Month: March 2011

Reihan isn't nostalgic for the past:

[Rob] Horning contrasts the “security that once came from long-term employment with large firms and the safety net supplied jointly by employers and the state” with the post-Fordist, neoliberal order created by “deregulation, outsourcing, globalization and total worker flexibility,” and I think it’s safe to say he believes that much has been lost. I don’t want to caricature Horning’s view, as I’m sure he understands that Fordist solidarity was built on exclusion, that entrenched gender inequality was a foundation of “family wage” social democracy, etc. And I recognize that my highly idiosyncratic subjective experience has inclined me towards preferring the new capitalism to the old.

Horning responds that he doesn't "think we can or should try to turn back the clock":

[T]he new forms of social relations offer certain freedoms at the cost of having to commodify oneself at a deeper level than wage slavery required, with more of everyday life subsumed into capitalism, made business like, subject to its procedures of rational calculation. Some of what stems from that is good: At times work is more harmonious with one’s overall life, at times it feels good to have the market assess the quality and extent of one’s sociality, at times the flexibility increasingly expected of us prompts us to be and feel more creative, at times our self-consciousness leads to a rewarding consideration of what other people are thinking, and not just what they are thinking of us.

But the negative aspects are inseparable from those positive aspects. 

Some welcome news:

Colonel Gaddafi's regime has sent one of its most trusted envoys to London for confidential talks with British officials, the Guardian can reveal. Mohammed Ismail, a senior aide to Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam, visited London in recent days, British government sources familiar with the meeting have confirmed.

The contacts with Ismail are believed to have been one of a number between Libyan officials and the west in the last fortnight, amid signs that the regime may be looking for an exit strategy.

That, of course, would be the ideal solution. But who on earth would then take over?

“The idea of a grand showdown on spending had long been a staple of conservative analysis. Even before Reagan’s inaugural, he had been approached by one prominent conservative who urged him to force a showdown over the debt ceiling and simply refuse to sign on to one until the Democratic Congress reined in its spending plans. Reagan rejected this idea with a comment I wish I had understood better at the time. The conservative activist who told me that story was convinced that Reagan would have won such a showdown. For fifteen years I agreed with him, but I was to learn something about the American people that too many conservatives don’t appreciate. They want their leaders to have principled disagreements but they want these disagreements to be settled in constructive ways. That is not, of course, what our own activists were telling us. They were all gung ho for a brutal fight over spending and taxes. We mistook their enthusiasm for the views of the American public.” – Newt Gingrich.

 The secretary of defense doesn't sound happy:

The challenge of governing Libya after Gadhafi goes is a daunting one, in Gates’ telling: balancing tribal interests and weaving together a coherent nation. Those tribes will play a “major role” in any future Libyan politics. Hmm, what costly, long wars already fought by the U.S. military does that sound like?

Gates … evinced the faintest confidence that the Libyan rebels would succeed in toppling Gadhafi. The opposition “is a misnomer,” he said, “very disparate, very scattered,” with each faction possessing its own agenda, and militarily “lacking command and control and lacking organization.” No wonder he doesn’t want the U.S. involved in helping it rise to power, or govern, reminding legislators of the “enormous human and fiscal cost” of the nation-building campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the opposition wants training and guns, “someone else” can provide it, he said, not U.S. forces.

Thank God for Bob Gates.

"'Ma feesh Sarkozy al yawm.' 'There was no Sarkozy today.'” Meaning no air support," – Ryan Calder, a sociologist blogging from Libya.

Twenty-five years of Pixar in five minutes:

Amy Davidson finds a historical precedent for Syria's awkward scene.

A reader writes:

Hang in there.  I – a mere academic weasel in the field of physics – got my EB1A green card a year ago. Clearly, you qualify. You've published, you've been cited, you're a leader in your field, and I'm sure you have a few awards. I guess your I-693 may freak them out a bit, but they can't refuse you for that anymore.

I know the anxieties that come with the green card.

They sent me an RFE, clearly mixing up my case with someone else's, even with their name on the forms. And they thought that I was an economist instead of a physicist. Idiots. Made me bounce around for a week or two. But, after that, I got the card, and last November I got married on Aruba to my American wife – without the USCIS knowing about it. I like it better that way. My personal life is none of their business. This is America. Land of the free.

Again: hang in there. And thanks for posting the view from my window captured an hour before my wedding.

Thank God someone still does: