Earlier this week, he ruled out a presidential run. Ezra sees this as a power play:
If Ryan was running for president in 2016 — or if Republicans even thought he might run for president in 2016 — they would assume his work at Ways and Means was really preparatory work on behalf of Ryan 2016. Worse, his fellow potential candidates would have to distance themselves from Ryan’s ideas, as he would be a threat to them. But now Ryan can work to shape all their agendas simultaneously, and they will have to compete for his favor — they’ll want both his endorsement and, if they win, his help.
Ryan has been better at understanding how much power ideas can have in American politics than pretty much any member of Congress in recent years. This shows that he’s got a clear-eyed view of how much power congressional process holds, too. If he was running for president in such a crowded field, odds are that he probably wouldn’t win — and, thus, neither would his ideas. But now that he’s forsworn any interest in the presidency while making clear he’s going to really use the power of the House Ways and Means Committee, no Republican will be able to win and govern without adopting Ryan’s ideas.
Reihan has mixed feelings about Ryan’s absence from the race:
He would have been the candidate of ideas and would have pressed his Republican rivals to think seriously about upward mobility and the need to modernize America’s safety net, among other issues conservatives tend to neglect.
Yet there is a silver lining in Ryan’s decision not to run, which is highlighted by the sweeping tax overhaul just proposed by House Democrats. Though Ryan is more open-minded and intellectually serious than we have any right to expect from an elected official, on tax policy, at least, he’s failed to come to terms with how the country has changed. A supply-sider to the bitter end, Ryan has made it clear that his first priority in reforming the tax code is to lower tax rates for everyone, including high-earners. In a conversation this summer with John McCormack of the Weekly Standard, Ryan insisted that “the best way to help the economy is to reduce rates across the board” and that “if you want faster growth, more upward mobility, and faster job creation,” lower tax rates are “the secret sauce.” Well, this is a secret sauce that is past its expiration date.
Gillian Welch’s lovely 2001 lament is as relevant now as ever. Released at the height of Napster, Welch saw the plug pulled on musicians’ ability to make a living, and correctly predicted what’s happening now – the music business is circling the drain. The single is available for purchase at CDBaby (cdbaby.com/cd/rainperrymarkhallman). (iTunes is coming.)
A former freeloader writes:
Here I was, having just done my little trick to get around The Dish’s pay-meter, only to read the piiiissed artist’s argument … and now I’m a subscriber.
You can join him and 30,462 others here! Another subscriber:
I used to torrent a ton. I used to download 17 TV shows a week, plus movies, plus an artist’s entire discography at once. I don’t anymore. I have Hulu, which has freed me from my physical TV and even my cable package. I have Pandora and Spotify for my music needs. I have Netflix for on-demand movies and DVD rentals. So I don’t need to pirate anymore. I pay less for all of that than I did for cable (which I had to offset my pirate guilt). And the Industries are still getting screwed! It’s a win/win for me!
Another former pirate:
Forgive me if I don’t shed a tear for the music and film industries; they brought this on themselves. Like the rest of the Napster generation, growing up I pirated everything – music, movies, sofware, you name it. The thing is, now that I’m older, with a job, I’d rather just pay and get something legit. I can afford it, and in theory it should be less hassle. The ease of buying music on iTunes was the main reason I started paying money for things.
Having said that, trying to be a good citizen with TV and movies is the worst. Three brief anecdotes:
At Christmas I discovered my girlfriend has never seen It’s a Wonderful Life, and decided to remedy that. So I loaded up iTunes on my laptop, paid for a rental copy, then went to beam it onto our TV. Only “You cannot play this movie as your TV does not support Copy Protection”. Great work fellas. You know what movie can be played on my TV? The pirated version I downloaded 10 minutes later.
The very same girlfriend, it also turned out, hadn’t seen Wall-E. Well that won’t do; a day or so later I went to rent a copy. Unfortunately, Wall-E is only available for purchase – at three times the cost of a rental – which is hardly worth it when we only want to watch it once.
A year or so ago a friend recommended I check out Battlestar Galactica; so I went to buy it online. The cheapest digital version I could find was £50. The same thing on DVD was £19 from Amazon. In what universe is the digital copy of a TV series significantly more expensive than a physical copy requiring warehouse space and shipping costs?
Three times there, I was at the brink of spending some money and was thwarted by the stupidity and greed of the TV industry. Legit copies of things cost more than they should, are burdened with horseshit copy protection and other restrictions, or aren’t available at all. The only way to beat piracy is to offer a superior product, and right now, that isn’t happening.
Another reader on how people are willing to pay for content as long as the industries can get with the times:
When I think about buying data, I want it to be mine. If I want to store backups, that shouldn’t be technically illegal. If I want to compress a movie so it fits on my portable drive, I should be able to. Ditto if I want to, for example, add a subtitle track, delete an audio track I don’t need, or even just trim a movie down to a selection of favorite clips. I have been stopped from doing all these things, with data that I paid to own, by Digital Rights Management. And then there are horror stories about purchased content simply disappearing from your devices one day, or becoming inaccessible because that old DRM format is no longer supported.
I recently paid a high price for an indie film because it was available online in a DRM-free format (independent distributor). Felt great. And kudos to the music industry for already caving on this one.
Another looks back to the early days:
I think it is worth looking back at how torrenting started. Namely Napster. At that point in time you did not have an option to buy a song. It just didn’t exist. I could go out and buy a shitty CD with one good single for $18.99 (while the much more expensive to make cassette only cost $9.99) or I could do without. So I had pricing that didn’t make sense and the inability to buy the product I wanted. You bet I stole a lot of music.
Eventually Apple started the iTunes store. I could buy at a reasonable price what I wanted and I did. Furthermore, there seemed to be an explosion of smaller labels (probably always existed but I just wasn’t aware) that put out albums that played solid from beginning to end. I bought lots of those. Most the people I know who stole music went legit once there was a decent way to do so. Today I subscribe to Spotify, buy music on iTunes if it isn’t on Spotify, and occasional buy a physical album if I love it or want to support the artist. Also, I go to shows, which I think is still the best form of revenue for an artist.
I do, however, torrent (okay, steal) TV shows, live sports, and occasionally movies. I always look to buy first but sometimes it just isn’t an option. Want to watch ESPN? Subscribe to cable. Want to watch Game Of Thrones? Subscribe to cable and HBO. Want to watch Battle Star Galactica? Go buy physical copies of the seasons.
Napster put pressure on the record industry to change their model, and now torrenting is putting pressure on the television and the movie industry to do the same. I subscribe to Netflix and I’m an Amazon Prime member. You can bet if HBO is offered at a reasonable price I would buy that as well. With the football playoff I would probably pay to watch ESPN as a standalone (cheaper than a bar tab I’m sure). I would buy lots of things if I did not have to maintain a cable subscription or go to movie theater to get them.
Follow the whole thread here. More of your emails soon.
When TLC announced it would air a one-hour special called My Husband’s Not Gay about Mormon men with same-sex attractions who pursue relationships with women, the LGBT community was understandably upset. Over 75,000 signed a petition calling on the network to cancel the show because it “promotes the false and dangerous idea that gay people can and should choose to be straight in order to be part of their faith communities.” GLAAD President Sarah Kate Ellis denounced the show as “downright irresponsible” and potentially harmful to young people.
I did not find the [“same sex attraction” (SSA)] guys aspirational, just like I don’t find the majority of people on reality TV aspirational.
I think much of what they do is ridiculous and the show is peppered with winking moments that reveal the underlying absurdity of their situation (“I don’t feel like I fit the mold of guys that are attracted to other men by other then my deep and abiding love for Broadway show tunes and my attraction to other males. Those are the things that are kind of gay about me,” says the single guy, Tom). We read story after story about the failure of reparative therapy, and if you know anything about sexuality, you know how suppressing it is a setup for failure.
But look, what My Husband’s Not Gay presents is an actual phenomenon within American culture, an imperfect way that people negotiate themselves with their religion.
The fact that most gay men do not experience attractions to the opposite sex, or feel that their sexuality is fluid, is not addressed. It is, however, referenced briefly by a guy identified as Shaun, who spends a few seconds acting as a pro-gay foil for the show’s protagonists. Shaun says that he feels no attraction to women, only to be told that his lack of ”familiarity with the equipment” doesn’t mean that he could never learn to enjoy sex with a woman. In that moment, when a gay man’s assertion that he is not and could not be attracted to women is challenged, the pretense that the show deals only with these particular men’s individual experience evaporates. They do not believe that they are different from gay men because they are also attracted to women; they believe that it is possible for gay men to become attracted to women, and they explicitly say so.
The show is a pre-packaged TLC special on yet another group who “live their lives a little … differently,” offering neither the courtesy of creative production nor moments of true feeling. This makes it it very difficult to find empathy for these men, who believe God made them to be flawed, nor the women who love them. Watching My Husband’s Not Gay is like the passive emotional experience of wandering through a low-budget carnival, gawking at the sideshow freaks for a short moment before losing attention and moving on.
For every Mormon man who vocally discusses his attraction to men in order to move on to lead a normative existence, there’s a Mormon kid who might bravely come out as “gay, not SSA”, and who might be subjected to bigotry: getting excommunicated from the Church and ostracized by his families. This is the other story that My Husband’s Not Gay isn’t interested in showing. It won’t present actual tragedy, because it wishes to be amorally lighthearted.
J. Bryan Lowder, on the other hand, has difficulty getting outraged:
[M]y main reaction to the show was, to be honest, something of a shrug. Over the course of the hour, I did not see an advertisement for ex-gay therapy (despite some of the men’s involvement in related organizations), nor really a suggestion that “curing” homosexuality is even possible. (These men are very clearly still homosexuals, by the strictest definition, in theory if not practice.) What I did see was a model of living and relating to others that felt not only alien, but also pointlessly difficult and inadvisable—and yet, in no way offensive or illegitimate.
We can read all kinds of condescending things into the psychology and motivations of these men (and, for that matter, their wives and dates), but in the final analysis, it’s not really for us to judge the validity of how consenting, informed adults build their lives or pursue happiness: Gays should know better than most where that logic leads.
On this, I’m with Lowder. I watched the show and was riveted by it for a simple reason: it shows a big shift in social and religious attitudes toward the reality of gay people in religious faiths. I don’t expect their path forward to be linear; and I found the show oddly affecting. These people deserve to have their story told as well.
Sure, some folks in Europe and elsewhere no doubt dislike Muslims, just as other losers hate the Irish or blacks or women. But the idea that there is a climate of Islamophobia, a culture of hot-headed, violent-minded hatred for Muslims that could be awoken and unleashed by the next terror attack, is an invention. Islamophobia is a code word for mainstream European elites’ fear of their own populations, of their native hordes, whom they imagine to be unenlightened, prejudiced, easily led by the tabloid media, and given to outbursts of spite and violence.
The thing that keeps the Islamophobia panic alive is not actual violence against Muslims but the right-on politicos’ ill-founded yet deeply held view of ordinary Europeans, especially those of a working-class variety, as racist and stupid. This is the terrible irony of the Islamophobia panic: The fearers of anti-Muslim violence claim to be challenging prejudice but actually they reveal their own prejudices, their distrust of and disdain for those who come from the other side of the tracks, read different newspapers, hold different beliefs, live different lives. They accuse stupid white communities of viewing Muslims as an indistinguishable mob who threaten the fabric of European society, which is exactly what they think of stupid white communities.
Are there people who hate Muslims simply for being Muslim? Sure. Are there people who respond to Islamic terrorism through acts of bigotry, even violence, against mosques and Islamic institutions? Yes. And shame on them all. Hunt them down, arrest them, throw them in jail.
But there are no anti-Muslim mobs massing in the streets. The mob that massed in the streets of Paris and other European cities on Sunday to protest jihad did not disperse and burn down mosques on their way home (unlike mobs in Muslim countries that torched embassies to protest Muhammad cartoons a few years back).We are not them. We once were, and are capable of becoming them again, as the history of the West shows, but we are not them now.
My notion that Islamophobia, or irrational fear of mainstream Muslims, is a recognizable feature of post-9/11 America is informed by the several cities that have attempted to stop the construction of mosques, state attempts to ban sharia law as if we’re on the cusp of being ruled by it, fears that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim, profiling of Muslim college students for no reason other than their religion, the anti-Muslim training materials that the FBI somehow adopted and used after 9/11, and dozens of Muslims I’ve interviewed who say that other Americans are more fearful of them than was the case prior to the September 11 attacks. …
There has not, of course, been a mass violent uprising against Muslim Americans, or British Muslims, or Australian Muslims, or French Muslims. The implication that it’s therefore irrational to worry about anti-Muslim bigotry or backlash is bizarre. A spike in hate crimes is enough to justify concern and attempts to preempt—surely it’s better to nip the impulse to exact group revenge on Muslims in the bud rather than to act only if a catastrophic backlash has already taken shape!
From the in-tray’s most frequent and passionate advocate of animal rights:
I give Charlie Hebdo the benefit of the doubt on allegations of racism and any other accusation of lack of compassion. Why? Because it has shown more compassion than virtually everyone else in the world when it came to the abuse of the most defenseless individuals: “Charlie Hebdo is the only French newspaper that dedicates a weekly column to animal rights, tackling issues such as bullfighting and foie gras.”
Regarding Dave Roberts’ comment that blocking Keystone “will show that there’s life in the climate movement”, I beg to differ. Keystone is a symbolic victory without any substance; if the moral victory is to “show that people can mobilize around climate with the numbers”, congratulations, you just won a victory that has zero effect on climate change.
I’ve been an environmentalist since I was a kid roaming the mountains of New Hampshire and the backwoods of Maine, but I cringe at supporting any environmental group that is focusing on Keystone. Today my charitable giving instead goes to groups like the Nature Conservancy that are actually working to protect forests, make coral reefs more resistant to climate change, and otherwise finding practical solutions instead of spending their resources fighting moral victories. If Roberts’ “climate movement” wants me to join them, start picking battles that actually matter – write a bill that sets national renewable standards, or that creates long-lasting incentives for non-carbon energy sources, or something that ACTUALLY MAKES A DIFFERENCE for the climate, and I’ll happily join the cause.
Another counters:
You quote a reader who says “Believing that stopping XL will benefit the environment is just sticking your head in the oil-sands.” Then you allow Dave Roberts to counter, with his claim that such commentators “apply wonk logic to an activist problem.” Not at all. If fact, it’s the “wonk logic” of your reader that’s off track.
Max Auffhammer, an environmental economist at UC-Berkeley, did the math last March and estimated that “not building Keystone XL will likely leave a billion barrels worth of bitumen in the ground.” All that bitumen simply cannot get out of Canada fast enough on trains. If Keystone XL goes down, a lot of CO2 will never enter earth’s atmosphere. McKibben isn’t right on everything, but he’s at least partly right on this.
Another:
To the reader who asked for a dose of reality when it comes to building Keystone; yes, this Liberal will give you that the oil will come out regardless of whether or not Keystone is built. Since we’re being honest, time for some honesty from the other side as well. First, stop saying this is about jobs. Why do the oil companies want the pipeline? Because it lowers their cost to get the product to market. The money they would pay to thousands of truck drivers and train companies they now get to keep. Yes, there will be some temporary construction jobs created, but once the pipeline is built, it will take very little people to manage, so the net impact will be less jobs.
More honesty? Whether Keystone is built or not, it will have zero impact on oil prices and therefore no impact on everyday Americans. Even more? Yes, the likelihood of a spill is less for the pipeline versus rail/truck, but the pipeline is carrying significantly more oil and a leak can go undetected for some time, so the chance is less but the impact is much, much larger.
So the last reality I’d like to reader to face is this has nothing to do with helping middle/lower class in this country. This is about people in the oil industry making as much money as they possibly can.
On that note:
As you’re covering the Keystone XL activity today/this week, I hope you’ll include an important factor in these votes and debates that isn’t getting covered: the $721 million the energy industry spent in the 2014 midterms to put industry-friendly politicians in Congress.
It’s no surprise that congressional leaders are so focused on passing Keystone their first weeks back in Washington. Despite this clear connection, most of the Keystone coverage has not highlighted how much the fight for this bill on the House and Senate floors is directly tied to the fundraising dollars that politicians received from big oil. Here are few valuable resources for you if you’re looking into how big oil has influenced the movement on Keystone:
How coal, oil, and gas industries have worked behind the scenes to encourage easing restrictions on private money in elections and to strip disenfranchised communities of their voting rights
At a news kiosk across from Paris’ city hall early on Wednesday morning, there was already a line before sunrise at 7:15 a.m. – 45 minutes before the newsstand was supposed to open. The stand opened at about 7:50 a.m., and by around 7:55 a.m., there were as many as 40 people in line. By 8:15 a.m., the newsstand had sold out.
The newsstand’s owner automatically handed people copies of Charlie Hebdo when they got to the front of the line, knowing they weren’t looking to buy any other newspaper. He wouldn’t sell more than one copy to each customer — “I don’t have enough,” he explained.
And good luck trying to buy the magazine in the US:
The short answer: finding a copy outside France on Wednesday will be tough. But that may change in the days that follow, especially if there are additional printings.
However, you can browse the issue using the above PDF, which Prachi Gupta passed along. Tracy McNicoll reads through it:
Under extraordinary circumstances, the surviving staff of Charlie Hebdohas produced an issue that is perfectly true to type: Defiant, uncompromising, funny, sometimes bittersweet, but with nary a hint of the melodramatic. None of the murdered staffers are left out and, just as they would have liked, no target for ridicule is spared.
In an interview about their work photographing abandoned buildings, Rusty Tagliareni and Christina Matthews respond to a question about the ethics of what they do and why the things they capture are more than just “ruin porn”:
To us this is history. Perhaps at its most raw, but also at its most accessible. We have spoken at school seminars from elementary to high school levels, about the importance of photojournalism. If you can gain someone’s attention, through interesting photos and videos, then you open them up to learning. It’s really that simple. Case in point:
a while back we spoke at a high school, one of the topics was about documenting abandoned asylums. Of course abandoned asylums are of interest to teenagers, they’re mysterious and full of ghost stories. The imagery of decaying buildings is a hook, upon which you attach information. Well, by the end of the 45 minute session the class knew all about the history of mental healthcare, evolution of modern day pharmaceuticals, and the de-institutionalization of the country. We know this because after each session we heard people in the hallway telling others about not only the abandoned buildings, but why they became abandoned, and why there are no longer a need for such large facilities. They all listened to what we spoke about, and they retained the knowledge because it was linked with things that piqued their interest. Our website is just a history lesson wrapped up in some cool aesthetics.
(Photo of Pilgrim State Hospital in Long Island, NY, at one time the largest psychiatric institution in the world. Used with permission of Antiquity Echoes)
I grew up visiting a cabin in the Sierra that my grandfather built after WW2, when my dad was little. Many of the stories about the cabin involved a Scandinavian journeyman carpenter they hired to help build it. Because of this, for much longer than I care to admit, I thought a finish carpenter was a carpenter from Finland.
Another:
I fly up and down the East Coast a lot. For a while I was puzzled about the flight attendants’ announcement about putting “your rollerboards” in the overhead compartments … until I realized that “rollerboards” is a corruption of “roll-aboards” – what small bags with wheels were called when they first came on the market.
Another:
My associate just tried to describe someone as shady and said: “He is all smoky mirrors,” instead of smoke and mirrors. I told her about your eggcorn thread and warned her that I would be submitting this.
Busted. Many more eggcorns below:
OK, I don’t know if you’ve heard this one already, but …
In the third grade, shortly before Christmas, we were coloring pictures to take home to our parents. Incidentally, it was Maryland in the 1950s, when each school day began with a prayer, and there certainly was no pressure to avoid religious themes. A friend of mine drew a nativity scene that included a short, fat man over by the side, among some of the animals. The teacher was prompting each of us to describe our work, and she asked my friend who the rotund gentleman was. His reply was that it was Round John Virgin.
Another:
From my French-speaking, Tunisian sister-in-law yesterday: “We should go back there, because it will be a safe heaven.”
Another:
You may be oversaturated with these, but I can’t resist the best one I have seen. I am an appeals prosecutor and read a lot of trial transcripts. One time an attorney said he wanted to be sure his client’s rights were protected, and the trial judge, known for his loquaciousness, said (according to the transcript), “We try to protects a defendant’s rights deciduously.” He obviously said “assiduously,” and the court reporter got it wrong. I couldn’t resist sending a copy of the transcript page to the judge and the defendant’s attorney with the question: should we be protecting a defendant’s rights deciduously or coniferously?
Another:
Read this today on The Atlantic’s readers’ discussion page:
This administration, beyond being the most polarizing and immature in history, is utterly and completely tone-death.
Tee hee.
Another:
Sorry to be so late with this one, but these eggcorns are hilarious. Many years ago I was at a meeting in a Midwestern city. One evening a colleague and I went to an English-style restaurant, where the waitresses were referred to as “wenches” (this was in the 1980s). I ordered roast beef, and the “wench” asked me if I wanted O Juice with it. I readily said yes. When we were served, my friend wondered where the orange juice was. Actually, I was responding to a familiar question that dated to the cafeteria in college, where they often served roast beef “au jus,” but the servers would always ask us if we wanted O Juice with it.
Another:
My sister always wanted to be outside playing with the boys; she resented it when grandmother kept her indoors to learn to knit and sew and do “crewel work.” I’m sure the frustration contributed to her habit, ever after, of calling it “cruel work.”
Another:
My wife’s grandmother, a sweet lady from the hills of Kentucky, wrote us that she was diagnosed with “high potension.” We were stumped. Hypertension.
One more:
My son’s eggcorn harkens back to the original. As a preschooler many years ago he understood that acorns came from oak trees. He then extended the concept to pine trees, calling pinecones pinecorns. No amount of gentle correction made any difference. They remained pinecorns for a long time.
Another reader takes a stab at a new subject:
If you’re stopping eggcorns, how about some spoonerisms? JUST THIS SECOND I made up a cool spoonerism from a passing conversation, a habit of mine. I like how it sort of mirrors the original phrase which I think aficionados score extra points for: “Roars to be fecund with.” You’re welcome.
Update from another:
Oh man, I can get on board this spoonerism train. My favorite to date is a take on describing something as highly active/pungent: “kicking like Bruce Lee” turns into “kicking like loose bree.”
And to add to the eggcorns, growing up, my sister didn’t like to make any hard and fast plans, but just “play it by year.” We rib her about that to this day.
Another:
A contribution to your never-ending thread: The head of the local home-school association once wrote, in a newsletter item following a school vacation, that she hoped everyone had had a nice “restbit.” I’ve used that ever since; it sounds even more pleasant than a respite.
Leann Davis Alspaugh laments the intrusion of smartphones into art museums, not least because of the newfangled “digital beacons” that mine them for data about the viewing habits of those who carry them:
These small wireless transmitters, now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Guggenheim, for example, can track how fast visitors move through the galleries and which pieces draw the greatest crowds.
The Polish developers of the Estimote digital beacon call their product a “super small computer,” one compatible with all major smart devices and energy efficient. The pastel-colored, irregularly faceted carapace also makes the Estimote uniquely recognizable, a design improbably incorporating the organic and the high tech. The beacons work through a combination of Bluetooth signals and cloud-based data storage. Suddenly made aware of their “innovation deficit,” museums find themselves rushing to hire data analysts and IT departments to crunch numbers and troubleshoot servers.
The pressure to exploit new technology is strong for museums, as one official noted in a recent Wall Street Journal report, to discover not simply “what’s significant art historically but also what’s perhaps on trend.” Big data can be used to point curators toward what people really want to see in exhibitions. “The customer is king” is marketing’s most basic lesson, but in this case only practicable if exhibitions are assembled like products plucked off of a warehouse shelf. Most museum exhibitions are the product of years of planning and negotiation, not to mention navigating logistics, customs, and insurance complications. And let’s not even think about placating private donors or ensuring that artworks are real and have uncontested rights and provenances. To add to these challenges the pursuit and identification of fleeting trends hardly seems a way to enhance the museum experience or to help it fulfill its educative function.
The Dish 