Category: The Dish

[Patrick Appel] He is on vacation this week, which mostly entails his staying at home and sleeping. He will be back on Sunday. Until then, you are stuck with us.

A Japanese Macaque monkey relaxes in the hot spring at the Jigokudani (Hell’s Valley) Monkey Park on February 17, 2008 in Jigokudani, Nagano, Japan. This Macaque troop regularly visits the Jigokudani-Onsen springs to escape the cold, behaviour originating from a female Macaque which ventured into the hot springs to retrieve soybeans in 1963. By Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images.

[Patrick Appel] Paul Lukasiak tries to argue that Clinton actually has the popular vote lead. Tom summarizes Paul’s argument:   

Apparently, if you only count votes up to Super Tuesday, discount every state that had a caucus, only go by the exit polling, and eliminate any voters who weren’t registered Democrats, then Hillary Clinton actually has the popular vote lead. In other news, based on exit polling and early voting from 2004 President Kerry will be running for reelection.

The idea that caucus states don’t count is pretty bewildering, especially when the Clinton campaign is simultaneously arguing that Florida and Michigan voters were disenfranchised. Even if you count Michigan and Florida voters, Obama still has the popular vote.

[Patrick Appel] Within the past few weeks, it has become obvious that the eventual Democratic candidate will attack McCain on economics. The Democrats have picked up where Romney’s attack ads left off. After reading Andrew Ferguson’s article, I don’t feel any better about McCain’s economic platform:

What makes it odd is [McCain’s economics advisors] aren’t like each other at all, at least when it comes to their economic views. A couple of them, if you put them in the same room, would set off an intergalactic explosion like the collision of matter and antimatter.

One adviser, Jack Kemp, is the man who talked Ronald Reagan into embracing supply side economics in the 1970s, which launched the Reagan boom of the 1980s. He’s the world’s bubbliest advocate of tax cuts, dismissing the traditional Republican fixation on balanced budgets as "root canal" economics. Another adviser, Peter Peterson, is root canal economics. He’s a dour Jeremiah who called the Reagan boom a "mad, drunken bash" and thinks steep tax increases on income, gasoline, tobacco, and alcohol, on top of a 5 percent consumption tax, are necessary to put the government’s finances in order. He and Rudman run the Concord Coalition, an advocacy group that regards the federal government’s budget deficit as the country’s foundational economic problem.

[Patrick Appel] I mulled over this sentence by Ryan McMaken most of yesterday:

…war is the biggest of big government programs, and the candidate that opposes it is almost inevitably the de facto small-government candidate.

[Patrick Appel] Sam Harris describes what he sees as the root of the emotion.

Bebek, Istanbul, 5 pm.

by hilzoy

From the Washington Post (emphasis added, and stolen from publius):

“Supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton are worried that convoluted delegate rules in Texas could water down the impact of strong support for her among Hispanic voters there, creating a new obstacle for her in the must-win presidential primary contest.

Several top Clinton strategists and fundraisers became alarmed after learning of the state’s unusual provisions during a closed-door strategy meeting this month, according to one person who attended.

What Clinton aides discovered is that in certain targeted districts, such as Democratic state Sen. Juan Hinojosa’s heavily Hispanic Senate district in the Rio Grande Valley, Clinton could win an overwhelming majority of votes but gain only a small edge in delegates. At the same time, a win in the more urban districts in Dallas and Houston — where Sen. Barack Obama expects to receive significant support — could yield three or four times as many delegates.

“What it means is, she could win the popular vote and still lose the race for delegates,” Hinojosa said yesterday. “This system does not necessarily represent the opinions of the population, and that is a serious problem.””

When I read this, I dissolved in giggles after the first sentence. It was that part about the Texas delegate selection rules “creating a new obstacle for her” that got me. In what sense are the Texas rules a “new obstacle?” Were they only recently passed? Not as far as I can tell — here, for instance, is a pdf about them from August 2007, which should have given the Clinton campaign ample time to get up to speed. While I was having fun thinking of possible analogies — would I describe the existence of the Pacific Ocean as “creating a new obstacle” for my plan to walk from Baltimore to Beijing? or the fact that five is a prime number as “creating a new obstacle” to my proving that it is a multiple of two? –my co-blogger publius was actually writing the post I might have written, only funnier:

“Good lord, let’s see if I have this right. The Clinton campaign decides to cede every post-Super Tuesday state to Obama under the theory that Texas and Ohio will be strong firewalls. After – after – implementing this Rudy-esque strategy, they “discovered” that the archaic Texas rules will almost certainly result in a split delegate count (at best).

While they were busy “discovering” the rules, however, the Obama campaign had people on the ground in Texas explaining the system, organizing precincts, and making Powerpoints. I know because I went to one of these meetings a week ago. I should have invited Mark Penn I suppose. (ed. Maybe foresight is an obsolete macrotrend.)”

Note to self: If I ever run for office and base my campaign on the idea that I am ready to lead from day one, I must remember to actually run an effective campaign.

by Reihan This’ll be quick.

It often seems as though right-wingers are trying to make light of inequality by pointing to consumption inequality, and that left-winger take inequality seriously by zeroing in on income and wealth inequality as meaningful metrics. I think, emphasis on think, that this is the wrong way of looking at things.

In The End of Equality, Mickey Kaus drew an insightful contrast between "Money Liberals," focused on income and wealth, and "Civic Liberals," focused on our shared institutions. His basic take was that while money inequality was a lost cause, we could create excellent schools and an excellent public healthcare system that all would be proud to use. These institutions, in turn, would serve as engines of mobility and opportunity. It’s an attractive vision, though I can’t say that it’s my own. I suppose I’m more skeptical about the ability of even the best-run bureaucracies to adapt to fast-changing circumstances. But Kaus’s framework is worth keeping in mind.

What exactly are the consumptionists telling us? My sense is that they are telling us that material deprivation isn’t a pressing problem in the United States. This point, very narrowly understood, isn’t very controversial. But it also doesn’t establish that inequality is not a problem. Far from it. Consider the ever-present danger that a wealthy elite will use its disproportionate political power to entrench its privilege. Though I’m pretty optimistic about American life, and though I cheer lustily for the market economy, it seems clear to me that something like this state of affairs already exists. Of course, my view is a little idiosyncratic, e.g., I tend to see things like, say, the tobacco settlement or a cap-and-trade system or Wal-Mart agitating for ostensibly "progressive" labor market regulations as examples of this kind of oligarchic self-dealing, etc. Other views can just as easily fit this framework. Inequality isn’t a problem because the hell of Anglo-Saxon capitalism is leading to people dying on their feet: it could be a problem "merely" because it corrupts our democratic institutions, a corruption that has corrosive effects on our life chances. That is, Money Liberalism could be an essential instrument for achieving Civic Liberalism.

Again, I don’t actually think this view is right, but it’s at least somewhat persuasive, which is more than can be said of the view that the economic immiseration of half or a third of Americans is the central fact of our time. When we talk about the problems stemming from inequality, we’re being very imprecise: we usually have in mind problems stemming from a lack of social cohesion, and more specifically from the proliferation of disrupted families. Now I’ll repeat, for the umpteenth time, way more money!" Well, it’s not so much that our problems are bigger as that our problems are different. That was something I gleaned from Judith Shklar’s  American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion, though I’d hardly be surprised if Shklar is rolling in her grave over the fact that I’ve claimed her in this small way. It also makes me wary of, say, a "Marshall Plan for the cities." Cultural capital can’t be bought; it needs to be rebuilt, slowly, and there are good reasons to believe that this is exactly what’s happening in many historically excluded communities.

The upshot of all this is that conservatives have, or rather conservatives should have, important and interesting things to say on these subjects. But the argument from consumptionism, sound as it may be, is only a first step.

[Peter Suderman] Look, I’m sure the Euphoria physics engine in the new Star Wars video game, The Force Unleashed, is pretty awesome. But I wonder if the reporter who sat through a couple of gameplay demos for this Vanity Fair article is really all that familiar with the gaming world, because there have been games that use rag-doll effects, A.I., and simulations of various physical properties for quite a while now. Admittedly, I haven’t seen the demo he has, but this passage strikes me as having the potential for serious overkill: 

By the time the demonstration was over, I was left with the unmistakable sense that LucasArts was on the cutting edge of a huge leap forward for the video-game industry—a technological breakthrough, nearly as revolutionary as the introduction of sound in film, that could finally give gaming the kind of immersive realism that would enable it to join movies and television as a form of mainstream entertainment. 

At the very least, it’s true that game companies have been showing very limited demos that make it appear as if they’ve stumbled upon the Holy Grail of gaming—completely seamless and lifelike physical interaction with the world at large—for quite a while. Look at this 2006 demo for Assassin’s Creed in which the host brags about the world design as well as the way that characters react organically within the game, not simply relying on preprogrammed animations. Or check out this 2003 demo of Half-Life 2, in which the announcer boasts of being able to "build environments" that the game company "couldn’t even dream of" just a few years previous. Later, he brags about the A.I. and shows off the interactivity the game allows with the physical environment. Sound familiar? 

The point is that game companies have been hyping their code like this for years without any one technology (other than the advent of 3D) really proving transformational.  Like politicians talking up their policy plans, game companies tend to make a lot of big promises but often fail to deliver on the revolutions they assure us are in store.  Things work much better on paper–or in demo mode–than they do out in the field. And while this write-up clarifying how Euphoria is supposed to work does make it seem like a neat piece of tech, I remain skeptical that this is anything close to "nearly as revolutionary as the introduction of sound in film."

Update: It’s also sort of odd to suggest that video games are not yet a form of "mainstream entertainment."  It’s an $18 billion industry that’s growing far faster than the movie or music business.  Sony has sold more than 120 million Playstation 2 consoles. It’s not exactly a niche market.