What's been set up and is playing out now is a Huge World Historical Battle between science and capitalism. Science is insisting more emphatically every day that [climate change] is a real and present danger. Capitalism is saying it isn't, because if it were true it would mean more government control of economies, more social justice (as a climate stabilization technique) and so on. These are the two big players in our civilization, so I say, be aware, watch the heavyweights go at it, and back science every chance you get. I speak to all fellow leftists around the world: science is now a leftism, and thank God; but capitalism is very very strong. So it's a dangerous moment. People who like their history dramatic and non-utopian should be pleased.

--Kim Stanley Robinson, from an interview with Terry Bisson

From White Souse:

A second topic of conversation last night allowed me to shoehorn in my pet theory about Ayn Rand: her works are like the chicken pox; it's important to succumb and recover early enough in life that you can go on to lead a healthy and productive adulthood. If you're exposed too late, however, there's a nasty tendency for the disease to stick, ravage the mental faculties, and return in chronic waves.

Best/most apt analogy ever?

Hilzoy, on the passage of Waxman-Markey:

Think about it. Cap and trade is completely in line with standard market economics: you identify an externality that the market does not capture, design a market system to capture and price that externality, and rectify a market failure. The Democrats, who favor the bill, have a huge margin in Congress. They water it down in various ways to make it more palatable to various wavering people. And after all that, it still only passes by seven votes.

That's sad. I hate to think what will happen to it in the Senate.

DFW, from one of the footnotes to "Consider the Lobster":

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

Prof. Kinbote, from Nabokov's Pale Fire:

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students).

I've seen quite a few able rebuttals of the jaw-droppingly stupid claim that Sonia Sotomayor, the next Supreme Court Justice, is somehow a racist. This, from the Prospect's Adam Serwer, is probably the best, the most succinct, the most incisive.

It gets to the heart of exactly why the standard conservative "reverse racism" line is wrong, though I suspect most everyone reading this has at least an instinctive awareness that it's wrong. Far from being some sort of essentializing move about the intrinsic superiority of Latina women to white men, Sotomayor's now-infamous but utterly benign "wise Latina" remark was, as Serwer says, about "life experience, and the idea that someone with the experience of being discriminated against might offer insight that those who haven't had that experience wouldn't have." In an alternate universe in which white folks had been colonized, robbed, enslaved, and marginalized for centuries and 'blackness' or 'brownness' had become the fictionally homogenous default, sure, one could substitute "wise white dude" for "wise Latina." But we don't live in that world.

The comments by Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Stuart Taylor, various folks at the Cato Institute, and a whole host of other prominent conservatives (to whom, bizarrely, we continue listening despite their long history of valueless verbal flatulence), in which Sotomayor is taken to task for suggesting that someone of her background might know something that wealthy white males don't, take the white male experience as the default--and, more insidiously, as something that has nothing to do with being white or male. A cursory glance at history gives the lie to this idea, which should be familiar to anyone who's spent time studying the rhetorical and political terrain of racism/sexism/etc. The really powerful mechanism of bias is not the crude "whites/men are better than blacks/women!" of the most virulent bigots, but rather the implied notion that white males (/heterosexuals/Christians/etc.) aren't marked or in any way impacted by their demographics. A gay atheist woman from Venezuala is a gay atheist woman from Venezuela, but a straight white Protestant guy from Detroit is just a dude. His experiences are universalizable, and have nothing to do with his being a straight white guy from Detroit.

Serwer again: "White people are as ethnic and culturally specific as non-white people, and there is a qualitative difference between asserting a specific cultural heritage and experience and lauding the inherent values granted by skin color." The value of diversity from a decision-making perspective (Sotomayor: "a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life") is not that it appeases interest groups or has symbolic value (though both of those things are true, and important in a context like SCOTUS), but that it covers experiences and perspectives that are frequently overlooked, experiences that were brought about by but are not reducible to being born into various minority demographic categories. This is important because, as critics of the Enlightenment have been fond of pointing out, there's no such thing as a universal subject. There's no such thing as a person whose thoughts and beliefs and decisions are independent of his or her life experiences. There's no such thing as a person who's just a person, without also being gendered, raced, etc. Not only does such a person not exist, it's sure as hell not interchangeable with a straight white wealthy Christian male. The mark of privilege is precisely the functional invisibility of one's demographic categories, and I say this as a straight white male who has never been forced to think consequentially of himself as a member of at least the first two of those three categories. There are endless variations of this--"man saves child from fire" vs. "black man murders three" in the newspaper, and so on and so forth. Once you see the pattern, its manifestations become pretty clear.

Put another way, the Gingriches and the Limbaughs of the world (and conservatives more broadly) believe that whatever success they've achieved in the world is wholly attributable to their own talent, hard work, perseverance, etc. They're Just People™, after all, not gay atheist Venezuelan women. The suggestion that a minority might know more than they do is, in their eyes, a bald assertion of race or gender superiority--hence "reverse racism." More broadly, their loathing of such things as civil rights protections and affirmative action is produced by their (inaccurate) sense that minorities are getting something they're not. What enables them to believe this is the very same demographic invisibility mentioned above--it's the notion that because there hasn't been affirmative action for white males, therefore white males haven't been privileged. I linked this pattern of thought to conservatives more broadly, at the start of this paragraph, and here's why: conservatives believe as a matter of principle that their successes are self-made, that they haven't benefited from anything outside of their own effort and ingenuity. (Many of their failures, of course, get blamed on "affirmative action hires" and such, but we'll leave that for now.) Never mind the public institutions and infrastructure that gave them as much of a net boost as anyone else. This kind of shortsightedness is understandable, but it's also something that needs to end. It's irrational, it's hypocritical, it poisons any conversation about difference, and it stands in the way of progress.

In a more general sense, it seems to me the only reason the conservative movement is able to delude itself into thinking it's viable (even indispensable!) is its myopia with respect to its own biases and assumptions. The arguments offered by conservative politicians, pundits, and think tanks are almost entirely structured around benefiting the white, the male, the heterosexual, the wealthy--i.e. the default demographic. A gay black woman who talks about civil rights is, to many modern conservatives, spouting biased nonsense that's entirely a product of her demographics; a Puerto-Rican woman who grew up in the projects, graduated summa cum laude from Princeton (and won its top award for undergraduates, as well as being elected to Phi Beta Kappa), and got her J.D. from the best law school in the country (while editing its law review) is, by the same logic, obviously an affirmative action hire. It's not just that the GOP's popularity with non-whites is plummeting, or that the country's population is becoming steadily less white. It's that movement conservatives, because of their misguided sense that Everyman is white/male/etc., can't understand why their ideas are so unappealing to everyone outside of that demographic. They think they're appealing to everyone because they think their views aren't shaped by their (privileged) life experiences and demographic categories--because they think they are everyone, in the sense that their ideas are just the ideas of people, not the ideas of people with particular histories and characteristics.

Yeah, the anti-immigrant fervor doesn't help, but it's not just about that.

Matt Yglesias, on the current state of the GOP and the laughable assertion that what it needs is more think tanks:

The problem they face is that the conservative movement, as presently constituted, is not prepared to accept anything other than “tax cuts” as a solution to anything. Consequently, they’re not really even prepared to accept the premise that other problems exist. Tax cuts can’t solve climate change, so there must be no such thing! Tax cuts can’t curb inequality, so there must not be a problem with growing inequality.

If you’re a white guy looking to vent about how Puerto Rican women growing up poor in the Bronx get unfair advantages in life, the conservative movement has a lot to offer you. But otherwise there’s nothing there policywise. That’s not, however, because there are no organizations out there capable of developing or marketing policy. It’s because the movement has become unremittingly hostile to constructive policymaking. Everybody’s too busy cowering in fear from Rush Limbaugh to come up with anything.

True story.

Take-home thought for the day: Health care reform hasn't yet happened largely because the skyrocketing costs of service have been hidden from consumers by the dominance of (tax-exclusion-subsidized) employer-based health insurance, as a result of which the only people who notice how ridiculously fucking much health care costs have risen are the ones who get hit hard by it because they don't have jobs/money/insurance and thus don't have much of a voice anyway. Yes, we need universal coverage to happen (for reasons not only ethical but economic, a point I wish more folks would emphasize), but the kicker here is that without a widespread awareness of the ballooning costs of health care--an awareness that's effectively stiffarmed by our historical accident of a health insurance system!--most of the public will continue clinging white-knuckled to the status quo. If the rising costs of health care (and the utter lack of a proportional increase in quality of care) had been visible to folks over the last couple decades, Bill Kristol and "Harry and Louise" and [convicted fraudster] Rick Scott and the whole right-wing opposition to health care reform wouldn't have been able to pull their inertia act so effectively for so long. Granted, it would also help if idiots would stop calling us all socialists or whatever, but still.

Oddly, given the American electorate's notorious resistance to tinkering with its horrifically inefficient health care system, this seems to be the rare piece of progressive-ish reform where legislators are actually ahead of the public. Polls have consistently shown overwhelming support for ambitious climate change/energy legislation, for instance, but last I looked, the 2020 emissions reduction in Waxman-Markey had been knocked down from an already-not-enough 20% to 17%. Whichever polling data you choose to trust on attitudes toward gay marriage, you can bet that the 40-50% who support gay marriage aren't matched by a similar proportion in Congress. And so on. I'm not really sure why health care has settled the other way, with the leaders actually doing the leading. Hell, even Ben "The Insurance Industry Pays My Salary" Nelson has backed off his opposition to a public plan, and Max Baucus has been surprisingly decent thus far, though I guess we'll see what happens when Finance and HELP start hashing out their differences.

If you read one article on health care this year (though you really should be reading Ezra Klein and Jon Cohn regularly), read Atul Gawande's piece in The New Yorker. I won't try to sum it up, but I will point to one end-of-article quote for my own purposes (emphasis mine):

"Congress has provided vital funding for research that compares the effectiveness of different treatments, and this should help reduce uncertainty about which treatments are best. But we also need to fund research that compares the effectiveness of different systems of care—to reduce our uncertainty about which systems work best for communities. These are empirical, not ideological, questions."

Point taken, I suppose, and this is a very small complaint about one short sentence in a long article, but I'd add that in a broader sense, ideology ought to be viewed precisely as something the results of which can be empirically measured. It's a heuristic, a way of making predictions and judgments about the value and effectiveness of different options for moving forward. That's the only way in which it's actually, y'know, meaningful or useful at all. (If this looks like something I've written about before, it probably should.) Just saying.

PS, Peter Orszag is totally awesome. I mean this for a great many reasons, quite a few of which have to do with the rest of this post, but for a more trivial example, I'll quote from Ezra's excellent profile from the Prospect a few months back:

"[Orszag] once quoted an Oliver Wendell Holmes poem in the footnotes to a CBO analysis of infrastructure spending, because David Brooks complained that budget analysis lacked sufficient 'romance.'"

That's an OMB director I can believe in. :D

And now I should probably go to sleep.

I've got a bunch more videos to post from last night's show, all courtesy of Sandi, but in the meantime, here's a video someone else took:

The Threadbare Orchestra - Grand Central Station Blues from Simon on Vimeo.

Mencken, during the Scopes trial:

Once more, alas, I find myself unable to follow the best Liberal thought. What the World's contention amounts to, at bottom, is simply the doctrine that a man engaged in combat with superstition should be very polite to superstition. This, I fear, is nonsense. The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.

I believe I promised some videos from last week's Threadbare Orchestra show, so here they are. There's also some really excellent pictures here--probably the best batch we've had so far, since the stage at the Brewery is actually (gasp) well-lit.




( More videos! )

In other news, last night--by which I of course mean around 5:30 this morning--I finished* mixing our first official recording. Like most things, it doesn't sound great on laptop speakers, so I'd urge you to listen on something less shitty (it sounds way better even on crappy iPod earbuds), but y'know, whatever. I suppose I can't be picky. ;) We have two other tracks that we're almost done tracking (and three more in earlier stages), though I don't know how quickly I'll be able to get them mixed and put up, since it's crunch time in Ye Olde Soul-Crushing Academe. And also since we have a big show next week, opening for These United States (!!!).

Anyway, go take a listen!: The Threadbare Orchestra - Opener.



* = mixes are like stories, poems, and papers--they're never finished, they're just due. Even now, I'm resisting my urge to go back and tweak things. Turn down the overheads, mess with the snare EQ, put some flange on the vocals . . bah.

Mori Dinauer at TAPPED, on the stimulus:

By my reckoning, the conservative argument for opposing the economic stimulus package now appears to take one of the following forms: they argue the stimulus wastefully spends money on contraceptives and park services. They believe the public is opposed to using federal money to meet state budget shortfalls. They believe a successful stimulus would help Democrats electorally both short- and long-term. They believe it is their duty to be as partisan as the Democrats were when they didn't agree to destroy Social Security in 2005. They are concerned about the findings of a CBO report that doesn't actually exist.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is today's Republican Party. Same bad time, same bad channel, same bad faith arguments. Let us be tremendously thankful that the terminally wrong John Boehner is the House minority leader.

Wow. Anyone read Halting State recently? :P

Two things from the last week:







The Rick Warren thing was not only repulsive on the level of principle, but arguably also stupid on the level of politics, since Warren would seem to get a lot more out of the deal (endorsement and legitimacy as a moderate, which he isn't; leverage in the battle for leadership of the evangelical movement, i.e. King of Turd Mountain) than Barack does. His invocation was roughly the mishmash of hypocritical bromides and metaphysical flatulence I expected it to be, and to say I gritted my teeth during it--especially during the vocal expressions of agreement and enthusiasm of some of the people around me--would be a gigantic understatement. That said, we'd all do well to remember some of the other voices. I'll take a secular progressive voice over a religious progressive voice any day of the week, and I'd be much happier if folks would abandon their mythological follies so we can all get serious about improving the world, but there's something to be said for the inclusion of an openly gay, unabashedly progressive bishop and an outspoken, 87-year-old civil rights icon.

While I'm at it, it's worth mentioning the very open question of the relation between the symbolic and the concrete in political contexts. This is, I suspect, one of the key points of disagreement about what the Obama administration is actually going to end up looking like. In turn, the importance of this question can largely be seen as a point of continuity from the Clinton years, during which the symbolic and the concrete became confused and conflated (some, myself included, would say that the defining failure of the Clinton presidency was its confused tactic of concrete concessions for symbolic benefits, when if anything, it should've been the other way around). This campaign and--boy, is this still a strange thing to say--this presidency elicit such questions more readily than most, for reasons that are probably fairly obvious. All that said, I think Barack is uniquely (and almost superhumanly, in some contexts) intelligent about marshaling symbolic forces to achieve concrete gains. Because his campaign was so thoroughly saturated with and driven by the energies of the symbolic, I think it's been easy for people to mistake the symbolic for the concrete and vice versa. (To put my cards on the table, I think this is behind a lot of the reaction to Rick Warren, though as I've said, I do think that was a terrible, if not hugely consequential, decision.) My impulse is to say that this confusion maps reasonably closely on to the confusion between policy aims and political strategies. I've heard a considerable number of people articulate some version of "my politics are quite a bit to the left of Obama's," and in a lot of cases, I have no doubt that it's true. However, it's not as uncomplicated a statement as it seems; I suspect there's a lot less discrepancy in terms of policy aims than the more-progressive-than-thou crowd seems to think there is. Regardless, while I'm pretty far from being a Third Way DLC-style centrist (and indeed, I find said folks to be hacks, if sometimes well-intentioned hacks), it's worth remembering that the only sense in which principle is worthwhile is in its exercise, in its deployment as a force for improving the world. This isn't a new critique, obviously, of Nader and his ilk, but neither is it a defense of the craven politics of Clintonian triangulation: any principle, any belief, any philosophy must be responsive to its practice and its impact on material conditions. Just as ideas don't exist independent of their expression in writing or speech and beliefs aren't significant if they don't manifest themselves in thought and action, a politics without a praxis is not only useless and impotent but also deficient on a philosophical level. An old Crooked Timber post had some line, possibly imported from elsewhere, about how one thing you can always say about the status quo is that it's no worse than the status quo, and you'd be surprised at how many plans don't pass that test. In this sense, I'm very much a materialist about thought and about the ethics behind philosophy and politics: it doesn't mean anything to me that you express to me your opposition to, say, torture, if your actions in service of that principle make torture more common and more widespread. I don't find 'ideology' to be a dirty word the way the entire media commentariat seems to, precisely because it's a tool for generating predictions and prescriptions (and should be measured and judged as such), but ideological purity isn't worth half a damn if it doesn't make anything better for anyone.

I will say, in conclusion, that if this is the (meta?) political and philosophical ethic I espouse, then Barack is probably the clearest example of a corresponding practice of that ethic. I have some significant policy disagreements with him, and a handful of strategic disagreements as well (the Warren thing being one), but I find his negotiation of principle and pragmatism--policy and politics, strategy and tactics, the symbolic and the concrete--to be exceptionally astute. It's not that negotiating those things is a novel endeavor in and of itself, but I think the how of it, compared to the big-name Democrats of recent decades, is remarkable. I'm optimistic about the efficacy of this brand of leadership, even as I chafe at Rick Warren sermons or dinner parties with right-wing pundits. That doesn't mean I think we should all sit down and shut up, that we shouldn't express our various dissents, but I think it would be a good thing to avoid letting our cynicism blind us, and to keep in mind that our goals are not reducible to our chosen methods of accomplishing them.

Things are happening:

• Detainee prosecutions under military commissions halted.


• Gitmo to close within a year, with all detainee cases reviewed.


• No more extraordinary rendition.


• No more torture--adherence to the Army Field Manual.


• No more black sites.


• Gitmo detainees have habeas corpus restored.


• Red Cross is guaranteed access to detainees.


• FOIA requests will be reviewed with the default aim of access, rather than non-disclosure.


• Executive privilege now limited to POTUS and former POTUS, and subject to extensive review by the Attorney General and WH counsel.


• Re-lifted the global gag rule.


• Marty Lederman (who is awesome) taking over the office formerly occupied by the odious John Yoo (who is a war criminal).

Not bad for the first three days, I'd say. But hey, what do I know?

Also, looks like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act passed the Senate today, and is soon headed to Barack's desk. This is a Very Good Thing™.

I don't even know what to say about this:

Told you so. Just saying.

Quoth CNN, which for some reason continues to tell us about this imbecile:

‘Joe the Plumber’ Wurzelbacher told a group of journalists covering the conflict in Israel and Gaza that he didn’t think the media should be allowed to report on war.

“I think media should be abolished from, you know, reporting,” Wurzelbacher said. “You know, war is hell. And if you’re gonna sit there and say, ‘well, look at this atrocity,’ well you don’t know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it.”

There are no words.

"Let's be frank: Norm Coleman doesn't have much of a future in electoral politics. Defeated Presidential candidates sometimes have nine lives, but defeated Senatorial candidates rarely do, and in his career running for statewide office, Coleman has lost to a professional wrestler, beaten a dead guy, and then tied a comedian. He doesn't have much to lose by fighting this to its bitter conclusion. But it's hard to envision how he'll come up with enough ballots to overtake Franken."

--Nate Silver

Heh. This interview with the apparently proudly "politically incorrect" Clint Eastwood made me recall an observation someone made a few months ago: gleefully labeling one's words or actions "politically incorrect" as a point of pride is a way of admitting you're wrong without actually taking any responsibility for it or expressing any shame over it. In other words, dismissing something as "politically correct" is, more often than not, semantically equivalent to saying that it's correct, but you choose not to care about its correctness.

In related news, conservative rhetoric is both idiotic and depressingly effective.