Month: June 2011

Incredible footage from yesterday.

After reading about the history of bloodletting, Yglesias wonders about our ability to tell medicine from snake oil:

I think discussions of health care economics pay far too little attention to the question of pre-modern health care. People have been earning a living as medical professionals for a long time. And yet everybody knows that the invention of actually useful medical treatments is pretty recent development. Surely this tells us something about the nature of the health care consumer’s ability to find and purchase cost effective treatments.

"Why should Lady Thatcher have any interest in meeting Palin? Even if the Iron Lady were not in such rusty health, what would be the point or purpose of any such encounter? What possible interest could she have in meeting a two-bit, half-term governor of Alaska? To ask the question is to make the answer so clear that even Palin's most deluded admirers might be able to understand it.

What, assuming the former prime minister were in the habit of receiving guests (which she is not), could they possibly talk about? One is a giant figure; the other, politically speaking, a carnival pygmy better suited to life on a second-rate reality television show," – Alex Massie.

A reader writes:

What would make the ultimate well-done Star Trek nerd video? Well, how about a Kirk/Spock slashup from the camporific Star Trek animated series, set to William Shatner's version of Pulp's "Common People"?

I'm a little in awe of this thing.  When I'm not laughing.

Some have argued that Anthony Weiner’s mistake was not to realize that what you say or write or  send online is not in some super-secret, personal dimension where the rest of the world cannot tread – but totally, irrevocably public. His delusionary sense of security and privacy came, in part, I think from the context – you’re often online in a private space and tend to regard emails or tweets like a phone call. But, of course, emails are not phone-calls or even letters. Everything has a record, especially digital photographs, and can be dispersed immediately to all four corners of the earth. (Ask yourself: would this mean anything if Weiner had merely had unrecorded sex talks with consenting adults over the phone? No: this was all about the power of a dick pic.) And the older you are, the likelier it is you may get tripped up by this, because the less likely you will be to have learned these disasters in adolescence.

But living online exactly as you live off-line doesn’t work either, as this lovely little video-ad for a new production at London’s ENO illustrates:

We have discovered a new way of living socially, and we haven’t quite figured out how to square it with our other lives. Jonathan Franzen wrote an exquisite piece about this a week or so ago. Money quote:

A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)

But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.

Hence Palin’s obsessive corralling of fans to pad her Facebook stats or swarm Wikipedia to conform reality to her insanity. And I don’t honestly believe that if Weiner were chatting up an admirer in a bar, he would have whipped out his impressive, briefed bulge or exposed his ripped, manly pecs (are you not, by the way, impressed  by how in shape these congressmen are?).

In online sex chat, you can disaggregate yourself, figuratively dismember yourself, become a body without a head (or a mind), be a pair of strained underpants, or actually send a picture of your own Favre in seconds. You can become porn. You can enjoy many of the best parts of sex without any complicating emotion or relationship or accountability. And you will not get an STD.

This is not real life. And you are not, in this interaction, a real or rounded person. You are a sexual avatar of sorts. You are your pecs; or your dick. Love is not the object here; “like” is.

The online world creates an outlet for the feelings that sexual adultery or sexual adventure create – but without actual sex, without actual intimacy, without our actual full selves. For gay men, it’s win-win – a harmless online playground where you flirt the hours away and never really get your feelings hurt and remain, as they say in the brutal jungle of online sex, “disease-free”. For straight men, it’s tougher to find willing partners who don’t think you’re creepy (most men and women are just wired differently in sexual matters), but still win-win until wives or girlfriends find out, and they do not see the virtual/real distinction. But, to my mind, the appeal of anonymity and of losing oneself in a virtual sexual encounter is so powerful and easily available it will never cease being popular. It’s as irresistible a mindless outlet as bad television or Angry Birds – and much more interactive and addictive. You can even send pictures of people other than yourself and pretend to be utterly other. Does that make it better or worse? Discuss …

All I can say is that we’re adjustng, slowly, and Weiner was a victim of this shift. Maybe more married or committed couples would do well to talk about it, set some rules, and make some preparation. Judging by the “shocked! shocked!” responses of some writers like Megan McArdle, there are a lot of conversations still to be had.

This was once a TNR staple, and every now and again, it rears its strange head. To wit, from yesterday's WaPo:

According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, President Obama leads five of six potential Republican presidential rivals tested in the poll. But he is in a dead heat with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney …

And today from Reuters:

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll on Wednesday, President Obama leads all potential Republican challengers by double-digit margins. He is ahead of his closest Republican rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, by 13 percentage points – 51 percent to 38 percent.

The key thing, I guess, is to take any single one of them with total skepticism. Especially at this stage of the game. But a gap of 13 points is pretty staggering. Especially when the samples are pretty much the same size.

Jesse Bering tackles Pride Week from a linguistic and evolutionary psychologist's perspective. And he dismantles "the assumption of a largely mythical, collective gay identity":

In my everyday life, and unless you bring it up, being gay is about as salient to my self-concept as is my having brown hair or driving a Honda; I don’t feel—wait for the gasps—a particular affinity with other gay people just because they’re gay. I might want to have sex with other gay men, sure. We’ve got that much in common. But anything else, well, there just simply aren’t any shared psychological traits that bring us together in some intrinsic brotherhood.

I haven't been to a Pride event in years, maybe a decade. My view is that they can be great therapy and empowerment for those just coming to terms with being out, but can end up enforcing some ghastly, single "gay identity" memes I don't really believe in. My hope has always been that as civil rights are extended and formal equality achieved, we can move past gay and straight to human, and within that broader category have far more niches, sub-sub-cultures, individuals and experiments in living as possible. The gay pride thing is so … well, gay. It was once a gateway; now it feels more like a holding pen.

(Photo by Flickr user tinou bao)

Just part of the Dish's pregnancy reality series.

The Wasillan Margaret Thatcher's protectors call "nuts" swings back at Ed Rollins:

"Beltway political strategist Ed Rollins has a long, long track record of taking high profile jobs and promptly sticking his foot in his mouth," said Sarah PAC chief of staff Michael Glassner in an emailed statement. "To no one's surprise he has done it again, while also fueling a contrived narrative about the presidential race by the mainstream media. One would expect that his woodshed moment is coming and that a retraction will be issued soon."

Expecting a retraction? Who does Glassner think he is? The Israeli prime minister dictating to the US president? Bonus extra-risky prediction: when Palin actually gets criticism from fellow Republicans, she will melt down and run as a third party candidate with Trump. Hey, I can dream, can't I?

Update: Rollins now says he wants to "let it go" and made a misstep. But:

Of Team Palin's call for a retraction, he said, "What's the retraction? I say she's serious?"

Susannah Breslin exposes our cultural hypocrisy:

Americans are fascinated by political sex scandals because the politician is doing what Americans are doing but won’t admit, or what they wish they were doing but won’t say, and Americans, rather than confess their natural tendencies or sexual fantasies, would rather criticize those political figures who there, but for the grace of God, are doing what Americans wish they were doing.

Tracy Clark-Flory summarizes:

These new shots may not be as raunchy or suggestive as the original but they are much more revealing — and not just about Weiner. They show a person wanting to be wanted, trying pathetically to be desirable, and that I dare say is a universal. It hints at how human sexuality can be at once narcissistic and self-destructive.

Clark-Flory's whole piece is really insightful. Greenwald makes powerful related points as well. The key thing here is that we have dispensed with even the pretense of any over-arching justification for this attack on Weiner. He hasn't been accused of adultery or hypocrisy; he has committed no crime; it doesn't seem as if he has spent any public money. No one he corresponded with complained. No harrassment is involved. And yet this case of doing something which is ubiquitous online is equated, in some cases, with Dominique Strauss-Kahn's brutal alleged rape.

I'm just amazed at the resources of American puritanism. This is the first sex scandal I can think of in which there was no even faintly credible reason to do it, but pure partisan hatred, and no actual sex. And yet Nancy Pelosi wants an ethics investigation! Maybe the correct response is for everyone to get a Twitter account and send out some part of their torso. The more the merrier.

(Image of "That Weiner-Spitzer-Clinton Look" via the City Room blog)