Month: September 2011

by Chris Bodenner

A reader sends a classic NSFW video and explains, "Chris Rock beautifully illustrates a guilty pleasure when he says he loves rap but he's tired of defending it." Another writes:

I like this discussion of guilty pleasures. My take: a guilty pleasure is one of two things. One, it's something you enjoy but that you know is bad for you (fatty foods, for example), or two, it's something you would be embarrassed to be seen indulging in (pornography, for example). Of course, like everything else, this is all subjective: one person's guilty pleasure may be another person's shameless pleasure – obviously not everybody is embarrassed to be known indulging in porn. But I think the historical societal norm is that consuming porn is something to be embarrassed about. As societal norms change, obviously guilty pleasures do too – premarital sex, for example, would once have been considered a very guilty pleasure, but hardly anyone blinks at it nowadays.

Another:

Nowhere in the discussion did I see anyone acknowledge the possibility that art can be appreciated in two different ways, for its craftsmanship and its enjoyability.

I consider guilty pleasures to be the ones that have the latter but not the former (and I don't take "guilty" literally). I can appreciate a movie that is incredibly well-directed and acted even if the story and characters don't appeal to my particular tastes. I can also enjoy a movie with a story and characters that appeal to me even if it is sloppily directed with poor acting. Of course, movies that have both are preferable and it is always a question of degree with each.

For example, I can appreciate the exquisite craftsmanship of a painstakingly hand-made wooden chair but prefer the comfort of a cheap old futon.  

In a video chat with Ta-Nehisi a few summers ago, Andrew discussed some of his guilty pleasures in Ptown.

by Patrick Appel

John Fund bets that Palin won't run and will instead endorse Perry. Weigel imagines how this might play out:

If we buy the Palin-Bachmann rivalry story, Palin's got to love how endorsing Perry accelerates Bachmann's collapse. As soon as Perry got it, in was clear that Bachmann, who appeals to the same voters but has no executive experience, had no real path to victory. But if Palin backs Perry, the catfight-crazed media will report the "Bachmann snub!" angle; it will become part of the story of how Bachmann fell. The hard-charging congresswoman, the first female winner of the Ames straw poll, declines to her rightful status as a Palin-lite; Palin, who will have just acknowledged that she can't win a primary on her own, will be seen as a kingmaker.

John Avlon, thinking along the same lines, says the "Palin seal of approval for Rick Perry would be the kiss of death for Mitt Romney."

 

A member of the COFADEH (Relatives of Honduran Detained Disappeared Committee) holds a poster with the picture of a missing person in Tegucigalpa, on September 2, 3011. The COFADEH says that at least 10 people related to social organizations disappeared during the government of President Porfirio Lobo. By Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images.

— C.B.

by Zack Beauchamp

Andrew Exum gets very angry about Rick Perry's claim (in this speech) that "American soldiers should be led by American commanders."

To the best of my knowledge, U.S. soldiers and Marines have served under the command of Dutch, Italian, Canadian, German and British commanders in Afghanistan. (I'm sure I could add more countries to the list.) Several countries have sacrificed mightily in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and I myself fought under a Canadian battalion commander in 2002 in Afghanistan and under a British special operations commander in 2003 in Iraq.

Most of our allies — and especially our friends in the ANZUS Pact, the 60th anniversary of which we just celebrated — are as blunt-speaking as any Texan and would have rather preferred Gov. Perry come right out and insult them to their faces rather than obliquely insult them while professing to respect them. I'm actually shocked that Gov. Perry's foreign policy advisors allowed this text to make it into his speech, but I can see how this jingoistic populism might prove politically effective in the battle for the Republican nomination. What might make for short-term political gains, though, also amounts to bad long-term foreign policy.

That Ex is right goes without saying. But Perry's ethos demands that America always be set above everyone else (except Texas), policy consequences be damned. In fact, Perry is the perfect vessel for what I call "expressivist politics." It doesn't really appear that Pery thinks through his policy proposals, as all of the original ones turn out to be uniformly awful ideas. What matters are the meanings they convey: repeal the income tax because big government bad! Let states elect Senators because federalism good! Execute people because crime bad! For Perry, policies aren't policies to be really implemented – they're value statements.

by Patrick Appel

Kevin Drum says the jobs picture is worse than it looks:

We need to add about 150,000 jobs each month merely to keep up with population growth, which means that real net job growth is negative and has been for over a year. The chart [above] shows real net job creation over the past three years.

by Patrick Appel

Will Wilkinson has no love for Paul:

[I]t irks me that, as far as most Americans are concerned, Ron Paul is the alpha and omega of the libertarian creed. If you were an evil genius determined to promote the idea that libertarianism is a morally dubious ideology of privilege poorly disguised as a doctrine of liberation, you’d be hard pressed to improve on Ron Paul.

(Hat tip: Alex Knapp)

by Zack Beauchamp

Brandi Grissom reports on some other questionable executions that Rick Perry refused to commute:

Leonard Uresti Rojas was convicted in 1996 of shooting to death his common-law wife and his brother. The appellate lawyer appointed to handle Rojas’ case was inexperienced, on probation with the state bar and suffered from mental illness, according to court documents. He had been disciplined for not adequately serving his clients and was serving three probated sentences from the bar while he was working on Rojas’ case. He missed crucial deadlines for filing appeals on Rojas’ behalf, effectively eliminating any chance he might have had for relief.

Kara Brandeisky compiles a similar list (with minimal overlap). Ryan Murphy and Noah Seger made an infographic looking at all executions in Texas under Perry's tenure. More Dish on Perry and execution here, here, and here.

by Patrick Appel

Bryan Appleyard ponders 9/11 art:

In 2002, Steven Spielberg told me he thought it would be years before the great 9/11 film was made; and Salman Rushdie recently pointed out that it was almost 60 years before the definitive work about Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia appeared — Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The novel was inaccurate, faintly mad and riddled with the author’s questionable theories of history, but it was more true than anything written before or since. “Often,” Rushdie said, “I think these great events have to rot down. Maybe another generation has to look at it.”

by Zack Beauchamp

Charles Simic wonders if we can still get bored:

Do people still suffer from periods of boredom even with computers, smart phones and tablets to occupy them endlessly? There’s also television, of course, which in homes of many Americans is on twenty-four hours a day, making it harder and harder to find a quiet place to sit and think. Even neighborhood bars, the old refuge of introspective loners, now have huge TV screens alternating between sports and chatter to divert them from their thoughts. As soon as college students are out of class, cell phones, and iPods materialize in their hands, requiring full concentration and making them instantly oblivious of their surroundings.

by Zack Beauchamp

DiA's J.F. analyzes Florida's failed policy of forcing welfare recipients to submit to drug tests:

Perhaps saving money was never really the point of the program. … [P]erhaps the point of the drug-testing program was for Florida's government to signal its disapproval of poor people using drugs, and if it took a massive government intrusion into people's lives, establishing a precedent for suspicionless drug testing on an entire class of people, and paying to defend themselves against lawsuits filed by civil-liberties groups to do that, so be it.

This "signalling" thing isn't just applicable here – it's a cause of serial policy failure. People decide something is wrong ("drugs/boycotts of Israel/prostitution/shari'a law are wrong!") and decide the government must ban those things because THEY ARE WRONG! Glossed over here is whether or not the government actually can get rid of those things. The point isn't policy analysis, it's expressing disapproval in the strongest possible fashion. Naturally, the policies adopted on these grounds perpetually backfire because the policies themselves are irrelevant to the actual aim: expressing moral disapproval in the strongest possible fashion.

The "expressivist" theory in moral philosophy holds that moral statements, properly speaking, don't mean anything: they're just strong expressions of approval or disapproval. But governing isn't mere words: bad policy hurts real people's lives. Expressivist policymaking is a recipe for catastrophe.