Monthly Archives: November 2013

Why Are Republicans the Wrecking Crew?

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The Wrecking CrewAfter reading a lot of nonfiction books — especially on politics — I’m not clear what I’m supposed to have learned. I’ll often go back through the book to figure out the theme. Part of this is just that I’m a bit scattered, and I’m very good at putting new data into an existing (or if the book is really good) alerted narrative. But it’s also the case that most books aren’t that well written. People do not make clear and direct arguments. And they often write 300 pages when 100 would have done the trick.

One writer I never have this problem with if Thomas Frank. Whereas other writers may see themselves as constructing an intricate web, Frank is a man with a hammer who is going to bang on the same issue page after page. Now, that would be tiring coming from a dull writer, but Frank is constantly smart and funny. And the fact that he tends to see the world the way I do probably doesn’t hurt.

I just read his 2008 book, The Wrecking Crew. He starts the book with the observation that Republicans manage the nation really badly whenever they’re in power. And his thesis is that they do this on purpose so that when the Democrats are in power, they won’t have the time or resources to enact any liberal policies. What’s more, the Democrats will be too focus on cleaning up the Republicans’ mess to do anything else.

It’s a compelling thesis. But I don’t really buy it. It sounds too much like what Republicans tell themselves about their policy failures. I think the situation is far more simple: Republicans are lousy at the jobs we elect them to do. And I believe the reason this is so is the same reason that our federal politics are so much more conservative than the people would want: our two-party constitutional democracy.

One person I greatly respect thinks this is rubbish: Jonathan Bernstein. He claims that the problem is simply that the Republicans have become a radical party. I think we can all agree on that. But the question is why. And I believe the answer is because our system does not force accountability. Neither party ever gets to run the government they way they really want to. During Obama’s first two years, even with overwhelming majorities, the bills that got passed were watered down almost to the point of uselessness.

The reason I think the Republicans have become radicalized and the Democrats have not is because the Republicans have a built in advantage in rural areas and the south. This has pushed the party more and more to the right. But since their policy choices have never been given a clear test, they can maintain plausible deniability. And even more important, the Democratic policies have never been given a clear test to show that they work. So we muddle on and there is no reason for the Republicans to moderate.

Along with the extremism in the Republicans Party has come incompetence. For one thing, a true conservative would find a very nice home in the Democratic Party. So the more reasonable Republicans just become Democrats. Even more important, a Republican who just wants his taxes kept low but doesn’t go along with the other stuff probably won’t even run, but would lose in a primary anyway. So you end up with ideologues who neither care about actual governance nor have the skills for it anyway.

There is one reason in particular that I think that the Republicans screw up government because they are incompetent rather than as an actual policy: Iraq. The Bush administration didn’t care at all that the people they were sending to rebuild the country were hopeless. In 2006, Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote, Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq. For example, “A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance — but had applied for a White House job — was sent to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange.”

Admittedly, this incompetence is at least partially the result of not caring. But even that pushes against the idea that the Republicans are evil geniuses who are wrecking the country to harm the Democratic Party. There is a powerful lesson here, though. The end result is the same. And we have seen it during Obama’s presidency. He is the first president since Johnson to pass even the mildest of liberal legislation. And this has been met with cries of, “Socialism!” But it is a reminder that the whole process of cleaning up after the Republicans is a bad strategy that only makes the Republicans stronger. Half of Obama’s time in office was spent obsessing about the federal deficit. No time in Reagan and Bush Jr’s terms was spent worrying about the debt. We need to be more like that.

Food stamps pay for themselves!

Lara Logan’s Benghazi Ax

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Lara LoganI’ve written a bit about Lara Logan’s dreadful 60 Minutes segment on Benghazi and how it has been shown to be totally wrong. But Digby puts it all in historical context, Lara Logan in her own words 10/2/2012. It seems that just one month after the attack, Logan was ranting about it. Her response to the attack brings back nightmares of 2002. In reference to the government sending FBI agents to investigate, she said, “I hope to God that you are sending in your best clandestine warriors to exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil, its ambassadors will not be murdered and the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.” [My emphasis. -FM]

It would seem that Logan is not exactly objective, especially in reference to this issue. In fact, she sounds very much like John McCain who seems to think every real or imagined attack on the United States should be responded to by attacking Iran. “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran.” There is nothing wrong with having opinions. Everyone has opinions, and I think we get worse reporting with this pretense of objectivity. But the situation is especially bad here. Logan looks like she would be a perfect fit at Fox News. And on this story, it was a perfect storm of bias and laziness. Digby explains:

Needless to say, the fact that she fell for such a clearly ridiculous hoax was due to her biases. She shows in that speech that she had already made up her mind about what happened. And 60 Minutes should have been professionally skeptical of her story because of that. Logan’s agenda blinded her to the fact that she was being played.

This was well on display Friday on CBS This Morning when Logan officially apologized for the report. One of the hosts, Norah O’Donnell, asks, “How did you vet [Dylan Davies, the basis of the whole story]?” It’s actually a really good question coming from a morning fluff show. Even still, Logan must have known it was coming. But her response was terrible. “We verified and confirmed that he was who he said he was—that he was working for the State Department at the time—that he was in Benghazi at the special mission compound the night of the attack… He gave us access to communications he had with the US government officials… We used US government reports and congressional testimony to verify many of the details of his story. And everything checked out!”

This is all just a defensive way of saying that she had a preexisting narrative that Davies fit, so she believed him. But notice the great Dick Cheney trick that is going on here. This was something Cheney did in the lead up to the Iraq War. His staff would leak information to the New York Times, which would print it. Then Cheney would do an interview where he talked about the very same “intelligence.” And to bolster his case, he would say, “It’s not just me; the liberal New York Times just reported the same thing.” In this case, Logan had a narrative based on the Republican show hearings going on at the House of Representatives. Everyone knows about those, most especially the guy who is writing a book that is trying to leverage those hearings for a quick buck. So we have an echo chamber that Logan thought was independent confirmation. Or at least that’s what she said happened.

The truth is that I don’t believe Lara Logan was especially trying to push her conservative narrative. She was just looking for a great old-style 60 Minutes scoop. The truth is that the show is mostly useless anymore. Their other big scoop recently was how disability fraud was killing us. That too was just another Republican talking point whipped up into a story of outrage. Since the show doesn’t seem to care much about journalism anymore, they might as well go for eye candy. And Logan is as close as they get to it.

Update (10 November 2013 3:38 pm)

Jay Rosen wrote an excellent timeline of the CBS response, Will CBS News Apologize for the Reckless Denials Before its Benghazi Story Collapsed? He brings up one especially good point:

CBS was not just wrong, it was wrong about an explosive and highly contentious story in which extra care should have been taken because of the risk that a faulty report will be instantly politicized.

Even worse, for about a week after the segment aired, Lara Logan claimed that the reason people were raising questions was because of the politicized atmosphere. Of course, her report was the reason that the Benghazi story came roaring back.

Update (10 November 2013 7:57 pm)

At the end of 60 Minutes, Lara Logan came on for roughly two minutes with a “correction.” All she mentioned was the questions about Davies. Nothing was said about the conflict of interest between the book publisher and CBS. And nothing was said about CBS’s stonewalling for almost two weeks as more and more questions were raised. She also made it sound like just one person in the report was misleading. Nothing was said about the fact that he was the whole thing or that the other two interviewed for the episode were well know hacks who have been everywhere making the same claims. As little as I think of 60 Minutes, I’m still shocked at just how poorly they handled this “correction.”

Ennio Morricone and His Musical Whips

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Ennio MorriconeOn this day in 1483, the religious reformer Martin Luther was born. I actually see him as a villain. Here I’m not just talking about his antisemitic views, which in fairness, were typical of the time. The whole protestant reform movement has done far more harm than good for the world. The Catholic Church of that time was hopelessly corrupt. But the fundamental idea of Luther that the religion was the Bible is an extremely dangerous thing. It naturally leads to fundamentalism. If there is no authority but the Bible, what are people to believe but that what it literally says (a fool’s errand regardless) is what it means. And what it leads to is things like the Jehovah’s Witnesses: a religion that started with a bunch of amateurs trying to figure out the Bible only to have their work ossify into a religion that is far less flexible than the Catholic Church. It also leads to a certain level of terror among Christians who feel they must be the ones to defend their faith—a task they are hopelessly unqualified for. Nonetheless, Martin Luther clearly had good intentions, but we all know where that paved road leads.

Mikhail Kalashnikov is 94 today. He is the inventor of the AK-47, probably the most important gun of the 20th century. It’s a dubious distinction given that almost unimaginable harm that has been done with the gun. On the other hand, if it hadn’t been the AK-47, it would have been some other gun. After all, guns don’t kill people; bullets kill people. In this case, the 7.62×39mm.

Other birthday: the novelist Winston Churchill (1871); actor Claude Rains (1889); actor Richard Burton (1925); songwriter Marilyn Bergman (84); actor Roy Scheider (1932); songwriter Tim Rice (69); film director Roland Emmerich (58); and comedian Tracy Morgan (45).

The day, however, belongs to the great composer Ennio Morricone who is 85 today. He is best known for his film scores of the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns. Of course, like most film composers, wrote the music for many films. Although it includes short films, the Internet Movie Database lists 517 films he has worked on. Here is the title sequence of A Fistfull of Dollars, which is just great:

Happy birthday Ennio Morricone!

My Life as an Atheist Outcast

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Nice Atheist GirlI don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Andrea has become quite the atheist. She is now going by Nice Atheist Girl. It all started with a conversation we had. I mention it mostly because it is so rare that Andrea finds any idea I have compelling. This is in stark contrast to the way I feel about her, which is basically that if she just decided to work on even her weakest ideas, she would quickly become an internet phenom. Anyway, we were talking about her son who is seeing a Catholic girl. And I made a joke that she ought to be like a Jewish mother, “Why can’t you meet a nice atheist girl?” Before you know it, I’m in charge of making every conceivable change to her new website, which is admittedly really good.

The thing about Andrea’s atheism is that it is so much more pure than mine. For me, atheism is a very complicated thing that is deeply related to what most people would call spiritualism. And indeed, I think that I commune far more profoundly with “God” than almost any Christian I know. Andrea has no tolerance for this kind of nonsense. To her, I think, atheism isn’t so much a rejection of God as it is a rejection of Christianity. And if I could look at it that way, I would be completely on board. Because Christianity is a laughable religion. (Sorry all my Christian friends!) But I feel just as strongly that the nature of existence is a paradox. So my mind reels.

What this means is that most atheists think I’m a squishy kind of proto-agnostic. And that’s not true at all! As far as I’m concerned, most of them are very much like the Christians I talk about. They don’t really engage in the debate at a serious level. But at least such atheists understand that they aren’t engaging. They know that they are simply defining God out of the realm of what is knowable. (Quite rightly!) Christians and other theists think of God as some super powerful friend or father figure in the sky. But the main thing is that atheists don’t much care of my form of atheism. They think of it the way that Baptists think of Unitarians.

To be honest, I feel a lot like the Terry Eagleton of atheism. I feel like I don’t fit in anywhere. (Except probably with Eagleton who considers himself a Christian while no one else does!) So I was encouraged this evening when Andrea sent me a a link to an Abby Ohlheiser article, A Short History of Richard Dawkins vs The Internet. It came along with a text, “It seems that Richard Dawkins is a bit of an asshole.” Being the ever faithful friend, I texted back, “I told you that!” But she said she didn’t know how bad he was. Well, it turns out that I didn’t either.

But here’s the ironic part. I actually kind of agree with Dawkins on his major point. I just don’t think he was making the point well. So I’m going to give it a try here. Religion really isn’t a problem. The key is that you can’t take it that seriously. In the Middle Ages, Islam was an incredibly liberal religion. Now, it is very conservative, by and large. The fundamentalists are in control. That’s a problem. And it’s a problem that hurts all Muslims.

Where I differ from Dawkins is in his focus. It’s true that Islam is coming out of a period of fundamentalism. But I actually think the trend is really good. The Mulsims are becoming more liberal and in another hundred years, I think it will be a force for good. Christianity (maybe with the exception of Catholicism—we’ll see) is moving in the opposite direction. In the United States, 36% of the population thinks that the earth is less than 10,000 years old and doesn’t believe in evolution. In the United Kingdom, the number is only 25%, but another 20% believe in Intelligent Design. Now I understand that there are are a lot of scary Muslims in the world. But shouldn’t Dawkins be more concerned about the bad trends at home?

The article itself gets much worse, with stuff that is an outgrowth of my long held negative opinions about Richard Dawkins. He is very much a man of his social class. And I very much understand: Skepchick is outside his comfort zone. And, most sadly, outside the comfort zone of most male (which is to say simple “most”) “new” atheists. As I discussed a few weeks ago, CJ Werleman quite accurately described the atheist movement as “white, middle class, intellectually smug and mostly apolitical.” But that apolitical part of it is based on the fact that the status quo benefits them. And the idea that women might have a few complaints of their own rankles them.

Of course, Dawkins argument is way beyond the pale. Basically, he claims that western women have nothing to complain about because their clitorises have not been cut off. I’m serious! All I can think is that he was drunk. Because even I don’t think that lowly of him.

Regardless of all this, I continue to find that I mostly agree with atheists. By this I mean “there is no God” and not “you can only complain after an honor killing.” But I still feel very much on the margins of the movement—a man who doesn’t believe in God but understands why people would. There is something good about my position. I’m kind of like the interfaith atheist, or the “intertheist,” if you prefer. And I think the atheist movement could learn a few things from me. Not as much as the theists could. But still.

Muppet Mash

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GroverLook: normally, I’m not that fond of this kind of music. But this is Sesame Street and for whatever reason, I find it really compelling. It could be as simple as this: Grover. He was long my favorite Muppet and I was crushed when he did not show up on The Muppet Show, although I can’t help but seeing a family resemblance between him and The Great Gonzo.

I think my adoration for Grover comes from the fact that he isn’t nasty like Oscar, generally stupid like Bert and Ernie, nor cloying like Big Bird. Don’t get me wrong: Grover is a hell of a nice guy! Or a hell of a nice monster. Whatever. But he’s the kind of nice that you want to hang out with and have a beer. And there are none of those annoying contractions to worry about.

Also in this song is Kermit the Frog. And of course, Kermit is one of my heroes: an intrepid reporter on Sesame Street who went on to manage that gang of loons on The Muppet Show. That’s what I aspire to be: the sane one surrounded by total nuts. I have not succeeded yet. But until then, there is this delightful song:

And Kermit the Frog yells, “Yeeeea!”

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

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BuffaloI don’t know how I missed this all these years. At some point last week, Chris Hayes mentioned the sentence “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” Being the kind of guy I am, I went crazy with it. I even dreamed about it. It’s all syntax so it was very much like the kind of math dreams I used to have with ideas and equations bursting into my mind from what always felt like different locations. This sentence is very much like a mathematical equation.

There are three different definitions of “buffalo” here: two nouns and a verb. The nouns are “Buffalo” the city and “buffalo” the animal. The verb is a synonym for “bamboozle.” It is more easily thought of as follows:

Buffalo from Buffalo that buffalo other buffalo from Buffalo also buffalo other buffalo from Buffalo.

It does show the vagaries of the language. One might say, “People other people abuse are often abusive.” It is clearer to say, “People whom other people abuse are often abusive.” But I don’t think anyone has a problem with the original construct. That’s especially true when spoken. In writing, I find it confusing and so I try to not do such things. It is best if the reader can gradually understand a sentence rather than have to figure it out in retrospect.

So given our sentence, it helps to set off “Buffalo buffalo,” which means “buffalo from Buffalo.” I’m going to do that and throw in a couple of commas as well:

(Buffalo buffalo), (Buffalo buffalo) buffalo, buffalo (Buffalo buffalo).

This actually allows us to get rid of “Buffalo” altogether. We’ll just assume that all the buffalo we are talking about are from Buffalo. Now the sentence is much simpler:

Buffalo, buffalo buffalo, buffalo buffalo.

Now let’s substitute “bamboozle” for our verb “buffalo”:

Buffalo, buffalo bamboozle, bamboozle buffalo.

I think the sentence is clear enough that we come to an uncomfortable truth: it is not a very useful sentence. Most likely, all it means that buffalo from Buffalo bamboozle each other. Strictly speaking, it means that there are a set of buffalo from Buffalo who bamboozle each other. So the con artist buffalo are prone to each other. In terms of meaning, it is no great shakes. But the syntax is nice: noun noun, noun noun verb, verb noun noun. It’s fun to play with.

Now maybe I can stop thinking about it!

Afterword

If you want to know the history of the sentence, Wikipedia has a very nice page on it.

An Atheist in the Foxhole

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An Atheist in the FoxholeI just read Joe Muto’s An Atheist in the Foxhole. What a great book! The guy can write. I just tweeted to him that he ought to write a novel. The story he tells in Foxhole is not all that interesting. But his telling of it is constantly exciting and often laugh out loud funny. I also found it personally fascinating because when I was his age, I too felt similarly cocky and similarly learned that it is usually best to tread lightly with one’s political passions.

For those who do not know, Muto was Gawker‘s famous “Fox News Mole.” Sadly, he was outed in only 36 hours. At the time, many of us thought that this was due to the fact that he had gone to Gawker instead of a more reasonable outlet. After reading the book, I feel even more convinced of this. If Gawker really wanted a mole, why even publish the videos? He had little to offer in that regard anyway. A few months of dispatches would have been great fun. Gawker didn’t manage a really good opportunity. And then after it was all over, they abandoned Muto. I think Muto’s biggest act of stupidity was turning to Gawker. Slate or Salon (where he now freelances) would have been better choices that would likely have served him better.

The book offers a great look inside the Fox News operation. The most shocking thing is just how low tech the place was and probably still is. You may remember the great scene in Broadcast News where Joan Cusack as a production assistant has to run through the office to get a tape on time to the live control room. Here it is; it’s a great scene:

The first job that Moto gets at Fox News is delivering the on air scripts to the set of the live broadcast. This is often done at the last minute requiring the production assistants to run through the halls to get them to the anchors. I wondered: why don’t they just have the pages printed directly to the studio? Regardless, all the money seems to go to Bill O’Reilly and company and little is left over for technology. Or staff salaries.

A good example of this is that Muto was hired for $12 per hour as a contractor. After six months, he gets taken on a regular employee. That means he gets benefits, so that’s all good. But they raise his salary to—Wait for it!—$12.74. That’s not a mistype; they raised his wage 74¢. That’s a 6.2% raise. Before he gets “promoted” to regular employee, a vice-president tells him he should be dressing better:

“Right, well, you should buy a couple [suits]. I mean, we pay you enough that you…” He glanced down at the paper on his desk, searching for the correct number. He grimaced when he found it. “Oh, well… you can at least to to Mean’s Wearhouse, right?”

That strikes me as entirely typical of conservatives: they always assume everyone must be well paid and if they aren’t, well, soon they will be. Liberals take it for granted that most employers screw their employees as much as they can. The outrage I hear from people about specific examples of this kind of stuff comes from conservatives. They are the ones who have this fairy tale idea that “almost all” bosses are Milton Hershey.

Most of the book is not an attack on Fox News. It’s just a memoir that I think even conservatives would enjoy.[1] But at the very end of the book, he gets serious. I want to leave you with an extended quote from the book that sums up what is really like to work at Fox News. I took the time to enter it myself, so read it!

About a month after I left, Fox & Friends played a video on their show. Four minutes long, it was a slickly produced package featuring sound bites and graphics, and absolutely throwing the kitchen sink at President Obama—hitting him on everything from the debt to unemployment, to food stamps, to gas prices. It played like an attack ad that had been created by the Republican National Committee. There was a massive uproar after the video aired, with repeated cries that Fox News had finally shed its last vestige of objectivity.

For the first few hours after it aired, Fox seemed poised to stand behind the video, featuring it prominently on the Fox Nation website. Then they reversed course and disavowed it, with an opaque statement that read, in part: “The package that aired on Fox & Friends was created by an associate producer and was not authorized at the senior executive level of the network.”

The associate producer in question was a guy named Chris, a guy who I came up with, a guy who started as a production assistant on the overnights around the same time I did. A good producer, and an honest one. And Fox was letting him twist in the wind, with a statement that left the door open to the interpretation that he had been acting alone when he put the piece together.

But that’s not how Fox operates. Something that long and elaborate would have taken at least three or four long days in the edit room to put together, days when a producer would be unable to do any other work. So unless Fox & Friends changed their operating procedures drastically in the month or so that I had been gone from the network at that point, I believe that Chris’ work on the package had to have been authorized by a senior—or even the executive—producer of the show. Someone had pulled Chris off his regular duties, and said, “Spend all your time the next few days making this tape and we’ll air it when you’re done.” I believe there’s no way that he was acting alone, but that became the narrative: the rogue Fox News producer who created an Obama hit piece! Reports surfaced that CNN—the high-paying promised land we’d all fantasized about as young PAs—had offered Chris a job shortly before the incident, but rescinded the offer following the controversy.

An Atheist in the Foxhole is not profound, but it is a quick and fun read. It’s probably better than most novels for vacation reading. And it answer the burning question, “What is Bill O’Reilly really like?” The answer: exactly what you think.

[1] The publisher must think this too. I noted many occasions when clarifying text was thrown in that I thought wasn’t necessary and burdened the flow. I assume these were editor added.

Carl Sagan and the Cosmos

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Carl SaganToday’s birthdays are way worse than they were yesterday. At least we had some good songs then.

On this day in 1731, the surveyor and astronomer Benjamin Banneker was born. He wrote a number of the most popular almanacs of his day. But he is most notable for being a free black man. His father was a former slave and mother was free born. He was self-taught in science and no doubt brilliant. It’s the anti-Tagg-Romney syndrome. No one hires a poor black man unless he’s brilliant—then or now.

Other birthdays: Russian writer Ivan Turgenev (1818); mathematician Theodor Kaluza (1885); British film director Anthony Asquith (1902); Futurama politician Spiro Agnew (1918); the murderer (who shall remain nameless) of Medgar Evers (1920); poet Anne Sexton (1928); chess grandmaster Mikhail Tal (1936); singer-songwriter Tom Fogerty (1941); actor and bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno (62); one of the decent politicians Sherrod Brown (61); and character actor Tony Slattery (54).

The day, however, belongs to the writer and scientist Carl Sagan who was born on this day in 1934. If you ask 10 scientists of my generation, 7 of them will tell you they went into science because of Sagan. It wasn’t just Cosmos. (Which is still quite watchable today!) His books were great, especially The Dragons of Eden. He was, I would say, the Mr. Rogers of teen nerds. Science has moved on since he was around, so his books are kind of out of date. But they are still good reading. He had a happy talent for composition and singular felicity of expression. Here is the opening of Cosmos for those who have not seen it:

Happy birthday Carl Sagan!

Smartphones and Productivity

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Samsung Exhibit 2Against my will, I was forced to get a smartphone. My friend and partner Will wanted to get a new phone so he decided to give me his old phone. It is some kind of a Samsung unit, but of course, compared to what I’ve had, it is awesomely amazing. I think what I had before is 0.0001g or some version of SLIP. (That’s old hacker humor!) This thing seems to do all the things I see people doing with what must be much better smartphones. I’m on Twitter, getting updated about what drunken atheists are up to. And I can check my 15 different email accounts. But it makes me wonder about the people who tweet and email throughout their days.

How do they do it? I’m a really good typist. In fact, I’m so good that I’ve forgotten where the keys are. My fingers know, my eyes don’t. The little keyboard comes up and I’m thinking, “Now where is that H character?!” It does, however, have this little microphone gadget that does a surprisingly good job of converting my voice into text. It makes obvious mistake. It is hopeless with homophones. It puts numerals into sentences when I don’t want them. And most of all, it is hopeless with punctuation and doesn’t know how to capitalize the beginning of a sentence. Still, it’s pretty amazing. I can get a tweet completed a lot faster than I could type it in. Of course, it is nowhere near as fast as I type on a proper keyboard.

The way I used the internet on my old phone was that I would enter a website and then put the phone in my pocket. After a few minutes, I would check to see if it had loaded. Mostly it did. Sites like Wikipedia do an excellent job of spitting out bits of pages to phones like mine. But even after regular pages would load, it was a hassle. It was very much like the old days using the text-based browser Lynx. If there was a left sidebar, you would have to scroll all the way down it because the page didn’t do any formatting. And worst of all, the phone’s browser would only load so much of a page. So the Frankly Curious page (which is hardly long) would only make it upwards of half way down the page.

Still, the whole thing makes me wonder. How is it that the whole society is going toward tablet computing. Maybe I’m just biased because I’m a writer, but I find a traditional setup with a keyboard and mouse far easier to use to get work done. Even for reading, I would rather just hit page-down than zip my finger across the screen, which seems always to cause the screen to move more than I wanted. Admittedly, I will doubtless get much better at that. But I wonder: does anyone get actual work done with these devices?

Q*bertI’m afraid that the answer is no. My experience in corporate America is that very little work ever gets done. And I suspect that the hyper-connectivity in modern business is just a way for management to convince itself that it is accomplishing things. I don’t mean to suggest that these tools can’t or even don’t help people be productive. But I think at this point, it would take me about four times as long to create an article on my phone—and that’s assuming I could use the microphone function. I could use the phone to tweet as I go about my life, but that would likely turn me into one of those sad people who tweet things like, “Just bought a BBQ chicken at Whole Foods. Yum!” And I can’t imagine anything but the tersest of responses on email.

The way the phone helps me greatly is that it will allow me to read my standard websites while I’m out. And I assume it will also work as a book reader. Also: the microphone function on the text messages is great, although Andrea has already complained about typos in the three texts I’ve sent her. But there’s no doubt that this is a major advance. It is just that its a major advance in the ways that I was already using my phone. And I don’t think those were making me especially more productive. In fact, I think that computers generally have made me less useful to society. So I curse them generally.

Of course, now that I’ve downloaded Q*bert, all bets are off.

Sympathy but Not Disease for Rob Ford

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Rob FordClare Malone has an interesting piece that I half agree with, Rob Ford’s Tragedy, Our Shame. At base, it is a call for a little understanding—not just for Ford but for all people who have allowed drugs to get out of control in their lives. And I’m totally on board with that. I wrote just that on Wednesday, Sympathy for Rob Ford. All of us have faced personal humiliations and, if we’ve thought about it, are grateful that they weren’t more public. I don’t know if I could deal with having animated gifs all over the world infinitely repeating even my most minor humiliations.

Where I differ with Malone is over her hand wringing about addiction as a disease. She even writes that addiction “is treated by doctors as a disease, classified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” That’s true. And homosexuality was also once treated as a disease and classified in the DSM. I have no doubt that the inclusion of “addiction” as a mental disease will one day be as embarrassing as “homosexuality” is today.

Doing drugs is an extremely common human behavior. I know of no culture that does not have socially acceptable intoxicant use. Thus to take drug use out of its social context and label it as a dysfunction, much less a disease, makes no sense. Like any activity, drug use has good aspects and bad aspects. In moderation, the good aspects swamp the bad aspects.

But what of one who has seemingly lost all control, or at least a large part of it? That strikes me as an incredibly naive question that only occurs because our culture is so very screwed up about the use of intoxicants. It should be very clear that Rob Ford has problems. I don’t know what they are. I’d guess that he suffers from feelings of inferiority and self-hatred. But it hardly matters. There are reasons that a sitting mayor of a major city allowed himself to be publicly shitfaced and at least once commit felony drug possession. And none of those have anything to do with the psychoactive properties of alcohol or cocaine.

The reason this is important is that our society’s current approach to drug problems is mostly useless and often harmful. Many years ago, I read Pathways from Heroin Addiction: Recovery Without Treatment. It was on the leading edge of work that showed that the vast majority of people get off even the mother of all addictions without any help from anyone. And the key for pretty much everyone was changing their self-images. There was no disease and there needn’t be.

So sympathy for Rob Ford, of course! The man clearly needs help. But what he doesn’t need is to be taught that he has an alcoholic gene and that he’s powerless against the demon brew. His life is out of control, but that could have manifested in any number of ways. In fact, it did! What kind of reasonable person goes into politics? I think that’s a red flag for any number of behaviors that do belong in the DSM. And we should show sympathy for all the mental baggage that each of us carries around.

Huge Black Vote In Virginia a Trend?

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Vote Baby Vote!Ed Kilgore has been following an interesting bit of demographics from Tuesday’s election, More on VA and the African-American Vote That Saved Terry McAuliffe. In comparing the 2009 election where the Republicans in the top spots won big, the 2013 electorate looks the same. Except: the turn out of African American voters was very high: more like the 2012 election. And this is the only reason that Terry McAuliffe will be the next governor of Virginia. Both Asians and Latinos voted at their 2009 levels.

The question is why this is and the truth is that no one knows. But Kilgore mentions a tantalizing possibility, “I’ve heard a few random folk cite the pre-election voter purge executed by Virginia as a provocation to black voters.” Ah yes. I talked about this a few months back with regard to Ross Douthat’s idea that Voter ID laws will, in the end, hurt Republicans. Given the southern history of voter suppression, African Americans especially will push back hard. It is one thing to not vote in an election where all the candidates are losers. It is quite another thing when people are actively trying to stop you from voting for those losers. And guess who they’ll vote for? The Democratic loser!

Or it could be that African Americans are just really pissed off. After all, this recession has hurt them far more than it has whites. As usual. That is a cheery thought: the poor might be coming to terms with the fact that we may not have money or individual power, but together through the profound act of voting we are the most powerful entity in the nation. The interesting thing is that as a group, African Americans don’t want that much—mostly just a reasonable chance at a decent life. Meanwhile, conservatives are obsessed by the thought that the government will have to pay reparations for slavery. That is how big a gulf there is between the thinking of the poor and the rich. Clearly, being rich does not generate clarity of thought.

Throughout American history, there has been a balance between the direct power of the rich and the electoral power of the poor. It has moved one way and then the other. But for the last 35 years, we have seen the pendulum swing toward the rich. Now we are at a point where income inequality is as bad as it has ever been. The time for the pendulum to swing back the other direction is long overdue.

Regardless of the reason that African Americans voted in large numbers in this off-off-year election, it is a good thing. And I hope that it is part of a trend. This nation has long been held back by conservative gains in off-year elections. The American people are center-left. The Democratic Party is center. The American voter is slightly center-right. And the Republican Party far right. Anything that makes the voting public more like the actual public is a very good thing.