What I find amusing is how some believe that the death of civility is a new development. It started with Joe Wilson and was compounded by Serena Williams. Civility has been chained to a rock getting its liver picked out by buzzards since the golden children of the Greatest Generation were encouraged to let their freak flag fly, to use a horrid phrase.
[. . .]
I’ve always thought it’s imperative to stay engaged with your times until your time, singular, is up. Otherwise your sense of the world calcifies, and your worst impressions become your default opinion. The glories of the imagined past become a means of self-admiration, because you were not only lucky enough to be there but smart enough to get it. Kids today, they don’t. Perhaps growing up in the 70s kept me from idealizing my own past; the culture was all gimcrack glitz and second-hand hippie shite before the jams were well and truly kicked out by the anti-sloth movements of the late seventies and early 80s. They were musical and political; the former was all over the road and the latter emotional and naive, but I think they were the first attempts to wrest control of the social narrative from the early boomers, and as such were derided with the smooth weary conceits you’d expect from the generation that remade the world and expected the rest of us to line up and lay laurel wreaths at their sandaled feet.
Then the rise of internet culture saved the late boomers and Gen Xers from cultural obsolescence, because it was no longer necessarily to participate in any of the usual events to be up to the moment. On the internet anyone can be about 26 years old.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2009-09-15
September 15, 2009
QotD: Generational obsolescence
September 14, 2009
QotD: Depoliticizing the economy
FOR years now, many businesses and individuals in the United States have been relying on the power of government, rather than competition in the marketplace, to increase their wealth. This is politicization of the economy. It made the financial crisis much worse, and the trend is accelerating.
Well before the financial crisis erupted, policy makers treated homeowners as a protected political class and gave mortgage-backed securities privileged regulatory treatment. Furthermore, they allowed and encouraged high leverage and the expectation of bailouts for creditors, which had been practiced numerous times, including the precedent of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. Without these mistakes, the economy would not have been so invested in leverage and real estate and the financial crisis would have been much milder.
But we are now injecting politics ever more deeply into the American economy, whether it be in finance or in sectors like health care. Not only have we failed to learn from our mistakes, but also we’re repeating them on an ever-larger scale.
Tyler Cowan, “Where Politics Don’t Belong”, New York Times, 2009-09-12
September 12, 2009
QotD: The Muse of Booze
It’s reasonably well known that the arts of brewing and fermenting arose in nice time for the dawn of human civilization (there are ancient poems and mosaics and that sort of thing, dedicated to the celebration of the fact), but it’s at least as notorious that an open flask of alcohol is a mouth that can lead to hell as well as heaven. This being the case — and one day we shall work out the etymology that leads us to use the simple Italian word for a bottle, fiasco, in the way that we do — then it is as well to have a true Virgil to be our guide through the regions infernal as well as paradisiac.
The late Sir Kingsley Amis (who wrote these slender but thoughtful volumes before receiving his knighthood and who was also the expert to consult on things like the derivation of fiasco) was what the Irish call “your man” when it came to the subject of drink.
Christopher Hitchens, “The Muse of Booze”, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008
September 11, 2009
QotD: Eight years on
On the Hewitt show tonight I started talking about 9/11, and my mouth overran my head, because somewhere down there is a core of anger that hasn’t diminished a joule. This doesn’t mean anything, by itself — anger is an emotion that believes its justification is self-evident by its very existence. Passion is not an argument; rage is not a plan. But as the years go by I find myself as furious now as I was furious then — and no less unmanned by the sight of the planes and the plumes. Once a year I watch the thing I cobbled together from the footage I Tivo’d, and the day is bright and real and true again.
Or not. It’s all so far in the past, isn’t it? The ten-year-old you had to sit down and console and reassure is off to college. The President is retired — seems like he left two years ago. The wars grind on, but as far as the front pages are concerned, they’re like TV shows that lost their popularity but pull enough viewers to avoid cancellation. (The video store doesn’t even carry the DVD of the first two seasons anymore.) We’re used to the hole in the ground where the towers used to be, and if they announced they won’t rebuild, but will pave it over and use it for parking, people would shrug. We haven’t forgotten that the towers fell, but no one remembers what they planned to replace them with. The towers they planned looked empty in in the pictures — shiny, contorted, as if twisting away to avoid a blow.
Right after the towers fell, people who’d never liked them as architecture wanted them back just as they were. Get back up in the sky! But it hasn’t happened. Even if they build the replacement towers, there’s still a space in the sky where no one will ever stand again. We could stand there once. That we couldn’t stand there eight years ago was their fault. That we cannot stand there today is ours.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2009-09-11
September 9, 2009
QotD: The Democratic Party’s problem with criticism
Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year’s tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web — both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy — I never saw a single minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows.
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.
Camille Paglia, “Too late for Obama to turn it around?”, Salon, 2009-09-09
September 7, 2009
QotD: Environmentalism as religion-replacement
It never ceases to amaze me that people who say we can “save the planet” by wearing a jumper or growing our own veg are treated with the utmost seriousness, while those who argue that tackling climate change might require some larger-scale projects — such as geo-engineering the Earth — are treated as sci-fi freaks who should stick to reading Philip K Dick novels and stop polluting public debate with their insane ideas.
When it comes to climate change, the only acceptable debate, it seems, is how we can encourage ordinary people to do less, consume less and fly less. Bigger and more far-reaching ideas about how we might offset the impact of climate change are elbowed off the agenda.
This reveals something profound about environmentalism: it is not really a campaign to find solutions to the practical problem of climate change, but rather has become a semi-religious, almost medieval demonisation of human behaviour as dirty and destructive. This is really a priestly, ideological effort to lower people’s horizons and expectations, rather than a focused attempt to create a less polluted planet.
Brendan O’Neill, “Wearing thermals won’t save the planet: Why is the 10:10 campaign, with its pledges to turn off lights and grow more veg, taken more seriously than geo-engineering?”, The Guardian, 2009-09-02
September 6, 2009
QotD: Politics in the 21st century will not be about . . .
. . . privacy and intellectual property. Or rather, it’s going to be about privacy and intellectual property the way that the 20th century was about steam locomotives and iron foundries. These were vital 19th century technologies that provided a platform for 20th century industries to evolve on top of, but triple-condensing steam engines tell us nothing about semiconductor fab lines: they lie too far down the stack of incremental technologies. By the time we reach 2050, the microprocessor and software industries will be about as innovative and interesting as steam locomotives were in 1950; and the big questions about privacy and IP will have been answered (hint: ubiquitous polycentric surveillance, some sort of abstraction layer to encapsulate and insulate the public against the crisis of copyright, and a generation for whom the concept of “blackmail” makes less sense than bleeding with leeches as a cure for a surfeit of billious humours).
Thirdly, it’s not going to be about biotechnology any more than the 20th century was about powered heavier-than-air flight. Yes, flight was and is important, but not in the way the Italian modernists of the first three decades imagined, with their manifestos about “air-mindedness” and Douhet’s insane, apocalyptic visions of air power — that led to such atrocities as the British Empire’s policing with bombers (dropping poison gas!) in the 1920s, and strategic bombing raids against civilian populations during subsequent wars. For the most part, military aviation falls into two categories (better artillery, and better logistics); it doesn’t really change warfare, it just makes the whole barbaric affair more efficient (which is to say, more destructive). Biotechnology is going to be an efficiency enabler for a whole lot of things, and have immense second-order effects (just like cheap air travel), but it’s not going to fundamentally change us (unless some lunatic repeats the mousepox/interleukin-4 experiment with weaponized smallpox, in which case we are probably all dead).
Charles Stross, “Chrome Plated Jackboots”, Charlie’s Diary, 2009-09-04
September 3, 2009
QotD: “The red-headed step-child of the environmental movement”
As a practical matter, we’d probably get more environmental benefit (and save more wear-and-tear on our roads) from improving our freight rail system, like the abysmal mess in Chicago, than from high speed passenger rail that is very unlikely to carry more than a handful of Americans on any regular basis. . . But this does not attract one eightieth of the interest that you see in HS(P)R. As I understand it, there is finally some actual progress on Chicago, but it’s still bogged down in process, and it’s not clear to me whether it’s really enough. It seems clear to me that switching freight to rail whenever possible should be a policy priority, but it’s the red-headed stepchild of the environmental movement. We need freight cars that look more like pandas.
Megan McArdle, “Rail: It’s Not Just for Passengers”, Asymmetrical Information, 2009-09-03
September 2, 2009
QotD: Section 13 violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms
I have determined that Mr. Lemire contravened s. 13 of the Act in only one of the instances alleged by Mr. Warman, namely the AIDS Secrets article. However, I have also concluded that s. 13(1) in conjunction with ss. 54(1) and (1.1) are inconsistent with s. 2(b) of the Charter, which guarantees the freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression. The restriction imposed by these provisions is not a reasonable limit within the meaning of s. 1 of the Charter. Since a formal declaration of invalidity is not a remedy available to the Tribunal (see Cuddy Chicks Ltd. V. Ontario (Labour Relations Board), [1991] 2 S.C.R. 5), I will simply refuse to apply these provisions for the purposes of the complaint against Mr. Lemire and I will not issue any remedial order against him (see Nova Scotia (Workers’ Compensation Board) v. Martin, 2003 SCC 54 at paras. 26-7).
Athanasios D. Hadjis, Canadian Human Rights Tribunal decision in Warman vs. Lemire, 2009-09-02
August 31, 2009
QotD: Apple’s App Store Antics
Oh, Apple Computer. What sorts of antics are you into this month?
Since the iPhone was released two years ago, watching Apple keep its obsessive vise grip on the device while trying to promote third party application development has been one solid I-didn’t-know-you-could-do-that after another.
Battle the recording industry for liberal music licensing terms and build the largest online music store, all the while living out the RIAA’s wet dream by manually approving every bit of code that runs on a computing device? I didn’t know you could do that.
Being run by an ex-hippie CEO who used to spike his Oolong tea with LSD, and then carrying on Jerry Falwell’s legacy by protecting the children from iPhone programs that show a bit too much skin? I didn’t know you could do that.
Have a board member whose own company makes a device that directly competes with your bread and butter? Well, I knew you could do that in Silicon Valley, because we’re all such good friends.
That is, at least, until the old crusties from AT&T show up with their Geritol and single letter ticker symbol. Here in the Valley, we run more at a line-of-blow-off-a-stripper’s-ass speed, so when Apple rejected the Google Voice application for the iPhone, everyone suspected that AT&T strong-armed them into kicking the Google to the curb. In fact, the move was so out of character that the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) — the governmental agency responsible for keeping seven dirty words off the public airwaves — started asking questions. Well, Apple got all butthurt and went on the defensive, posting an open reply to the FCC on their website.
Ted Dziuba, “Feds break Apple’s code of App Store silence: Heads you’re in. Tails you’re out”, The Register, 2009-08-31
August 28, 2009
QotD: Trading one right for all the others
At some point we will come to see that the developed world’s massive expansion of personal sexual liberty has provided a useful cover for the shrivelling of almost every other kind. Free speech, property rights, economic liberty and the right to self-defence are under continuous assault by Big Government. But who cares when Big Government lets you shag anything that moves and every city in North America hosts a grand parade to celebrate your right to do so? It’s an oddly reductive notion of individual liberty. The noisier grow the novelties of our ever more banal individualism, the more the overall societal aesthetic seems drearily homogenized — like closing time in a karaoke bar with the last sad drunks bellowing off the prompter “I did it My Way!”
And in the end even the sex doesn’t do it. In the Netherlands, the most progressive nation in Europe, the land where whatever’s your bag is cool, where naked women beckon from storefront windows, a certain ennui is palpable. Last week, the ANP news agency released a poll showing that the Dutch now derive more pleasure from going to the bathroom than from sex. It wasn’t a close-run thing: eighty per cent identified a trip to the toilet as the activity “they enjoy the most” — or, as the South African newspaper the Witness put it, “The Bog’s Better Than Bonking.” To modify Eliot, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a flush.
Mark Steyn, “Do you notice anything shrivelling? We’ve never had more personal sexual liberty. And less freedom of almost every other kind”, Macleans, 2008-08-27
August 27, 2009
QotD: Taliban propaganda, as abetted by the mainstream media
Well, surprise, surprise: yesterday’s VBIED attack in the city of Kandahar killed at least 41, and wounded over 80 more people. All of them were civilians. Every single one.
And yet still, in the AP piece above, you read the phrase “Taliban spokesmen were not immediately available for comment…” What if these lying sacks of shit had been available for comment, folks? Would we have been reading their misinformation in black and white, juxtaposed credibly against BGen Tremblay’s words in a pathetic bow to “balanced reporting” — like somehow both should be weighed equally? You bet we would.
I’m tired of it. I’m sick and tired of our media giving them a soapbox from which to proclaim what is clearly, plainly, and obviously pure propaganda designed to attack our will as part of a well planned and executed information operations campaign. I’m tired of our journalists willfully ignoring the fact that they’re not just observing the war, they’re affecting it with their reporting. I’m bone-tired of them refusing to take steps to ensure their powerful voice isn’t used against the very system of government that allows them such unfettered speech in the first place.
Damian “Babbling” Brooks, “Real propaganda”, The Torch, 2009-08-26
August 25, 2009
QotD: The Race War that Isn’t
These are indeed “profoundly troubling” charges, which makes one wonder why they’re being bandied about with such flippant regard for historical plausibility.
The “jackboot” analogy, for starters, breaks down at the ankle: The footwear was favored by enforcers for totalitarian governments, not random Ron Paul supporters flashing Thomas Jefferson quotes outside political events. Weimar-era brownshirts were an organized Nazi paramilitary group perpetrating calculated violence against political opponents in a hyperinflationary, recently humiliated country that had never enjoyed liberal democracy; not a dozen-plus scattered gun nuts in one of the world’s oldest democracies peacably (if jarringly) exercising their Second Amendment rights by keeping their guns holstered (not “brandishing” them, as Rich and countless others have claimed). The last actual lynching in America, depending on who you ask, took place in 1981; the atrocious practice had been all but dead since the 1960s.
To fear the Weimarization of America, or the return of lynching, is to fundamentally lack confidence in the very real progress the United States has made over the past several decades. Conditions have improved exponentially even since the post-lynching 1980s, when I was coming of voting age. Back then there was still a politics to be had in bashing Martin Luther King, supporting apartheid South Africa, whipping up fears of black ultra-violence, and otherwise appealing openly to white resentment against blacks. It was gross, it was reckless, it led to terrible policies, and it was the reason I permanently swore off joining the Republican Party. It’s also largely an artifact of the past.
Matt Welch, “The Race War That Isn’t: Media anxieties over ‘lynch mobs’ and ‘brownshirts’ demonstrate a telling lack of faith in contemporary America”, Reason Online, 2009-08-25
Update, 27 August: Matt Welch posted a follow up to the article from which this QotD was abstracted. He writes: “The assertion that the Esquire piece was promoting the “racial-resentment” narrative was inaccurate, and I have corrected the article accordingly.”
August 24, 2009
August 22, 2009
Tweet of the day
Esther Dyson: russian pol Yavlinsky said: “Problem is not freedom of speech. Problem is freedom *after* speech.”
