People often ask why there isn't more coverage of Syria, Ivory Coast or Yemen. One answer is something that non-journalists sometimes don't appreciate -- the difficulty of getting visas. Yemen and Syria are completely blocking Americans. Only hope to get an Ivory Coast visa is to go to Senegal and beg its embassy there. Sad truth is we systematically undercover what we don't get access to.
A reader responds:
Stating this outright, more frequently, would count as 'more coverage' in my book.
I agree. Another good point from another commenter:
And thus the world media rewards dictatorships by over representing Israel in their stories instead of trying harder and covering dangerous places, or simply dictators wishing to hide their genocides.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)'s vice president says:
"Language matters. Calling an animal 'it' denies them something . . . They are beloved by God. They glorify God."
Well, if you're going to make a proposal, it should be specific and practicable. That's a truism: a proposal is something that can actually be put into practice. Even if everyone agreed that "it" is not ideal, it's far from clear what could replace "it":
David Berger, the dean of Yeshiva University’s Bernard Revel graduate school of Jewish studies, said making the shift in English PETA is requesting would be difficult given the nature of ancient Hebrew.
“In Hebrew all nouns are gender-specific. So the noun for chair is masculine and the noun for earth is feminine. There’s simply no such thing as a neutral noun," Berger told CNN. “It’s unusual to have a noun that would indicate the sex of the animal.”
“In Proverbs it says, 'Look at the ant oh lazy person. See its ways,' " Berger said, quoting the English transition from the book of Proverbs. "In Hebrew it’s 'see her ways.' That's because the word for ant in Hebrew happens to be female. It’s not intended to exclude male ants as far as I know. It’s just an accident the Hebrew word happens to be feminine.”
He said that verse and many others are not intended to single out one sex or the other of the animals.
"It’s a little bit misleading given the fact in English the gender of the pronoun means something. It refers to the masculinity of the person or the animal that’s being referred to. In Hebrew in most cases its just sort of an accident of the masculine or feminine of the pronoun to which it referred," Berger said.
David Lyle Jeffrey, a distinguished professor of literature and the humanities at Baylor University, teaches about ancient texts and the Bible's relationship to literature and the arts.
“I agree with their contention that God cares for all of creation," Jeffrey said. "It is true that we have a responsibility to reflect that affection.
"In gender-inclusive Bible translation the generic terms for humankind, let's say, are then replaced with an emphasis on he or she. Instead of the generic he, you say he and she. I don’t quite see how that would work with animals," Jeffery said.
"Do we need to know the gender of the lion Samson slew? What would it give us there?" he said. "You could try to specify that, but you would be doing so entirely inventively if you did. It's not in the original language. ... Nothing is made of it in the story." . . .
"When you get to the point when you say, 'Don’t say it, say he or she' when the text doesn’t, you’re both screwing up the text and missing the main point you addressed."
Aside from all that, I have another problem with PETA's campaign. I agree with the principle behind what PETA is saying, and I support the essential mission of PETA itself. But I often find the way they implement their mission to be highly unfortunate, and I don't see why they thought this was a good move.
Vegetarians, vegans, and animal-rights activists are already perceived as left-wing radicals who are out of sync with mainstream American culture. So, what does PETA choose as a target? The Bible! The folks at PETA might be vegetarians, but they have a cannibalistic tendency to feed off of the weaknesses of their own kind.
In Libya, many people (we don’t yet know how many) were arrested, forcibly disappeared and possibly executed as the Qaddafi government consolidated its control over Tripoli and rebel-held enclaves, like Zawiyah, in the country’s west. But the Obama administration and its international allies did act soon enough to prevent the much larger-scale atrocities that would likely have followed Qaddafi’s reconquest of eastern Libya and especially the city of Benghazi. Indeed, though this intervention must have felt painfully slow to the people of Benghazi as Qaddafi’s army bore down upon them, it was, by any objective standard, the most rapid multinational military response to an impending human rights crisis in history, with broader international support than any of the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s.
But precisely because the international community acted in time—before Qaddafi retook Benghazi—we never saw what might have happened had they not acted. Today in eastern Libya, there are no columns of refugees marching home to reclaim their lives; no mass graves testifying to the gravity of the crisis; no moment that symbolizes a passing from horror to hope. The sacking of Benghazi was the proverbial dog that didn’t bark. And so, just days into the military operation, commentators have moved on to a new set of questions—some serious (Is the mission to protect civilians or to remove Qaddafi? Will NATO be stuck patrolling a divided country?), and some trivial (Should Obama have gone to Brazil when the bombing started? Did the interventionist “girls” in his administration out-argue the cautious boys?)
But before the debate moves on, as it must, we should acknowledge what could be happening in eastern Libya right now had Qaddafi’s forces continued their march. The dozens of burned out tanks, rocket launchers, and missiles bombed at the eleventh hour on the road to Benghazi would have devastated the rebel stronghold if Qaddafi’s forces had been able to unleash them indiscriminately, as they did in other, smaller rebel-held towns, like Zawiyah, Misrata, and Adjabiya. Qaddafi’s long track-record of arresting, torturing, disappearing, and killing his political opponents to maintain control suggests that had he recaptured the east, a similar fate would have awaited those who supported the opposition there. Over a hundred thousand Libyans already fled to Egypt fearing Qaddafi’s assault; hundreds of thousands more could have followed if the east had fallen. The remaining population, and those living in refugee camps abroad, would have felt betrayed by the West, which groups like Al Qaeda would undoubtedly have tried to exploit. Finally, Qaddafi’s victory—alongside Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s fall—would have signaled to other authoritarian governments from Syria to Saudi Arabia to China that if you negotiate with protesters you lose, but if you kill them you win.
And the United States would still have been embroiled in Libya—enforcing sanctions, evacuating opposition supporters, assisting refugees, dealing with an unpredictable and angry Qaddafi. But it would have been embroiled in a tragedy rather than a situation that now has a chance to end well.
For the next year every Republican hopeful is going to be attacking the other hopefuls looking for the tiniest edge. Therefore, all of these guys are probably going to continue to fall in popularity vis a vis Obama.
Robert Wright, who strongly opposed President Bush's invasion of Iraq, starts out by giving a hedged defense of President Obama's invasion of Libya (he sees it as "dicey" but justified and likely to succeed soon). However, he becomes disturbed once my mom, Ann Althouse, explains how constitutionally suspect Obama's actions have been. That's when he makes the statement I've put in the heading of this post:
The constitutional part of their discussion starts at 11:45.
(The Libyan city Wright at first can't remember the name of is Benghazi.)
Geraldine Ferraro — who was a prosecutor in Queens, then a House Representative, then a United Nations Ambassador, yet will go down in history for her unsuccessful run as the first woman on a major-party presidential ticket — died today at 75.
Perhaps Ferraro's strongest moment was in the 1984 vice-presidential debate between Ferraro and then-Vice President (future-President) George H.W. Bush, when she rebuked Bush for patronizingly purporting to "teach" or "help" her with foreign policy (Ferraro's and Bush's verb choices, respectively):
Here's video of the full debate. To see that exchange in context, watch Ferraro's initial comments on foreign policy starting at 46:30, Bush's rebuttal at 49:00, and Ferraro's response from about 50:00 to 51:00. (Transcript.)
The New York Times obituary (the second link above) notes that this was the first time "a major candidate for national office talked about abortion with the phrase 'If I were pregnant.'" (You can see this in the video, the first time she speaks.) The Times says:
The abortion issue, magnified because she was Roman Catholic and a woman, plagued her campaign. Though she opposed the procedure personally, she said, others had the right to choose for themselves. Abortion opponents hounded her at almost every stop with an intensity seldom experienced by male politicians.
More from the Times:
Everywhere people were adjusting — or manifestly not adjusting — to a woman on a national ticket. Mississippi’s agriculture secretary called Ms. Ferraro “young lady” and asked if she could bake blueberry muffins. When a Roman Catholic bishop gave a news conference in Pennsylvania, he repeatedly referred to the Republican vice-presidential nominee as “Mr. Bush” and to the Democratic one as “Geraldine.” . . .
“I am the first to admit that were I not a woman, I would not have been the vice-presidential nominee,” she wrote. But she insisted that her presence on the ticket had translated into votes that the ticket might otherwise have not received.
In any event, she said, the political realities of 1984 had made it all but impossible for the Democrats to win, no matter the candidates or their gender. “Throwing Ronald Reagan out of office at the height of his popularity, with inflation and interest rates down, the economy moving and the country at peace, would have required God on the ticket,” Ms. Ferraro wrote, “and She was not available!”
Don't just know your friend's or partner's qualities — "casual acquaintances" can do that. What requires being closer to them, and what will improve the friendship or relationship, is if you know what they find annoying. (via)
1. "In decisions that have split the court in any direction, Justices [Antonin] Scalia and [Clarence] Thomas have voted on opposite sides more often than they voted together."
2. "Employees suing companies for civil rights violations have won all three cases decided so far, two of them by votes of 8-0."
3. "By wide margins, the court has rejected arguments put forward by corporate defendants in several cases."
The sample size here is tiny:
What accounts for the topsy-turvy world of the Supreme Court’s 2010-2011 term?
One answer might be that the deviation from expected behavior is just an illusion, based on a small number of decisions that might not prove representative of the term as a whole. The court has decided 25 cases so far . . . .
Still, when the court decides so few cases — 73 last year — 25 decisions count for something.
Greenhouse admits:
At the very least, this preliminary snapshot reminds those of us (and I include myself) who think they have taken the court’s measure that assumptions are a poor substitute for close observation.
[D]emand for quinoa (pronounced KEE-no-ah) is soaring in rich countries, as American and European consumers discover the “lost crop” of the Incas. The surge has helped raise farmers’ incomes here in one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries. But there has been a notable trade-off: Fewer Bolivians can now afford it, hastening their embrace of cheaper, processed foods and raising fears of malnutrition in a country that has long struggled with it. . . .
While malnutrition on a national level has fallen over the past few years thanks to aggressive social welfare programs, . . . studies showed that chronic malnutrition in children had climbed in quinoa-growing areas . . . in recent years. . . .
“I adore quinoa, but I can’t afford it anymore,” said Micaela Huanca, 50, a street vendor in El Alto, a city of slums above the capital, La Paz. “I look at it in the markets and walk away.” . . .
At supermarkets here, a 1,000-gram bag of quinoa, just over two pounds, costs the equivalent of $4.85, compared with $1.20 for a bag of noodles the same weight and $1 for a bag of white rice. . . .
This is disturbing. A few things, though:
1. Bolivians are already working on solutions:
President [Evo] Morales said this month that he planned to make more than $10 million in loans available to organic quinoa producers, and health officials are incorporating the plant into a packet of foods supplied to thousands of pregnant and nursing women each month.
2. The Times is clearly fascinated by talking about how rich countries' voracious (albeit healthy) appetite is hurting Bolivians. This skews the reporting. Oh, the Times does mention that we're also enriching Bolivians farmers by buying so much quinoa. But this point just gets a sentence or two; it isn't amplified with statistics or anecdotes or color photographs. The observation that rich countries are helping a poor country by buying its exports doesn't make for a fascinating New York Times article.
3. Buried 15 paragraphs into the piece, we discover that the reporters aren't just talking about Bolivians choosing to use white rice or noodles instead of quinoa when they cook dinner. The article says that "changing food preferences" might "play a role." How so? Well, a government official explains:
"[I]f you give the kids toasted quinoa flour, they don’t want it; they want white bread . . . . If you give them boiled water, sugar and quinoa flour mixed into a drink, they prefer Coca-Cola."
So, kids prefer drinking Coke to drinking quinoa! I'm not sure anything would have stopped that from happening in the modern world.
In a cruel irony, the law was "supposed to protect the fetus from pain." Do you think the pro-life movement is going to be disturbed by the perverse consequences of its laws and use this experience to more intelligently tailor its legislation in the future? Somehow, I doubt it.
"The outcome of my pregnancy, that choice was made by God. I feel like how to handle the end of my pregnancy, that choice should have been mine, and it wasn't because of a law."
Conservatives make powerful arguments about how the government should avoid over-regulating people's behavior. Thomas Sowell, for instance, has often argued that individuals, who are intimately familiar with the mundane details of their situations, are more capable of figuring out the best course of action than remote lawmakers or intellectuals, who know little about the pros and cons that these decisions will actually entail but who want to move the pieces of society around like a puzzle to form a vision they find pleasant. I wish more conservatives would think more clearly about how their own argument applies to abortion.
Today's New York Times Magazine has a piece about Dana Adam Shapiro, who, when he was in his mid-30s, interviewed all his friends he knew who had gotten divorced. He then asked each of them for referrals to other divorced couples. Almost everyone was happy to talk to him about their divorce. He's now making a movie (not a documentary) called Monogamy based on the interviews.
The article sums up three of the couples Shapiro interviewed: "The Young Wife," "The Two-Time Ex," and "The Adultress."
So, what lessons do we learn from the article? It turns out that marriages fail due to adultery, alcoholism, sex starting to feel like a chore, people taking less care of themselves, and the realization that what they had in common from the beginning was too superficial to be a strong basis for a lifelong commitment. Stop the presses!
It's disappointing if those are the most interesting insights from 50 interviews with "people of all ages, all across the United States" about their divorces. There isn't one unexpected observation in the whole piece.
If you like the "Here are a few paragraphs about a couple and their problems" format, I recommend, instead, a book called One to One by Theodore Isaac Rubin, M.D. Here's one of my favorite vignettes from the book (102-104):
Lionel and Lisa
This couple was seen by their friends as "glittering, beautiful, fun-loving." . . . When asked how things were with them, their inevitable answer was "Great!" . . .
They gave large cocktail parties every three or four months and ate out frequently with friends, of whom they had many. In actuality, few of their "friends" knew very much about them except that they were good-looking, fun, and obviously successful. . . . [T]hey took pains to avoid any kind of "heavy talk," on the few occasions when they ate out alone. . . .
The fact is, there was very little openness, tenderness, trust or intimacy, caring or kindness between them, or between them and anyone else. . . . This is an example of two highly narcissistic, shallow people who affected a pose for the outside world but who had very little tolerance for each other. . . .
They . . . used history between them only to seek further evidence for recrimination. "Do you remember," said Lisa to Lionel, "the time two years ago when you forgot my birthday?" Interestingly, their sexual lives were satisfactory in terms of arousal and response, but neither Lionel nor Lisa was aware of any love or tenderness during sex. . . . [I]n view of their great similarity, and their high degree of narcissism and alienation, they got through the barrier of antagonism sexually by seeing each other as mirror images of themselves. . . . [T]hey engaged in masturbatory or solitary sex, even though it took place together. . . .
They came to see me, not to get help, but to use me to support them in their onslaught on each other and to win me over to believing that each was right in hating the other. . . . I do not know whether they parted company or continued on an antagonistic basis. Antagonism can keep people together in a state of mutual pseudo-aliveness for a lifetime.
For now, this looks like a victory for [Governor Scott] Walker. In the very long run, if it allows government to work more efficiently without, say, elaborate rules that often require the retention of the least productive workers (who, even if threatened with layoffs, then get to “bump” lower-seniority employees, who then bump other employees) the winner will be the party that most desperately wants the government to work. That’s the Democrats. . . . I think. … At least in theory. …
1. I wonder if those who claim to believe in "moral relativism" are actually expressing their opposition to certain varieties of moral absolutism, to which they have strong moral objections.
2. Are there names for the fallacies that are the opposite of "straw man" and "ad hominem"? These fallacies would be, respectively, describing your own position to sound more attractive than it really is, and appealing to the good character of someone who makes an argument you agree with.
3. Advertisements often show couples (who are always presumably married), but there must be a set of rules somewhere about what kinds of couples can be shown. You'll often see a couple made up of two white people or two black people, but you almost never see a clearly interracial couple in ads. I don't think you ever see a same-sex couple unless the ad is somehow about gay people. I can't remember ever seeing an ad with a couple in which the woman is brunette and the man is blond. And I doubt I've ever seen an ad where only one person in the couple is overweight. We want to see diversity, but we want it to be predictably homogenized diversity.
Among men, median wages have "declined by 28 percent, or almost $13,000 (in constant dollars)" since 1969. (And no, 1969 was not cherry-picked as their peak; they peaked in 1973.)
If you go to that post and look at the chart, you can see how much difference it makes whether we include all men, or just men who are working full time. Not surprisingly, the latter measure (represented by the red line on the chart) paints a rosier picture.
The blue line includes men who have dropped out of the labor force. If you go by that measure, men's wages seem to be taking a firm nosedive.
An Economix commenter says:
After about 1970 there was a big expansion of the labor force, for three reasons. The first was the Hart-Cellar act of 1965, which produced a big increase in immigration. The second was a surge of women into the labor force after 1970. The third was the entry of the baby boom kids in the late '70s.
It really shouldn't be a surprise that an expansion of the labor supply leads to stagnant or falling prices (wages).
(That commenter has expanded on those points in a blog post, which seems to be totally anonymous.)
Glenn Reynolds posted the blog post to Facebook, and Brittany Gardner had this take (she gave me permission to quote from our discussion using her name):
As female strengths (empathy, social networks, collaboration) become increasingly marketable in a workforce, we will have to be sure that male strengths (competition, experimentation, systems thinking) can find a new niche and balance to match. With many traditionally "male-dominated" fields being automated or outsourced, I think that one logical entry field will be one women have dominated for a while.... child-rearing. Early education needs a complete overhaul to meet the needs of the next generation, and who better to design and implement new systems and experiment bravely and rationally, than men?
Men may also find they are uniquely equipped to get kids off the couches, net, and video games for a bit, and into the physical world, working on hands-on projects, games, experiments, and exploration.
I responded:
I agree about child-rearing, but the norms against men taking a lead role in raising children seem to be a lot more entrenched than the norms against women in the workforce. It's no longer socially acceptable to question whether women can do any job they want, but boys will still be teased if they pretend to be daddies; we'd feel more comfortable to see them pretending to be mass murderers. Many people might accept the idea of a stay-at-home dad in theory, but how many men would truly feel comfortable in that role in practice? Alas, men aren't seen as one of the kinds of people we're supposed to be concerned with, so anyone trying to draw attention to these issues will be fighting an uphill battle.
Glenn Reynolds said:
I think John's right, especially as any man who actually does want to work with children is immediately suspect as a child abuser.
There is a growing number of stay-at-home dads at the park and at playgroups I've attended. I was impressed at how much "better" they seemed to be at effortlessly managing behavior and teaching/interacting with their children . . . .
If it's true that unemployment is becoming a reality for more men, talking up roles with the next generation makes a lot of sense, and other projects can be worked on simultaneously. (All the stay-at-home fathers I know also work from home, or have productive hobbies they can work on simultaneously and involve their children in, to both parties' benefit and enrichment.)
The idea that steer-heading the next generation of humans is somehow emasculating, needs to be abandoned.
To paraphrase a quote I read recently: Sense of masculinity has always flowed from men's utility in society. Not the other way around.
And here's her response to Glenn Reynolds:
I think the suspicion directed at men who want to work with children mirrors the suspicion of motives we direct at women who take leadership positions . . . I think the more we normalize both, the better.
I've been reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss, which is worth reading if you read it critically enough to sort out the great advice from the terrible advice. I like this suggestion from the book (which he originally made in a blog post):
Work is not all of life. Your co-workers shouldn't be your only friends. Schedule life and defend it just as you would an important business meeting. (326-27)
Ferriss isn't recommending that you put a high priority on socializing in general. In fact, the above advice only makes sense if you first take stock of which socializing is truly valuable, by asking yourself these questions:
• Positive friends versus time-consuming friends: Who is helping versus hurting you, and how do you increase your time with the former while decreasing or eliminating your time with the latter?
• Who is causing me stress disproportionate to the time I spend with them? What will happen if I simply stop interacting with these people? (81)
At first, he suggests explicitly confronting the negative friends about how you're not getting enough out of the relationship, but he realizes many readers won't be up for this. So instead, he recommends "just politely refus[ing] to interact with them":
Be in the middle of something when the calls comes, and have a prior commitment when the invitation to hang out comes. Once you see the benefits of decreased time with these people, it will be easier to stop communication altogether. (82)
I'm reminded of a scene from a Seinfeld episode, "The Boyfriend," where Jerry's annoyed that his new friend (Keith Hernandez) hasn't called him:
Elaine: You know, maybe he's been busy. Maybe he's been out of town.
Jerry: Oh, they don't have phones out of town? I love how people say they're too busy. 'Too busy!' Pick up a phone! It takes two minutes! How can you be too busy?
Everyone's "too busy" for what they don't really want to do. We make time for the things value the most.
I would say that the story per se is usually left-wing, in both good and bad ways. It elevates the seen over the unseen, can easily portray a struggle for justice, focuses on the anecdote, and encourages us to judge social institutions by the intentions of the people who work in them, rather than looking at their deeper and longer-term outcomes. Precisely because the story is itself so left-wing, there won't be a definitive example of the left-wing novel. Story-telling encourages context-dependent thinking, although not necessarily in an accurate manner. One notable feature of Atlas Shrugged is how frequently the story-telling stops for a long speech or an extended dialogue, in order to explain some first principles to the reader.
I don't think the story is a bad form for conservative thinking, even if in practice most novelists have been left-wing. The basic themes of identity, conflicts between good and evil, and personal struggles over adversity, temptation, etc all fit with both the novel and conservative thinking. But the novel is not at all suited to social science thinking, which . . . looks for systemic patterns. Social scientists dismiss as outliers events novelists would see as deeply significant.
This is the first time this has ever happened but there was one euthanasia last Wednesday and *I can't remember what the circumstances were*. It's driving me mad as the entire purpose of this blog was to remember every animal. I know it was a dog. I know it was either old or sick but the week became such a blur that I just can't place it. I'm sorry, anonymous dog.
