Month: June 2012

Where the shortest words survive:

The same frugal whittling that leads us to contract can and not (though not am and not) may also affect which aspects of a language withstand the test of time and which don’t. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot discovered an inverse relationship between word length and word frequency: the words we encounter most often also tend to be the shortest.

(This is often mistaken for Zipf’s Law, which describes the frequency distribution of words in a language.) Certainly most of the fixed class of English function words—including pronouns, prepositions, and articles—are both monosyllabic and extremely common. This relationship makes a lot of sense. When a word is long and clunky, it is shortened. When a word is long and clunky and said often, it is shortened quickly. Each of the clunkily named cities I’ve called home (Cincinnati, Columbus, and Champaign-Urbana) have been given nicknames (Cincy, C-bus, and Chambana) by those most at risk of having to say them.

Charlottesville, Virginia, 11.21 am

That's Niall Ferguson's suggestion. I'm delighted he sees the limits of American power and the need for more global responsibility from China. I loved this passage:

In terms of geopolitics, China today is the world’s supreme free rider. China’s oil consumption has doubled in the past 10 years, while America’s has actually declined. As economist Zhang Jian pointed out in a paper for the Brookings Institution last year, China relies on foreign imports for more than 50 percent of the oil it consumes, and half of this imported oil is from the Middle East. (China’s own reserves account for just 1.2 percent of the global total.)

Moreover, China’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil is set to increase. The International Energy Authority estimates that by 2015 foreign imports will account for between 60 and 70 percent of its total consumption. Most of that imported energy comes through a handful of vital marine bottlenecks: principally, the straits of Hormuz and Malacca and the Suez Canal.

Yet China contributes almost nothing to stability in the oil-producing heartland of the Arabian deserts and barely anything to the free movement of goods through the world’s strategic sea lanes.

Larison recoils. But it seems to me that any way we can be less involved in that pitiless part of the world is a good thing. Especially if newly exploited natural gas reserves help us to wean ourselves off their oil.

Greenwald goes another round:

The constant assumption in American political discourse is that there are so very many people in the world eager to attack the U.S. — The Terrorists — but the question of why this is so is simply never asked (actually, I ask that question often, but aside from patent propagandistic pap (they hate us for our Freedom) it’s rarely answered).

In response to my argument over the last two days that ongoing U.S. aggression is making a Terrorist attack more rather than less likely, Sullivan rhetorically asked: “is he not living on the same planet I am?” Actually, I’m not: I’m living on the same planet as most of the people on Earth, who share these views and reject Sullivan’s; I’m living on the same planet as Ibrahim Mothana, who sees these truths in his daily life; I’m living on the same planet as the mountain of empirical evidence that explains why there are so many people eager to bring violence to the U.S. (as opposed to, say, Peru, or South Africa, or Finland, or Brazil, or Japan, or Portugal, or China).

Glenn makes some serious points about blowback from civilian deaths, especially when our own government keeps changing its statements on them. I acknowledged that in my original post in this conversation. It's particularly worrying in Yemen, where our drone attacks seem to be radicalizing the populace, as well as taking out Jihadist terrorists. Don Rumsfeld's infamous remark that he worried we were creating more Jihadists than we were killing is completely salient here. But here's a sentence I would love to see Glenn write:

I do not envy President Obama having to figure out how to respond.

There is no acknowledgment in Glenn's posts of any balancing of interests here, or of any terror threat that cannot be blamed on the American victims.

We know that we were attacked on 9/11 – and my apologies to Glenn but it killed thousands of innocent civilians and was designed only to kill innocent civilians – by a gang reared in training camps in Afghanistan. So we have proof of principle that allowing such camps to form and to organize is to risk the lives of Americans. Some risk is inevitable. But a responsible president cannot simply ignore that risk altogether. He is the commander-in-chief. Preventing his own citizens from being murdered within the Constitution is part of his job description.

Counter-insurgency is a far more expensive, and far more protracted and thereby, for the same reasons Glenn elucidates, likely to be counter-productive. Counter-terrorism by aerial intelligence and drone strikes is far more effective in terms of results and costs. If you compare the number of civilians killed under US occupation in Iraq, there really is no comparison at all. We're talking hundreds versus a hundred thousand. And I for one am relieved that al Qaeda in Af-Pak has been decimated, relieved that the US has been free of Jihadist mass murder for the past decade, happy that bin Laden is at the bottom of some distant ocean so that he cannot murder again.

But Glenn is right that we should not get intoxicated by this tool. It can backfire badly. But the answer to that is not a view that Jihadism is solely a creation of the US. It is in part, but it is also a modern form of religious fundamentalism annexed to brutal violence and barbarism. In other words, it's both. Which makes this a real debate. I'd say that the Obama administration has done a remarkable job on offense against terror, but needs to be more transparent and more honest and more selective in its drone strikes. There is a balance to be struck. And in striking that balance, I'm glad Glenn is out there prodding Washington to see past its own hall of mirrors.

Readers debate the question:

I think holding frequent press conferences would be a waste of time.  What has changed profoundly since Kennedy’s time is the press.  If you watch those old tapes, true Kennedy is charming, but it’s hard not to be with such a fawning press corp.  Today much of that group would look at every encounter with the President (any president) as an opportunity for “gotcha” moments.  Bush 41 tried to do more informal conferences and that’s exactly what happened – and things have gotten a lot worse since then.  The amount of time to prepare and the careful way he’d need to answer each question would be distracting and kind of pointless. 

Another writes:

Your reader is ignoring the fact that when Obama initially tried to engage the press, going on talk shows and news shows alike, he was criticized for being a “celebrity.” It was said that he should spend less time on TV and more time in the Oval Office. Even with his supporters it is almost impossible for Obama to win.

(Video: An AP report on Obama’s open forum with Republicans in Baltimore in January 2010)

Maybe.

Issandr el Amrania joins the debate:

[W]here Obama fails more generally is that, at a moment when the policies of GWB meant that American foreign policy needed a radical overhaul and conceptual rethink — most notably a withdrawal from the Middle East — Obama shied away from that.

You might argue he tried somewhat on Israel/Palestine, but I do not believe that attempt was genuine. More generally, in the Middle East at least, policy has been more of the same and continued support, post-Arab uprisings, for the traditional dictators/allies of the region: pro-Saudi and pro-Khalifa in Bahrain, pro-SCAF in Egypt, a massive surge in spending to protect the Jordanian monarchy (or more accurately, King Abdallah’s current power structure), pro-status quo in Morocco, etc. I will concede a good reaction on Tunisia, although we don’t know the details there yet.

The media story of yesterday was MSNBC's Fox-like editing of a clip to distort the meaning and emphasis of Romney's comparison between the public and the private sector. The real story was whether his claim that an optometrist had to fill out a 33 page federal government form twice to change his address was in any way true. Mediaite finds the form to be two pages long, and four if you include instructions.

Sounds pretty reasonable to me. So Romney wings it once again.

For me the only interesting thing here is that Romney starts out with an ideological proposition and only then finds facts or anecdotes to back it up. When made aware that the facts are not facts, he simply moves on to another story. The press needs to press him on this now, before we enter a Palinite truthy universe once again.

Update from a reader:

Also note that the 2 (or 4 page) form that Mediate found is actually created by a contractor working for the New York State's Medicaid program.  So this "horribly complicated bureaucratic form" was actually created by a private company working under contract for a state. How does this exemplify President Obama's regulatory tyranny? 

Every now and again, a real star emerges. And Ben Smith at Buzzfeed has now nabbed Chris Geidner, one of the best gay reporters out there, to chart gay issues through this campaign and beyond. Dish readers have already come to know Chris's work in the gay press. This is a sign that the mainstream takes this story – and the accurate telling of it – as seriously as it should.