Month: January 2013

A nice take-down of the attention-seeking Naomi Wolf.

… in North Korea. The e-Library is a real Potemkin chiller.

Michael Grunwald heard little new in the president’s speech:

Obama has governed as a left-of-center pragmatist, and I see no evidence from his rhetoric that he intends a different approach in his second term. He did make a strong pitch for climate action, but he did that in his first inaugural, too, and then he followed up with strong climate action. He did make a strong pitch for gay marriage, but he’s been doing that for the last year. Anyone who thinks that Obama never talks about alleviating poverty or training science teachers or building research labs or reducing inequality or equal pay for equal work has never heard Obama talk.

Noam Scheiber disagrees:

[Y]ou could argue that there wasn’t much new in Obama’s speech if it reflects an m.o. he adopted well over a year ago. But I disagree. Since his emergence on the national scene, Obama has clung to the Eisenhower-era distinction between campaigning and governing: You make your case during election season, then take down the TV ads and stump speeches when it’s over so you can get on with policymaking. Before today, it was possible to believe Obama still clung to that distinction.

Frum’s view:

Those are not words intended to invite Republican cooperation, but to slam Republican non-cooperation; not to conciliate, but to confront. They were fighting words, and they portend a second term in which the president is fully as willing to take the fight to his opponents as they have been to take the fight to him.

Drezner thought the foreign policy section was thin. Larison is heartened:

The encouraging thing about this relative neglect of foreign policy in the address is that it suggests that foreign policy in the second term won’t be an extremely ambitious or ideologically-driven one. Bush’s Second Inaugural promised a foreign policy that was both of these things, and to the extent that the Bush administration pursued the goals outlined in that address it managed to cause a great deal of harm. We will have to hope that Obama’s boilerplate in the speech is evidence that he intends to eschew grand projects overseas in the next four years.

Freddie puts Obama’s historical examples in context:

During Obama’s speech, for which he is receiving the typically polar response, he name checked the Stonewall riots, Selma, and Seneca Falls. What’s worth saying, not so much in regards to Obama but to the liberals who zealously defend him, is that Martin Luther King was adamantly opposed to gradualism, and as Ned Resnikoff pointed out, those events of resistance represent the rejection of the political process due to the urgency of profound oppression. Gradualism has become the cudgel with which liberal Democrats beat left-wing critics, and the partisan political process is advanced not merely as the most important route to change but as the only valid route to change. To ask for change in the face of injustice and suffering is to be called naive and sanctimonious; to advocate resistance that transcends voting once every four years is to be called a traitor. Yet the man who we celebrate today, and the events referenced by the very president who is defended in those terms, speak to the profound poverty of conscience that resides in the doctrine of the lesser evil.

And Benjamin Dueholm addresses Obama’s rhetorical style:

[T]he respect for the audience implicit in these moments is rare in a politician of any stature. You, America, can get your mind around truths that are self-evident but not self-executing. You can handle the irony of uneven and unreliable progress. You won’t get angry at hearing big words.

It’s unlikely that the next president, whatever his or her party, will attempt anything like this. People are understandably a little fatigued at the Obama style. Even I am, at this point; it courts decadence to dwell so determinedly in the examples of the past and to praise the nation so constantly in such unqualified terms. But it is very probable that friend and foe alike will end up missing this, at least a little bit.

As part of a wider devastation of Morgan’s incendiary and personal rhetoric, Michael Moynihan homes in on the rather extreme way the CNN host defines his gay critics – and so, so many others.

Jack Goldsmith argues that the need for intervention in Mali was caused by intervention next door:

There are many causes, but the proximate one is the 2011 NATO invasion of Libya.  A chunk of Qadaffi’s army consisted of Tuaregs – a nomadic group whose homeland includes Northern Mali, and who returned home with powerful weapons when Qadaffi was defeated. With assistance from their Islamist friends (including al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb and Ansar Dine), they took over cities in Northern Mali and declared independence. They are now on the move south, which is the occasion for the French military action.

Nasser Weddady shakes his head:

Sorry, but that does not even begin to explain the total collapse of Malian governance by the time [Tuaregs] Azawadis took to arms in early 2012. …By the time Qadhafi’s regime in Libya fell, northern Mali had been home to Jihadi elements that left Algeria a decade earlier after being thoroughly defeated in the civil war.

Bruce Whitehosue takes on other claims that US policy is to blame, specifically that the rebels had turned against the government once they had been trained by the Pentagon:

Pentagon-sponsored training was provided to a broad cross-section of officers and NCOs in the Malian military, of which the defectors (most of them Tuareg) made up a minority. US-trained personnel fought on both sides of the conflict: at best the effects of their training were canceled out, at worst they were negligible. The problem with the US military’s training program wasn’t that it benefited the wrong people, it’s that it didn’t work. Following exercises in 2009, detailed in Wikileaks, even one of the Malian army’s most elite units got poor evaluations despite lengthy collaboration with US trainers. Whatever “advantage” such collaboration may have provided, it was the last thing the Tuareg — experienced desert fighters — needed to defeat Malian government forces.

Olga Khazan describes the thesis of the above video:

[It] takes a bit of an advocacy bend, arguing that the United States plays a major role in the violence, both because our high levels of drug use fuel the narcotics trade and because our loose gun controls make it easy for cartels south of the border to arm themselves.

Sally Davies looks to the past:

The Roman orators Cicero and Quintilian believed that “paronomasia”, the Greek term for punning, was a sign of intellectual suppleness and rhetorical skill. Jesus himself was a prodigious punster. His declaration that “upon this rock I will build my church” famously played on the way Peter’s name echoed the Ancient Greek word for rock, “petra”. Jesus may have also salted his speech with puns on Aramaic words, the language of everyday communication. When he condemns the Pharisees for letting punctilious piety blind them to mercy, Jesus calls them “blind guides, which strain at a gnat [galma], and swallow a camel [gamla]”.

And, of course, there’s Shakespeare:

The characters in his plays that begin the bawdy jests and elaborate badinage are almost always pages and buffoons, commoners at the mercy of their aristocratic overlords. Puns give them a cloak of deniability – the joke permits ordinary folk to make light of their social betters without violating the norms of respect. Sex and death were these characters’ favoured subjects – Shakespeare seemed to intuit what Freud would argue some 300 years later, that humour helps us cope with the terrifying and taboo.

Matthew Panzarino notes the similarities between the version of “Baby Got Back” that appeared on Glee in October and its cover by the Internet musician Jonathon Coulton (above):

What appears to have happened here is that a music producer on the show found the song and thought that it was just an ‘internet musician’ that they could cop it from and no one would be the wiser. Unfortunately, Coulton is an immensely popular performer and almost universally beloved on the Internet.

Even Coulton is unsure which rules apply:

I have some questions about how IP works in terms of this song. It’s a cover of a Sir Mix-a-Lot song obviously, but I wrote a new melody for it, which this recording uses. Back when I released it, I bought the statutory license to distribute my version of this song through Harry Fox. Creative Commons doesn’t come into play because it’s a cover song, and anyway my CC license specifies Non-Commercial. A complicating factor is that, to my ears, it sounds like it actually uses the audio from my recording – not the vocals obviously, but the instruments sound EXTREMELY similar.

Pivoting off Freddie’s contemplation of the singular “their,” Robert Lane Greenetraces how “you” evolved from the objective form of “ye” to something more:

As you encroached on ye’s territory, it did so on both fronts, being used for the plural and formal singular. The informal singular was still thou, in those centuries in which English maintained the informal/formal pronoun distintion that many modern European languages still have: tu-vous, du-Sie, tú-usted, etc. But gradually social change sealed you’s triumph. Using a plural to address a single person was once reserved for the very highborn, but made its way down the social ladder until any social superior was to be addressed with you. It didn’t stop there, though, as vous and Sie did. Instead, having once crowded out ye, you now edged out thou in the early modern period.

Jesse Hicks examines the near-omnipresent surveillance technology in most casinos, where “cameras monitor 98 percent of the casino floor”:

They keep a close eye on the tables, since that’s where cheating’s most likely to occur. With 1080p high-definition cameras, surveillance operators can read cards and count chips — a significant improvement over earlier cameras. And though facial recognition doesn’t yet work reliably enough to replace human operators, [Las Vegas director of surveillance Ted] Whiting’s excited at the prospects of [Optical character recognition (OCR)]. It’s already proven useful for identifying license plates. The next step, he says, is reading cards and automatically assessing a player’s strategy and skill level. In the future, maybe, the cameras will spot card counters and other advantage players without any operator intervention.

Update from a reader:

I can confirm anecdotally that your post is correct.

My mother lives in Las Vegas. She and a friend went to dinner at a casino one night, and then to a show. When she sat down at the show, a security guard walked up and handed her a jacket she had left on her chair at dinner at the other end of the casino. When she asked him how they had found her, he pointed to one of the “eyes in the sky” and just said “rewind.”

(Photo: The Grand Lisboa hotel and casino in Macau. By Samantha Sin/AFP/Getty Images.)