The Dish

“Google makes it harder than ever to escape the past,” Lawrence Lessig told the New York Times a while back, noting that “we haven’t developed effective norms yet for all the relationships that develop” because of Google and the Internet. Now Jeffrey Rosen writes that “an etiquette is beginning to emerge” regarding the sharing of personal information online. “I would never reveal the identity of a date — it violates the honor among bloggers,” one blogger told Rosen. As personal bloggers proliferate, a stigma against revealing others’ personal information may be the only way to reclaim an expectation of privacy. Rosen suggests that the “blogging community” police itself by shaming unscrupulous bloggers. But Simson Garfinkel thinks the problem isn’t so serious.

THE MIND OF GOD: In related news, both the Boston Globe and the New York Times run editorials today on Google’s book-scanning project. One of the co-founders of Google, Sergey Brin, has said that the perfect search engine “would be the mind of God,” all-knowing and able to “give you back exactly what you need.” Well, Google is at least adding the inventories of five great libraries (Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library) to its wealth of information. The Globe opines, “Trying to access the world’s overflow of information can be like trying to take a drink from Niagara Falls. This project should tame the flow.” But doesn’t Googlizing libraries seem more like opening the floodgates, letting loose an undifferentiated mass of information without the organization that a library (or a physical book) typically provides? Just as the web demanded portals, directories, and blogs, some digital equivalent of the Dewey decimal system is bound to arise. Still, Boolean searches seem a far cry from the mind of God.
–Steven Menashi

The conventional wisdom has long been that the Bush administration “disengaged” from the Middle East peace process. As the New York Times editorialized, “the administration has allowed the situation in Israel to turn into a stalemate.” Back in August, Aluf Benn, diplomatic correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, challenged this cliche. “The Bush administration, which appears indifferent, has been far more involved than any previous administrations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Benn wrote. Now, David Brooks reports on the fruits of Bush’s approach:

It almost makes you think that all those bemoaners and condemners don’t know what they are talking about. Nothing they have said over the past three years accounts for what is happening now. It almost makes you think that Bush understands the situation better than the lot of them. His judgments now look correct. Bush deduced that Sharon could grasp the demographic reality and lead Israel toward a two-state solution; that Arafat would never make peace, but was a retardant to peace; that Israel has a right to fight terrorism; and that Sharon would never feel safe enough to take risks unless the U.S. supported him when he fought back. Bush concluded that peace would never come as long as Palestine was an undemocratic tyranny, and that the Palestinians needed to see their intifada would never bring triumph.

If that’s disengagement, it’s not half-bad.
–Steven Menashi

The evidence mounts for “The End of the Jewish Vote.” Here’s The Forward on the White House’s ties to Orthodox Jews: “Both supporters and detractors of the president said the events showed that Bush was rewarding the religiously traditional elements of the community that supported his re-election and sending a message to the more liberal segments that did not.” Last month, Peter Beinart wrote that “Religion is eclipsing ethnicity as a force in American politics.” When Rick Santorum is a favored guest at the Novominsker Yeshiva in Brooklyn, who can disagree?
–Steven Menashi

I can certainly see why many intelligent people wouldn’t want George W. Bush in charge of making science policy. What I’m less clear on is why anyone would want these people in charge instead.

— Ross Douthat

An excellent post from one of the better religion blogs out there, GetReligion, takes on Charles Krauthammer’s take on Christmas:

. . . Many of this year’s Christmas culture war skirmishes have nothing to do with tolerance and very little to do with the separation of church and state. They are simply cat fights between armies of liberal fundamentalists and conservative fundamentalists. [Krauthammer] chose to pick on the anti-Christmas left, but pick up almost any newspaper these days and there will be a story in it somewhere about the latest outbreaks on the right . . .

Then again, the cultural steamroller called “The Holidays” has done almost as much damage to the actual religious traditions of Hanukkah as it has to the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Once upon a time, Hanukkah was a smaller Jewish holiday reminding Jews not to compromise their faith when facing pressures to assimilate into a dominant culture. Today, Hanukkah is a giant, major holiday because it is close to the holiday previously known as Christmas. Religious history doesn’t get any more ironic than that.

Read the whole thing.

— Ross Douthat

Reihan is much, much too kind. I don’t pay him enough — especially given the slings and arrows being hurled our way. He’s so kind, in fact, that I will take up the gauntlet thrown down by Jonah Goldberg and defend Reihan’s view that affirmative action at elite universities is essentially a “sideshow,” and one that’s useless to disadvantaged minorities, because it only “affect[s] the miniscule segment of the population that has the chance to attend any selective school.”

Goldberg retorts that “I don’t think you can call the fight for how our leading civilizing, culture-transferring and, yes, wealth conferring institutions pick and choose their students a ‘sideshow.'” Now, I’d be the last to disagree, for obvious reasons. But the point that Reihan is making, I think, is that for all intents and purposes, “our leading civilizing, culture-transferring” institutions pick and choose their black students from the exact same pool as their white students — i.e. the meritocratic haute-bourgeoisie. (This article, I suspect, could have been written about the black population at almost any top-flight school.) With rare exceptions, the people that affirmative action is supposed to benefit don’t see any returns from Michigan Law School et. al. giving minority applicants a few extra points on the ol’ application score sheet. All those extra points do is churn the waters of the upper-middle-class a little.

POINTLESS PREFERENCES: So the affirmative-action-at-elite-schools debate is a “sideshow,” because it has no serious impact on how race, and more importantly class, are lived in America. This suggests, first of all, that liberals should stop racing to the barricades every time somebody hints that racial preferences might not be a good idea — at least if they really want to reduce racial inequality, rather than just feel good about how diverse the Brown student body looks in its Yearbook photo shoots. But it also suggests that there might be more profitable ways for the Right to spend its time than railing against the injustice of Stanford Law daring to pick a black kid with a 3.6 GPA instead of a white kid with a 3.8. Sure, it’s unjust . . . but it’s also not that important. And pointing out how unimportant it is, and how ineffective such programs are, might be a better way to the hearts and minds of minority voters than just repeating the “color-blind society” mantra and waiting for Sandra Day O’Connor to retire.

— Ross Douthat

“I like your blog, warts and all, and have read it and contributed a few small tips for a few years now. It’s passionate. And well written. And experimental. But this is an experiment gone wrong.” More feedback on the Letters Page.

— Reihan Salam

Charles Clarke has embraced a national ID card for Britain. It will be a miserable failure. I’m constantly surprised and disappointed by the otherwise incredibly sharp people who’ve fallen for this awful idea. My objections aren’t those of the civil liberties left, I promise you. Any attempt to build a “foolproof” national ID card for the US will backfire. We’re better off with data-mining technologies, like the unfortunately named, and now dead, “Total Information Awareness.”

— Reihan Salam

Curtis Sittenfeld breaks the bad news. It seems that publishing a book, even if it is, simply put, the best, most groundbreaking work written in a generation-or at least since Andrew’s latest-is not the way to “score” with “babes.” (Or, in Sittenfeld’s case, with dudes.) So why write books at all? Why not communicate via smoke signals, or tattooed passenger pigeons? Thanks to the pleasing visual properties of pulp, book-writing (not to be confused with “book-larnin’,” which has no place in the future anarchistic “Badlands” civilization Ross, Steve, and I hope to build through Social Security privatization and massive tax cuts, though they’re sure to deny it) remains the best way to transmit “mad knowledge” concerning the meritocracy and American life. I’m going to write at great length about Ross’s book, mainly because it’s officially one of my all-time favorites. For now, I’ll just point you to it. It’ll arrive too late for this Christmas, but not for next Christmas. Or, for the nontraditional spiritual practitioners among you, “All Hail Various Lovable Animals Day,” which conveniently falls of March 3rd, the day after the release of “Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class.” Buy it now. Buy ten copies for your friends, ten more for your enemies. To college admissions officers, I say buy a copy for yourself, for junior, and for every last one of your students, all of whom ought to know what the hell it is they’re getting into. High school students, I promise you, this book was literally written with you in mind. I mean, it probably wasn’t “literally,” but it may as well have been. (Ask Ross.) If you want the straight dope, the inside skinny, the real deal, you will get it here, I promise you.

Lastly*, there’s just one book I’d mention in the same breath as “Privilege.” It’s “Goodbye, Columbus.” Trust me. Ross’s book is nonfiction, but it has all the pathos, the warmth, the keen intellect, and the gut-busting hilarity that made Roth’s outsider story an affecting generational statement in the non-lame sense.

* By “lastly,” I mean only that this first of many, many plugs is drawing to a close. And yes, all of these links are going to the same place. Take the hint, Mack.

A SPECIAL NOTE TO MY GENERATION: We’ve had differences in the past. Back in elementary school, I sensed that the New Kids on the Block presaged the Menudo-ization of our national life, and I chose to “stand athwart History yelling ‘Stop!'” Being exceptionally small for my age, this did little good. History marched on. I kept it street. Sadly, this led others to treat me as a major thoroughfare. That is, I was trampled underfoot. Chuck Taylors, Doc Martens, Air Jordans, Birkenstocks, stylish leather Coach slip-ons, Adidas Sambas, and other generational footprints have left welts across my back and my chest. Suffice to say, I was, well, chagrined by all of this. But now, there’s a chance, however fleeting, for real reconciliation. If you name Douthat our generational spokesman, all will be forgiven. What, do you want it to be Gideon Yago? Hillary Duff? Jenna Bush? Seriously dude.

— Reihan Salam

I’m not sure which is weirder — that Maureen Dowd and William Safire both wrote alternate histories of the Iraq War on back-to-back days (in Dowd’s It’s a Wonderful Life takeoff, Donald Rumsfeld was never born; in Safire’s reboot of The Plot Against America, Iraq was never invaded) . . . or that Dowd’s is actually the more plausible of the two.

Yeah, I know what you’re going to say. In Dowd’s vision, relayed via Clarence the guardian angel, Saddam is forced from power by a combination of SecDef Sam Nunn, Veep Chuck Hagel, and the tender ministrations of Hans Brix — sorry, Blix. Not terribly believable, huh? But is it really any less absurd than Safire’s tale of how leaving Saddam in power leads to 1) an immediate Saddam-PLO-Al Qaeda alliance, 2) a Gulf-State-sponsored worldwide recession, and 3) the union of Libya and Egypt into a nuclear-armed, Islamist superstate (!!!!) . . . all within two years?

I report, you decide.

–Ross Douthat