Month: May 2011

Ryan Calder remembers the late photojournalist Anton Hammerl, who died in Libya:

From Anton — and from two other photographers I came to know in Libya, Samuel Aranda and João Pina – I learned that photojournalism is not just about taking riveting photos and selling them to whomever will pay. It’s about becoming familiar with the world — paying attention not just to the who-what-when-where of a breaking story framed in the apposite image, but to the why. Photojournalists — at least the best ones, like Anton and Samuel and João — know that to seal the texture and history of a moment in an image, or to capture the struggles of the everyday in a subject’s face, you need to understand the stories and the forces of society behind them.

Perhaps all journalists already know this. I’m sure all photojournalists do. But I didn’t. We sociologists may think we have a monopoly on the practice of sociology. We don’t.

The Lens has more.

(Photo: South African photographer Anton Hammerl at work, March 31.)

A reader writes:

Perry has indeed been a driving force in favor of that pre-abortion ultrasound requirement bill. By doing so, I wonder if he hasn't lost himself some votes even among pro-life women. That bill doesn't just require the woman to undergo an ultrasound prior to abortion. It requires, among other things, that the ultrasound be trans-vaginal in many cases (that is exactly what it sounds like) rather than the external sonogram most pregnant women are given.

This is because, as a practical matter, a trans-vaginal ultrasound may be the only way to meet the "medical standards" requirements of the law with respect to women who are seeking abortions in their first ten to twelve weeks of pregnancy. Furthermore, there is no exemption for victims of rape or incest. So a 14-year-old victim of rape, for instance, would have to submit to having a large probe inserted into her vagina by a stranger before she would be able to have an abortion. (And yes, Perry, along with the Texas legislature, knew exactly how big one of those probes is, since Representative Carol Alvarado brought one to the debate.) 

Don't even get me started on how many otherwise staunch conservatives Perry has pissed off in the education field.  I don't write him off as a candidate, and it's true he gives good stump. I'm sure he would put up a good showing and sucker a lot of people into voting for him. But the attack ads will write themselves.

Another writes:

You said: "Perry yesterday upped his conservative cred by signing a law requiring women to get a sonogram before receiving an abortion." And that's not all; currently in the Texas Legislature right now, Perry is lobbying against using the $9 billion+ "Rainy-Day Fund" (basically a reserve fund for the budget) to balance the state deficit this session, which is valued at anywhere between $15B and  $27B, depending on who you talk to. Why doesn't he want to use it? So he can say to the conservatives supporting him, "I balanced the budget without using the piggy bank!"

Meanwhile, the estimates of lost education jobs (including teachers) by this budget is expected to hit 90k+. One site tracking the losses already has 12k lost with only 5% of the districts reporting. Currently it looks like the legislature will use around $3B to pass its budget, kicking most of the budget woes until next session (which will be higher, due to accounting tricks they're using to pass this year's budget). And in Texas, talk of raising taxes is out of the question. Even somewhat reasonable ones such as indexing the gas tax to inflation (last time done? early 1990s) or increasing the sales tax by a penny have been quickly and forcefully shot down.

This, however, was not classified as an "emergency item" by Perry this session. Nope, that revered status went to your aforementioned sonogram bill, a bill preventing "sanctuary cities", yet another voter ID bill (we get one every two years here in TX), eminent domain, and finally, a "loser pays" tort reform bill. Nevermind the recession.

All these cuts while Texas has the leanest per capita spending rates in the nation: per capita state government expenditures are ~$3,800 . It is also second to last [pdf] in high school graduation rates, 47th [pdf] in spending per student, second worst in food insecurity rates, and one-third of the population is in poverty.

So while I would agree with your prior readers' assessments that one should not ignore Perry – he is very shrewd politically – he's got a lot of tar on his hands to deal with right now. I don't see him running until 2016, when the economy's a bit better, the deficit is mostly handled, and he doesn't have tens of thousands of teachers showing up at the state capitol to protests cuts. But I could definitely see him running then.

A demonstrator in costume looks on at the Sol Square Camp during a continued protest on May 22, 2011 in Madrid, Spain. Despite a ban on political protests ahead of Spain's regional elections, about thirty thousand demonstrators, angry with the high youth unemployment and economic policies, have gathered in the capital's central Puerta del Sol. By David Ramos/Getty Images.

David Frum reads Gabriel Sherman’s new piece on Roger Ailes. Among his takeaways:

Mitt Romney has been plugging along, off-camera, raising money, building support among business leaders and county party chairs. He has been the unspoken target of Fox’s media campaign since 2009. Romney gets scant attention in the Sherman story, except as an example of a candidate whom Ailes finds “not compelling.” Yet by any conventional definition, Romney is the Republican front-runner. Presumably he has been working hard to woo Ailes, and unsuccessfully. Ailes remains unreconciled. If Ailes throws Fox beyond a credible opponent, say  Tim Pawlenty, Ailes becomes Romney’s most lethal and important enemy. How Romney handles Ailes will tell a lot about whether he has the cunning and the toughness to be a successful president.

A reader writes:

I can understand empathy for deluded people who believe in the Rapture.  But I am indeed laughing at them.  Why?  Because Rev. Camping made it clear that the reason the Rapture is coming now is because the world is so immoral that God must end it, like he did with the flood.  And a prime cause of that immorality?  Homosexuals gaining rights and respect around the world.

These people make a point of saying that they are more moral than you, and certainly more "worthy" than you.  They are part of an elite – the very few people that God will choose to "save" while the rest of us wicked people writhe around in torturous conditions.  What they wish upon us is far more than laughter and humiliation:  it is a slow painful death, the "wages of sin" that we so richly deserve.

So no, I do NOT have sympathy for someone who delights in the thought of my torture and death while they party it up in heaven, and believe that this is all God's plan.  It is, in fact, a very dangerous idea, and one that is rightly mocked and derided.  You of all people who have come out so strongly against torture for revenge should be abhorred that torture for revenge is a central tenet of these believers.

Another writes:

End-of-the-world cults are a window into the mind of absolute certainty.  How often does a fundamentalist (insert belief here) make absolute and inflexible claim?  Answer: all the time; that's why they're called fundamentalists.  Sometimes they are non-falsifiable claims such as moral claims.  Sometimes they are historical or empirical claims, that they surround with such smoke an mirrors, that believers can't be talked out of anything.  But it is rare that they put themselves so on the line, with such a concrete prophecy that there is almost no way to rationalize their way out of.  We (and hopefully they) can now see the absurdity of their claim laid bare.  I just wish they could so clearly debunk their own anti-evolution beliefs.

I noticed that Camping's last prediction of the end of the world was 1994 – also two years into the first term a new Democratic president. 

Camping has yet to respond to his followers or the public in full:

[Family Radio’s international projects manager Matt] Tuter said Camping was expected to come to the Oakland, Calif.-based office Monday morning to work, but has yet to arrive. The international projects manager, who has worked with Camping for 23 years, said he has not been able to confirm with Camping that he will come to the office to comment on the situation at the set time of 5:30 p.m. PST.

Camping made a “mess” of the situation, Tuter told an on-site CP correspondent inside the Family Radio office Monday morning. … “Everything is ready, the crew is ready,” Tuter said to CP regarding Family Radio’s preparation for Camping to publicly respond.

AIPAC's executive director comes clean.

Robin Hanson mulls the words:

In my experience “I believe X” suggests that the speaker has chosen to affiliate with X, feeling loyal to it and making it part of his or her identity. The speaker is unlikely to offer much evidence for X, or to respond to criticism of X, and such criticism will likely be seen as a personal attack.

Adam Ozimek takes this a step further:

In his post Robin argued that people often convince themselves that they truly reconsider their strongly held beliefs, but what they do is false reconsideration with the real purpose of reassuring themselves and strengthening the belief. Before it was just a strong belief, but after false reconsideration it’s a strong belief that they’ve really, definitely, seriously reconsidered. But if you can’t  imagine yourself going through the day holding another set of competing beliefs than you never actually reconsidered it.

Nate Silver continues to urge caution:

[T]he margins matter as much as the victor: if Ms. Hochul wins by a single vote, that tells us almost exactly the same thing as if she loses by a single vote. Also, Ms. Hochul’s share of the vote matters: the lower Mr. Davis’s vote goes, the more we can read into the results. As I noted two weeks ago, if Ms. Hochul finishes with a vote share in the mid-to-high 40s, that would be consistent with how Democrats performed in the district in the strong Democratic years of 2006 and 2008 and is a result that Democrats could be pleased with.

Jonathan Bernstein seconds:

[W]hat everyone wants to know about NY-26 is how Medicare plays. And, if the polling is good enough, it should be possible to get at least a bit of information about that. But Silver is also right that it's really easy to read way too much into those data (for example, as he points out, those who would have supported the Democrat anyway may say that it was because of Medicare because that's what she's talking about). And what Silver doesn't mention is that knowing how Medicare plays in one place in spring 2011 doesn't necessarily predict how it will play elsewhere in November 2012. It's information, and you always want to add information, but you also have to be careful not to pay more attention to the data you happen to have than to the (potentially far more important) data you don't happen to have.

Screenshot from a vicious anti-Corwin parody website.

On the dress?

John Freeman puts the debut album in context:

[P]erhaps, Please by Pet Shop Boys is the perfect first album. Although maybe not their best (this scribe would struggle to choose between 1988’s Introspective and 1990’s Behaviour), Please is an assured and hugely successful (three million sales worldwide and counting) record containing some of their best-known songs. However, Please also acted as lift-off for Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe’s creative wanderlust. In the quarter of a century since the its release, Pet Shop Boys have shape-shifted and experimented with a range of artistic media and each one of these personas has a umbilical rooting within Please. Be it New York disco, Italian house, classic pop, understated miserabilism, pumping Eurotrash, gay anthems, experimental electronica, rock opera or even the gauche atmospherics of their current foray into ballet – all roads lead back to Please.

Thank you.