Category: The Dish

A grim story from India:

A roadside cluster of young girls, heavily made-up and dressed beautifully, attract the attention of travelers in passing "vehicles. The girls’ maidenheads are offered for sale to the highest bidder.Nita (pic) is a pretty 13-year-old virgin who will follow her four sisters into the prostitution trade. One sister said Nita is particularly pretty and should command a high price. And Nita is willing, saying she doesn’t like housework.Nita’s family is one of 59 who populate the roadside collection, all members of the Bedia tribe."

Barcelona, Spain, 1 pm.

From James Fallows’s 1996 article:

When ordinary citizens have a chance to pose questions to political leaders, they rarely ask about the game of politics. They want to know how the reality of politics will affect them–through taxes, programs, scholarship funds, wars. Journalists justify their intrusiveness and excesses by claiming that they are the public’s representatives, asking the questions their fellow citizens would ask if they had the privilege of meeting with Presidents and senators. In fact they ask questions that only their fellow political professionals care about. And they often do so–as at the typical White House news conference–with a discourtesy and rancor that represent the public’s views much less than they reflect the modern journalist’s belief that being independent boils down to acting hostile.

The limited curiosity that elite reporters display in their questions is also evident in the stories they write once they have received answers. They are interested mainly in pure politics and can be coerced into examining the substance of an issue only as a last resort. The subtle but sure result is a stream of daily messages that the real meaning of public life is the struggle of Bob Dole against Newt Gingrich against Bill Clinton, rather than our collective efforts to solve collective problems.

The natural instinct of newspapers and TV is to present every public issue as if its "real" meaning were political in the meanest and narrowest sense of that term–the attempt by parties and candidates to gain an advantage over their rivals. Reporters do, of course, write stories about political life in the broader sense and about the substance of issues–the pluses and minuses of diplomatic recognition for Vietnam, the difficulties of holding down the Medicare budget, whether immigrants help or hurt the nation’s economic base. But when there is a chance to use these issues as props or raw material for a story about political tactics, most reporters leap at it. It is more fun–and easier–to write about Bill Clinton’s "positioning" on the Vietnam issue, or how Newt Gingrich is "handling" the need to cut Medicare, than it is to look into the issues themselves.

A page from cartoonist John Martz’s redrawing of his mother’s 1968 yearbook– over 1000 portraits in all. The rest can be seen here.

"Fundamentalism can be understood as a particular way of believing one’s beliefs rather than referring to the actual content of one’s beliefs.

It can be described as holding a belief system is such a way that it mutually excludes all other systems, rejecting other views in direct proportion to how much they differ from one’s own. In contrast, the a/theistic approach can be seen as a form of disbelieving what one believes, or rather, believing IN God while remaining dubious concerning what one believes ABOUT God (a distinction that fundamentalism is unable to maintain). This does not actually contradict the idea of orthodoxy but rather allow us to understand it in a new light…

This a/theism is not then some temporary place of uncertainty on the way to spiritual maturity, bur rather is something that operates within faith as a type of heat-inducing friction that prevents our liquid images of the divine from cooling and solidifying into idolatrous form," – Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God.

A reader writes:

I think your latest post explains the blogger/reader relationship. When I read the New York Times or the Washington Post, I don’t hear about the columnist’s asthma. When I read The Dish, I think of my son who has asthma and appreciate the scholarship he gets every year to go to a special asthma camp.

When I read an Op/Ed on gay rights, I say "right on," but when I read your discussions from a real-life perspective, I think of my gay friend who told me that his brothers tried to "beat the gay out of him."

That said, it all really boils down to honesty. You and I disagree on many, many issues, but unlike the traditional media, you lay bare any biases you may have, which allows me, the reader, to do the same.

One can examine the polling data and watch the news, but the true pulse of the electorate is found in an open, honest conversation. For good or ill, the blogosphere is the new kitchen table, sans the horrid meat loaf that you pretend to like.

I actually do love meatloaf.

Seeing this post, Dan recalls the following:

Tyler Cowen highlights the following paragraphs from the NYT‘s coverage of the international food crisis:

In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.

“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”

Useful perspective as we obsess about polls in Pennsylvania.

Ezra thinks Democrats frame the tax debate badly:

This gets to a generalized problem in Democratic tax talk, which is that they’re very unwilling to talk about taxes in terms of value. There are lots of government services which are actually a good deal for middle income families and should be sold as something that Americans would be wise to invest in. But rather than making a positive case around awesome stuff we’re going to get, Democrats talk about taxes in complete isolation from the things that taxes buy, and begin with the premise that they’re so odious and painful that they should only be levied on folks too rich to notice. It’s not exactly the strongest argumentative ground.

But every tax takes money from people; until you concede that, you cannot argue that the benefits outweigh the costs. But I agree that a saner take on taxation would be less abstract.

I asked for it.