Thursday, July 02, 2009

Some niche blogs

Laura McKenna (via Russell and a couple of other places): "It's all about niche blogs. If you have a particular expertise and unique perspective, they you can quickly gain a following. Everyone else is out of luck."

Some of these are better known than others, some more serious than others. All are fun in their respective ways.

Apostrophe Abuse

Bad Paintings of Barack Obama (the images come up randomly, so keep clicking if you get repeats)

Goths in Hot Weather

Old Jews Telling Jokes

Passive-aggressive (and just plain aggressive) notes

Spotted: D.C. Summer Interns

Strange Maps

Toronto's abused shopping carts

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Tuesday, June 30, 2009

A quick comment on Waxman-Markey and logic

Three potential beneficiaries of Waxman-Markey.

I have a thing for polar bears--so much so that I'd say this about them: My existence and my world are intangibly better places because of their existence and would be intangibly worse off were they to cease to exist in the wild. These seem like frivolous things to say, I recognize: indeed, someone could reasonably argue--indeed, some are making it, in effect--that while I gain nothing material because polar bears exist in the wild, I will lose materially if the U.S. and the world's other economic powers take steps that might--might--preserve their habitat and, thus, their continued existence. Fine, I say. I'm really okay with that--and I say that as a person who, just now, is not especially privileged in the strictest socioeconomic sense.

Pretty dumb, huh? But maybe not: This morning, Andrew Sullivan links to an article in Scientific American about behavioral economics that contains an observation which seems especially apropos to me as I mull over the debates regarding climate-change policy (up to and including whether or not anything can/should be done by governments to address it . . . assuming, of course, you think it's even a problem in the first place).

One group that does not value perceived losses differently than gains are individuals with autism, a disorder characterized by problems with social interaction. When tested, autistics often demonstrate strict logic when balancing gains and losses, but this seeming rationality may itself denote abnormal behavior. “Adhering to logical, rational principles of ideal economic choice may be biologically unnatural,” says Colin F. Camerer, a professor of behavioral economics at Caltech. (my emphasis)
So, it's normal, at a personal level and no matter our wealth or poverty, to make economic decisions that make no rational sense but which we argue, rightly or wrongly, make our lives better in some way(s) we can't measure in the usual ways. This is another way of getting at why Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal"'s utterly-correct, utterly-cold logic shocks us: babies are intangibly Good Things in and of themselves, never mind the various inconveniences they create for their parents; and to reduce them to commodities is, well, nuts.

All that said, choosing the wrong illogical benefit can also get us into collective trouble. Consider: for some time, we in the West have collectively decided that it's more fun all the way around to buy cheap things made elsewhere than it is to buy slightly more expensive things made here. One could claim that the decision to move manufacturing to poorer countries was driven by purely logical considerations--the reduction of costs--to which I'd say, Oh really? Fat profits for management and cheap stuff for consumers aren't pleasure-inducing? Ah, well. The auto-eroticism of consumerism, fueled by cheap credit and wealth created through speculation rather than genuine investment, has lost its magic: Such an economy was bound, sooner or later, to collapse on itself and, well, here we are--and we have no partner to blame for feeling less than satisfied.

So long as irrationality is going to figure into our economic decision-making anyway, I'd like to suggest that we might all be better off if we collectively acted more out of love of polar bears--or, to pick some slightly less-frivolous examples, the people of, say, Bangladesh or much of sub-Saharan Africa or various island-nations or, if those people are too far away, New Orleans.

If you've read this blog for a while, you've probably figured out without my telling you that I'm in favor of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the complex cap-and-trade, reduction-in-carbon-based energy, investment-in-alternate-energy legislation that just passed the House of Representatives and faces an admittedly uncertain future in the Senate. My reasons for supporting it, though, include one that may surprise many of you, given that a) it's not usually one that comes up in the debates about the bill and b) that its source is John McCain.

I'll talk about (b) first because it will lead inexorably to (a). At some point during last year's campaign (the primaries, I believe), during a debate when the question was about climate change legislation, McCain said something to the effect that even if reducing carbon emissions does little or no good in affecting what may after all be a naturally-occurring phenomenon, there are still-indisputable goods to be obtained by passing such legislation: a cleaner, healthier environment and greater self-sufficiency (political as well as economic) due to reduced dependency on foreign oil. I agreed with very little McCain offered up as reasons to vote for him, but on these points, at least, he was absolutely right (and would be now, if he still felt it expedient to make them). However, it's equally indisputable that one reason these points don't get raised is that, as desirable as these things are, you can't quantify them so as to include them in any of the various cost-benefit analyses being offered up in support of or against Waxman-Markey. Thus, they become inadmissible as evidence.

Just once, I wish someone would come along and say, When clean-water and clean-air legislation were enacted in the '70s, businesses pitched fits about their increased costs and having to pass those costs on to consumers. Well, sure: and as a result we pay more because businesses were forced to change behavior they were very likely not to have changed out of the goodness of their hearts (because there was a time when it cost literally nothing to dump waste as people saw fit, air and soil and water quality be damned--and it showed, I well remember those days). But is anyone opposed to Waxman-Markey, or anyone opposed to "excessive government regulation," seriously going to argue that that our quality of life would be better if not for the creation of the EPA, given the clear road we'd been heading down? The resounding No we'd hear, true, doesn't fit into a strict cost-benefit analysis, but the fact that it shows people prefer--and benefit from--cleaner air and water surely needs to figure into this debate. Or has that become such a given (the '60s and '70s becoming ever more distant memories for many of us) that it strangely seems negligible as a consideration?

I recognize that the costs of this legislation, by some reckonings, are potentially enormous**--but I'd argue that the fact that we can't place a monetary value on all its benefits is not, in and of itself, a valid reason for opposing it. But, so long as we want to stick to the quantifiable, some of these analyses implicitly assume that doing nothing to reduce carbon emissions costs us nothing and, therefore, is preferable to doing something. But many times, as many people who have delayed and delayed a repair can attest, there often are costs, many times unforeseen and often much more expensive than the initial fix would have been.

Still: for me, the most helpful way to think about this question is not in terms of costs but in terms of the simple question, What kind of planet do we want to live on? As I answer that for myself, I go back to John McCain's argument: a cleaner planet and a more economically- and politically-independent United States are inarguable long-term goods in and of themselves--and not just for us here in this country. And maybe, just maybe, if enough nations around the world answer in the same way, we might get to have polar bears around for longer than might otherwise be the case.


__________

**One critique of these estimated costs is that they assume technologies and economies won't be developed or adapt in ways that mitigate these costs; yet, a big part of Waxman-Markey is investment in precisely such things.

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Thursday, June 25, 2009

R.I.P.

[Note: This is part of a draft of a post from last year, the 25th anniversary of the release of Thriller. It never got finished, and I never came back to it. Edited somewhat to make it more apropos for today.]

Here is a moment filled with considerable pathos for me, Michael Jackson's performance of "Billie Jean" at Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever. Remember this, those of you Of A Certain Age?



It's a risky thing to convey accurately in this space the effect that seeing this performance had on me in the spring of 1983--"risky" because the language I'd have to use would seem either absurdly hyperbolic or downright weird. So I'll settle for something the guitarist Johnny Lang said in an interview: he said that seeing this performance was the most memorable performance he'd ever seen, and that when his father told him, "He's not really singing, you know," Lang replied, "I don't care."

That about sums it up for me, too. Before that moment, I frankly didn't like Michael Jackson very much--he had basically broken up with his brothers to pursue a solo career and so what the hell was wrong with him, wanting to sing one of the "new songs" right after his Jackson 5 medley with his brothers; after he had finished, I was asking what the hell was wrong with me for thinking that. The New York Times said, "There's Michael Jackson, and there's everyone else," and I just nodded, dumbfounded.

There are some memories you don't want tainted by subsequent events: you want them clear and pure and unfiltered and undimmed. For me, the year of Thriller's release is a memory like that. In 1983, I don't know how deep the cave would have had to have been for someone not to have heard or seen something about this album; yet for me, I felt as though I'd been made privy to some great secret.

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Friday, June 19, 2009

Thinking about Tehran

As I write this, it is now Saturday in Tehran, not yet dawn. Mousavi's and the other opposition candidates' supporters will be rallying in a few hours in direct defiance of the Ayatollah's orders in his sermon today. Here are a couple of e-mails received by the National Iranian-American Council (via Huffington Post). You read these, and no matter how legitimate your worries, it's hard for them not to seem small by comparison to what these people have already faced this week and will face in a few hours.

"I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to get killed. I'm listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow! There are a few great movie scenes that I also have to see. I should drop by the library, too. It's worth to read the poems of Forough and Shamloo again. All family pictures have to be reviewed, too. I have to call my friends as well to say goodbye. All I have are two bookshelves which I told my family who should receive them. I'm two units away from getting my bachelors degree but who cares about that. My mind is very chaotic. I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so they know we were not just emotional and under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender to despotism. This note is dedicated to tomorrow's children..."

Another one below the fold, from a 30-year-old female architect [UPDATE: and a truly remarkable YouTube (with a translation). These people speak in poetry]:

The events of the last couple of days have been so moving that I haven't be able to digest it all yet. Life was already fast and hectic enough in Tehran where we wouldn't have time to get to everything, now after 3 PM everything comes to a halt and based on a collective agreement, we all leave our houses or daily routines and head towards downtown without any transportation! Believe me that every day we leave the house, we are not sure if we will make it back. Some of us like me and my family and our close friends who are among the crowd every day worry even more and each night after the rally we keep calling each other to make sure everyone is back home safe and sound. During the rallies we see such variety of bitter and sweet incidents that it gives us material to think about for months to come. We come across small kids, men and women over 75 years old, people from all walks of life.


Today I saw a blind young man accompanied by his father, many people with broken limbs, blued eyes, and many who carry the pictures of those killed in the events which breaks your heart.

Many people distribute drinks and refreshments to protestors, some wave hands from the windows of their houses showing their green ribbons, and all of this, in an unbelievable moving silence.

Remember when in middle school as a composition homework, we had to write about "Imagine you could see the seed of people's hearts." Today these green ribbons have become those seeds. When you see them you get energized, and feel that you are all one. Cheating these people is worse than any crime and it is such a loss to waste all this hope and energy. I hope we make something good out of it.

I have to add that what you and other Iranians outside of Iran are doing to support us is really warming our hearts. We are sure what you are doing is very effective. When they ask all foreign reporters to leave the country and when all of the communication channels are disconnected, it is your voice that takes our voice to the outside world.

Many criticize us and wonder what does Mr. Mousavi have that is so special? They argue that after all he is one of the many in that corrupt system of the Islamic Republic and will never act against it. My argument is that this is not about Mousavi, but about people realizing that they are not followers like a herd of sheep that goes anywhere it is summoned to go. They will know that the individual will does matter and that their actions can be effective and can speak louder than any specific person; this to me is the most important aspect of these events. Now either Mousavi or anyone else who will end up in power, they will have the understanding of what people want and what they are capable of, and how they can voice their requests. This is the significant and important step and now that Mousavi has chosen to go ahead, we will support him.

I had so much to tell! It is so good talk to each other.


And the YouTube (the translation is below):



Tomorrow is Saturday. Tomorrow is (inaudible).


Tonight, the cries of Allah-o Akbar are heard louder and louder than the nights before.

Where is this place? Where is this place where every door is closed? Where is this place where people are simply calling God? Where is this place where the sound of Allah-o Akbar gets louder and louder?

I wait every night to see if the sounds will get louder and whether the number increases. It shakes me. I wonder if God is shaken.

Where is this place that where so many innocent people are entrapped? Where is this place where no one comes to our aid? Where is this place that only with our silence we are sending our voices to the world? Where is this place that the young shed blood and then people go and pray -- standing on that same blood and pray. Where is this place where the citizens are called vagrants?

Where is this place? You want me to tell you? This place is Iran. The homeland of you and me.
This place is Iran.

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Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Happy Bloomsday

James Joyce's sketch of Ulysses' hero, Leopold Bloom. The line in Greek is the opening line of The Odyssey: "Tell me Muse, of the man of many devices, who over many ways…” Image found here.

It is June 16th again. If there's a literary equivalent of solar calendars, surely one of the days by which it would be oriented would be this day. Ulysses is one of those books which, even if you haven't read it, you have inescapably read books which owe their forms and strategies to it. (And just for the record, I'm saying that like it's a good thing.)

By way of celebrating the day, here's Kate Bush's video for the title track of her 1989 album, The Sensual World. It's not quite 1904 Dublin, but listen closely and you'll hear some very familiar language:



Also, by (the Mrs.') request, this blast from the past.

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Sunday, June 14, 2009

"The Revolution will be Twittered"

( . . . and YouTubed and blogged . . . )

On occasion, this blog is visited by Iranians. More precisely, they visit this post almost to the exclusion of any other post. I have often wondered what it is in this post that draws them. It contains no special insight into Van Gogh or into modernist art. There are other posts here at good old Blog Meridian that are better than this one that my Iranian visitors seem to gravitate toward.

In rereading that post for this one, though, I noticed that its comment section has a little musing on the fact that, at their best, blogs have now become the equivalent of Enlightenment-era coffee shops, as sites for the exchanging of ideas. It was in rereading them that I was reminded of what I'd read yesterday and last night: how most of the "facts on the ground" coverage of yesterday's events in Iran--not just Tehran--was coming not from established media but from people in Iran calling relatives via satellite phone, blogging, sending in videos via YouTube, and--crucially--Twittering. And that last has been used not just to communicate information abroad when the government had shut down most other telecommunications, but to organize it:



(Basij, incidentally, literally translates as "mobilization of the oppressed;" it is "the largest student union in Iran and a volunteer-based Iranian paramilitary force founded by the order of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on November 1979. The Basij are subordinate to, and receive their orders from, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.")

Not even a week ago, I'd asked some colleagues rhetorically, "What of any importance can you convey in 140 characters?" This video is a pretty solid rebuke that I, someone who makes his living by persuading others that language matters, needed to be administered.

The websites of the U.S. cable news networks have been lousy, frankly, in their coverage of post-election events. [UPDATE: To get a sense of just how bad the cable channels were last night, have a look at this quick survey. I distinctly recall, during the first Gulf War, that CNN quickly became the go-to source for television coverage and proved (to me, at least) 24-hour news's potential. But last night? A re-run of a Larry King interview with the people who bring us American Chopper??] I've been mightily impressed by Andrew Sullivan's rounding up of information from an extraordinary range of sources both inside Iran and abroad; other very informative places have been these constantly-updated posts at the New York Times' news blog, The Lede and The Huffington Post. [UPDATE: I forgot to include this one earlier: For even more-immediate news/information/rumors directly from Iran, see this page of the English-language tehranbureau.com.]

Sullivan sees these events' larger implications for other governments as this technology spreads:

That a new information technology could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times. It reveals in Iran what the Obama campaign revealed in the United States. You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.
Yup.

The future of political organizing is here and now. What is happening right now may not lead immediately to real change in Iran--these protests may even be violently crushed--but people there will not soon forget this.

UPDATE: Video of the results of the Twitter message in Sullivan's post above. They are shouting, "ALAHO AKBAR"--"God is great.":



Like calls to prayer from the minarets. But not. And from rooftop upon rooftop upon rooftop.

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Wednesday, June 10, 2009

"I could read a hundred of them--I mean, from today!"

I could comment on the specifics of today's shooting at the National Holocaust Museum or even on the background of the accused shooter.

Instead, I'll let Shepard Smith read "a representative e-mail":



This was an important and needed thing he did today. More like it needs to be done.

UPDATE: Putting the moron in "oxymoron": Via hilzoy, here's a snippet from this Washington Post article about the shooter:

[Self-described white-supremacist John] De Nugent called von Brunn a genius but described the shooting as the act of "a loner and a hothead."

"The responsible white separatist community condemns this," he said. "It makes us look bad."

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Sunday, June 07, 2009

Front Porch Cycle Chic: A bicycle on every autarchist's front porch

The Roberts and Gregory families, Kentucky, early 20th century. Click on image to enlarge. Image found here.

What follows isn't exactly a continuation of yesterday's post. It's more like a picking up of another thread and unraveling a perfectly good idea from Front Porch Republic so as to hastily (and, no doubt, clumsily) re-weave it here in combination with other recent concerns of mine as a garment to hang in cycling's metaphysical closet. I'm not sure, incidentally, whether the following, famous injunction from Thoreau's Walden--"I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes"--implicitly condones or condemns that re-weaving. But if the latter, I take some presumptuous hope from George Bernard Shaw's statement, "All great truths begin as blasphemies."

Enough preambling. On with the ambling.

One of the central causes of what the writers of Front Porch Republic contend is our current cultural and political predicament is a perversion of our understanding of property and the resulting policies and politics arising from that perversion. This matter gets addressed directly in James Matthew Wilson's "The Need for Autarchy": Following Hannah Arendt, Wilson argues that that perversion is the result of "the specious conflation of the idea of private property (which Aquinas was right in defending as necessary to a good society) with that nefarious invention of modern usury, unlimited wealth accumulation." Here's Arendt, as quoted by Wilson:

Private property is not a euphemism for anything I happen to acquire, but a reference to the place in the world that is necessarily mine if I am not to be reduced to dependence on another. The way to secure such property is not usually to expand it and widen its frontiers (though that may sometimes be the case), but to fortify it, to fill it with the productive means necessary to maintain it and for it to maintain me. That kind of security and self-sufficiency-in a word, autonomy and autarchy-requires stewardship and conservation rather than expansion and avarice. Such virtues serve the purpose of having the property remain my property with a permanence approximating to the solidity of its literal foundations. [. . . ] [W]e reply to the capitalist that he does not defend private property but, instead, rationalizes endless wealth accumulation, and in so doing he does not defend the one, best hope for the wide distribution of private property. He advocates, rather, the source of its usurpation and dissolution.
Wilson then sums up Arendt's argument: Private property, once freed of market capitalism's co-opting of it, "is a public good but also provides for the individual household the basis for what is itself a great good, the foundation of a family’s liberty: autarchy [which literally translates from the Greek as "self-sufficiency" and thus is not to be confused with "autocracy"]. And the autarchy of the family household, I contend, is the analogous foundation, the microcosmic model, for still another public good: the sorely needed autarchic independence of our country." (Wilson's italics)

So: what does all this have to do with cycling in particular and, more broadly, issues of livability?

The rest is here.

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Saturday, June 06, 2009

Front Porch Cycle Chic: The revolt against lifestyle

Two people converse next to a high-wheel bicycle at the fence of the first home of Alfred W. Bitting, 259 North Emporia Avenue, Wichita, c. 1882. Unknown photographer. Click image to enlarge. Repository: Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum. Image found here.

I don't know whether the bicycle in the picture belonged to the Bitting family or to a visitor. But it doesn't matter. What matters for purposes of this (very long) piece is what that bicycle suggests to me and, indeed, what cycling has come to embody for me: an easy, practical means for its owner to maintain a connection with others who don't live within its owner's immediate vicinity.

Something I'd never before imagined myself seeing was a philosophical kinship of any sort between Copenhagen Cycle Chic and Front Porch Republic. But that was before this morning. As strange a confluence as this is, though, it matters to you--or should--if you share my interest in trying to shift the conceptual frame cycling gets placed in by Wichitans--even by most cyclists--known by the insidious term "lifestyle." Until that shift occurs, we'll continue to see really, really nice bike paths built that don't really go to places where people live, work and shop and, at the same time, a continued lack of on-street infrastructure for cyclists that would facilitate their getting to places where they do live, work and shop.

(Much) more here.

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Friday, June 05, 2009

"The game that's sweeping the nation!"

Michael Pollan or Michel Foucault?

Admit it: If you've found your way to this blog, you already want to play. You just don't know it yet.

(Hat-tip: Matthew Yglesias)

And: Old Jews Telling Jokes. Exactly what it purports to be. Some NSFW.

I promise that more substantive posting is coming. Sometime.

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Our future leaders--and tax dollars--at work

Spotted: DC Summer Interns.

One of the more amusing ones I've read there:

An intern had been with the office for a few weeks, and the Legislative Director wanted to give her a substantial assignment to work on:

LD: What issues are you interested in?

Intern: [thinks for a moment] Yes.

LD: Um, no, I mean, what legislative issues do you find interesting? Do you like health care?

Intern: Yes.... I mean.... No. Because health care deals with sick people, and sick people make me sad.

[and a comment]

I'm guessing this intern never got her substantial assignment...

Dumb people make me sad, so I guess I'd better not work on education issues.

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Flannery O'Conner: Already dangerous at age 9

A brief passage from Brad Gooch's new biography, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor:

A cartoon O’Connor drew when she was nine years old shows a child walking with her father and mother. In a balloon coming from the mother’s mouth are the words: “Hold your head up, Mary Flannery, and you are just as bad, Ed.” To which the girl, dragging along, snidely replies, “I was readin where someone died of holding up their head.”
This appears over in Front Porch Republic in Jason Peters' review of the book. Those of you interested in O'Connor should read Peters' review--in particular, the distinctions he makes between "place" and "region" (something I recall Eudora Welty saying is important to her as well) and the connection between that idea and her spirituality. Good, meaty stuff.

While I'm at it, I'd also like to plug Front Porch Republic generally, as I know I've done before. In its exploration of "Place. Limits. Liberty" it is deeply conservative, but most definitively not in the currently-prominent version of conservatism. As you'll see in my friend Russell's and my own comments on the post I linked to, it's possible for moderates and liberals to visit FPR and feel strong resonances with its writers' emphases on and celebrations of the Local, even as they might disagree on the means by which to best achieve those commonly-valued ends. In these days of both liberal and conservative blogs' and talk radio's and cable news' awful dumbing-down of political discourse, FPR is a welcome tonic for the intellectual and political soul, no matter one's own personal leanings.

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