Category: The Dish

A new ORC/CNN  Texas poll has Clinton and Obama in a statistical dead heat. Considering the primary is more than two weeks away, it is little more than a straw in the wind, but this continues Obama’s upward trend in the Texas polls.

by Reihan

Razib Khan, my favorite science blogger, is a rare bird: a Bangladeshi-born neo-paleocon who is deeply knowledgeable about subjects ranging from genomics to anthropology to computer science. He also firmly believes that assortative mating and shrinking families are a good thing. But why? Well, it seems that Razib finds a lot of his relatives deadly dull. And by deadly dull I mean "mind-asphyxiating." For those of you who’ve been trapped in endless gossip with your “aunties,” this post will have special resonance.

Values, norms and ideas float on a social surface. If one’s local network is saturated with family members, family values will be preeminent. Eccentric interests are not likely to be shared across the family network unless one is totally inbred. So there is a strong selection for banal conversation topics which everyone can participate in, or signalers that everyone can appreciate. There’s a local fitness peak of mediocrity around which a family gathers in terms of topic and creative expression; everyone knows uncle-so-and-so or the terrible thing that happened to that particular cousin. Remove the close relations and the landscape is no longer so regular and coalescence around a local fitness peak no longer as inevitable. As an isolated individual, you move to a new location and float in and out of social circles based on common affinity. In other words, the non-family world is one of a shifting balance of ideas and an exploration of a more rugged topography. The sample space of possibilities is larger, the risks greater, the comfort zone less incestuous. Depending on your values, that might be a good thing….

That’s a fairly strong case for the supposed anomie of modern urban life. Down with the family! Except I suppose I see at least some of these banalities in a more positive light, which accounts in part for my family valuesism. Razib continues:

Even shared affinity groups can become too incestuous, to the point where all creativity is removed.

This reminds me of the much-derided (unfairly, in my view) Pauline Kael remark,

“I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”

At a dinner party a few weeks ago, a friend and I had a heated yet mostly playful exchange (about privacy norms and social graph gluttony) that mortified all of our other friends. After I had said my peace, one of my best friends said to my interlocutor, “I can’t believe you let him say that!,” almost as though I had knifed someone in the chest. It occurred to me that my core social group is diverse enough that what strikes some of us as bantery disputatiousness strikes others as monstrously rude. Which is interesting. I do try to keep my combativeness in check.

[Patrick Appel] Above is a picture Abisko Ark Hotel in Sweden. Visitiors stay in fishing huts specially modified so that they can watch the Northern Lights. I blogged about Sweden’s ice hotel yesterday. I’m not sure why Swedish hotels have become a running theme this week. More photos here. Photo by Doug McKinlay/The Observer.

by Reihan Is George W. Bush a good dad? I honestly have no idea. I wouldn’t say I’m indifferent, exactly. The United States would be better off if the president weren’t spending his off-hours loudly demanding that his children not use wire hangars. But really, questions of child-rearing should be left to the president and his wife and possibly Uncle Cheney, better known as "Bad Cop."

Which is why I found this op-ed in The Badger Herald so strange.

Growing up, Hillary was like a second mom to all of Chelsea’s friends (we are sure you know the type of mom we are talking about from your own adolescence). She was a constant presence at school events, sleepover parties and family gatherings. She was the hit of the annual Mother’s Day Skit in high school, imitating Chelsea in tights and ballet slippers with her nose buried in a book. She was a shoulder to cry on after a particularly bad high school break-up and taught us that sometimes, after a terrible day, a giant chocolate brownie is truly the best medicine. She encouraged us to work hard in school, converting the White House kitchen into our exam study room. She taught us how to make sweet potato soufflé when we decided to attempt our first Thanksgiving. She was a source of solace and love when we lost a parent.

There’s more. It seems that Senator Clinton also inspired Chelsea’s friends to believe that they too could achieve great things. Now, I don’t know these young people, and perhaps many of them did grow up under hardscrabble circumstances and not in the manicured precincts of Upper Northwest Washington, a neck of the woods a friend of mine once affectionately called "Upper Caucasia." But my guess is that attending a wonderful, nurturing school, highly selective school probably went a long way towards opening their eyes to the bountiful opportunities available to bright young people in America, and that being close to the First Family was icing on the cake.

I have to say, I’m perhaps a little sensitive on this subject because my parents weren’t a constant presence at school events. That’s because they both worked six if not seven days a week, thus making it impossible for them to take part in any extracurricular activities. My sisters attended parent-teacher conferences on their behalf, and I’m grateful to them. One of the best weekends of my life happened when my mother made it up to my college campus to see me perform in a play. I was amazingly proud and pleased, but I was always amazingly proud and pleased because I had really wonderful, cool parents. Granted, they weren’t always "down to hang" with my cronies, and they didn’t inspire my friends to believe that they too could achieve. My friends were mostly inspired by the hard work of their own parents and by teachers and by kids who were a few years older.

Clearly this testament to the singular excellence of Hillary Clinton as a mother and role model isn’t meant to denigrate my immigrant parents. But that’s the trouble with our pharaonic presidency: we shouldn’t expect our president to be a moral exemplar in every respect. Character does count, but it counts in certain contexts: prudence, humility, judgment, resilience, an ability to lead. That all matters, as demonstrated by the many failings of the often-petulant, allegedly incurious President Bush. But parenting skills? There are many different ways to be a good parent, and I’m powerfully vexed by the idea that a particular bobo parenting stye constitutes a noteworthy qualification for office.

While we’re on the subject of parenting, I have to wonder: given the reflexive hostility of many in our political class against the titans of finance capital, doesn’t it seem odd that Senator Clinton’s daughter and proxy-in-chief works for a hedge fund focused on distressed securities? I see nothing wrong with this because I think that this work is vitally important, not just not morally suspect. But given the privileged circumstances of the younger Clinton’s upbringing, the lens of personal politics leads us to ask questions like, "Does this really reflect your most deeply held values, Senator Clinton?" And of course the fact that some privileged people do choose less remunerative work has implications for the inequality picture, but I digress.

Once we praise Hillary Clinton for being a truly terrific mother, do we then ask about John McCain’s alleged infidelities, or Bill Clinton’s? There is plenty to say on both subjects. This is a trap. It never stops.

If I were to choose a candidate based on her purely personal qualities, I think it would have to be John Edwards. Some time ago I listened to Elizabeth Edwards answer a radio interviewer’s question about privacy, and Edwards said, refreshingly, that she never cared much for privacy: the neighborhood kids would stroll right into her bedroom and say, "What’s cookin’?" She wasn’t trying to be "relatable" (I make sweet potato soufflé!"), but rather she was saying, "I’m an incredibly social weirdo who loves talking to strangers." That’s my kind of woman. By winning her over, John Edwards demonstrates his mettle and keen intelligence. Then, of course, there is the fact that he has embraced the Soviet interpretation of American life, which I find problematic. You get my point.

[Patrick Appel] Matt makes a good point about the Andrew Ferguson article I mentioned earlier:

Under the right circumstances, having advisors from competing schools of thought would probably be an asset…The best policies can often secure support from a variety of different perspectives, and certainly complicated undertakings tend to be improved by accepting some critical input. The trouble is that to make something like this work you need the person in charge to actually be capable of assessing different kinds of advice and ironing them into something resembling a coherent policy and there’s little in McCain’s background to suggest that he has any idea of how to season a policy with a touch of Kemp and a dollop of Peterson.

I have no problem with McCain, or any candidate, having a variety of advisors, but I have yet to see evidence of McCain’s ability to synthesize disperate viewpoints into a sound economic platform.  If he wants to weather the inevitiable  Democratic attacks against his admitted weakness in economics, he is going to have to do a hell of a lot more than name his advisors.

[Peter Suderman]

Jeffrey Overstreet points us to the trailer for the new David Mamet film, Redbelt.

Mamet’s a love-him or hate-him kind of filmmaker, and I tend to fall on the love-him side: the tense, terse Pinteresque dialog and brooding machismo is suggestive of a primordial Michael Mann. In his movies, everyone’s a con artist, and most people are conning themselves too. Everything’s turned inward, backed up on itself to the point where it’s impossible to truly see the end of the duplicity and manipulation; they’re crime films as Escher paintings.

[Patrick Appel] I am not one to cry foul over negative attacks; I think they can point out important differences between candidates. What confuses me about some of the recent attacks against Obama is Clinton isn’t highlighting differences. Critiquing Obama on public financing doesn’t make a lot of sense when you haven’t agreed to public financing yourself. Attacking Obama for using the words of other politicians would be a stronger charge if Clinton hadn’t already appropriated much of Obama’s rhetoric. David Kurtz puts it this way:

Sure he gives better speeches than I do, the Hillary line goes, but the words aren’t even his own. He may talk a good game about public financing, she asserts, but when push comes to shove his position is the same as mine.

The attacks are intended to bring down Obama’s positives, to knock him off his pedestal. But it’s hard to see how they raise Hillary’s. Her argument, boiled down, is: "He’s no better than me." (Or perhaps, less charitably, "He’s just as bad as me.")

[Patrick Appel] Ethan Zuckerman explains the relationship between the Kenyan middle class and the Kenyan bloggers covering the disputed elections:

There’s a strong overlap between the emerging middle class in the developing world and the world of citizen media. Bloggers in Africa are highly educated, and generally are wealthier than the average African. (It’s not cheap, in African terms, to afford the amount of internet access you need to maintain a blog.) Kenya’s got a large middle class, and it’s got one of the largest blogger populations on the continent, behind South Africa, Egypt and very few others.

This group of bloggers and their peers are documenting the election crisis in a way that’s unprecedented in Africa. Traditionally, we’ve heard about African crises either long after they took place (Rwanda) or through the eyes of international media (Darfur, northern Uganda, eastern DRC). In Kenya, we’re hearing raw, emotional accounts from people directly affected by this violence. These accounts are complicating mainstream media narratives. Immediately after the election, many newspapers offered a narrative of the Kenyan violence in terms of “long-simmering ethnic tensions” – bloggers reminded us that these tensions had been consciously stoked by political parties, and that the nation had been largely free of serious ethnic tension for most of its history. As the violence has taken on a clear ethnic cast, bloggers have reminded us how unexpected and how shocking the violence is against the backdrop of Kenyan history.

[Peter Suderman] Susan Jacoby, following up on this Times Online piece, seems to think so. Right now, she says, there is "a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism."

Jacoby has joined the ranks of a growing cohort I think we should call techno-moralists. They run basically the same game as the moral scolds who shriek every time Quentin Tarantino or Eli Roth release new movies, or Rockstar Games puts out another edition of Grand Theft Auto. But instead complaining that culture is being debased by particular imagery, their complaint is that new technologies—particularly the internet—are causing the downfall of Western Civilization.  

We saw this recently with Doris Lessing, for example, who in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech intimated that computers and the internet are rotting our brains. We hear ominous warnings that text-messaging teens are "losing very natural, human, instinctive skills" to a steady stream of  communication via 160-character blips. Thanks to a combination of technology and laziness, American kids, we’re told, are "dumber than dirt." 

But are we really headed for an electropocalypse heralded by whatever’s in this week’s Best Buy flyer? Somehow I doubt it. Text messaging for example, seems to have made kids more comfortable with writing, and some evidence suggests that kids are actually growing more literate. Meanwhile, on the violent imagery front, violent crime amongst youth is down since 1993, when violent video games like Mortal Kombat began appearing. 

Now, I’m not naïve enough to think that it’s all sugar plums and roses. New technologies do cause changes in the way we live, and some of them will probably be at least partially negative. Shorter attention spans might become the norm, but so, I suspect, will greater ability to process larger amounts of discrete information. Memorization will decrease, of course, but ability to link and organize facts will probably increase. As video becomes more dominant, strong writing skills may not be as prevalent, but the ability to communicate in the grammar of film—sounds, images, spoken words—will grow as cheap high quality video cameras become the pens and notepads of the next generation.  

So yes, as new technologies insinuate themselves into more and more lives, there are and will be trade offs, but Jacoby just ignores them. Instead of actually addressing the challenging and complex ways technology is transforming society, she’s chosen simply to be offended—which, as far as I’m concerned, is an anti-intellectual stance if there ever was one.

[Jim Manzi]

Megan McArdle correctly characterizes Hillary Clinton’s proposal to provide mortgage relief by legally prohibiting interest rate resets for years and foreclosures for months as a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.”  The obvious problem with this plan is that, while a pretty sweet deal for the people who get their debt unilaterally renegotiated by the entity that controls the army, it may become very hard to get lenders to enter into future contracts with customers who have marginal credit.  Of course, the government could subsequently address this problem by requiring that any lender who wants to participate in the US mortgage market must make loans on favorable terms to these consumers, and more to the point, voters.  The resulting cross-subsidies, combined with restrictions on exotic products, would inevitably lead to some degree of reregulation of the mortgage industry in the name of fairness and equity.

It seems to me that this proposal is a great example of the kind of ideas that liberals generally, and Clinton and Obama specifically, have been pushing to deal with the many political issues that are really various manifestations of one underlying problem: inequality has been rising steadily rising in the US for the past 30 years.  There are many reasons why inequality started growing in the late 1970s – the oil shocks, the transition to a knowledge-intensive services economy, the dismantling of the traditional family, massive immigration of low-skill workers and so forth – but the Reagan policy of deregulation has interacted with and exacerbated these trends.

The common philosophy underlying the relevant liberal proposals such as mortgage relief is therefore simple: reregulation.  On one level this is sensible, since reregulation can be used to decrease inequality. However, it holds a huge pitfall.  The reason that Reagan embarked on the deregulation process in the first place was that increasing international competition demanded this if the American economy was to continue to succeed.  The objective global conditions that had allowed

America to have it all – rapid growth combined with high equality – had changed for the worse by the late 1970s.  In economic terms, this has gotten much more severe since 1980 due to the economic rise of the Asian heartland.

There is no going back to the successful regulated economy of 1955, but there is also no denying the depth of the problem of inequality.  In an article on this topic in the upcoming National Review, I pose the resulting dilemma this way:

So here we have our current economic situation: we are rich and economically successful, but increasingly unequal.  If we give up the market-based reforms that allow us to prosper, we will lose by eventually allowing international competitors to defeat us; but if we let inequality grow unchecked, we will lose by eventually hollowing out the middle class and threatening social cohesion.  This, not some happy-talk about the end of history, is what “globalization” means for the US. … Seen in this light, the challenge in front of us is clear: how do we continue to increase the market orientation of the American economy, while helping more Americans to participate in it more equally?