Month: February 2013

Joel Kotkin and Harry Siegel fear that population decline will distort our politics:

[I]f singletons are swelling as a voting bloc and interest group now, the demographics of childlessness mean that they’re likely to lose out in the long term. Already, retirees have bent government to their will, with people 65 and older receiving $3 in total government spending for every dollar spent on children younger than 18 as of 2004. At the federal level (which excluded most education spending) the gap widens to 7 to 1. With an aging population, that spread will continue to expand, placing an ever-greater burden on the remaining workers and creating a disincentive for the young to have children.

In the long run, notes Eric Kaufmann, the author of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, high birthrates among such conservative, religious populations as Mormons and evangelical Christians will slant our politics against the secular young, childless voting bloc as well.

La Repubblica has published the following story, summarized by the Guardian:

A potentially explosive report has linked the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI to the discovery of a network of gay prelates in the Vatican, some of whom – the report said – were being blackmailed by outsiders. The pope’s spokesman declined to confirm or deny the report, which was carried by the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica.

The paper said the pope had taken the decision on 17 December that he was going to resign – the day he received a dossier compiled by three cardinals delegated to look into the so-called “Vatileaks” affair … The newspaper said the cardinals described a number of factions, including one whose members were “united by sexual orientation”.

In an apparent quotation from the report, La Repubblica said some Vatican officials had been subject to “external influence” from laymen with whom they had links of a “worldly nature”. The paper said this was a clear reference to blackmail.

Hmm. Is the Vatican’s grotesque hypocrisy on the issue of homosexuality part of this story? We don’t yet know.

(If a reader who knows Italian could translate the original piece, I’d be grateful. Photo: Getty Images.)

In a wide-ranging essay on the work of Stanley Cavell, Charles Petersen summarizes the philosopher’s animating impulse:

Surrounded by certainty, he became an adept of what in philosophy is known as “skepticism.” This term goes back millennia, but it is closely related to the sense of fraudulence Cavell had experienced while young: the distrust of the reports of one’s peers; the doubt that what one does has any real connection to what one sees; the feeling, therefore (and here we reach full-blown skepticism), that one is only dreaming the world. Cavell insisted that this feeling, even if in its intensity it can seem unjustified, casts light back on its legitimate origins—that we never can be absolutely certain of ourselves or our relation to the world.

Such certainty was exactly what the logical positivists had been trying to achieve. He therefore reinterpreted their philosophy: instead of an attempt to get closer to the world, their demand for certainty was a way of fleeing from the world in all its ambiguity. This was the sense in which their philosophy was fraudulent, and why it so repelled the young Cavell. Under the banner of getting closer to the world, the logical positivists moved further from the world than ever.

Robert Butler relays a conversation he had with a painter who, as a boy, studied with W.H. Auden when the poet taught at a prep school in the early 1930s:

[Auden] would insist that the boys in his class learn poem after poem by heart. Even parrot-fashion. Auden said it didn’t matter whether they understood them. If they learnt the poems now, they would not forget them and maybe, later in life, they would understand them. “It’s true,” the painter told me, “I can still remember them.”

He was sitting in an armchair, in front of his gas fire, wearing a black velvet jacket and a silvery tie that couldn’t have been more loosely knotted. Quickly and softly, he began to recite Milton’s sonnet “On his Blindness”:

When I consider how my light is spent
E’re half my days, in this dark world and wide

These were lines that he had memorised for Auden 75 years before. He went on:

And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg’d with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account…

The elderly painter’s comment on those words: “I still don’t understand it. But I understand it a bit better.”

Raised in a “large Amish-Mennonite family, at the dead end of a dirt road in eastern Ohio,” Rachel Yoder is disappointed by Amish Romance novels these days – tales of “a young Amish widow whose simple life is thrown into turmoil one stormy night when a wounded riverboat captain shows up at her door.” In her youth, Yoder preferred Martyr’s Mirror: The Stories of Seventeen Centuries of Christian Martyrdom from The Time of Christ to A.D. 1660:

For my already straying ten-year-old self, Martyr’s Mirror contained within its pages a confusing and provocative convergence of religious passion, sacrificial love, and ecstatic agony. Most excellently, it also contained archaic illustrations, and these were what fascinated me the most. Anneken Heyndricks, bound to a ladder, cast her eyes heavenward in sublime abandon as flames licked her body. George Wanger, a tailor, wasted away in a dungeon, bound with lusty chains. In the most famous etching, Anabaptist hero Dirk Willems rescues a guard who’s pursuing him from the deathly clutches of an icy moat, only to be captured and burned at the stake. …

If the Mennonite and Amish have anything to offer about romance, it’s this: a heavy book of death and torture, a love letter to all their pursuers, their captors and executioners. Consider the love language of these people something similar to a moaning, choking agony addressed at the universe. Call it holy desperation. Call it devotion. Call it belief in inherent dignity. This is real Amish romance, as real as it gets, a three-hundred-year love affair with life, with the sacredness of life.

Osnos puts Chinese censorship of American films in historical context

Historians point out that this is hardly the first time that Hollywood has heeded the demands of foreign customers, and that some of the most severe cuts were ordained by our allies. In the nineteen-twenties, the British Board of Film Censors had what the author Ruth Vasey called a “range of idiosyncratic requirements” relating to animal cruelty, references to mental insanity, Christian ceremonies, and depictions of colonial relations. The British censor in Hong Kong, then a Crown Colony, explained to the American consul that protecting Britain’s image onscreen was vital in “a small settlement of white men on the fringe of a huge Empire of Asiatics.”

As the minimum wage debate gains attention in DC, Spencer Woodman shines a spotlight on spending cuts to the agencies responsible for enforcing minimum wage laws:

Budget cuts are no surprise in an era of austerity. Yet the effect of these cuts on wage-and-hour investigative units—charged with examining and settling wage disputes—has seriously compromised an essential line of defense for already vulnerable low-wage earners, according to experts. State labor officials and researchers around the country tell In These Times that low-wage workers facing abusive employers increasingly have nowhere to turn.

According to the National Employment Law Project’s Catherine Ruckelshaus, “It’s to the point where, in some industries, there’s no minimum wage floor at all.” Previous Dish on the minimum wage debate here, here and here. Discussion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, a potential alternative to raising the minimum wage, here, here and here.