The Dish

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I lived in Houston for over 30 years before moving to the Northwest.  Portland should be counted every bit a major city as Portland, and Providence as well.  Yes, Houston has a much larger population, but it’s also a huge urban sprawl.  We used to drive 50 miles from our house to my parents, both of which were in the city limits.  A lot of cities in mountainous or water-bound areas, would have a much larger population if you took all of the surrounding towns within 25-35 miles and included them in their population.

However, Houston electing a gay mayor is huge, because it’s the first major Southern city to do so.  This isn’t Portland or Providence in the crunchy Northwest or liberal Northeast, but a city in Texas.  And we’re not talking about Austin. While there’s a thriving gay community in the Montrose area, Houston is a pretty eclectic mix of folks.  It has a large African American (as Annise Parker’s opponent was), a huge Asian population, a mix of urban liberals and big business conservatives, and a very large Baptistfundamental population.  While I don’t know if Houston would vote for gay marriage, I’m very proud that my former home town was open-minded enough to elect an openly gay mayor.

Perhaps Houston will be a stop on Conor’s forthcoming road trip through the South. Atlas Obscura, a site we blogged about this weekend, notes five odd attractions in Houston. Here’s the entry for the Beer Can House:

John Milkovisch loved beer. He drank a six pack a day and saved all the cans. When he retired in the 1960s, he put the cans to good use by covering the exterior of his house with them. Not wanting any part of the cans to go to waste, Milkovisch built mobiles, fences, sculptures and windmills out of the tops and bottoms of his beer cans, as well as wind chimes and curtains out of the pull tabs. When he died in 1988, he had spent 18 years covering his house, fence and even his tree with some 39,000 beer cans. In the words of John Milkovisch: “Some people say this is sculpture, but I didn’t go to no expensive school to get these crazy notions.”

I’m sure Dish readers can suggest even cooler, more obscure sites found in Houston. Right?

Today on the Dish we composed a reax of Joe Lieberman's latest antics on healthcare reform. Yglesias vented about how shackled Congress is by the GOP minority (which seems to include Joe these days). In other news, the head of the Anglican Church spoke out against the Uganda bill, cross-dressing activism in Iran grew stronger, and the regime finally made a move against the detained American hikers.

Among the posts composed by Conor today, he tackled Jonah Goldberg over his views of proper punditry, spotlighted a detestable sheriff, recommended a sprawling new piece by Jim Manzi, and blegged for: recommended Southern sites, journalism from 2009, unreported topics, and jokes. Among Sprung's writings today, he examined Secretary Gates' approach to Pakistan, sized up the latest spat between Greenwald and Joe Klein over Af-Pak, and profiled the hidden beauty of Buffalo, New York.

In other coverage, Patrick joined Larison and Yglesias in critiquing Taibbi's latest liberal tirade against the Obama administration. Appel also continued his discussion over the inner-workings of the Dish and I dug up a passage from Sully addressing the same.

People actually buy these for dogs.

— C.B.

by Conor Friedersdorf

In National Affairs, a new magazine run by the estimable Yuval Levin, entrepreneur Jim Manzi presents a manifesto of sorts for bringing about the continued prosperity of the United States. The whole article is worth a read, so I am not going to excerpt it, though I am going to return to narrow points in later posts. Like Grand New Party, the thoughtful product of Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, Mr. Manzi's piece suggests a framework for understanding the challenges that America faces — thank goodness another serious voice is getting us beyond bromides about liberty and tyranny — the trade-offs we must resolve in our public policy, and specific policy proposals for those persuaded by what precedes them. I hope it gets the attention it deserves, including thoughtful responses from across the political spectrum.

And should it reach folks making policy within the Obama Administration and the current Congress, I hope it lays bare for them how negligent they are in grappling with grave challenges that have gone ignored for too long already.

by Chris Bodenner

Buzzfeed collects the ten most depressing Christmas songs. Here's one even bluer than Elvis':

Apparently the most depressing day of the year is five weeks away – the third Monday in January.

by Chris Bodenner

The three American hikers detained in Iran five months ago will now stand trial for espionage. Ugh.

by Patrick Appel

Yglesias argued a few days ago that the country is ungovernable because the Democratic agenda has been hamstrung by the minority. Ezra Klein has often written a posts along the same lines. Ed Morrissey, among other bloggers on the right, pounced:

Funny, but I don’t recall Yglesias demanding those changes while Democrats were in the minority in the Senate.

Yglesias says he is being misread:

Maybe “ungovernable” was not a good word for this, but I meant to convey the fact that the political system seems incapable of addressing large-scale objective problems. For example, there’s the long-term fiscal deficit. For another example, there’s anthropogenic climate change. For another example, our tax code is a very inefficient means of raising revenue. For a final one, our health care system involves a massive level of waste. These are real problems, not just ideological bugaboos. And I don’t think anything from the Bush administration experience should give us confidence that they’re solvable. Mostly Bush got “a lot done” by dodging those problems. When he did edge toward tackling them—his tax reform commission, for example—he got nowhere.

Weigel offers some support:

When Bush put his weight behind the sort of reforms that [Glenn] Reynolds likes, and that his base wanted — Social Security reform, for example — it died in Congress.

The big exception to all of this, of course, was tax policy. Bush got enormous supply-side tax cuts through Congress. But as Reynolds must know, those tax cuts didn’t need 60 votes to get through the Senate; they went through the budget process and needed 51 votes. I don’t think anyone would make the argument that tax cuts should have to pass a supermajority threshold. I know very few conservatives who are glad that Democratic filibusters, when the party was at an ebb of 45 Senate seats, could kill entitlement reform. But in our current system, cost-shifting policy like that is easy to pass and large-scale policies are tough to pass — note that “deficit hawks” like Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) are not proposing actual entitlement reforms, but toothless “commissions” to look at those reforms.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Patrick says that he "doesn't buy" Scott's argument about peasant societies in so-called "Zomia" discarding writing as part of the creation of new forms of social order apart from authoritarian state practice. I haven't read Scott's book yet so can't say what I make of the evidence in his specific case, but Patrick's reaction seems to be based on an implicit theory of the neutral superiority of writing as a functional technology for organizing society. But the history of writing and the state is riddled with examples of writing becoming the location for power struggles. Genghis Khan, for example, as he swept with his illiterate forces across Asia at some point made the decision to introduce certain forms of literacy as the only available technology for coordinating his expanding empire, and as a result a class of scribes from literate tributary states rose to power in his court. He adopted writing because it was the best possible way for him to rule, which is one of Scott's points.

Medieval England after the Conquest provides another historical case that in many ways resembles Scott's claims about Zomia. England's move from unwritten customary law to more codified legal arrangements (Glanvill famously writes in the 12th century, "Although the laws of England are not written, it does not seem absurd to call them laws.") involved a transfer of power from the old martial nobility to a new group of literate state-builders. Often this latter group resisted the demands of the new written social order strongly because writing was not just writing, it was a new basis for power that made their swords and retainers count for less. Clanchy's book "From memory to written record" provides a wonderful history of this transformation, and he relates a nice story from the chronicle of Walter of Guisborough that captures this sense of writing involving the transfer of power:

"The king disturbed some of the great men of the land through his judges wanting to know by what [written, legal] warrant they held their lands, and if they did not have a good warrant, he immediately seized their lands. Among the rest, the Earl Warenne was called before the king's judges. Asked by what warrant he held, he produced in their midst an ancient and rusty sword and said: 'Look at this, my lords, this is my warrant! For my ancestors came with William the Bastard and conquered their lands with the sword, and by the sword I will defend them from anyone intending to seize them. The king did not conquer and subject the land by himself, but our forebears were sharers and partners with him!'"

The point being that these guys also resisted a social order based on writing for very rational reasons. What Scott argues is not that people have chosen to be illiterate, but that they have realized that organizing themselves around writing has important consequences for the consolidation of power and control, that is, of the state. The title of Scott's book is "The Art of Not Being Governed". Whether or not the evidence supports the claim is a different story, but on its face insisting on oral and customary traditions instead of writing is an absolutely plausible element of such an art. Ask Genghis and Henry II.

by Andrew Sprung

Buffalo" (NY) and "beauty" do not normally occur in the same sentence. We're talking about a city 'belted' with derelict factories that's been losing population for a generation. It's struggling to demolish thousands of abandoned houses. It's been known to get snowed on for 100 days in a row (I was there — with a long driveway and no snow-blower).

But Buffalo has elements of beauty dear to a few doughty hearts (e.g., my wife's – she's a native). These include Olmsted-designed boulevards radiating from an Olmsted central park (Delaware Park); a number of early twentieth-century architectural icons; lots of big, boxy beautiful Victorian houses that can be had for a relative song; a handful of long, graceful commercial and residential avenues that make a vital urban enclave; a surprisingly vibrant arts community; and prices that make it almost like living in another country.

In recent years, too, Buffalo has become a site of the triumph of imagination over physical reality in two ways that have caught my heart. The first is the inkpool spread of neighborhoods that have gone mad with gardening.  Really. Gardening, like happiness and obesity, is contagious, and urban pioneers on the West Side have inspired neighbors to garden and so attracted  new urban pioneers. Call it clear, grow and build. The movement has been driven in large part by the mind-blowing Buffalo Garden Walk, America's best event of its kind, held the last weekend in July.

Unlike in most garden walks, any resident can exhibit — and over 340 do. There are no admission fees. There are Japanese gardens, English gardens, Russian gardens (i.e., barely controlled wildernesses) and what I would call Buffalo gardens – eclectic, funky mixes in which found objects and exotic-looking surrounding rooftops figure prominently. There's ubiquitous bee balm, which grows like a weed up there. There's a miniaturist intensity to many of the small back-yard enclosures.   But Buffalo's also got a fair amount of open space, and some entries are more like small parks. A slideshow is here.

The second Buffalo transformation is in the paintings of local artist Peter Fowler, whose richly layered urban fantasias, in his own words, "conjure a parallel world of past and present."

To look at his landscapes (which are proliferating as fast in Buffalo living rooms as bee balm in the yards), you'd think Buffalo was Venice, or Shangri-la. You'd want to go to there. And you should!

by Patrick Appel

Bryan Caplan points to a survey of 438 professional philosophers and PhDs and 210 philosophy graduate students on their feelings about various subjects. This relates to the free will debate (if you don't understand these terms, Wikipedia is there to help)

Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?

Accept: compatibilism	873 / 3226 (27%)
Lean toward: compatibilism	788 / 3226 (24.4%)
Lean toward: libertarianism	303 / 3226 (9.3%)
Accept: libertarianism	288 / 3226 (8.9%)
Lean toward: no free will	255 / 3226 (7.9%)
Accept: no free will	236 / 3226 (7.3%)