Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

I don’t think that there was any “fair” result from Michigan. Not only was Obama not on the ballot, but turn out was incredibly low because people were told that the votes wouldn’t actually elect any delegates.

Considering these rather odd circumstances, ther was no good way to apportion the delegates. It can’t really be said that Clinton’s 55% reflected her “true” level of support (lots of people probably just voted for her because she was the only major nominee on the ballot) and Obama’s “true” support was significantly underestimated with his zero percent. So the RBC should have decided Michigan by doing whatever the Clinton campaign wanted. This wouldn’t have actually affected the results – Obama still would have his delegate lead – and we wouldn’t have to be worried about Harold Ickes pronouncing that “We reserve the right to challenge this decision before the Credentials Committee.” At this point, all that matters is getting Clinton and her supporters to see the delegate allocation and Obama’s inevitable victory as legitimate. Although the ultimate Michigan ruling of halving the delegate vote and giving the uncommitted to Obama may be “fair,” when Harold Ickes says that four delegates have been “hijacked” from Clinton, all I can see is Clinton continuing her campaign and continuing to press on Michigan despite the superdelegates moving to Obama after the Puerto Rico primary.

PS – for three great dispatches from the protests outside the RBC meeting, read Eve Fairbanks’, Dana Goldstein’s and Chris Hayes‘ accounts. They’re all excellent.

but Michelle Malkin had a point in the entire Rachael Ray business. Sure, on the specific points, she was horrifically wrong. Ray isn’t wearing a keffiyeh, keffiyeh’s aren’t necessarily “hate couture” and enforcing this type of conservative political correctness is just stupid. But she still had a point about the proliferation of the keffiyeh as a hipster accessory. Although in the Middle East, the keffiyeh is hardly terrorist wear – in Jordan its red and white, in the Gulf it’s just white and Palestinians of all stripes sport the black and white one – but it’s only popular in the West because of its terrorist chic. Just like Che shirts, or more accurately, the spate of khaki and leather military-esque jackets that proliferated in the 60s and 70s, they are only cool because of the inherent association with revolt and violence. Now, I don’t particularly mind people wearing keffiyeh’s, they are remarkably useful and look really cool, but the argument that they’re totally innocuous and have no association with violence, nationalism or revolt just ain’t true.

Full disclosure. I own a keffiyeh. I bought it when I was ten in Palestinian East Jerusalem. It’s really cool.

UPDATE: If you dare look below, I’ve uploaded some really crappy pictures of me sporting my authentic Palestinian keffiyeh in both relatively traditional and hipster fashion. View at your own risk

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Yglesias notes with fascination that, in Brazil, a “undiscovered” group of people have, well, been discovered. He discusses research that shows that these hunter gatherer groups have more leisure time and higher living standards than comparable agricultural (though not technologically advanced) societies. Marshall Sahlins developed this theory based on field work with !Kung people in southern Africa showing that even though these hunter-gatherers didn’t ever have surpluses, they still weren’t living on the brink of starvation, as was previously thought. Their diets were varied and because of the impossibility of surplus, it may even be possible that they solved the central problem of economics: reconciling man’s unlimited desire with limited resources. Sahlins concluded that perhaps these hunter-gatherers simply wanted less. As he put it, they lived in the Original Affluent Society.

There was one major problem with this revisionist line of antropology: it underrated the extreme level of violence in hunter-gatherer society. Work done by Richard Wrangham, Matthew LeBlanc and others showed that our primate ancestors, namely Chimpanzees, are amazingly violent, and that this pattern is repeated in pre-state human society. Steven Pinker has a fantastic article detailing this and other research, in which he claims that “If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.” Lots of archaeological and anthropological work done in hunter-gatherer societies has discovered mass graves, implements of warfare and other indicators of fairly widespread violence in pre-agricultural settlements. This is very much in the mainstream of anthropology, which has largely rejected the idea of the Noble Savage and instead has adopted a much darker view of human pre-history.

Of course, just because chimpanzees were nastily violent doesn’t mean we have to be. We can also look to bonobos, our other primate ancestors. Unlike chimps, who will raid other chimpanzee groups, kill their men and rape their women, bonobos are not only matriarchal, but they are generally much more altruistic, compassionate and cooperative than their primate relatives. Oh yeah, and they love, just love, having gay sex with each other. It’s how they resolve conflicts and what not.

There’s a problem when among a large cross-section of policy makers, activists and even industry honchos have all decided that reducing carbon emissions should be a priority, and yet still pursue inane schemes like carbon sequestration to do it. As the Times documents, the plan to burn coal and bury the carbon emissions is a huge failure. It’s too expensive, impractical and beset with technical challenges to become a real option anytime soon.

In January, the government canceled its support for what was supposed to be a showcase project, a plant at a carefully chosen site in Illinois where there was coal, access to the power grid, and soil underfoot that backers said could hold the carbon dioxide for eons.

Perhaps worse, in the last few months, utility projects in Florida, West Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota and Washington State that would have made it easier to capture carbon dioxide have all been canceled or thrown into regulatory limbo.

Coal is abundant and cheap, assuring that it will continue to be used. But the failure to start building, testing, tweaking and perfecting carbon capture and storage means that developing the technology may come too late to make coal compatible with limiting global warming.

“It’s a total mess,” said Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Coal’s had a tough year,” said John Lavelle, head of a business at General Electric that makes equipment for processing coal into a form from which carbon can be captured. Many of these projects were derailed by the short-term pressure of rising construction costs. But scientists say the result, unless the situation can be turned around, will be a long-term disaster.

The thing is, if carbon were priced, it would be evident that just about any option that included burning coal was stupid. We’d see by the energy input into even creating a sequestration system that we were better off expanding wind or nuclear power. But if make the focus of our energy policy the investment of large-scale resources into projects, it’s hard to see how something like the coal sequestration boondoggle wouldn’t happen again. What’s hopeful in the article is that because the political climate is becoming more hostile to coal in general, companies are restraining themselves from even trying to build new coal fired power plants. But for us to make any real action on warming, this feeling will have to be institutionalized with some real incentives to produce clean energy and some real disincentives to produce dirty energy. If we got those in place first, the chips are likely to fall in the right place.

Charles Krauthammer gives us a doozy of a misleading scientific reference:

If you doubt the arrogance, you haven’t seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton’s laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming — infinitely more untested, complex and speculative — is a closed issue.

What Krauthammer is trying to say is that because science is an imperfect, speculative activity whose conclusions are always partially shrouded in doubt and subject to massive revision, we can’t put too much confidence in global warming models that predict catastrophe if we continue to emit carbon dioxide at our current rate. As evidence for his argument that models can be overturned (randomly! unpredictably!), he mentions that Newton’s account of physics was overturned by Einstein’s. And he’s right, we now know that a Newtonian model is not the best one to describe our physical reality. But it can still describe most of what’s important to us.

Just because Newton’s laws of motion can now be described in other ways doesn’t mean that when you drop an apple, it magically floats up. It just means that we have a different explanation for why the apple falls. What Krauthammer wants us to believe is that when Einstein came around, we viewed the world totally differently and had a radically different way of predicting the behavior of physical bodies and so it’s possible that something similar could happen for climate science. But relativity and quantum mechanics were more of an extremely nuanced correction to an account of physics that is overwhelmingly accurate, and more importantly, incredibly useful in nearly everything humans do. So it’s incredibly likely that our climate models are missing some rather meaningful nuances that will be discovered later, but the point is that there is a scientific consensus that when we put CO2 in the air, the climate is affected in very substantial ways. Surely this account can be updated and tweaked, but there is nothing that an obtuse reference to the history of science can do to make us place such extreme doubt in a rigorous scientific consensus.

Whenever one discusses the Holy Land, a point that is often brought up by Israel partisans is how liberal a state Israel is. And, for the region and despite its identity as a 19th century throwback relgio-ethno state, Israel is remarkably open, pluralistic and free. But because of the deadening moral ordeal of the occupation, Israel is closing in. Earlier this week, the government refused to let Norman Finkelstein, the leftist critic of Israel and son of holocaust survivors, into the country, citing his hostile political views. They reportedly banned him from the country for ten years. And now, the US has withdrawn Fulbright scholarship money for students in the Gaza strip, because the Israeli government refuses to let them out. It’s hard to see how denying Gazan students from studying in the United States will make them more likely to view Israel or the US more favorably. What’s increidbly distressing is that these are the very people who aren’t Hamas supporters, who could rebuild Palestinian civil society. But that’s going to be hard to do if Israel keeps them penned up in the open-air prison that is Gaza. This quote from a Palestinian student is just heartbreaking

“If we are talking about peace and mutual understanding, it means investing in people who will later contribute to Palestinian society,” he said. “I am against Hamas. Their acts and policies are wrong. Israel talks about a Palestinian state. But who will build that state if we can get no training?”

Tragic.

I have a soft spot for Marxist academics, especially those who remain, well, Marxists. My favorite is Perry Anderson, whose London Review of Books essays are consistently some of the best written and best argued long pieces on international politics. Well, not surprisingly, his brother Benedict, a historian who specializes in Indonesia, is similarly fantastic. And so, since we’re talking about the history of Indonesia, I couldn’t help but point yall to Anderson’s essay in New Left Review “Exit Suharto: Obituary For a Mediocre Tyrant.”

Here’s a bit on Timor:

Suharto tried everything he could think of, but nothing really worked. The land of East Timor, famously arid, had no mineral resources and scarcely any forests; its people were desperately poor and largely illiterate. Teachers hated being assigned there, as did bureaucrats. Attempts to settle migrants from other islands failed in the face of popular hostility and intermittent sabotage. The territory’s one high-class export, coffee, became a military monopoly. The deeper problem was that in East Timor, Indonesians, often half-realizing it, were in the position of colonialists. Hence the regular colonial complaint that the East Timorese were ‘so ungrateful’, language that would have been taboo anywhere in Indonesia itself. Furthermore, East Timor could not be accommodated in the standard ‘our centuries-long struggle against the Dutch’ narrative of nationalist ideology and school textbooks. Worse still, they were Catholic in a 90 per cent Muslim national population. Irritatingly, the Vatican refused to merge East Timor’s priests into the pliant and often cowardly Indonesian Catholic hierarchy.

Read the whole thing, of course.

Josh Patashnik goes over the basic reasons for this somewhat surprising result – air conditioning as opposed to heating, LA is actually pretty dense – but there may be something else at play. It’s important to note that much of the West Coast is very dense, when you look at where the people live. That’s because the major areas – LA and the SF Bay Area – are hemmed in by hills and mountains on one side and ocean on the other, which leads to fairly dense living arrangements. But LA may be getting a bit of a free ride because the survey didn’t count the entire metropolitan area that has sprung up around the city. Although the city itself may be rather hemmed in by the geographical constraints of the LA Basin and San Fernando Valley, there are still millions of people who live far away from LA itself, and drive huge distances to get there. These would be people mainly in Orange, Ventura and San Bernardino counties. I don’t think inclusion of those areas would affect the basic direction of the rankings, but I don’t think anyone can pretend that the Inland Empire is some paragon of energy efficiency.

Dylan Matthews raised an important point – one needn’t recourse to Kissinger’s Jewishness or his continued prominence to find a good reason to utterly despise the man. One could simply look at his record. Specifically, Indonesia.

What’s utterly infuriating about Ferguson’s review is that he doesn’t mention “Indonesia”, “Suharto” or “East Timor” once. But considering that Ferguson is apparently unable to find a reason beside Kissinger’s ethnic background to explain the Left’s utter contempt for the man, it is worth remembering exactly what happened in East Timor.

To make it simple, in 1975, our loyal ally Suharto wanted to invade East Timor. In December of 75, he met with Ford and Kissinger, and they both made it clear that they supported the invasion. And it wasn’t just words, the United States was the main patron and arms supplier of Suharto and the Indonesian regime up until 1999, when Clinton finally halted arms sales. When Suharto cabled Ford to inform of the invasion, the Indonesian dictator said that “We want your understanding if we deem it necessary to take rapid or drastic action.” Despite the fact that Portugal intended East Timor to be autonomous, Ford replied that “We will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the problem you have and the intentions you have.” When they met in Jakarta, Kissinger’s only words of caution were that Suharto should invade after the President and Kissinger returned to Washington, so as to avoid embarrassment.  The Indonesians invaded East Timor the next day. In the first year of the occupation, somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 Timorese had been killed.  By 1979, 300,000 Timorese had been displaced and shipped into Indonesian military camps. By 1980, between 100,000 and 230,000 Timorese were dead as a result of the invasion and occupation. All of this murder and displacement had been sanctioned and materially supported by the US Government with the explicit approval of Ford and Kissinger.

The closest Ferguson gets to addressing the moral emptiness at the heart of Kissinger’s politics is talking about how the man was a “revolutionary” because he wanted to check Soviet influence in the third world. This, of course, meant supporting the odious, murderous regimes in Indonesia, Pakistan, Chile, South Africa and Argentina (just to give you an idea). For Ferguson, the murder and subjugation of East Timor can simply be explained by saying that “some unpleasant regimes had to be tolerated, and indeed supported” This, of course, is not the first time Ferguson has taken such a blasé attitude towards the massive death tolls that are the inevitable result of the imperialistic realpolitik that he admires so much in Kissinger. Ferguson is the biggest fan of the late British Empire, and has consistently obfuscated, minimized and otherwise excused the massive death tolls that were a direct result of British Imperial policy.

As Johann Hari documented, when Ferguson discusses imperial Kenya (his boyhood home) in The War of the World, there is literally no mention of the Mau Mau Rebellion, and the subsequent network of concentration camps built across Kenya to torture and detain some 300,000 Kenyans. Or of the 50,000 killed, due to the instruction to British soldiers to kill whomever they liked, “so long as he is black.” Ferguson also has a hard time coming to grips with how many Indians were killed by deliberate starvation and imperial negligence. When 29 million Indians died of famine in the 1870s and 1880s, Lord Lytton made it illegal for anyone to feed or assist those dying. Not only did he make relief illegal, he used the military to insist that India export grain to London, even as millions of Indians were dying of starvation. As Amartya Sen has consistently argued, famine did not exist in India before the British arrived, and since they left, there have been no famines on the same scale as the Bengal Famine of 1943 or other, earlier, famines.

But where do these Kenyans, Indonesians or Indians show up in Ferguson grand historical calculus? As usual, the benefits for the imperial powers are all important, while the matter of dead natives is quietly slept under the rug.

Indonesia Links:

George Washington University’s National Security Archive write up of recently released documents relating to the Ford administration’s Indonesia Policy

AFP story from 2001 about said documents.

India Links:

Johann Hari’s first and second articles reviewing Ferguson’s work.

Amartya Sen’s TNR essay on Ferguson British Imperialism in India.

Isaac Chotiner quotes this Niall Ferguson review of a Kissinger biography, in which the English historian asks if all the special hatred directed towards Kissinger is, at least, partially anti-Semitic:

Has the ferocity of the criticism which Kissinger has attracted perhaps got something to do with the fact that he, like the Rothschilds, is Jewish?

I tend to sympathize with the “all American foreign policy after the War was horrible” view, but one can easily make the argument that Kissinger was especially bad. As Chotiner points out, he was the foreign policy vizier for the least popular president, helped prosecute the worst possible war and not only is still alive today (unlike, say, Dulles), but he’s an incredibly rich, popular and influential individual. And if you’re looking for a single figure to represent just how vicious American foreign policy could be, Kissinger is about as good a symbol as you can get.

But I’ll admit that some of my dislike for Kissinger is not just because he is Jewish, but because he’s almost the perfect example of a Jewish American immigrant story. He was born in Germany, fled his homeland as the Holocaust was starting and then, when he reached New York, attended City College. Tack on some more degrees from Harvard and incredibly sucessful civil service career, and you have the dream of every Jewish parent. But, from the perspective of a liberal jew, he took his amazing cultural values and incredibly high intelligence and put it in service of the most regressive forces in America. Nixon, himself someone who had nothing nice to say about Jews, was able to draw from 3000 years of beautiful history from Moses to Sandy Koufax to implement his horrific policy vision (with the exception of China). Now, I recognize that accusing minorities who politically go off the reservation of being sellouts is a regressive thing to do, but there is a visceral reaction to seeing someone who could personally symbolize the incredible story of American Jews be so loathsome. To quote Abbie Hoffman, Kissinger is a shonda for the goyim.

I’d make the staff watch Recount over and over.

Let’s say that Clinton gets the Michigan and Florida delegations seated. All this changes is that Obama’s lead in pledged delegates is lessened, but he would still have the lead. He would also have the lead in total delegates, because he’s taken the superdelegate lead. The only thing Clinton would get is the “popular vote.” But the popular isn’t an official metric of anything – the total delegate count is.  But if Clinton is pushing Florida and Michigan to be seated so that she can tell superdelegates that she’s the popular vote leader, then it doesn’t actually matter if the delegates are seated at all. The popular vote is still a unofficial metric, and so it really makes no difference if the states that give her a popular vote lead are actually seated. Clinton can no longer make a case based on delegates, no matter who gets seated, so if she wants to make the popular vote argument, she should just make it without trying to say that Obama’s election is illegitimate.

The way Andrew Solomon describes it, the autism activists are split into three camps. One, the vaccinists, think that autism (or autism spectrum disorders) is not only a crippling disease, but one that should be eliminated by fixing the environmental factors. The genetics also think that autism spectrum disorders are crippling, and think we should be trying to find a cure. The neurodiverse types are more of a mixed lot, but generally tend to view autism and Aspergers not as a disease, but as a different way of thinking. To them, autism is only a disability because of a normative view of what an abled person, and that if we tried to accept and accommodate those on the spectrum, much of the “symptoms” would go away, mostly because they wouldn’t be viewed as symptoms.

The vaccinists are clearly wrong on two points. One, vaccines don’t cause autism. But not only are they selling false hope, they promote a ridiculously regressive model of the disorder, seemingly excluding any possibility that someone on the spectrum could see some value in their neurological difference, just insisting that they’re not only disabled, but poisoned. The geneticists often adopt the same view of the vaccinists, seeing autism as purely negative. But they’re probably closer to the truth in seeing a genetic component of autism. Where they are right, in my opinion, is that looking to a genetic cause of autism won’t lead to the elimination of neurodiversity by means of abortion. The genetic component to autism likely involves hundreds of genes operating in a epistatic fashion to influence some traits that all add up to a spectrum disorder. It’s highly unlikely that well ever be able to point to some specific genes and say that a baby will be autistic.

Where the neurodiversity folks get it wrong, I feel, is in their (sometime) categorical objection to seeing any objective component to autism-as-disability. Oftentimes, their tributes to the benefits of autism can fall on the deaf ears of parents who spend massive sums and huge amounts of time just trying to get their kid not to have self-destructive tantrums or potty trained. To those parents, it’s hard to say that their kid is merely approaching cognition in a different way, he’s disabled (if the term is to mean anything at all).

I see no reason why we can’t come to some sort of compromise as outlined by Temple Grandin:

Neurodiversity has dawned since she began grappling with autistic pride, and though she has enabled it, she is too late to be its beneficiary. Grandin argues that both the autistic person and society have to make accommodations. “I won’t do all the neurotypicals want, but you have to go halfway,” she says. “We had manners pounded into us. We had fancy dinners at my grandmother’s, and I was expected to sit at Granny’s table for twenty minutes and I couldn’t monopolize the conversation. You can’t degeekify the geeks, but you can be a polite geek. Autism is a continuum from genius to extremely handicapped. If you got rid of all the autism genetics, you’d get rid of scientists, musicians, mathematicians. Some guy with high-functioning Asperger’s developed the first stone spear; it wasn’t developed by the social ones yakking around the campfire. The problem is, you talk to parents with a low-functioning kid, who’ve got a teenager who still goes to the bathroom in his pants and who’s biting himself all the time. This guy destroys the house, and he’s not typing, no matter what keyboards you make available. His life is miserable. It would be nice if you could prevent the most severe forms of nonverbal autism.”

Grandin’s desire to find a middle ground resonated with me. If there is one thing that everyone in the autism world seems to recognize, it is the pervasive confusion about what qualifies as “sick,” and what qualifies as “odd.” Some of the geeks, in Grandin’s parlance, are autistic; some are just geeky. Some people with no language make social connections; others are highly verbal but unable to understand social rules; others are paralyzed by anxiety, or have hyperacute sensory responses that cause them to withdraw. Some kids have full use of language, and others have echolalia (meaningless repetition of overheard phrases), and yet others have language for basic communication but no more; Alison Singer, an executive vice-president of Autism Speaks, told me that her daughter had language at last—“which means that she says, ‘I want juice,’ not that she says, ‘I feel that you’re not understanding how my mind works.’ ”

I guess the major question is if it’s even possible to integrate all the baggage associated with the concept of autism being a “disease” with some sort of program to recognize the perspective of those with spectrum disorders who don’t feel particularly sick. If we accept certain concepts of social interaction as desirable or normative, then basically anyone on the spectrum is going to be “weird” or “disabled.” But if we take some of the neurodiversity standpoint, will we still be able to say that there are some who really would benefit from some sort of treatment or something to let them interact with the world, or at least prevent active self harm?

Of course, I’m ranting on much too long. Clearly those with spectrum disorders and their parents are the ones who ought to be having this conversation, not bystanders like me.

*Point well taken.

Yglesias worries that some elite Democrats won’t get on the Obama bus when it leaves the station:

I’d say that the more legitimate concern about unity would have to do with elite unity. There’s a certain set of people who, say, donated to the Clinton re-election campaign in 1996, to Al Gore in 2000, to the DNC when Terry McAuliffe was chair, to some pro-Kerry 527 groups in 2004, and to Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign in 2008. These folks aren’t going to vote for McCain, but how invested will they be in backing Obama? That’s in part going to be a function of whether or not Bill and Hillary urge them to be deeply invested in backing Obama. And much the same could be said for other brands of elites — interest group leaders, random consultants and strategists, etc.

Maybe Hillary Clinton would strongly prefer being Vice President to being Senator from New York. If so, her sway over these kinds of people could be a good reason for Obama to seriously consider a unity ticket even though such a ticket has a bunch of other drawbacks.

From what I hear, Obama has already contacted the 100 biggest Clinton donors, and they’re all ready to give Obama money and throw their support at him – but only after Clinton drops out. And after June 3rd, when the Pelosi/Dean/Reid block moves to Obama, you can expect these donors to either encourage Clinton to officially give it up, or to start explicitly supporting Obama. Also, there’s no real reason to think that these elites are only interested in the Democratic party because they’re enamored with the Clintons. As for the interest groups leaders, random consultants and strategists, they’re mostly interested in self-preservation and trying to get into a Democratic White House. Patti Solis Doyle is already talking to the Obama campaign, and we can expect many mid-level staffers and consultants to ingratiate themselves with Obama soon enough. And even those interest groups will realize that if Obama wins, they want to be on his good side: no one wants to get frozen out of Democratic administration that can work with a super-majority in the House and 55-60 votes in the Senate.

It’s worth remembering in these discussions that the reason many fundraisers, consultants, strategists and interest group types are so close with the Clintons is because, since 1992, they’ve either been at the helm of the party, or their flacks (McAuliffe) have. To be a major Democratic mover and shaker in the last 16 years is to be a Clinton loyalist of some degree. There just wasn’t much else out there.

I’m a blogger, so I have to say something about Emily Gould’s ponderous New York Times Magazine essay. Although plenty have been outright critical of this LiveJournal esque, purely personal piece, I though it at least had potential.

After all, there has been a culture shift among people of Gould’s generation (of which I am a younger member) when it comes to comfort with sharing personal information with strangers. But instead of an essay that starts with Gould’s travails at Gawker and then gives us some sort of conclusion or speculation about the larger effect or root causes of oversharing, we get page-after-page describing her panic attacks, relationship with Josh Stein and mean commenters. We don’t really get any insight into the sociology (or pop sociology or anthropology) of being an oversharer. Instead, we get Gould’s redemption story (replace drink too much with overshare and you get James Frey without the lying!), with very little insight into why people share so much and why readers are so fascinated with lives of young bloggers.

On a slightly different note, isn’t it super obvious what the Times is doing? Just by having Emily Gould – blogosphere star! – write something, they’ve guaranteed themselves a ton of traffic and buzz. This isn’t the first time the Times has done this. Remember that weird, anecdotal “blogging kills” article? Sure, there wasn’t any news or even a real trend to report, but they sure got a ton of incoming links!

Crossposted @ A Culture Blog.

One small problem with my blogging has been that I’m unsure how want to organize my writing thematically. Hypothetically, blogs are supposed to be pure expressions of whatever the writer is thinking. Now, most people think about all sorts of things that have nothing to do with each other, and so personal blogging can become pretty disorganized. There’s certainly something a bit weird when you put basketball commentary, political stuff and scathing reviews of the new Usher track all on the same blog. For some, this works out perfectly OK, but I for one want to keep this blog relatively rigorous and seriously minded. But I want to write about silly things too! Like Usher! And Rihanna!

So, for all my pop culture musings, please click over to A Culture Blog. I already have amazingly insightful posts about Wanted, Usher, Sisqo, Young Jeezy and Emily Gould.

Jemele Hill’s column wishing for a Pistons-Spurs series reads like something written by a 82 year old white guy, pining for the days of crisp bounce passes and the great play of George Mikan. And that’s the sensible part of the column. Hill’s first argument in favor of a San Antonio-Detroit finals is that it would put to rest any talk of a conspiracy to put these two major-market teams with a historic rivalry in the finals. But wouldn’t a Pistons-Lakers or Spurs-Celtics finals achieve the same? The “substance” of Hill’s argument is that a Pistons-Spurs finals would show that the NBA still has its “core values.” And also shouldn’t someone point out that the Pistons have been in six consecutive conference finals, won the championship in 2004 and lost to the Spurs in 2005. Oh yeah, and the Spurs have won four championships since 1999. So it’s not like the NBA isn’t rewarding the Spurs and Pistons for their style of play.

Hill goes on to enunciate how the Spurs and the Pistons, because they are slow paced, defensive oriented teams who score a lot of their points off open jump shots created by ball movement, are somehow purer than teams populated by “And-1 wannabes” who just want to see themselves on SportsCenter. This, of course, is a critique of the modern NBA that goes back to Pete Maravich (how dare he take shots from so far away! Showboat!) and is unfailingly pronounced every season. But the major reason this line of criticism never makes sense is that the NBA, even compared to other professional sports leagues, has the most talented players. The 300 or so NBA players are of a higher class than the 1650 in the NFL or the 900 in MLB.

Which means that the Spurs starting line up, or the Pistons, could play “And-1″ style basketball, by which Hill must means some combination of a fast break offense and a half court strategy based on isolation plays for the best players, against any group of basketball players, with the exception of the rest of the starters in the NBA. The reason they don’t play that way is because they aren’t skilled enough on the margins to do so. It makes more sense for a group of players with the Pistons skll set (lots of good, yet somewhat old and slow shooters who can all pass) to play the type of offense they do. The same goes with those teams that play And 1 basketball – the Warriors or the Suns could play patient, half court offense, but it just so happens that considering their lineups, a more run-and-gun approach is effective.

Hill’s column makes even less sense when you consider that it’s in the context of the Celtics not being in the finals. The Celtics, who have the best defense in the league, don’t play a particularly flashy brand of basketball and the press has been practically salivating over how well integrated the team is. But Hill gets out of this by saying that we should prefer the Spurs and the Pistons because they built their teams “the old fashioned way.” By which she means good draft picks (like Kobe Bryant or Paul Pierce, perhaps) and trades for underrated players. But is there really any good reason to think that big trades and free agent signings – by which she surely means Garnett, Gausol and Allen – are in any way less legitimate or organic or pure? And where does my favorite Piston, Rasheed Wallace, fit in to this? Last time I check, that was a pretty inorganic importing of superstar.

These types of arguments are especially lame coming from old white guys, and I usually ascribe it to some sort of latent racism or conservatism; but for a black woman, who is a real basketball fan, to argue that the NBA is afflicted by players showboating and not trying on defense is just depressing. The NBA has some of the most talented athletes on the planet, of a higher caliber than in any other professional sport. The small differences between playing styles simply represents marginally different strategies, not varying approaches to the game itself.

Gabriel Schoenfeld’s LA Times column denouncing the “theology of arms control” is very weird. He starts out talking about Obama’s pledge to renew America’s equipment to nuclear abolition and then abruptly transitions into how Joseph Cirincione, the president of the Plougshares Fund, an informal Obama advisor and one of the most respected nuclear wonks in the country, thought that Syria didn’t have a nuclear weapons program when it did. For Schoenfeld, the presence of a Syrian nuclear program – one that wasn’t especially close to actually acquiring a bomb – proves that the approach of using NPT style international treaties to halt proliferation combined with a committment by the nuclear countries to pursue abortion is dead. But is it the NPT’s fault that Syria is proliferating? When you consider that we have had eight years of a president who’s done his best to trash the nonproliferation approach that Shoenfeld criticizes, shouldn’t we we perhaps look to that radically new approach as the source of our problems?

It’s probably a good idea to review the nonproliferation lowlights of the current administration. After Bush petulantly withdrew form the Agreed Framework with North Korea, they developed more nuclear weapons than they ever did under Clinton. Also, his committment to unilateral military action as the primary means to deal with proliferation – despite the obvious fact that Iraq had no nuclear program – provided an incentive for every country on the US’s bad list to acquire a nuclear deterrent as soon as possible. And how could we forget the India Nuclear Deal, a blatant violation of the NPT that sent the message that the US would opt out of its nonproliferation treaty committments if it meant some short-term geopolitical advantage. And there’s also the serial trashing and attempted discrediting of the IAEA, despite (really, because) their being freakishly accurate about Iraq.

The only theology that’s been shattered recently is the hawkish adherence to the rule that the United States can make the world safe from the danger of nuclear violence by a doctrine of unilateral preemption.

Jesse Lerner has a fantastic piece in Dissent appraising the work of Friedrich Hayek from an explicitly left wing prospective. In Lerner’s opinion, Hayek got one thing absolutely right: that planned economies are horrible, horrible ideas. He thus spends a lot of time on Hayek’s most famous work – The Road to Serfdom – but not so much on his ideas about pricing in markets and the importance of dispersing knowledge.

What’s interesting about these two ideas, which are by far Hayek’s most influential intellectual contributions, is how obvious and almost redundant they seem today. The Road to Serfdom is either horribly overblown or very narrowly descriptive. His description of what inevitably happens when a state controls and plans the entirety of the economy is early prescient and perceptive, but is only applicable to situations in which the state control the entirety of the economy. Road became horribly bastardized when conservatives and libertarians would point to every instance of European social democracy or the existence of some state-owned industries and then wave around Road and say that tyranny was just around the corner(arguably, Hayek is partially to blame for this unfortunate tendency). But when we see that European social democracies are some of the most substantively and formally free nations on the face of the earth, we must grapple with the fact that either Road was wrong, or it was right about a system that has little relevance today. That’s not to say that Road wasn’t an important contribution in 1944, when many British socialists were promoting an incredibly technocratic, “enlightened totalitarian” model, but it’s hard to discern its relevance today when the most “socialist” states (Scandinavian social democracies) have the freest economies.

Hayek’s second great idea, his price theory, has a similar historical pedigree. His theory, that prices can only be determined efficiently by decentralized, dispersed markets, as opposed to central planners, came out of the Socialist Calculation Debate. Basically, in the 30s and 40s, lots of socialist economists argued that a planner and technocrats who were operating a centrally planned economy could set prices for goods that would efficient for their pseudo-market to function. Hayek pointed out that the equations and calculations necessary to determine prices from a centrally-planed perspective were just too complex for any planners, and thus the knowledge inputs that determine prices should be distributed widely and communicated through a relatively free market. Hayek, of course, was totally correct. But like his claims about an entirely planned state leading to totalitarianism, his arguments about pricing have largely been assimilated into mainstream thought and economics, and no one really disagrees with him anymore.

Hayek was a very influential and prescient thinker, and on the big questions of his day, he was indisputably correct. But when it comes to the messy part of actualizing Hayek’s thought into politics, too many have used his work to justify a doctrinaire libertarianism that is neither wholly supported by his thought or particularly commendable.

Now that John McCain has been forced to admit that Hagee is an anti-Semite and reject his endorsement, there should be some reckoning for those Jews who have trumpeted him as a friend of Israel and the Jewish people.

At an Christians United For Israel event where Hagee was speaking, Joe Lieberman described him as “An Ish Elohim. A man of God..Like Moses.” Abe Foxman has said that Hagee deserves to be heard and recognized by pro Israel types “because of his support of Israel. And AIPAC has repeatedly had Hagee speak at events and be something of an officially sanctioned advocate for Israel. So why were these two prominent Jews, and the most prominent Jewish political organization, supporting a conspiratorial, pseudo-Holocaust denying anti-Semite? That’s because short-term and unquestioning support for a hardline stance on Israel  has replaced any substantive committment to Jewish values or more enlightened support for Israel as a mark of true Jewishness in the mind of Lieberman, Foxman and AIPAC. But because of McCain’s denouncing, the jig, fortunately, is up (or at least it should be).

And while AIPAC, Foxman and Lieberman may denounce Hagee now (despite his anti-Semitic ravings having been widely known for years), their dalliance with him just shows how morally and intellectually bankrupt the “pro-Israel” project is.

This is probably as good a time as any to implore everyone (especially Jews) to sign up for J Street’s email list. They did a great job of trumpeting the Hagee-Holocaust story and definitely helped raise its profile among Jews.