Pollock

Ed Yong reports on the fascinating case of a bird that raises another bird's offspring because evolutionarily it's easier than not:

Some battles aren’t worth fighting. The rewards of victory are too small or the costs of combat are too high. Good generals know this, and so does evolution. The natural world is full of intense arms races between predators and prey, hosts and parasites. If one side evolves a small advantage, the other counters it with an adaptation of their own, and both species are locked in an ever-escalating stalemate. But sometimes, these arms races never take off. The costs of engagement just aren’t worth it.

by Zoe Pollock

Paula Sadok catches up with Cairo's past, and its former Jewish population:

Before the creation of Israel in 1948, the Jewish community in Egypt boasted 80,000 members. In three waves of immigration—after the 1948 war, after the Suez Crisis in 1956, and after the Six-Day War in 1967—the community has dwindled to its current population of fewer than 40.

by Zoe Pollock

"Late Ripeness" by Czeslaw Milosz:

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
ready now to be described better than they were before.

I was not separated from people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget – I kept saying – that we are all children of the King.

For where we come from there is no division
into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.

We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part
of the gift we received for our long journey.

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago –
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef – they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.

(Image: Saint Redundus, the saint of the homeless and unemployed, by Various and Gould)

by Conor Friedersdorf

In the current issue of National Review, Daniel Foster has a long piece on Pigford vs. Glickman. As Wikipedia notes, the Pigford case is "a class action lawsuit against the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), alleging racial discrimination in its allocation of farm loans and assistance between 1983 and 1997. The lawsuit ended with a settlement in which the U.S. government agreed to pay African American farmers US$50,000 each if they had attempted to get USDA help but failed. To date, almost US$1 billion has been paid or credited to the farmers under the settlement's consent decree."

As Salon explains, the case is a matter of public controversy largely because Andrew Breitbart has become obsessed with it. His allegation is that the payout is rife with fraud and political corruption. I haven't mentioned the matter before because having witnessed Breitbart's carelessness with facts, the egregiously sloppy journalism he publishes on a daily basis, and his hubristic, immoral, "ends justify the means" approach to activism, I have serious doubts about his integrity and a strong conviction that his ethical compass is broken. More to the point, I just can't trust a damn thing he publishes, and having discredited himself on a national scale in the Shirley Sherrod case, a lot of others agree.

But I've enjoyed Foster's work for awhile now, and critical as I've been of a couple colleagues he works with at NR, the publication retains the ability to publish solid pieces, especially the ones prepped for print.

Although I can't personally vouch for the facts in his Pigford story, having never reported on the matter myself, it reads like a solid piece – one that raises serious questions worthy of scrutiny. Alas, it is behind National Review's paywall, and that presents a problem: As press coverage of the Pigford case increases – Breitbart is touting it singlemindedly at CPAC, and the stories are inevitable – the conversation is starting to focus is on the man whose heat-to-light ratio detracts from a cool-headed assessment of facts more than anyone in America. One purpose of this post is to suggest that we'd all be better off focusing the discussion on the NR piece, paywall or no. Certainly, liberal bloggers writing about the matter should acquire access to it. I'd be curious to see if they have a persuasive rebuttal. If so, I'll air it here. And if not – if the Foster piece has everything right – the story definitely merits attention.

Here's a very brief summary:

– Everyone agrees that between 1983 and 1997, the USDA discriminated against black farmers.

– The class action lawsuit made eligible for compensation farmers or aspiring farmers whose interests were harmed due to USDA discrimination. (There were other requirements too, but forget that for a moment.)

– According to Foster's piece, a 1997 census study found a total of 18,500 black farmers nationwide.

– Yet there are nearly 100,000 claimants in the Pigford case.

There's a lot more to Foster's story, and this matter generally. But that gap between the number of claiments and the total number of black farmers in America is what struck me. If accurate it suggests widespread fraud.

A word about the bigger picture.

There are conservative bloggers expressing outrage that Americans haven't been told more about this story. It's worth pondering that reaction. It's understandable: the misuse of public funds is always a legitimate story, and I hope this one gets reported out if that's what has happened. But the fact that Americans have never heard of the Pigford case before now is most damning because it means we were utterly ignorant of the fact that the federal government was discriminating against thousands of blacks for almost 15 years, and as recently as the late 1990s! That is far more troubling than the possibility that private citizens perpetrated fraud on a poorly conceived settlement (though it doesn't excuse it).

One narrative taking hold is that the Pigford case is about political correctness – that the fraud is "reparations in disguise," and is enabled by a mainstream media willing to look the other way rather than inform the public about an injustice. Anyone spreading that narrative ought to remember that although the federal government's racism against some Pigford claimants has been written about some in the media, it remains an obscure story known to very few people – and most of them didn't show any interest in the story until it fit into the narrative of PC excess and the left buying off votes.

There's nothing wrong or unnatural about political adversaries tuning into a story when their opponents may be guilty of corruption. A rare benefit of partisanship is that it creates an incentive to expose bad behavior. And the rest of us shouldn't care about their motives insofar as it affects how we go forward– if fraud has been perpetrated on a large scale, better that we learn about it if only to prevent the same sort of thing in the future. Had the federal government discriminated for years against black farmers, however, then paid them off efficiently and without fraud, the vast majority of people in the conservative movement – and most of America along with them  – would've ignored the whole Pigford matter entirely. Is that the mark of a society overrun by political correctness?

Surely outrage is warranted for the initial discrimination.

So often, stories like this turn into conversational train wrecks. I see one coming – and an opportunity to do better. Let's treat this like a complicated matter, one where even people writing in good faith can make mistakes, making it a perfect fit for the vetting function that comes from honest back-and-forths in the blogosphere. Let's make it about determining the truth rather than point-scoring – whatever happened in Pigford, it needn't say anything definitive about the left or the right generally. Let's use Foster's piece as our point of reference on the right, rather than Big Government work, just as we'd reference a New York Times story rather than one appearing in the National Enquirer, even if they were in substantial agreement. There's got to be a better way of getting at the truth than watching Andrew Breitbart and Media Matters snipe back and forth at one another.

And although it's in no way obligated to do so, it would be awesome if NR put this one piece online for the sake of the conversation.

by Patrick Appel

A fantastic animation of a Stephen Pinker talk on language:

by Zoe Pollock

Lisa Miller argues it's all in the Bible:

The man lingers over his lover’s eyes and hair, on her teeth, lips, temples, neck, and breasts, until he arrives at “the mount of myrrh.” He rhapsodizes. “All of you is beautiful, my love,” he says. “There is no flaw in you.” The girl returns his lust with lust. “My lover thrust his hand through the hole,” she says, “and my insides groaned because of him.” This ode to sexual consummation can be found in—of all places—the Bible. It is the Song of Solomon, a poem whose origins likely reach back to the pagan love songs of Egypt more than 1,200 years before the birth of Jesus.

She quotes the author of a new book on biblical sex and desire, Jennifer Wright Knust:

The Bible doesn’t have to be an invader, conquering bodies and wills with its pronouncements and demands. It can also be a partner in the complicated dance of figuring out what it means to live in bodies that are filled with longing.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Here's a bold statement by Matt Welch:

I am willing to give Tim Rutten or anyone else $1,000 in Ron Paul-backed currency if they can prove to me there are fewer total journalism jobs (or total journalist-compensation) in 2011 than there were 2006, or 2001, or 1996.

I have no idea what those comparisons would show.

by Conor Friedersdorf

 

(Hat tip: Tony Comstock)

by Zoe Pollock

Josh Rothman challenges Jesse Bering's theory of mind and God:

If belief in God is instinctual, then how do atheists overcome that instinct? I don't believe in God – but I don't find myself fighting some built-in tendency to personify the universe. … His idea is that all people are religious the way children are religious – that is, in a literal, animist way. … Being religious, though, isn't about having an imaginary friend; it's about understanding the meaning of life. Victor Frankl called his book Man's Search for Meaning, not Man's Search for a Personality Up There in the Clouds. If there's an instinct at work, it's the instinct to make sense of things. That's why it's a mistake for Bering to dismiss theology: Systematic theology is about making sense of the universe, and it's at the heart what makes religion useful.

My guess? It's the search for meaning, not the search for personality, that makes religion part of the fabric of human life. Aristotle called it "the desire to understand." That's a desire we all share – atheist and religious alike.