So much for the End of History

Just some cheerful words to chew on while our politicians wear their enamels off congratulating themselves about the Iraqi election:

“The collapse of the rival giant [the Soviet Union] has exaggerated America’s apparent strength because it has so much more economic muscle than any single rival. But for many decades America’s share of the world’s economic output has been in decline. Think of a see-saw. America at one end is now easily outweighed by any substantial grouping at the other, and most of those powers are on friendly terms with each other. America’s modesty in 1945 understated its muscle, just as Bushite vanity overstates it today. He has over-reached. His country is overstretched, losing economic momentum, losing world leadership, and losing the philosophical plot. America is running into the sand.”

Maybe I’ve been hanging out in France, where declinism (both French and American) never goes out of fashion, for too long, but that assessment seems more convincing than this disappointing “We are so great—right now” rebuttal by Victor Hanson. And the CIA seems to concur (though admittedly in more neutral language):

“The likely emergence of China and India … as new major global players—similar to the advent of a united Germany in the 19th century and a powerful United States in the early 20th century—will transform the geopolitical landscape with impacts potentially as dramatic as those in the previous two centuries.”

Election Redux

Realized I haven’t commented on the election since it happens. Basically, I have nothing to say about the whole thing. Primarily, I was rooting for an electoral tie, just because it would have been delightfully ludicrous. Barring that I was hoping for Kerry to win the electoral vote but lose the popular vote, because (a) it would have been wonderfully ironic and (b) because legislative gridlock is always desirable and there wasn’t a chance in hell the Democrats were going to control either house of Congress. Okay, neither of those things actually happened and, to be honest, it all played out pretty much how I expected. I mean, I hate to say “I told you so”, but, well, I told you so:

Bush is going to win this election. For better or for worse, his arguments are essentially positive: I will do X because I believe it is the right thing to do. Whether or not he believes his own arguments, and whether or not what he does exemplifies whatever beliefs he may actually have (and I’m skeptical that he has any), he’s arguing from an essentially stronger position than Kerry, all of whose arguments boil down to the following: I am not George W. Bush.

[…]

None of the above should be construed as an endorsement of Bush. Rather, it seems to me unlikely that someone running on an essentially negative platform, like Kerry, is going to defeat someone who at least pretends to be running on a positive platform.

As it stands, the only thing I wish I’d emphasized more strongly is the fact that Kerry supporters, by and large, tried to portray possible Bush voters as idiots, fools and evil psychopaths. Needless to say, not the best strategy for attracting those voters who might be sympathetic to Republican ideas on the war or anything else while also being sympathetic to the Democrats (who, so far as I can tell, didn’t take much of a stand on anything other than that they didn’t like Bush one damn bit). And it looks like at least one voter’s mind was swayed by exactly this fact (props to cosmicv for the link):

Your attitudes, language, and behavior toward people like me: reasonable, thinking Christians who are quite moderate politically and who are just as well-informed as you are (yes, I’ve read all the PNAC essays, too, and yes, they scare me, too) is reminiscent of nothing so much as an abusive ex-lover, a crazy and drunken stalker. “I’ll make you love me, or you’ll regret it, you worthless bitch! Come here and let me beat you over the head and tell you how stupid and worthless you are! Then you’ll see it my way!”

I’m not saying I agree with her stance on the war, Social Security or anything else, nor am I suggesting that domestic violence metaphors couldn’t be applied in the opposite direction with equal justification, but I suspect there are many, many others who felt and feel the same way. Something to think about.

(See also David Brooks’ column, especially the second-to-last paragraph)

Don't Vote!

This summer, when I had more time on my hands than sense, I thought about making up some anti-campaign posters to put up around town. Needless to say, at this point I’m much too busy (and lazy) to actually follow through, but I still think it’s a good idea.

So what is an “anti-campaign poster”? Well, basically the idea would be to come up with something that would simultaneously ridicule the candidates and their militant supporters, the inane “get out the vote” campaigns, and the very process itself.

One of my favorite ideas was:

Which white, millionaire Yale alumnus and Skull & Bones member do you want deciding economic policy?

This point hasn’t, in my opinion, been emphasized enough. The feeling I get from most Kerry supporters I know is that they’re voting for Kerry, not because of who he is or what he stands for, but because he’s not Bush. Well, that’s all well and good, in theory at least, but how different are they, really? They both went to Yale, they’re both middle-aged, they’re both white, they’re both millionaires, they’re both members of the super-elite Skull & Bones, neither did much to actually earn his money, one went AWOL from the National Guard while the other organized protests with Hanoi Jane (Fonda) and they’re both all about increasing spending. Okay, admittedly, one looks like a chimp while the other looks like a horse, but that’s not really much to go on.

My other favorite idea was:

The only candidate to win a clear majority in this election will be ‘None of the Above’

Let’s not kid ourselves, nobody’s getting a “mandate” from the electorate, because the majority of the electorate either doesn’t care who wins or doesn’t like either one of the candidates (or thinks the entire process is morally bankrupt, but I’m guessing us radicals don’t comprise a significant percentage). And let’s be honest, there are good reasons for being part of that “silent majority”. For one thing, there’s Drew Carey’s take: “”Quit pretending that it matters, would you? Can you vote for all the nefarious cabals that really run the world? No. So fuck it.”

Also, as Steven Landsburg points out: “Even if you voted in the most hotly disputed state [Florida] in the mostly hotly disputed election [2000] in American history, your vote did not change the outcome.” The consensus seems to be that Bush won Florida by 530-odd votes; if any one person had acted differently, either by voting or not voting, Bush still would have won by 530-odd votes. Landsburg goes on to evaluate the likelihood that a single Florida voter could sway the election this time around:

If Kerry (or Bush) has just a slight edge, so that each of your fellow voters has a 51 percent likelihood of voting for him, then your chance of casting the tiebreaker is about one in 10 to the 1,046th power—approximately the same chance you have of winning the Powerball jackpot 128 times in a row.

Needless to say, as JTK has pointed out several times in the past (for example, commenting on Brian Doss’s post), you would do more to enhance your candidate’s chances of winning by buying a PowerBall ticket and mailing it to him than by voting for him. With that in mind, I rather like Virginia Warren’s idea regarding letting people pay for votes:

The benefits of a vote market would be quickly realized if the ban were lifted. For one thing, it would muzzle the tedious affirmations of mysticist, lever-wanking airheads who flounce about proclaiming “Every vote counts!” It wouldn’t take long for them to finally be shown the exact worth of an individual vote on the open market.

Given Landsburg’s numbers, let’s just say there aren’t currency denominations small enough to adequately express the market value of a single vote in a presidential election (and, needless to say, Michael Moore is overpaying).

Anyway, after tossing the numbers around, demonstrating that even if the preferences are split 50/50, your chance of casting the deciding vote is smaller than your chance of being murdered by your mother, Landsburg feels compelled to almost apologize for his advocacy of non-voting:

The traditional reply begins with the phrase “But if everyone thought like that … .” To which the correct rejoinder is: So what? Everyone doesn’t think like that. They continue to vote by the millions and tens of millions.

True enough, but I think Joe Sobran’s take is more compelling:

Nonvoters are often described as lazy, apathetic, lacking in civic spirit. Voting is touted among us as a moral imperative. If you don’t vote, we are told, you have no right to complain. Voting, in fact, is the way we are encouraged to complain!

It’s hard to know where to start refuting such imbecility. The act of making an X in a box, or its high-tech equivalent, is close to worthless as a means of either self-expression or imparting information. When masses of votes can be won by wearing silly hats and repeating silly slogans, it’s pretty hard to maintain the belief that election results reflect an aggregate wisdom in the electorate. I marvel that faith in democracy has survived the advent of C-SPAN.

Sobran goes on to give a moral argument for not voting, which I think is compelling but won’t reproduce here. Rather, I think Robert Anton Wilson’s response to the question “Who are you going to vote for?” does quite nicely:

I’m voting for myself because I don’t believe anybody else can represent me as well as I can represent myself.

Think about that for a second, and ponder just what casting a vote for someone else says about you.

With all that in mind, why do people still vote? Surely if there’s anything we learned from the 2000 election, it’s not that “every vote counts”. Rather (and either JTK stole this from me, or I stole it from him; I can’t remember which) the lesson we learned from 2000 was: if the election’s close enough so that every vote counts, the only votes that are going to matter are the 9 on the Supreme Court.

Okay, but that’s just illustrating the point, not answering the question. So why do people vote? The answer, I think, can be found buried within Hunter S. Thompson’s otherwise incoherent pastiche of his own writing from 3 decades ago:

The genetically vicious nature of presidential campaigns in America is too obvious to argue with, but some people call it fun, and I am one of them. Election Day — especially a presidential election — is always a wild and terrifying time for politics junkies, and I am one of those, too. We look forward to major election days like sex addicts look forward to orgies. We are slaves to it.

That’s right: people vote because it’s fun, because it’s a thrill, because they get a rush from forcing others to submit to the will of their chosen despot. What that says about human psychology is probably best not considered too deeply, but I figure it’s as good an answer as any.

From politics to mathematics and back

Last night I found myself with an unusually large chunk of time on my hands and, after doing some maintenance work around here that I’d been putting off, decided to catch up on some blog-reading. I read Colby Cosh’s excellent analysis of the ALCS from a week or so ago, enjoyed Billy Beck’s musings on book addiction and rantings on the justice system, caught up on the No Treason/Karen DeCoster/Thomas DiLorenzo shitstorm, uncovered the latest links that appear below in the “External Links” section, and enjoyed Scribbling’s pomegranate pictures. Somewhere along the way, I came across Cosmic Vortex’s “First political diatribe,” which suggests the notion of “political shock levels” as a complement to the future shock levels which extropians go on about. The author lays out a sort of political spectrum, ranging from communist to fascist, and then suggests the following:

Now, its very easy for a socialist and a progressive to discuss issues and come to an understanding, but try to get a socialist and a right wing republican together, and nothing will get accomplished except frustration and anger. Where does this leave us? Not in a good situation really - as theirs no real way to drag anyone more then 1 level away. Even if they did want to try to understand your position, they just couldnt map the concepts over if you jump too far. The cognitive differences would be un-breachable and it would require starting at the begining of their conceptual “tree”, validate every concept along the way, and maybe then something could be worked out.

Interesting idea and stated in a somewhat unique way. What really caught my attention in reading, though, was the sentence I’ve taken the liberty of italicizing. I have to admit, the very first thought that popped into my head upon reading that sentence was: “Sounds like a chain complex!” For those too lazy to click the link, a chain complex is basically a sequence of maps between objects such that moving two steps along always takes you to zero. They arise a lot in topology and homological algebra (for example, I first ran across them while learning about simplicial homology in an algebraic topology class). The connection with shock levels being that if you try to map more than one level down the line you can’t go anywhere but zero, just as the conversation between socialist and republican goes nowhere.

“A nice little analogy,” I though to myself, not quite realizing, for the moment, how loony it would have sounded had I tried to explain it (at this point tenses completely break down, given that I just have tried to explain it). Consider, in addition, how one of my office-mates and I had laughed earlier in the day when she described having just caught herself before asking two of her students (who are identical twins) if they were “isomorphic”. I know I’ve talked about this before (that time when a friend referred to this Strong Bad song as a “canonical techno song”), but I still find the way in which the accumulation of a new vocabulary shapes my outlook either amusing or frightening, depending on the time of day.

Of course, in a sense, the vocabulary is the least important part of what I’ve (hopefully) learned in the last year or so of grad school, but applying the vocabulary outside of its mathematical context is perhaps the most obvious outward sign. Well, one of the most obvious, anyway. Perhaps the other obvious sign of what might be called my increasing mathematical sophistication (or confusion, depending on your perspective) manifests itself in how I answer the questions of my students.

I’m currently teaching four recitation sections of a class innocuously called “Ideas in Mathematics” in the course catalogue, but of which the unofficial course title bestowed by the professor is “Mathematics and Politics”.¹ A friend rather uncharitably characterizes it as “math for morons”, in that it’s the only freshman-level non-calculus course that fulfills the college’s math requirement. Anyway, the point is that I spend most of my time answering questions about the homework or the lectures, and, in answering, I often find myself engaging in impromptu monologues about how intuitionists would object to proofs by contradiction or how mathematics only describes the world insofar as it simplifies away the hard bits. And, most importantly, I have a very difficult time answering conceptual questions definitively.

Needless to say, I imagine my students find it frustrating when, for example, they ask “Why is a conditional true when its antecedent is false?” and I have to say something along the lines of the following:

Well, the short answer is because it’s defined that way, and the long answer is still because it’s defined that way, but it’s defined that way because that’s really the most reasonable way to define it. You see, when we’re thinking about whether a logical statement is “true” or “false”, it’s probably best not so much to think actually in terms of “true” and “false”, but rather in terms of compatibility with the world. In other words, can you believe the statement while also believing in reality without contradicting yourself? We only say the statement is “false” if not; otherwise we call it “true” even though it may be counterfactual, absurd, or completely irrelevant to reality.

At this point, I’m usually lucky if the looks I’m getting are merely quizzical. So I try again:

Well, let’s think in terms of an example. Suppose, back in 2002, a friend told you “If the U.N. approves a war in Iraq, France will go to war.” Now, we know that, in reality, the U.N. didn’t approve the war and that France didn’t go to war. So this is a situation where the antecedent and consequent are both false, so, if we’re thinking in terms of logic, we would say the conditional is true. Why? Well, because you can believe what your friend said and also believe in reality. That is to say, you can believe the statement without contradiction. So the assignment of “true” or “false” is more or less like how you treat a friend: because he’s your friend and you trust him not to mislead you, you assume he was telling the truth unless you can definitely prove that he was lying. In this case, the only way you could know he was lying would be if the U.N. had approved the war and France had stayed home (i.e. the antecedent is true and the consequent is false), since that’s not what actually happened, we would say that the statement is “true”.

Having given this explanation more than a half dozen times, it’s been mildly surprising that nobody has actually called me (and, by extension, math) out on it all being a bunch of convoluted bullshit, but I have to imagine some were thinking it. Usually, at this point, seeing the pained expressions on some of the faces staring out at me, I say something along the lines of “Of course, you could just think of this as the definition,” which seems to be a great relief to some. Which is ironic, given that, without the explanation, the notion that things could be this way just because that’s how they’re defined seems entirely unsatisfactory (which, by the way, I completely agree with. Definitions suck without context).

Having spent ten minutes writing about the conditional, I’m not sure it really illustrates the point I’m trying to make. Perhaps more appropriate would be the times that I’ve had to catch myself before I start ranting about epistemology, theories of logic, reductionism and how mathematics education is, essentially, a system of useful lies. Just as a calculus teacher extolls the virtues of the definite integral, talking about how useful it is and how many amazing physical properties it explains without mentioning that, in any actual application integration is not only difficult but usually impossibly difficult, I find myself teaching material which is useful in certain cases but usually too simplistic to be applicable to the real world. I try to point this out as much as possible, but I think it’s still probably misleading.

That having been said, the underlying concepts are, in fact, incredibly deep. It’s difficult, though, to emphasize that what’s important are the concepts, the fundamental ideas which lead us to particular formulas or computations, especially when midterms are looming and homework is due on Friday. I remember one student asking, the night before the midterm, if she ought to memorize a particular counter-example listed on the review sheet. My honest answer was “No, I don’t think you should memorize it; I think you should understand it,” which I don’t think she liked very much.

That question, though, lies at the heart of the topic that I’m apparently (finally) coming around to, which is that there seems to be a fundamental dichotomy in most people’s minds between, say, the humanities and mathematics. I doubt if anybody would ask an English professor, the night before a midterm, if he ought to memorize Joyce’s “The Dead” for the test, but in a math class it seems like a perfectly legitimate question (incidentally, I’m not trying to say that memorizing is completely worthless; in learning a foreign language, for example, unless one is lucky enough to be living in the country where the language being learned is spoken there’s really no way to make progress without memorizing verb conjugations, vocabulary, etc.). The fact that, for whatever reason, mathematics seems to be equated with rote memorization and plugging values into a formula seems to me to be one of the primary reasons that so many people have such a strong aversion to math.

Which is completely understandable, in a way. Memorizing is boring and almost completely lacking in cognitive content, which most people instinctively recognize, and the fact that math is equated with this boring activity is, I think, one of the primary reasons why an aversion to mathematics is considered acceptable even among people who would strongly decry stunted development in other intellectual pursuits. As John Allen Paulos puts it in Innumeracy: “In fact, unlike other failings which are hidden, mathematical illiteracy is often flaunted: ‘I can’t even balance my checkbook.’ ‘I’m a people person, not a numbers person.’ Or ‘I always hated math.’”

As I look back on the above, I hope I’m not giving the wrong impression about my students. They’ve been wonderful, certainly much more perceptive and good-natured than I had any reason to expect, and I hope they’re learning as much as I am. What it comes down to, I think, is that it’s virtually impossible to interact on a daily basis with people whose level of expertise in a given field is significantly less than one’s own without having to think quite a bit both about the nature of that expertise (imperfect though mine still is) and the misconceptions about the field that will inevitably come to light.

Anyway, I’ve now strayed quite far afield of what I originally intended to write, which was a self-deprecatory post about how I’ve become almost stereotypically geeky in grad school, but I guess the above sort of illustrates that point.

¹ Actually, a very interesting class. Aside from learning some basic logic and doing some simple proofs, we’ve talked a lot about different voting systems, leading up to the proof of a simplified version of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, the full version of which says that there is no voting system (other than a dictatorship, which everybody pretty much agrees isn’t much of a voting system) which satisfies both the Pareto condition (which says that if everybody prefers candidate X to candidate Y, then Y will not win the election) and independence of irrelevant alternatives (i.e. there is no “spoiler effect”). Also, we’ve learned a bit about power indices, namely the Shapley-Shubik and the Banzhaf indices, and are now starting on some basic probability.

The Song Remains the Same

Stumbled, quite by accident, across the second half of the presidential debate on the idiot box tonight, and I just have a few questions. First, has Kerry even read the Constitution? At one point, regarding a question about naming Supreme Court justices, he claimed that his priorities were on interpretation of the Constitution rather than on ideology, and then listed off three or four Constitutional “rights” that he would want an appointee to protect, like equal pay for women, abortion rights, etc. Admittedly, he may have been thrown off a bit by Bush’s wacky Dred Scott reference, but he followed up a question or two later by again suggesting that “a woman’s right to choose” is a Constitutional right, so I’m inclined to think it wasn’t a mistake. Now, no matter how one feels about any of these issues, the simple fact of the matter is that they’re not mentioned anywhere in any version of the Constitution that I’ve ever read.

On the other hand, what was up with that Dred Scott reference? It’s admittedly one of the most famous Supreme Court cases in history, so it may be the only one Bush has ever heard of, but it seemed like a particularly ham-handed way for him to try to dissociate himself from the Southern reactionary stereotype.

Speaking of stereotypes, what’s up with using “liberal” as if it were a dirty word? Now, admittedly, I’m violently opposed to the position identified with liberalism in the modern American political climate, but the day I accept “liberal”, a word the dictionary defines as meaning “Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry”, as a slur is the day you can officially pronounce my critical thinking capability dead.

If you’ll excuse the ranting dogmatism for a moment, both major parties in this country are conservative, not in the somewhat bogus sense that the word is currently used but rather in its original meaning: both are committed to propping up and sustaining the currently dominant power structures and institutions. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing is, of course, an entirely separate question, but the simple fact of the matter is that neither wants to fundamentally change much of anything.

Hypothetical questions aside, the debate convinced me of something that John T. Kennedy has been telling me for months: Bush is going to win this election. For better or for worse, his arguments are essentially positive: I will do X because I believe it is the right thing to do. Whether or not he believes his own arguments, and whether or not what he does exemplifies whatever beliefs he may actually have (and I’m skeptical that he has any), he’s arguing from an essentially stronger position than Kerry, all of whose arguments boil down to the following: I am not George W. Bush.

Admirable as that quality may be, Kerry doesn’t seem to even be pretending to believe in much of anything. Based on what he said (and I think my interpretation is relatively unbiased, given that I dislike both candidates), he’s not opposed to top bracket tax cuts because he has a strong belief in social justice or egalitarianism: he’s opposed to top bracket tax cuts because the beneficiaries only comprise 2% of the electorate. For God’s sake, he practically admitted as much when he tossed off that canard about he, Bush and the moderator being the only people in the room who would be negatively impacted by rolling back tax rates for the top brackets to Clinton-era levels.¹ More fundamentally, at practically every stage he was reacting to what Bush said, in many cases legitimately pointing out inconsistencies or flawed reasoning, but still allowing Bush to dictate the terms of the debate. This became especially clear during the series of health care questions, in which Kerry spent more time explaining what his plan is not and how it was being misrepresented by G.W. than what it is, to the point of prefacing his answer to an entirely different question with a statement to the effect that his plan isn’t what Bush had been claiming it was. Despite the fact that I neither know nor want to know very much about Kerry’s health care plan, I’m certain that it was being misrepresented by Bush; nonetheless, getting defensive and allowing your opponent’s misrepresentations to fluster you is not a good way to win a debate.²

None of the above should be construed as an endorsement of Bush. Rather, it seems to me unlikely that someone running on an essentially negative platform, like Kerry, is going to defeat someone who at least pretends to be running on a positive platform. It didn’t work for Dole in ‘96 or McGovern in ‘72 and, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about politics, it’s that things don’t change all that much. Admittedly, Kerry’s more charismatic (has that been made into a newspaper pun yet? Kerrysmatic?) than Dole and (much) less radical than McGovern, so the race will undoubtedly be closer, but the old Zeppelin song title is still relevant.

¹ A specious claim, by the way. Make fun of trickle-down economics all you like, but the rich generally don’t hoard their money: they invest it. And let’s just say there’s a relationship between investments and jobs.

² Speaking of bad debating strategies, argumentum ad verecundiam seems to be another Kerry favorite.

That which goes unspoken

Just thinking about race today, how stupid and silly the concept itself is, and even more so the vast ocean of debate surrounding it. I was thinking about racism and the persistence of it, in my own mind and, I would venture to wager, to a greater or lesser degree near universally in our country, if not the world. I used to consider this a societal failure, that our worldview is so saturated with ideas about race that it remains virtually impossible for twisted views on the matter to not take root in the mind. However, it occurs to me now that perhaps the real error lies not in how we actually do view race (as opposed to what we say in public), but rather in what is regarded as the proper attitude towards race.

Remember that the civil rights movement in this country was originally NOT about racism per se, i.e. the holding of prejudiced racial views. It was about legal and social, and to a lesser extent economic, equality. The existence of racism is relevant to this insofar as it shapes the actions of those with racist views but, in a society like ours today, in which the strictures on discrimination are so draconian, social as well as legal, where the mere accusation of racism is enough, almost anywhere, to cause the loss of a career and social ostracism for life, it seems to me that we have entered an age in which the undeniable persistence of racism is largely devoid of significant outward symptoms. Do not misunderstand me: I have several non-white friends who constantly regale me with stories of unnumerable little injustices and humiliations they suffer, but for the most part they seem to me about equal in magnitude, if greater in frequency, to the slights that I occaisonally have suffered as a male, or as a teenager (until two months ago), or as an American abroad, etc. I have heard the stories of police beatings and racial profiling, so I certainly do not presume to extrapolate my own experience too far, but to be quite honest, knowing what I do about the general environment of the ghetto, just as young Arab men (usually wealthy) are pretty clearly by far the most prominent group in the current wave of international terrorism, I don’t think that the general police fixation in America with young black men is necessarily unwarranted. In any case, now we are back in the realm of action, not of thought. But racism is, ultimately, thought not action. The oft-cited call to “eradicate racism,” then, is implicitly a call to manipulate and reform thought. Viewed in this light, the failure of the civil rights crusaders, in which so many in our society have been complicit, may be perhaps not that they have been unable to surmount the boundless narrow-mindedness of Americans but rather that they have set themselves an absurd and, if I may say, a totalitarian goal, not that of reforming the outward conditions of life but rather of transforming people’s minds.

The stigmatization of racial views in America now seems to me an at least equal, if not far graver, injustice than the minor forms of outward discrimination that still exist, now that the mere holding of racist (or more generally “discriminatory”) views, much less espousing them, is more or less generally considered a crime. But this is itself a greater crime against the intellectual openness of our society, where most any view, no matter how perverse or frightening, usually is, and certainly should be, tolerated, on the grounds that all ideas are legitimate and freely held, that they do not incur moral force or liability until they translate into action. Of course, determining to what extent ideas shape action is no easy matter, but I believe that I can demonstrate that in this matter the ideas themselves are being targeted, not the the actions that might ensue from them. To wit: imagine to yourself a party or some other social function, in which a guest said something to this effect: “I believe that, given the problems associated with the over-proliferation of humanity, the sanctity of life is a load of shit and, furthermore, that a certain percentage of the infants born each year in the world ought to be slaughtered.” Now imagine that another guest were to say (presumably in a different context): “I believe that black people are generally lazy and stupid.” Now imagine, in virtually any social setting, which view would face more immediate opprobium and hostility. Now I grant that a certain perverse rationality lies in the first statement, and that it could perhaps be stated more psychopathically, but no matter how the core sentiments in each case were phrased, I don’t think it would even be a close contest. Talking about baby-killing would probably cause some embarassment in almost any setting, probably some real hostility if it happened to be a particularly religious gathering, but in the case of the second, I venture to say that almost anyone saying such a thing would be almost assured of losing a friend or two before the night was over; if his boss or co-workers happened to be there, he would likely lose a job and maybe a career. I could even see a lawsuit or two erupting.

This scenario may be somewhat exaggerated, but it surely indicates the fundamental disjunction that seems to exist in the realm of anything considered “discriminatory.” It is an evil that has resulted from the attempt to coerce peoples’ ideas. Not only the principal of intellectual freedom dictates that we should attempt no such thing; prudence dictates this course as well, for prejudice will always exist. In the the sense that prejudice represents an ignorant and generalized view towards something or someone(s), most ideas are inherently prejudicial. So really it is not even prejudice itself that is being quarantined, but merely a particular class of discrete ideas. And this is pure authoritarian nonsense. No society can ever be free when ideas are subject to persecution.

Tryin' to kill me, eh?

After intimating that intellectual property crimes are, in effect, thought crimes, I want to continue in a similar thematic and, perhaps, iconoclastic vein by suggesting that attempted murder is not a crime. A bit radical, perhaps, but I want to make a case that such a position is at least understandable, even if nobody ends up actually agreeing with me.

To that end, it would probably be useful to make the terms I’m discussing as explicit as possible, so I’ll argue on the basis of the definitions given by the Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes, since that’s my current state of residence.

18 Pa.C.S. § 901(a) defines criminal attempt as: “A person commits an attempt when, with intent to commit a specific crime, he does any act which constitutes a substantial step toward the commission of that crime.” Obviously, in the case of attempted murder, the “specific crime” in question is that of murder, defined in 18 Pa.C.S. § 2502. As for punishment, 18 Pa.C.S. § 1102(c) gives the sentencing guidelines for attempted murder, which carries a maximum sentence of 40 years if the victim suffers “serious bodily injury” and 20 years otherwise, which correlates to the punishments for third degree murder (18 Pa.C.S. § 1102(d)) and for first degree felonies (18 Pa.C.S. § 1103), respectively.

What this all boils down to, then, is that, according to Pennsylvania law, if I stab someone with the intent to kill him, I’m subject to twice as long a prison sentence as if I stab without intending to kill. Similarly, if I do anything the court construes as a “substantial step” (a phrase I suspect left intentionally vague) towards killing someone, even if I never actually hurt her (and even if she never even knows about my attempt), I’m subject to just as long a sentence as if I rape her. Think about that for a minute.

Now, I don’t want to suggest that what we call attempted murder should never be punished. If I stab someone, that’s clearly a crime (namely, aggravated assault), whether or not I intended to murder him. If I spray bullets in someone’s direction, even if I miraculously fail to hit anybody, that’s also a crime (again, aggravated assault). And I certainly think aggravated assault is a crime worthy of punishment (although I will note that I disagree with the federal and state justice system’s emphasis on punishment of the criminal over rehabilitation of the victim).

What I have problems with is the notion that, in and of itself, intending to kill someone is criminal. Certainly harboring such intentions makes me not a very nice person, someone who deserves to be shunned by society and cast out of polite company, but, assuming my attempt breaks no other laws, I’m not sure on what grounds it can be justified as criminal (or on what grounds having an intent to kill while committing an assault is worse than simply committing the assault).

As I see it, the issue boils down to the simple question: are a person’s thoughts, intentions and desires, however degenerate or reprehensible, criminal? To me, the answer has to be “no”; for something to be criminal, it must be wrongfully damaging to another (this sort of statement must, of course, be founded upon an entire theory of justice, which in turn is based on morality, which I’d rather not get into right now; those holding contrary opinions are, as always, free to prove me wrong) and I simply don’t see how a person’s thoughts, beliefs or intentions can, in and of themselves, harm another. The qualifier “in and of themselves” is important in the preceding sentence, because actions predicated on certain thoughts or beliefs can, of course, be harmful.

The obvious parallel to a much more controversial topic is that of hate crimes. An example from the Pennsylvania statutes is “Ethnic intimidation” (18 Pa.C.S. § 2710), which states the following:

A person commits the offense of ethnic intimidation if, with malicious intention toward the race, color, religion or national origin of another individual or group of individuals, he commits an offense under any other provision of this article or under Chapter 33 (relating to arson, criminal mischief and other property destruction) exclusive of section 3307 (relating to institutional vandalism) or under section 3503 (relating to criminal trespass) or under section 5504 (relating to harassment by communication or address) with respect to such individual or his or her property or with respect to one or more members of such group or to their property.

Such offenses cause the crime to be classified one degree higher than otherwise specified. I’m not particularly familiar with “hate crime” laws in other states, but my impression is that they are similar.

Again, I’m not sure how the beliefs or intentions of a criminal are necessarily criminal. The implication of this particular law is that my beating up a black man on the streets would be worse if I were a racist than if I were simply a sadist. Now racism is certainly reprehensible (as are homophobia, misogyny and any other attitudes that might be targeted by “hate crime” laws), but, again, I don’t see how assaulting people for racist (or homophobic, misogynist, etc.) reasons is any more damaging to the victim than assaulting people for misanthropic or sadistic reasons. Put more bluntly, Matthew Shepard isn’t any more dead than Nicole Brown-Simpson (to take two high-profile cases from the last decade).

The case might be made that racists are more likely to be repeat offenders than other violent criminals and hence deserve harsher punishment, but, even setting aside the fact that sadists probably also have a higher propensity than average towards repeat offenses and yet there are no “sadist laws”, such considerations are already taken into account (at least in theory) by the legal system. Sentencing (again, at least in theory) takes into account both aggravating and mitigating circumstances and, although I’m no lawyer, I would have to imagine that a propensity towards repeat offense qualifies as an aggravating factor.

Anyway, the point is that a crime is not somehow worse because the criminal has a certain agenda and, going back to attempted murder, having certain intentions, no matter how despicable, is not a crime. Additionally, on a wholly more practical level, these “crimes of intent” are dangerous because they place evaluation of intent under the purview of the judicial system. And, let’s be honest, do any of us really trust the courts to be able to determine accurately what our thoughts may or may not have been in any given circumstance?

Smoking out the kids

Along the lines of my post on Creekstone farms and the mercantilist policies that are preventing them from testing their beef for mad cow, comes news that clove cigarettes are being outlawed, supposedly to prevent kids from starting to smoke, but more importantly because Philip Morris doesn’t make flavored cigarettes (other than menthol cigarettes, which are expressly omitted from the ban) and is flexing its lobbying muscles to prevent competitors like R.J. Reynolds and Brown & Williamson from marketing such things as the Camel Exotic Blends and Midnight Berry Kools:

Since added flavors make cigarettes more appealing to “our children,” they cannot be permitted. It’s just a happy coincidence that Philip Morris, one of the bill’s main backers, does not manufacture cigarettes with any of the prohibited flavors—although it does make menthol cigarettes, which are specifically exempted from the ban.

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, featuring the snappy acronym FSPTCA, is, of course, rationalized on the standard “for the children” grounds, since, of course, 15-year-olds are right now lining up to purchase smokes that cost twice as much as normal cigarettes. Now, admittedly, I wasn’t really plugged into the whole high school smoking scene, but I’m pretty sure most underaged smokers, especially those still in the experimental stage, are smoking whatever manifests that elusive combination of low cost and availability, with the primary emphasis on availability. In other words, probably not niche-market flavored brands. Still, though, the sentiment is nice.

And not, of course, without precedent, as anybody who remembers Australia’s ban of Moo Joose knows. Again, that ban was justified by the supposedly negative impact that a widely-distributed alcoholic milkshake would have on the maturity-challenged. Of course, left out of the rhetoric was the fact that so-called alcopops (like hard lemonade), which were first introduced in Australia in the early ’90s, are still a going concern. Google is remarkably unhelpful on this front, but let’s just say I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that Australia’s hard lemonade manufacturers threw their lobbying support behind the Moo Joose ban.

Speaking of smoking, yesterday I came across news that Portuguese police are planning to let English soccer fans smoke dope before Sunday’s match with France at EURO 2004 on the notion that stoned soccer hooligans don’t hooliganize so much as drunk soccer hooligans. The “Here We Blow” policy was apparently inspired by the Dutch, who employed a similar strategy to great success in 2000.

Which, of course, draws to mind the old Bill Hicks bit:

“You’re at a ballgame, you’re at a concert and someone’s really violent, aggressive and obnoxious. Are they drunk or are they smoking pot?”

“Drunk!”

“Wow. We all know the truth. I have never seen people on pot get in a fight because…it’s fucking impossible: ‘Hey buddy!’ … ‘What?’ … end of argument.”

Portugal’s got the right idea if you ask me, but the head of the British police contingent in Portugal sounds a bit miffed:

“English people should be adhering to the standards of law that we follow at home.

“From our perspective it would be quite an unusual sight to see two or three thousand England fans draped in their flags ‘whiffing a bit of blow’, or whatever we are calling it these days.”

Needless to say, that particular phrase seems to be entirely the good constable’s own invention, demonstrating once again that George W. Bush and Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf aren’t the only malaprop-prone public officials out there.

(Speaking of which, the latest Bushism I’ve seen comes from the text of his “we’re going to Mars” speech, where he calls NASA-employed astronauts “spacial entrepreneurs”, which is depressing in that it uses the right terminology to commend the wrong strategy.)

Regrettably necessary

First off, I want to apologize again for the lack of content around here recently. Being on vacation for the last few weeks has made regular updating difficult, but during the last eight days I’ve endured multiple migraines on all but two of the days. Which makes it sort of hard to think very clearly or write very effectively. Anyway, I got some new drugs from my doctor today, so hopefully the migraines will soon recede.

Okay, what was I going to talk about? Oh, yeah, politics. Somehow, despite the fact that I hate politics, especially party politics and especially this year’s version, I seem to be uncontrollably drawn to some sort of weird punditry every couple of weeks. This round’s inspiration are the dual pillars of madness and genius embodied by The Onion and Hunter S. Thompson, Doctor of Journalism. Reversing the order of discussion and thereby causing no end of anguish to my tenth-grade English teacher (if she’s reading this, anyway), those who pay any attention to the Books page have no doubt noticed that I’m currently reading Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72, which is, more or less, a collection of the biweekly articles he wrote on the ‘72 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone.

Needless to say, those looking for “objective” journalism should look somewhere elsewhere than Thompson. In fact, in his own words:

So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here—not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

Anyway, the point of that little tangent is to say that Thompson, as should surprise nobody familiar with his work, has no qualms about projecting himself into his articles on the campaign, no problem with stating his opinions directly and pursuing his biases openly. Though I haven’t even reached the Democratic Convention yet, one of the main themes of the book is obviously the problem that, in 1972, a lot of people cared more about defeating Nixon than about any particular opposition candidate. Which was the primary reason the apparently Ibogaine-dependent Ed Muskie was crowned in 1971 as the Democratic front-runner solely on the basis of the opinion that he was “the only man who can defeat Nixon”. Needless to say, one sees some immediate parallels to the current election.

In fact, the parallels are quite overt. The situation in Iraq is small potatoes compared to what was going on in Vietnam in 1972, but the fact remains that in both cases America was involved in a military conflict in southern Asia. In both cases, the incumbent is a Republican who had succeeded a southern Democratic predecessor, but in neither case had the incumbent defeated his predecessor in an election. Cynics can, no doubt, fill in their own table of similarities between George W. Bush and Richard M. Nixon.

Early in the book, when it appears obvious that Thompson’s favored candidate (McGovern) will be an also-ran in the Democratic primaries, he has this to say on the whole process:

How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame but “regrettably necessary” holding actions? And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?

Hmm…sound familiar? As it turned out, in ‘72, the choices actually ended up being fairly disparate, with the anti-war and semi-radical McGovern getting stomped by tricky Dick. In ‘04, on the other hand, it looks like we will face down exactly what Thompson was most horrified by, the necessity of choosing the lesser of two evils, of choosing which rich, white, middle-aged member of Skull & Bones will be the president for the next four years (or at least until the winner is impeached, which somehow strikes me as likely and fits in nicely with my 1972 parallels).

In fact, that’s precisely what caught my eye in The Onion this week. After I got done chuckling at the caption “Shotgun Blast To Abdomen Just Pisses Wilfred Brimley Off More”, I had to admit that the article “Many Americans Still Unsure Whom to Vote Against” (archived) pretty much hits the nail on the head:

According to the poll, 46 percent of the registered voters surveyed would vote against Bush if the election were held tomorrow, while 45 percent said they were ready to vote against Kerry. Factoring in the 2 percent margin of error, the two candidates are essentially deadlocked in the race to determine which candidate America doesn’t support.

Of course, I find it all deliciously ironic. People who claim to care about social justice, egalitarianism and pacifism will be voting for John Kerry, who in addition to being a part of the elite of the elite for his entire life is notoriously difficult to pin down on just what, exactly, he thinks ought to be done in Iraq (pretty much the same thing Bush thinks, as it turns out). On the other hand, people who came to care about free markets, freedom and smaller government will probably cast their votes for Bush, who is not only a mercantilist of the old school, but passed into law the USA PATRIOT Act (which Kerry, and the rest of the chumps in Congress, voted for but now hypocritically denounces, by the way) and has increased federal spending like it was going out of fashion (which is ironic, because it never seems to).

Anyway, the point is that nobody, but nobody, who votes in this year’s election is going to be voting for a candidate with which they agree with on more than half the issues. Actually, let me re-phrase that: Nobody with half a brain who votes, etc. In other words, the president, whoever it ends up being, does not accurately represent the citizenry.

And yes, I’m well aware that this isn’t exactly a startling insight. But it still needs to be said, as plainly and as often as possible. Oh yeah, and one more thing: voting is a sucker’s bet. You’re about as likely to get run over by a car on the way to the polling booth as to cast the deciding ballot in the upcoming election (pdf file) and, let’s be honest, the difference between life and death is orders of magnitude larger than the difference between Bush and Kerry in the White House.

To complete the cycle, a couple more relevant quotes from the book:

But this is stone bullshit. There are only two ways to make it in big-time politics today: One is to come on like a mean dinosaur, with a high-powered machine that scares the shit out of your entrenched opposition (like Daley or Nixon)…and the other is to tap the massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote. This is like being told that you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy.

— pg. 73

The latest craze on the local [Washington, D.C.] high-life front is mixing up six or eight aspirins in a fresh Coca-Cola and doing it all at once. Far more government people are into this stuff than will ever admit to it. What seems like mass paranoia in Washington is really just a sprawling, hyper-tense boredom—and the people who actually live and thrive here in the great web of Government are the first ones to tell you, on the basis of long experience, that the name or even the Party Affiliation of the next President won’t make any difference at all, except on the surface.

The leaves change, they say, but the roots stay the same.

— pg. 90

Vote early, vote often

Just a quick theory on why elections in Iraq are currently scheduled for January (but which might be moved up to as early as December) in spite of the fact that the official transfer of power in Iraq is supposed to take place in late June: holding those elections before the U.S. presidential election in November could well be disastrous for the Bush administration. Why? Because, as the cynics have been saying all along, Iraq is not suitable for a Western-style democracy at this point in time. A truly free and honest election would likely result in a pretty reactionary government, precisely the sort of thing continued U.S. involvement after the official end of the war was supposed to prevent. Simply put, fundamentalist candidates winning the election in Iraq would nullify practically the entire justification for the ongoing U.S. occupation and, as such, would pretty much destroy whatever credibility the administration still has among moderates. This, in turn, means there can be no election in Iraq before the pesky domestic one is taken care of.

Again, you might ask “Why?” After all, it’s not like the U.S. hasn’t staged fake elections in other countries before (hello Nicaragua!). However, in this case, given the almost overwhelming scrutiny that is sure to come to bear on the Iraqi elections, blatant electoral fraud (which, again, I suspect would be the only way to ensure that moderate candidates gain a plurality) seems unlikely to pass unnoticed. And can you imagine the righteous fury on the part of Democrats if elections were held in Iraq before November and systematic electoral fraud to help “moderate” (read: cozy with the Bush administration) candidates were uncovered?

The point is, pre-November elections are a damned-if-you-do,-damned-if-you-don’t proposition for the administration and I can’t but think that’s the real reason elections won’t be held until January, or December at the earliest.

Oh, and just so as to dispel any hint of partisanship here, let me just state for the record I’m already pre-warming the disgust node in my brain on the off chance that Kerry is elected, because he and his followers will inevitably fall all over themselves in appeasing whatever fundamentalist scumbag rises to the surface in Iraq come January. Whether or not that puts him on a higher moral plane than Bush is, of course, something you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Why television is like politics -- bad adaptations of cultural theories

TV is the epitome of Low Art in its desire to appeal to and enjoy the attention of unprecedented numbers of people. But it is not Low because it is vulgar or prurient or dumb. Television is often all of these things, but this is a logical function of its need to attract and please Audience. And I’m not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests. It’s all about syncretic diversity: neither medium nor Audience is faultable for quality.

(Excerpted from David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. fiction”, from the collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments and first published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993)

Though I wouldn’t claim to know how original the above argument is, I would venture to say that it’s probably the most coherent and reasoned explanation I’ve read of why television has never, shall we say, lived up to its cultural and educational promise. The standard critique of television is simply that it’s vacuous, vulgar, etc. or, perhaps, downright evil, but little thought is usually given to exactly why this is the case. Or, if an explanation is given, it usually falls exactly along the lines that Wallace rejects, namely that the audience is vacuous, vulgar, etc. as well. But that does little to explain why many intelligent, cultured people are almost inexplicably drawn to even the most blatantly hackneyed crap available on the idiot box. Wallace’s explanation, on the other hand, explains much of this in a single deft maneuver.

And, more importantly, his explanation rings true. Which of even the most jaded aesthetes among us can help bobbing their heads and singing along to 50 Cent’s “In the Club” or Nelly’s “Hot in Herre”, even after the twentieth repetition in the last week? (Okay, that’s something of a dated example, but my spring-break memories from a year ago are still quite vivid; two years before that it was the supremely obnoxious “Who Let the Dogs Out?”) Who hasn’t been drawn in at least once by one of those godawful professional wrestling shows, which are simultaneously fascinating and unbelievably dreadful? Finally, how many people haven’t, at some time in their lives, stayed up much too late reading a formulaic thriller in the Grisham/Crichton/Clancy/Brown mold? Extrapolating from my own experience, I would speculate that most of us who know better are, at least occasionally, drawn to these forms of entertainment because they rather directly appeal to our “Low” tastes.

And let’s be honest, there isn’t a particularly large variety of “Low” themes out there. Sex, violence and melodrama pretty much cover that particular genre and there are only so many ways that sex, violence and melodrama can be combined without ascending to a realm where they require at least a moderate investment of intellectual effort.

Okay, so far I haven’t exactly added anything to DFW’s initial point, so let me perhaps apply the same theory to other sorts of socio-entertainment outlets. As alluded to above, the same explanation serves for the cases of, for example, pop music, summer blockbusters, thriller novels, etc., all of which are considerably more popular and revenue-producing than their higher-concept cousins (a fact which should have been the first clue that the vacuity/vulgarity of television isn’t exactly unique to the medium and, therefore, that explanations on the basis that television is just evil or whatever are overly reductionist). The same holds for most other varieties of art I can think of off the top of my head (suburban cookie-cutter architecture vs. Frank Lloyd Wright (or even the detestable Frank Gehry), Penthouse photography vs. Jan Saudek, etc.)

Another area where I think this sort of framework is applicable is in the sordid realm of politics (you just knew I had to tie it into politics somehow, didn’t you?). There’s a myth these days that politics is more superficial than it ever has been, but I’m pretty sure it’s nothing but a myth, in the same psychic space as various other nostalgic myths. Until very recently, historically speaking, the majority of politics (at least in the choosing-a-leader sense which today draws the majority of our cynical scorn) was almost unimaginably superficial, being based solely on who fucked (and, thereby, presumably impregnated) who. The baroque machinations of the Founding Fathers in doing everything in their power to prevent the common man from actually having any influence on important elections demonstrates pretty clearly that they knew damn well that representative democracy would be no less superficial; the fact that “mudslinging” is a 19th century term bears out the hypothesis that the devolution isn’t entirely a late 20th century phenomenon.

In politics as in television, there are wildly divergent disagreements on the “important” issues, whereas there is much more homogeneity in the realm of superficial concerns like what the candidate looks like and how empathetic he seems. The big one, of course, is “consensus-building”, which seems more important than actually having any beliefs or goals to build a consensus around.

So but like (dear God, I’m picking up DFW mannerisms now) the point is this: as in the case of television, the blame for politics’ superficiality cannot rightly be laid either on the populace or on the candidates themselves per se, but rather must be viewed as a sort of necessary consequence of the very process itself. Just as television necessarily tries to engender as much watching and to gather as many viewers as possible, politics is all about gathering maximum votes. In both cases, the most efficient tactic is to appeal to the areas with the broadest appeal, which almost of necessity are in the most superficial areas. Again, this isn’t necessarily because the populace is itself superficial, but rather because “higher” interests and tastes are so much more varied than the “lower” or superficial ones. And GW doesn’t get extra points for votes based “important” issues.

Okay, some more quotes from the book for you to think about (or just laugh at):

Despite the unquestioned assumption on the part of pop-culture critics that television’s poor old Audience, deep down, “craves novelty,” all available evidence suggests, rather, that the Audience really craves sameness but thinks, deep down, that it ought to crave novelty.

— “E Unibus Pluram”

The fact is that TV’s re-use of postmodern cool has actually evolved as an inspired solution to the keep-Joe-at-once-alienated-from-and-part-of-the-million-eyed-problem. The solution entailed a gradual shift from oversincerity to a kind of bad-boy irreverence for the Big Face that TV shows us. This is turn reflected a wider shift in U.S. perceptions of how art was supposed to work, a transition from art’s being a creative instantiation of real values to art’s being a creative rejection of bogus values.

— “E Unibus Pluram”

“This is potentially key,” I’m saying. “This may be just the sort of regional politico-sexual contrast the swanky East-Coast magazine is keen for. The core value informing a kind of willed politico-sexual stoicism on your part is your prototypically Midwestern appreciation of fun —”

“Buy me some pork skins, you dipshit.”

“— whereas on the East Coast, politico-sexual indignation is the fun. In New York, a woman who’d been hung upside down and ogled would go get a whole lot of other women together and there’d be this frenzy of politico-sexual indignation. They’d confront the ogler. File an injunction. Management’d find itself litigating expensively — violation of a woman’s right to nonharassed fun. I’m telling you. Personal and political fun merge somewhere just east of Cleveland, for women.”

— “Getting away from already pretty much being away from it all”

[David] Lynch’s movies, for all their unsubtle archetypes and symbols and intertextual references and c., have about them the remarkable unself-consciousness that’s kind of the hallmark of Expressionist art — nobody in Lynch’s movies analyzes or metacriticizes or hermeneuticizes or anything, including Lynch himself. This set of restrictions makes Lynch’s movies fundamentally unironic, and I submit that Lynch’s lack of irony is the real reason some cinéastes — in this age when ironic self-consciousness is the one and only universally recognized badge of sophistication — see him as a naïf or a buffoon.

— “David Lynch keeps his head”

[Tennis Canada] is Canada’s version of the U.S.T.A., and its logo — which obtrudes into your visual field as often as is possible here at the du Maurier Omnium — consists of the good old Canadian maple leaf with a tennis racket for a stem. It’s stuff like Tennis Canada’s logo you want to point to when Canadians protest that they don’t understand why Americans make fun of them.

— “Tennis player Michael Joyce’s professional artistry as a paradigm of certain stuff about choice, freedom, limitation, joy, grotesquerie, and human completeness”

Interesting

A few things of note:

• The Jesus Landing Pad — Apparently, the Bush administration is consulting with apocalyptic, evangelical groups with a self-decribed “theocratical perspective” on issues relating to Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, etc. Ironically, the most radical Zionists are apparently no longer Jews, but rather evangelical Christians who are convinced that the rapture cannot occur without a unified Israel. Apparently, the most outspoken of these groups is a Pentecostal group called the Apostolic Congress which, aside from appropriating the Great Seal iconography, is apparently represented in Israel by a missionary who fears witchcraft emanations from Harry Potter books. Needless to say, somewhat disturbing.

• Michael Moore Hates America — A new documentary being directed by Mike Wilson, who apparently intends to turn the tables on Moore a bit. Be sure to check out Wilson’s journal page, currently detailing a couple of offers made to Moore to live up to his own professed principles. For more, check out the Telegraph article, which also references one of the most tasteless jokes I’ve ever heard, wherein Moore apparently suggested in jest at a recent live show that if the doomed 9/11 flights had been populated by blacks instead of “pampered whites”, the passengers would have fought off the hijackers. (Links via Catallarchy)

• Atkins News and the Technical Interpreter — Also from Catallarchy, Jonathan Wilde uses recent Atkins-related reporting as a jumping-off point for a more general critique of the presentation of science and scientific results in the media. Along the same lines, check out John Allen Paulos’ Innumeracy, which I’ve mentioned before.

• AIM viruses — Lucky for all of us, we can now get viruses over AIM. The worst offender so far seems to be BuddyLinks, which is using a viral dissemination approach for its games.

• “Half the world has never made a phone call” — Ever heard this claim? Well, it may have been true back in 1994, but certainly not anymore, as Clay Shirky demonstrates pretty clearly in this article (which itself is from 2002 and is, therefore, almost certainly out-of-date in its own right). Of course, he’s also quite correct to point out that the sort of thinking that lies behind this phrase is exactly the wrong sort of thinking:

  Something incredibly good is happening in parts of the world with dynamic economies, and that is what people concerned with the digital divide should be thinking about. If the world’s poor are to be served by better telecommunications infrastructure, there are obvious things to be done. Make sure individuals have access to a market for telephone service. Privatize state telecom companies, introduce competition, and reduce corruption. And perhaps most importantly, help stamp out static thinking about telecommunications wherever it appears. Economic dynamism is a far better tool for improving telephone use than any amount of erroneous and incomplete assertions on behalf of half the world’s population, because while The Phrase has remained static for the last decade or so, the world hasn’t.

• And, last but not least, Tim is back in the blogging game, even though he promised not so long ago never to blog again. Be sure to check out his post on the preposterousness of “owning” a word, a follow-up to the notorious EULA.

President of Beers

I’ve had a fair amount of free time in the last couple of weeks, so I’ve been watching a lot of basketball and hockey recently. No, I’m not going to delve into sports (please, hold your applause); rather, I wanted to mention briefly a commercial I’ve been seeing a lot of recently as a result of all this sports-watching. Specifically, I’m talking about the Miller ads that have been running, the ones that are part of the “President of Beers” ad campaign.

Aside from the fact that they’re more entertaining than most of the commercials you’ll see on the idiot box, I like the Miller ads because they do a nice job of satirizing the whole democratic process as currently conceived. They capture both the mudslinging antics of politicians and the Everyman complaints about the lack of choices in the political system quite nicely. For example, in the debate ads, the Miller spokesman/candidate both attacks his opponent (a Clydesdale, obviously representing Budweiser) for being a horse and wearing blinders as well as getting frustrated that the debate moderators won’t let him expand on his position.

What I think I like best about the ads, though, is that they highlight (unintentionally, no doubt) the fact that the beer market embodies much more completely the very principles that the democratic process is supposed to uphold. For example, whereas voters who prefer the losing candidate are stuck with the winner, beer drinkers aren’t forced to consume any particular beer simply because a majority prefers it. Non-voters who dislike all the candidates are still going to be stuck with one of them, whereas teetotalers are under no obligation to drink beer simply because the majority of people do. Furthermore, if you like, say, Kerry’s stance on healthcare and Bush’s stance on the war (God help you), you won’t be able to have both, whereas someone who likes Budweiser for a relaxing beer after work but prefers Miller when bar-hopping on the weekends can have both (how such a person could distinguish between the two is beyond me, but we’re only speaking in hypotheticals here). Also, if the candidate you really like best is, say, Ralph Nader, you know in advance that you’re going to lose, whereas if you prefer Guinness or Fat Tire to Bud and Miller, well, you can buy those instead. And, finally, if you like some part of a candidate’s platform but not others, you can’t choose only to fund those parts that you like, whereas you’re free to purchase precisely as much beer as you drink, instead of having to purchase three cases a week when you only want one.

The point is, in the beer market everybody can make the choices that make them happiest, whereas in politics the supreme lack of choices and the winner-take-all reality means that virtually everybody comes away dissatisfied. This, I think, is what makes the Miller ads work: the notion of holding a beer election in the same way we hold presidential elections is so patently absurd that we can’t help but chuckle a bit at the ads.

And what does that mean for politics? Well, in that regard, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Bureaucratic symbolism

If you’ve ever been in Washington, DC, as I was this past weekend, you’ve no doubt seen this symbol on all the license plates and street signs in town. It’s the official flag of Washington, DC, and, given that it’s a relatively simple yet distinctive design, I suppose it was only natural that the public works department down there decided to plaster it all over public spaces.

Nonetheless, this particular design has always struck me as being just a little bit odd. You see, if you know anything about the Mayan numeral system (scroll down a bit for the relevant synopsis), you’ll immediately notice that this symbol could easily be used in that system to represent the number 13. In fact, as someone with a more than passing familiarity with the vagaries of Mayan mathematics, it was pretty striking to see the number 13 plastered all over the city the first time I visited DC last summer, especially given the well-known superstitions concerning this particular number harbored by a surprisingly large percentage of the population. We omit 13th floors from tall buildings, but don’t bat an eye to see it on every street corner in the nation’s capital. In fact, if you’re drawn to conspiracy theories, you might read into this a suggestion of the 13 Satanic Bloodlines or something equally sinister.

Of course, the actual explanation is somewhat more innocuous (or more subtly menacing, I suppose, if you’re of the conspiracy bent). The flag is the product of a 1938 contest intended “to procure a design for a distinctive flag for the District of Columbia.” The winning design was submitted by Charles A.R. Dunn, who was impressed by the Maryland flag but had little use for flags with seals (presumably he didn’t care much for the Virginia flag). Dunn drew his inspiration from the Washington family coat of arms, which apparently derives from George Washington’s Norman ancestors (though it seems unlikely that this same source was also the inspiration for the more famous Stars and Stripes, 19th century theorists notwithstanding). The “argent, two bar and in chief three mullets gules”, the official description of the Washington coat of arms, was apparently intended to signify the following:

Endurance to achieve Purification. Winning one’s spurs and becoming a knight, a member of the Peerage. As a member of the peerage the knight can sit in Judgement because he himself is considered to be Pure.

Actually, come to think of it, even if you’re not of the tinfoil-hat persuasion, maybe you should see the pervasive use of this symbol in the nation’s capital as being a bit sinister. Washington policymakers are already notorious for their superiority complexes without the necessity of constant subconscious reinforcement by way of ubiquitous peerage symbolism. The last thing we need is more bureaucrats thinking themselves pure and therefore worthy to sit in judgment of the rest of us.

The the signs that go before...

So by now everybody has had a chance to get worked into a lather about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American interrogators. No matter how one feels about the issue, I have to wonder about the timing of the story breaking, because apparently the evidence of this has existed for at least a month or more, and yet it breaks just this week, somewhat obscuring two other stories which in my opinion are a lot more relevant to people’s worries about the creeeping growth of police-state tactics: firstly the news that last year, for the first time, secret intelligence court-issued surveillance warrants outnumbered regular criminal court-issued surveillance warrants and that now, sure enough, with the blessing of the U.S. military, one of Saddam’s old generals is now in command of Fallujah.

The fact is, no military operation, especially one conducted under guerrilla warfare conditions, is ever going to proceed without some abuses of this sort by soldiers. And if it turns out that less than 20 prisoners were abused overall in the course of the war, it will probably be the cleanest operation in history. I don’t say that to excuse matters, simply to put their significance in perspective. On the other hand, the fact that the shadow judicial system is now starting to have a significant impact despite initial indications that it might not actually have much to do is certainly enough to give one pause, as is the seeming concession in the air at the moment that order is not going to be restored in some quarters of Iraq without having recourse to the services of Saddam’s old henchmen. The torture case is going to have a horrible effect on America’s image in the Arab world and is probably going to dispel some of the current good-will in this country towards the soldiers in the military, but it is not going to have any direct reprecussions for the civilian leadership—there will probably be summary justice for a few low-ranking scapegoats, and that will be that. But the other two stories I think show a certain emptiness at the heart of the principles of engagement in both the judicial and military wings of the current anti-terrorism push.

Joints for MPs

Over in Bulgaria marijuana was criminalized. Previously, small amounts of “personal use” dope were legal, but not only did that come to an end, the new law apparently makes no distinction between, say, marijuana and cocaine for punishment purposes. Possession of even a single dose of any variety of narcotic can result in a 3-15 year prison sentence.

Needless to say, a lot of people are pretty unhappy, and today the editors of Edno, a weekly magazine, decided to do something about it. Using their press passes to bypass security at the parliament building, they calmly went about putting a joint in each MP’s mailbox.

Of course, they were arrested pretty quickly (though not before putting about 40 envelopes containing joints into various mail boxes) and their actions denounced as “criminal propaganda” by legislator Borislav Tsekov, but I’m sure it’s going to be a pretty hot topic for the next few days.

I’m not surprised that the only articles by non-Bulgarian press on news.google are different packagings of the same AP release, but it did seem a bit odd that three of the four articles appeared on Canadian news outlets.

UPDATE: See Petya’s reaction for more.

Pundits? We don't need no stinking pundits!

Ah, politics. Some selections from around the web:

• JohnKerryIsADouchebagButImVotingForHimAnyway.Com — The URL pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?

• Stand Up and Holla! — An essay contest for 18-24 year-olds being sponsored by the Republican National Convention. The essay topic is: “Why is the President’s call to community service important and how have you demonstrated it?” Okay, I have two questions. First of all, what the hell is that question even asking? The part before the “and” is straightforward, but how does one demonstrate “the President’s call to community service”? Does demonstrating against it count? Okay, that’s already more than two questions, but I’ve got a second major question. It’s a one-word question. “Holla”?

• Bush Country Ketchup — What would a campaign be without partisan ketchup? A pretty obvious gimmick, really. Reminds me of the lame anti-Ben-and-Jerry’s Star Spangled Ice Cream, the “Ice Cream with a Conservative Flavor”. Personally, I think you’d have to be some kind of nut to actually want to purchase a flavor of ice cream called “Choc & Awe” (though presumably not a “Nutty Environmentalist”). Seriously, are there any funny Republicans? Even Dennis Miller’s gotten considerably less funny and more didactic since he became an outspoken neocon.

• My Secret Life as a Prostitute — No, not about politicians. Instead, a rather well-written weblog by a more noble variety of whore. Makes for pretty interesting reading.

• Hey Crackhead — Speaks for itself:

  I am an engineer. Do you ever see me shaking down bums in the Loin for a calculator and sliderule? No, you don’t. Because engineering is the main thing I do, I went and bought myself a calculator. The main thing you do is crack. How do you get by without a crackpipe? The other crackheads must clown on you non-stop. I mean, the fucking saw you used to saw off my sparkplugs is probably worth five or ten bucks. Why not sell or trade it for a crackpipe? You really haven’t put much thought into this, have you?

It's funny because it's true

Best “Onion” headline in quite some time: “Cheney Wows Sept. 11 Commission By Drinking Glass Of Water While Bush Speaks.” Though it definitely faces competition from this one from the same issue: “Libertarian Reluctantly Calls Fire Department.”

Free-market fundamentalism? Not hardly

If you really want to get your blood boiling, read “Entrepreneurship Gets Slaughtered”, an L.A. Times op-ed on the Department of Agriculture’s disgraceful decision to prevent Creekstone Farms from testing all its cows for mad cow disease (free registration required):

According to the Washington Post, Creekstone invested $500,000 to build the first mad cow testing lab in a U.S. slaughterhouse and hired chemists and biologists to staff the operation. The only thing it needed was testing kits. That’s where the company ran into trouble. By law, the Department of Agriculture controls the sale of the kits, and it refused to sell Creekstone enough to test all of its cows. The USDA said that allowing even a small meatpacking company like Creekstone to test every cow it slaughtered would undermine the agency’s official position that random testing was scientifically adequate to assure safety.

That is to say, the Department of Agriculture would rather expose Americans to the risk of a rather horrible death from mad cow disease than to admit that maybe, just maybe, they are not as capable of protecting consumers as the private sector is. And that’s their official statement, the one which presumably contains the most favorable rationalization of their actions.

What didn’t get mentioned in their official statement, but which is correctly pointed out in the article, is that the more likely reason for Agriculture’s decision is that most of the meat-packing industry is vehemently opposed to the notion of testing every cow:

“If testing is allowed at Creekstone … ,” the president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Assn. told the Post, “we think it would become the international standard and the domestic standard, too.”

There are three separate issues here that I’d like to address one at a time. First, let me re-emphasize the fact that Creekstone was voluntarily choosing to go above and beyond the required safety measures in an attempt to guarantee that their meat was clean. Apparently, this should come as no big surprise, as Creekstone is known for working hard to reduce the use of antibiotics, for using humane slaughtering techniques and for paying high wages. The point, though, is that the notion that, absent government regulation, companies would produce shoddy, dangerous products is utterly absurd. Sure, many companies would like to be free of government safety regulations, but consumers rather like not contracting diseases from their food, being injured by their appliances, etc. and many are more than willing to pay extra to prevent such things. In fact, the primary way for slipshod, cut-rate corporations to prevent their competitors from luring customers with safer products is through (surprise) government regulation.

Which brings me to my second point: agency capture. From the article:

The Department of Agriculture seems to have only one purpose in preve