Doctors back circumcision

From Nature:

Expectant parents face many anxieties in preparing for a child. For those who have a son, there is an extra complication: deciding whether to keep his foreskin or have it snipped off.

On 27 August, a report by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) concludes for the first time that, overall, boys will be healthier if circumcised¹. The report says that although the choice is ultimately up to parents, medical insurance should pay for the procedure. The recommendation, coming from such an influential body, could boost US circumcision rates, which, at 55%, are already higher than much of the developed world (see ‘Cuts by country’). “This time around, we could say that the medical benefits outweigh the risks of the procedure,” says Douglas Diekema, a paediatrician and ethicist at the University of Washington, Seattle, who served on the circumcision task force for the AAP, headquartered in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. The recommendation is also sure to stir up debate. The practice of circumcision cuts deeper than the body, tapping into religious rituals and cultural identities. What is a harmless snip to some signifies mutilation to others. And in the developing world, many see it as an essential life-saving measure. Condoms are more effective at preventing disease, but are not used consistently.

More here.

Wednesday Poem

Dutch

Much of life
is Dutch
one-digit
operations

in which
legions of
big robust
people crouch

behind
badly cracked
dike systems

attached
by the thumbs

their wide
balloon-pantsed rumps
up-ended to the
northern sun

while, back
in town, little
black-suspendered
tulip magnates
stride around.
.

by Kay Ryan
from Say Uncle, 2000
Grove Press, New York, NY

How the US and Israeli justice systems whitewash state crimes

Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian:

The US military announced on Monday that no criminal charges would be brought against the US marines in Afghanistan who videotaped themselves urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters. Nor, the military announced, would any criminal charges be filed against the US troops who "tried to burn about 500 copies of the Qur'an as part of a badly bungled security sweep at an Afghan prison in February, despite repeated warnings from Afghan soldiers that they were making a colossal mistake".

In doing so, the US military, as usual, brushed aside demands of Afghan officials for legal accountability for the destructive acts of foreign soldiers in their country. The US instead imposed "disciplinary measures" in both cases, ones that "could include letters of reprimand, a reduction in rank, forfeit of some pay, physical restriction to a military base, extra duties or some combination of those measures". Both incidents triggered intense protests and rioting that left dozens dead, back in February this year.

Parallel to that, an Israeli judge Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit against the Israeli government brought by the family of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old American student and pro-Palestinian activist who was killed by a military bulldozer in 2003 as she protested the demolition of a house in Gaza whose family she had come to befriend.

More here.  [Photo shows Rachel Corrie.]

Bill Clinton reads "Concord Hymn" by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Lance Armstrong and the Philosophy of Making Bad Decisions

Evan Selinger in The Atlantic:

Lance Armstrong's decision not to fight the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency has drawn mixed response: supporters and detractors wasted no time before airing their views. While some supporters maintain lack of incriminating evidence is key, others have stated that Armstrong still deserves our sympathy even if he is guilty of using banned substances. It is crucial to understand why this might be the case, as the implications of the judgment extend well beyond feelings directed at a high-profile athlete.

The sympathy-for-a-possible-cheater argument is expressed clearly in "Pillorying Armstrong: Complete Nonsense," a piece co-written by Arthur Caplan -- one of the most famous bioethicists in the U.S. -- and two other NYU professors. The authors write: "Shouldn't Armstrong, especially because of the inspiration he is to cancer survivors or anyone on the short end of the advantage stick, get a pass for being no more dirty, but a whole lot better than everyone else in his sport? Armstrong isn't being investigated as the only cheater. He is in all likelihood just the best, most talented one." In other words, we should feel bad for Armstrong because LiveStrong promotes so much social good that it blunts part of the cheating stain, and because professional cycling is rotten to the core, filled with so many cheaters that breaking the rules is the only viable way to compete.

For the sake of argument, let's say this assessment of the state of cycling is correct. Why should its constraints incline us to be sympathetic for a cheater? Why shouldn't we instead appeal to the lesson about individual responsibility and peer pressure that we learned in Kindergarten -- the one that ends with not jumping off a bridge because Johnny did?

More here.

What Went Wrong in Mali?

Bruce Whitehouse in the LRB:

The Republic of Mali has long been seen as the exception to the dictatorships or civil wars that have seemed the rule in West Africa since the end of the Cold War: a state that was able to shift from autocracy to democratic governance. Arid, landlocked, larger than France (its former colonial master) and Spain combined, and among the world’s poorest nations, dependent on foreign aid, Mali shook off single-party rule in 1991, when massive protests touched off a coup that ended the 23-year reign of General Moussa Traoré. The coup’s leader, Colonel Amadou Toumani Touré, presided over a transition that brought a new constitution and multiparty elections the following year.

Every five years since then Mali has held elections which have been considered generally free and fair by observers. Alpha Oumar Konaré, who won the presidential election in 1992, reformed state institutions and negotiated an end to a long-simmering rebellion by Tuareg nomads in the northern deserts, where central government had never had much control. Konaré stepped down in 2002, respecting a constitutional two-term limit, and was succeeded by Touré. Privately owned newspapers and radio stations, once a state monopoly, flourished, and the country became popular with aid donors, a destination for tourists and a regular venue for music festivals. It was a tranquil place that never made the news.

It lost that distinction on the afternoon of 21 March, when troops in Kati, just outside the capital city of Bamako, launched a mutiny. 

Among the Republicans

V.S. Naipaul's 1984 piece on the Republican National Convention, in the NY Review of Books (not much has changed):

To leave the air-conditioned auditorium and go outside was to appreciate anew the extent of the church’s properties, many of them named after Dr. Criswell. It was also—though the shadows of tall buildings made the street look cool—to be reminded of the one-hundred-degree heat of Dallas.

Most of the time you were protected from the heat, and were aware of it only as a quality of the light or in the color of the sky. But from time to time the heat came upon you like this, a passing sensation, not unpleasant, a contrast with the general air-conditioning, a reminder of the bubble in which you lived.

Dallas was air-conditioned—hotels, shops, houses, cars. The convention center was more than air-conditioned; it was positively cool, more than thirty degrees cooler than the temperature outside. Air-conditioned Dallas seemed to me a stupendous achievement, the product of a large vision, American in the best and most humane way: money and applied science creating an elegant city where life had previously been brutish.

Yet in this city created by high science Dr. Criswell preached of hellfire and was a figure. And the message of convention week was that there was no contradiction, that American endeavor and success were contained within old American faith and pieties. Karl Marx and homosexuality were on the other side of these pieties and could be lumped together.

The fundamentalism that the Republicans had embraced went beyond religion. It simplified the world in general; it rolled together many different kinds of anxieties—schools, drugs, race, buggery, Russia, to give just a few; and it offered the simplest, the vaguest solution: Americanism, the assertion of the American self.

Genealogy and Plurality

Over at the SSRC's Immanent Frame, there's been an interesting and ongoing debate stemming from Akeel Bilgrami's SSRC Working paper “Secularism: Its Content and Context.” In the paper, "Bilgrami addresses two questions: first, the meaning of secularism and second, its justification and implementation. Engaging Charles Taylor’s recent calls for a “radical” redefinition of secularism, he offers an alternative conceptualization of the category, while also addressing Taylor’s deep concerns about the politics of secularism for our time. According to Bilgrami, secularism has its point and meaning not in a decontextualized philosophical argument but in the historical and contextual specificities in which it is applied. In the end, secularism “needs, not replacement, but merely proper implementation, in order to get us ‘beyond toleration.’”  Among the responses are ones by Justin Neuman and Simon During. During:

I am in general agreement with Bilgrami’s argument. But I am puzzled by the turn it takes at the point when he squarely confronts the most obvious problem it poses. What about states and polities that don’t accept rights-based, liberal-democratic ideals and the rights and goods that they promise? In such states, there may be no legislative or administrative tension between Church and State, and the demand for neutrality need not get a look-in. The polity may be religious through and through. How might a state-neutralist of Bilgrami’s stripe persuade such a non-secular, non-liberal state to join his position?

The problem is all the sharper because, as has become standard in post-secular liberal arguments, Bilgrami wants to make his case without reference to intellectual secularism. He does so by distinguishing what he calls “atheism” from “secularism.” Atheism (a rather loaded term) denies religion’s propositional truth, while secularism is a “stance towards religion” taken in pursuit of non-religious ends, and which, as such, cannot be true or false. (Here Bilgrami is drawing a distinction similar to the one that Habermas posits between religion’s “validity claims” and its “truth content” [its morality and ethical sociability].) For Bilgrami, there are only “internal reasons” for pursuing secularism (i.e. reasons grounded in one’s own values) not external evidentiary ones. So revealed and natural religion’s falling out of propositional truth is discounted.

Bilgrami responds to both Neuman and During:

On more substantial issues, his instinct is exactly right (and mine) when he says that Taylor wants a neutralism that is not necessarily secular. I wrote a fair number of words in my essay to try and make that instinct into a sound bit of criticism in political theory. I am sure that I have not persuaded Taylor, but it is gratifying to see that During and I share an understanding of Taylor. If he and I are right, Taylor’s honorable and interesting effort to redefine secularism as his form of “neutralism” fails. Or at any rate—if one takes the view that definitions, being stipulative and conventional, cannot exactly fail—it is not theoretically well motivated. During doesn’t mention his grounds for thinking Taylor to be wrong, but does gesture at broad agreement with the grounds I had presented.

Where he seems to find my dialectic is missing something is at the point when I mention that theimplementation of secularism (in those contexts where its implementation is called for) in the face of resistance to it, should appeal to a historicized conception of the subjects who resist it. He suggests that I should have given a thicker sense of the actual historical development that might be needed to bring such subjects around to secular polities and proceeds to guide me to a path by which this might be done by providing a genealogy of how it was in fact achieved in Europe. These genealogical and historical remarks are valuable, but I want to shepherd their relevance to a different part of my dialectic from where he places them.

Fear of a Black President

As a candidate, Barack Obama said we needed to reckon with race and with America’s original sin, slavery. But as our first black president, he has avoided mention of race almost entirely. In having to be “twice as good” and “half as black,” Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.

Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic:

The irony of President Barack Obama is best captured in his comments on the death of Trayvon Martin, and the ensuing fray. Obama has pitched his presidency as a monument to moderation. He peppers his speeches with nods to ideas originally held by conservatives. He routinely cites Ronald Reagan. He effusively praises the enduring wisdom of the American people, and believes that the height of insight lies in the town square. Despite his sloganeering for change and progress, Obama is a conservative revolutionary, and nowhere is his conservative character revealed more than in the very sphere where he holds singular gravity—race.

Part of that conservatism about race has been reflected in his reticence: for most of his term in office, Obama has declined to talk about the ways in which race complicates the American present and, in particular, his own presidency. But then, last February, George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old insurance underwriter, shot and killed a black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman, armed with a 9 mm handgun, believed himself to be tracking the movements of a possible intruder. The possible intruder turned out to be a boy in a hoodie, bearing nothing but candy and iced tea. The local authorities at first declined to make an arrest, citing Zim­mer­man’s claim of self-defense. Protests exploded nationally. Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea assumed totemic power. Celebrities—the actor Jamie Foxx, the former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, members of the Miami Heat—were photographed wearing hoodies. When Rep­resentative Bobby Rush of Chicago took to the House floor to denounce racial profiling, he was removed from the chamber after donning a hoodie mid-speech.

More here.

Tariq Ali: Why Latin America backs WikiLeaks

British-Pakistani author, journalist and activist Tariq Ali chaired a rally outside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London on August 19. The rally came before WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange's widely publicised speech. Ali also gave two speeches. In the second, he spoke about why it was that Assange and WikiLeaks had found support in Ecuador and Latin America more generally — and highlighted the revolutionary movements that have swept the continent to challenge US corporate domination. You can watch a video of this speech here. It is transcribed below.

Tariq Ali in Green Left:

I think one aspect of this [situation] that has not yet been dealt with. And it needs to be understood — especially in the Western world. Why is it that an Australian citizen, facing prosecution from a European country, decides to appeal for asylum to a South American republic?

And the reason for that is that for the last 10-15 years, huge changes have been taken place in South America. And these changes are very interesting.

For a whole while, as many of you will know, South America was governed by military dictatorships, of one sort or another — backed by the United States and its European partners — and allowed to do whatever they wanted.

They were taught how to torture [by the US], they were taught how to kill, and they carried on doing it until the changes began. And the changes began for social and economic reasons, it should be pointed out.

The changes began when the people in Venezuela — who were the first — said enough! Enough of International Monetary Fund regulations, enough of World Bank rules. We don't like neoliberalism, we don't like the way our oligarchs are running our country, we don't want to live in a world where everything is privatised, where there is no public sector — that is what started it off.

More here.

"Sweet Home Alabama" -- Musical Tesla Coils

From the description at YouTube:

These are two gigantic solid state musical Tesla Coils. A Tesla Coil is a special type of transformer invented by Nikola Tesla that is able to generating extremely large voltages using a phenomenon known as electrical resonance. Each coil in this video is capable of generating a 13 foot spark. This equates to about 500,000 volts of electricity. 

The primary drive system for the coils consists of high power semiconductors arranged into an H-Bridge switching configuration. During a spark event, the coil is pulsed on for a few hundred millionths of a second. During this short time, thousands of amps circulate within the primary tank circuit and the energy is coupled into the secondary resonator through magnetism. 

So what appears to be a continuous burst of sparks is actually a specific number of sparks generated per second. By modulating the number of sparks that emit from the coil each second, different tones can be produced by the coils.

These coils were constructed by Eric Goodchild and Steven Caton.

 

Antibiotics Linked to Weight Gain in Mice

From Scientific American:

Bacteria living naturally within the gut provide a gateway to flab, according to a few reports this week. These bacteria may explain how antibiotics fatten farm animals and perhaps people too, and how certain genes predispose organisms to obesity.

In a study published 22 August in Nature, researchers mimicked what farmers have been doing for decades to fatten up their livestock: they fed young mice a steady low dose of antibiotics. The antibiotics altered the composition of bacteria in the guts of the mice and also changed how the bacteria broke down nutrients. The bacteria in treated mice activated more genes that turn carbohydrates into short-chain fatty acids, and they turned on genes related to lipid conversion in the liver. Presumably, these shifts in molecular pathway enable fat build-up. Just as farm animals get fat, the antibiotic-fed mice put on weight. Martin Blaser, a microbiologist at New York University in New York, says that parents might unknowingly be promoting a similar phenomenon when they treat common ailments and ear infections in their children. To back that idea up, he points to another study he authored. The study, published on 21 August, found that a disproportionate number of 11,000 kids in the United Kingdom who were overweight by the time they were 3 years old had taken antibiotics within their first 6 months of life.

More here.

When the Mango Bites Back

From The New York Times:

NEW DELHI — Accepting a just-picked mango from a stranger in Lodi Gardens and then putting it directly into my mouth — skin and all — was stupid. I admit that. But why did my first horrible case of traveler’s diarrhea in India have to result from a mango? I love mangoes, and India’s vast array of deliciously different mango varieties has been one of the great delights of moving here. “You didn’t even wash it?” Dr. Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, asked me later. No. “Even by your standards, that was really stupid,” Dr. Offit said. But what about the local yogurt I had eaten and the probiotic pills I had taken — weren’t my gastrointestinal flora protecting me? Since we all carry 10 times as many bacterial cells as human ones, wasn’t I for all intents and purposes already more Indian than American? “Yogurt probably won’t hurt you, unless it’s contaminated as well,” Dr. Phyllis Kozarsky, an expert on traveler’s health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an interview. But there is no food on the planet that will protect against an onslaught of toxic bacteria, she added.

Despite decades of immunological research and a recent surge of interest in the bacterial garden of the human gut, diarrhea remains the most unpredictable travel-related illness. There is a grim acceptance among Western expatriates and visitors here that they will be felled by it — often on multiple occasions. And there is a host of myths surrounding traveler’s diarrhea, many of which I have cheerfully perpetuated to family and friends. (Well, mostly to my wife.) There are also intriguing mysteries about how natives gain immunity to the food- and waterborne bacteria that prove so toxic to non-natives. I have lived in India for four months, and I have been in gastrointestinal distress five times — roughly once a month. Part of the problem is that Indians are a very hospitable people. Almost everywhere I go, someone offers me food and drink, forcing me to quickly weigh the chance of contamination against the likelihood that a refusal would cause offense.

More here.

Wimbledon Diary

A terrific bit of sports writing by Asad Raza in n + 1:

The giant stadium screens you see at sports venues are another of the omnipresent, light-emitting diode displays that now accompany us on our walks and escalator rides; that keep us company as we loiter around bus stops, hotel lobbies, subway cars, and at home; that warm our ears as we speak on phones. Although LED-based video, with its hyperreal colors, is pretty new, it uses the same trichromatic system as a tube TV, a Kodachrome snapshot, and Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky’s 1908 color photo of Leo Tolstoy: a red, a green and a blue image are superimposed to create the full spectrum. Unlike all previous color systems, stadium screens designed for sports have a curious genetic modification: their pixels are made up of one red, one blue, and two green LEDs. Why two green ones? Because grass is green.

Three weeks ago, the first Wednesday of Wimbledon, the specialty pixels combined to display the familiar, near-fluorescent hue of ryegrass, expertly clipped and rolled. Until 2001, the tournament’s tennis lawns contained only 70 percent rye; the remaining 30 percent was the gothically named, but less resilient, creeping red fescue. But throughout the ’80s and ’90s, a phalanx of serve-and-volley players left the grass courts worn down to a T-shaped pattern of bald, baseball diamond-like dirt. This created a vicious cycle in which the more worn down the grass became, the faster players had to get to the net and keep the ball from bouncing erratically off the footprint-scalloped dirt. The exile of creeping red fescue was also part of a sport-wide attempt to slow down play on all surfaces in the wake of huge servers—Boris Becker, Goran Ivanisevic, and above all, the metronomical Pete Sampras—along with heavier balls and more sand mixed into hardcourts’ green paint. One way you know someone hasn’t been watching much tennis is if they trot out the old saw about the sport having become a serving contest. Since the switch to 100 percent ryegrass, no player who serves and volleys has won Wimbledon.

More here.

Tuesday Poem

The Illumination of the Kentucky Mountain Craftsman

Alone, he has come to the end
of the handing down of his art,
the time having little use
for such skill as his, his land
seeded with lies and scars.
So much has he suffered
in his flesh that the end of time,
the signs behind fulfilled,
the unsealing of the seals,
seems only to be borne
as he has borne the rest.
On the mountain top, stunning
him like the glance of God,
the lightning struck him. Entering
at the big tendons of his wrists,
it has stayed in his body
so that the insects no longer
bite him, and in the night
he is not afraid anymore.
.

by Wendell Berry
from Framing, a Handbook
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, NY

Justin E. H. Smith to Judge 4th Annual 3QD Philosophy Prize

UPDATE 9/24/12: The winners have been announced here.

UPDATE 9/17/12: The finalists have been announced here.

UPDATE 9/15/12: The semifinalists have been announced here.

UPDATE 9/6/12: Voting round is now open. Click here to see full list of nominees and vote.

Dear Readers, Writers, Bloggers,

We are very honored and pleased to announce that Justin E. H. Smith has agreed to be the final judge for our 4th annual prize for the best blog and online writing in the category of philosophy. (Details of the previous three philosophy prizes can be seen by clicking on the names of their respective judges here: Daniel Dennett, Akeel Bilgrami, and Patricia Churchland).

Justin E. H. Smith is professor of philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Beginning in 2013 he will be Professeur des Universités at the Université de Paris 7-Denis Diderot. Completing a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2000, his primary research focus over the past 15 years has been the history of metaphysics, philosophy of science, and natural philosophy in early modern Europe, with a particular interest in the philosophy of Leibniz. This interest culminated in 2011 with a lengthy study of Leibniz's theory of the generation, structure, and motion of living beings, entitled Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life. He has recently completed a book on the origins of so-called 'racial science' in the 18th century out of early modern philosophical debates about species taxonomy and the problem of natural kinds. This book, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of Race, will appear from Princeton University Press, in 2013. He has also recently completed a translation and critical edition, with François Duchesneau, of Georg Ernst Stahl's Negotium otiosum, seu Skiamachia (1720), to appear from Yale University Press next year. He also has longstanding metaphilosophical and methodological interests in the relationship of philosophy to its history. This interest has recently culminated in an edited volume, with Eric Schliesser and Mogens Laerke, on this topic, to appear next year from Oxford University Press. Another major research project, under contract with Princeton University Press, is a book entitled A Global History of Philosophy, to 1700, which, thankfully, he has another five years to complete. In this connection, he has a developing research interest in classical Indian philosophy, particularly the philosophy of language in the Pāṇinian tradition, as well as the theory of the composition of bodies in Vaiśeṣika atomism. Running through this recent turn to comparative and so-called 'non-Western' philosophy is a serious interest in the nature of the philosophical project, including its anthropology and sociology, and its historical relationship to other, partially overlapping domains of human activity, particularly religious ritual and applied science. He also writes for the New York Times Stone series. More about his work can be found here: www.jehsmith.com/philosophy.

As usual, this is the way it will work: the nominating period is now open, and will end at 11:59 pm EST on September 3, 2012. There will then be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add up to three wildcard entries of their own choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by Justin Smith.

The first place award, called the "Top Quark," will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the "Strange Quark," will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the "Charm Quark," along with a two hundred dollar prize.

(Welcome to those coming here for the first time. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed.)

Details:

The winners of this prize will be announced on September 24, 2012. Here's the schedule:

August 27, 2012:

• The nominations are opened. Please nominate your favorite blog entry by placing the URL for the blog post (the permalink) in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win. (Do NOT nominate a whole blog, just one individual blog post.)
• Blog posts longer than 4,000 words are strongly discouraged, but we might make an exception if there is something truly extraordinary.
• Each person can only nominate one blog post.
• Entries must be in English.
• The editors of 3QD reserve the right to reject entries that we feel are not appropriate.
• The blog entry may not be more than a year old. In other words, it must have been written after August 26, 2011.
• You may also nominate your own entry from your own or a group blog (and we encourage you to).
• Guest columnists at 3 Quarks Daily are also eligible to be nominated, and may also nominate themselves if they wish.
• Nominations are limited to the first 200 entries.
• Prize money must be claimed within a month of the announcement of winners.

September 3, 2012

• The nominating process will end at 11:59 PM (NYC time) of this date.
• The public voting will be opened soon afterwards.

September 14, 2012

• Public voting ends at 11:59 PM (NYC time).

September 24, 2012

• The winners are announced.

One Final and Important Request

If you have a blog or website, please help us spread the word about our prizes by linking to this post. Otherwise, post a link on your Facebook profile, Tweet it, or just email your friends and tell them about it! I really look forward to reading some very good material, and think this should be a lot of fun for all of us.

Best of luck and thanks for your attention!

Yours,

Abbas

Conventional Wisdom

by Akim Reinhardt   

As the Republican Party begins its national convention today in Florida, I offer this brief history of political conventions and examine their relevance to modern American politics.

The generation of political leaders who initiated and executed the American Revolution and founded a new nation, believed in the concept of republican virtue.  That is, they felt it the obligation of every citizen to give of themselves to the welfare of their new, shared political endeavor.  That their definition of citizenship was quite narrow is very imoprtant, but another matter altogether.

The founders believed that in order for the republic to survive and be healthy, citizens must sublimate their selfish interests for the sake of the general welfare.  In line with this, they imagined that the nation’s politicians would be citizen servants: men, who for a temporary period of time, sacrificed the profits and joys of their personal pursuits so that they might shoulder the responsibility of governing the nation, the states, and localities, offering their wisdom and insight for everyone’s benefit.

There was nothing of political parties in this vision.  Neither the Articles of Confederation nor the U.S. Constitution made any mention of them. They are, in the strict sense of the term, extra-constitutional political organizations, and they are most decidedly not what the new nation’s architects had in mind when they fashioned this republic.  Indeed, they did not even use the term “party” for the most part, instead referring to the political alliances that soon formed as “factions.”  George Washington especially despised the new factionalism, even in its nascent form, and he refused to ally with any group.  To this day, he is the only president listed on the roll of chief executives as Independent.

Perhaps it was näive of Washington and other purists to scoff at the emerging political gangs.  Perhaps the constitution’s framers should have better anticipated this development and done something to temper it, to keep it from warping their beloved system of checks and balances.  Regardless, the move towards modern parties was underway as the nation’s politicians began to lineup behind the philosophies and reputations of top leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams.

During the early 19th century, Jefferson’s Democrat-Republicans began to eclipse the less popular Federalists, who were largely relegated to New England.  Along the way, the Democrat-Republicans pioneered some modern electoral techniques. They developed a communications network of sympathetic newspapers and they blanketed certain areas with their own pamphlets and handbills.  They also engaged in early efforts to “get out the vote” on election day.  By 1806, they outnumbered Federalists 118-24 in the House of Representatives and 28-6 in the Senate.  But it was not long after their ascension that the Democrat-Republicans fell into their own chaotic, internal factionalism.

During the half-century following the Declaration of Independence, the new factions-cum-parties were still rudimentary things, not yet forming into full-fledged institutions.  Though unchallenged, the Democrat-Republicans still lacked the organization, discipline, and resources to create a one-party state.  They unraveled during the 1820s and then re-emerged under the tumultuous leadership of Andrew Jackson.

By the time Jackson first ran for president in 1824, there was no longer any Federalist party to speak of.  Everyone, by default, was a Democrat-Republican. When none of the four presidential candidates got a majority of electoral votes, the election was thrown into the House of Representatives.  The initial stalemate was broken when candidate Henry Clay implored his supporters to back John Quincy Adams.  It was enough to get Adams over the top, and Jackson’s supporters decried it as the “corrupt bargain.”

Jackson ran again in 1828 against the incumbent Adams.  This time, however, his campaign was more organized.  To help out, he brought New York’s Martin Van Buren on board.  The son of a Dutch tavern keeper in the upstate town of Kinderhook, Van Buren had risen to the zenith of New York politics by helping assemble the nation’s first statewide political machine, known as the Bucktails.  Members were loyal first and foremost to each other, and used their power as a voting bloc to dominate the state legislature and indulge in the spoils system of political patronage and payoffs.  Van Buren and the other leaders of the Bucktails were known as the Albany Regency.

By then a two-term U.S. Senator, Van Buren brought his relatively sophisticated party apparatus to Jackson’s 1828 campaign.  Gimmicks included planting hickory trees and handing out hickory sticks at rallies, to remind people of their candidate, who was nicknamed “Old Hickory.”  More substantial organizational techniques featured the hiring of a committee chair in each state who divided their state up into districts, and appointed leaders who rounded up volunteers to politick for Jackson.  It was a smash success and Jackson stormed to victory.  In return, he appointed Van Buren secretary of state, the cabinet position which at that time was seen as a grooming post for future presidents.  Later in Jackson’s first term he served as ambassador to England.

When Jackson had a falling out with his own vice president, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, he tabbed Van Buren to replace him in the next election.  Van Buren got the nod at the party’s first ever national convention, held in 1832 in Baltimore. Van Buren himself had been instrumental in organizing the first convention, and he would go on to win the presidency in 1836 after Jackson retired.

Jackson’s followers now dropped “republican” from their name and simply called their party the Democrats.  Democrats would continue to hold conventions as the place where they nominated their political candidates.  Rising from the ashes of the Federalists, the new opposition party known as the Whigs followed suit. They held their first convention in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1839 and nominated General William Henry Harrison for the following year’s presidential election.  Harrison would go on to defeat Van Buren in 1840.

By the 1850s, the Whigs were already on the on the road to extinction, unable to remain viable as the issues of slavery, nativism, and moral reform swept the nation.  Those opposed to slavery, immigration, and America’s supposed moral decay formed the new Republican Party, which emerged on the national stage after holding its first convention in Jackson, Michigan in 1854.

As political parties became entrenched in the American political landscape, national conventions became de rigeur.  Soon, state conventions followed as the parties stretched their tendrils ever further down to the local level.  Aside from developing a political platform, the main purpose of these conventions was to select political candidates to represent the party in upcoming elections.  And generally speaking, the process was highly undemocratic.

From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, high level party operative dominated the selection of major political candidates in most elections.  But since parties were private, extra-constitutional organizations, they were free to set their own rules about just how those candidates were nominated.  And for the most part, that meant ignoring the voting electorate.

Large national and state conventions were usually dominated by political bosses who negotiated with each other to come up with a party slate.  This process is now often romanticized by the image of hazy backrooms filled with cigar smoke and the stench of bourbon, where men with extensive facial hair rolled up their sleeves and went to work. However, the reality was that conventions represented a de-democratization of American politics.  Political candidates produced by this system were usually a far cry from the citizen servants that the Revolutionary generation had imagined.  Instead, they were often career politicians who owed their success to powerful, private interests: the bosses who could make or break them by getting them on or keeping them off the slate.  It was a recipe for corruption.

At the local level, it was even worse.  Local leaders competed and negotiated to select nominees not only for important municipal and state offices like mayor and state legislator, but for also for every elected office, no matter how minor, including the proverbial dog-catcher.  Party primaries for city elections were often held at late hours in unadvertized, hard to find locations. And since the list of favored party nominees was usually negotiated in advance behind closed doors by party leaders, what followed was often little more than a coronation of those decisions.

During the Progressive era (ca. 1890-1917), pro-democracy reformers in the United States began to call for changes.  In 1910, Oregon became the first state to override parties.  It required them to send delegates to their national conventions who supported the nominees chosen by Oregon voters.  The modern presidential primary had been born.  Eleven states followed Oregon’s lead within two years, though most of them offered voters only non-binding primaries.  And by the mid-1960s, the number states employing presidential primary elections (most of them non-binding) was still just twelve.  Thus, the conventions were still where everything got decided as party leaders from around the nation bargained and bullied to get their men nominated.

When television burst on the scene in the 1950s, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Republican and Democratic national conventions every four years was the norm.  And it was mandatory viewing for interested citizens.  The cameras never went behind the closed doors where many of the decisions were actually made, but nevertheless, the decision unfolded live on TV.

The turning point came with the Democratic Party’s fiasco at their 1968 national convention in Chicago, which is best remembered for Chicago police beating the shit out of anti-Vietnam war protesters on live, national television, while the bloodied but defiant marchers repeatedly chanted “The whole world is watching!”  But that convention was also important because it provided the impetus for the modern primary system wherein party candidates are selected by voters.  Democratic incumbent Lyndon Johnson did not run for re-election in 1968 because of his unpopularity over the war.  His handpicked successor was Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who gained the nomination from party leaders despite the primary successes of anti-war candidates Eugene McCarthy, and the recently deceased Robert Kennedy, shot to death shortly after winning the California primary.

In response to widespread party discontent over this development, compounded by Humphrey’s subsequent defeat to Republican Richard Nixon in the general election, the Democratic National Committee created the McGovern-Fraser Commission to assess the situation.  It recommended that the party should have more (though not all) of its national delegates be selected by its registered electorate.  The Republican National Committee soon made a similar recommendation.  Not coincidentally, McGovern-Fraser Committee co-chair George McGovern, who was intimately familiar with the new rules, made the most of it to successfully win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972.  He too lost to Richard Nixon.

Television networks continued to cover the national conventions even though the candidates were now unofficially chosen long before the conventions took place.  Consequently, the purpose of the conventions shifted.  Instead of selection, the focus now shifted to revelation.  Under the glare of television lights, conventions now became the place where the major parties unveiled their new political platforms and showcased their star politicians, including a crescendo featuring its candidates for the White House.

For most of the remainder of the 20th century, the quadrennial national party conventions continued to be must-see TV for the politically engaged.  However, slowly but surely, the once mighty party conventions have lost their luster for most Americans.  Here in 2012, the major television networks are according a scant three hours of live coverage to each party’s party.  They’ve determined that they can garner better prime time advertising revenues by airing the usual fare of crime dramas and sitcoms, some of them repeats.  Each convention only got three hours from the major networks in 2004 as well, though slightly more in 2008 amid the excitement surrounding Barack Obama.

Without any meaningful decisions to be made, the conventions have lost most of their pizzaz.  And in the modern age of mass communications, they have become tightly scripted and highly predictable.  Aiming to be engaging spectacles, they miss the target by a wide mark, as they’re typically short on surprises, long on dogma, and chock full of frozen smiles, stilted oration, and wooden stage presence.  These are, after all, modern politicians, and most of them boast a level of charisma that pales in comparison even to the cast from reconstituted Hawaii Five-O; a repeat episode of that turgid drama is bumping the Republicans from CBS tonight.  Full coverage of the conventions has long since has been relegated to the mostly partisan cable news channels.

Since their inception, private political parties have done far more harm to American politics than good.  Their nominating conventions, which dominated the political landscape for well over a century, in many ways epitomized their near monopoly on politics and the corruption that flowed from it.  So to the extent that the conventions’ sinking popularity and growing irrelevancy represent a strike against the anti-democratic bulwark of political parties, let us celebrate.  However, to the extent that it represents a general decline of citizens’ interest in the political life of the republic, let us mourn, and note that the parties themselves have much to anser for on this count.
--
Akim Reinahardt blogs regularly at The Public Professor.

Monday Poem

The Architecture of Memory

Every room has its story—

the back of the house is darkest
but light floods the porch
where we sit after a long day
rising now and then from its steps,
momentarily leaving our drinks
to wander back through old doors
and rummage among the stuff we’ve stacked
against walls and under beds
reaching for the odd object
we’d just nudged with a recollection
as we sauntered through conversation,
as if a salvaged thought was a lamp
which, being disturbed,
clicks on automatically,
becomes a sun in a dimming universe
or lightning strike in a new storm,
either way a big brilliant thing
massive as the posts & beams
of a venerable house
—the bellied bones of time
upholding the spirit
of the place
.

by Jim Culleny
8/8/12

Reading a Riot

by Gautam Pemmaraju

Over two weeks ago, on August 11, a sizeable gathering of over 15,000 gathered at Azad Maidan, a public ground in Mumbai, to protest violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar/Burma and those of the northeastern Indian state of Assam. It was in early to mid July that violence broke out between sections of the multifaith indigenous Bodo people and migrant Bengali Muslims in Kokrajhar, Chirang & Dubhri districts of Assam displacing over 400,000 people, and earlier, 87 people were reportedly killed in ethnic clashes between Rohingya and Buddhists in Rakhine. The crowds were responding to a call by Raza Academy, a 25 year old Mumbai based organization, that has been actively mobilizing Muslims in the city protesting slights against their religious sentiments – from anti-George Bush public protests, announcing a cash prize of 100000 rupees for hurling a slipper at Salman Rushdie at the Jaipur Literary Festival early this year, seeking the revoking of a visa to the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, to protesting the presence in Mumbai of the Canada based Pakistani cleric Tahirul Qadri, accused of apostasy and of thanking Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, for providing state security for his public gathering in Ahmedabad. (See Faisal Devji’s interesting piece on the Rushdie/Jaipur Lit Fest episode here).

A group of no more than 2000 people were expected to gather, but unanticipated crowds filled up Azad Maidan, and reportedly, a group of rioters, armed with sticks, rods and swords, which had infiltrated the congregation, went amuck at around 3.15 PM, setting fire to TV OB Vans, police vans, public transport buses, besides attacking policeman and media persons. The violent mob, gathered at the gate of Azad Maidan, had begun to raise angry slogans against the media for not adequately reporting the ‘atrocities’, displaying images of ‘atrocities’ against Muslims. These images, which had been circulating across social media, were in no small measure, immensely provocative. In the violence that ensued, two Muslim youth were killed in firing, and 54 people were injured, mostly police. There have been allegations that some policewomen were sexually assaulted.

The graphic images of Muslims being ‘slaughtered at the hands of Buddhists’, as several reports have revealed (in particular, this one by Pakistan based Faraz Ahmed) are doctored. A picture of ‘1000 people killed in Burma’ captioned ‘Continuity of Massacre of Muslims of Burma by Buddhists’ was in actuality a 2004 picture of Thai protestors, he revealed. Several commentators have written about the circulation of these images via social media and Yousuf Saeed writes here of his attempts to reveal them as fake. While the suffering of the Rohingya and the complexity of the situation (see here & here) is doubtless, most commentators have been quick to point out, these doctored images have facilitated a peculiar and disturbing mobilization, both online and off, as played out at Azad Maidan on August 11. In addition, several publications played up these doctored images and the accompanying rumours alongside amplified outrage, as CM Naim points out here to an editorial article published in the Delhi Urdu paper Sahafat, on the “World Community’s Silence on the Massacre in Burma”.

Arup Patnaik, the now transferred police commissioner, as many have argued, did what most sensible cops would do (and ought to do) – he did not lose his cool and order a firing on the mob. He instead restrained his force, ‘running helter-skelter’ with ‘fingers on the trigger’, appealed on stage for calm and orderly dispersal, and thereby not just ensured a timely scaling down of the extremely volatile climate, but in no uncertain terms, averted what would have been a major catastrophe. It is not just the potential loss of human life that was at stake there, it was also the collective fragile psyche of a city that was torn apart by communal mayhem 20 years ago, in the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid by Hindu right wing forces. Pointing to the top cop’s ‘exemplary restraint’, Javed Anand and Teesta Setalvad write here that it was “precisely what peace loving Mumbaikar’s need to thank him for.  Instead of repeating history, Patnaik has tried creating one.” Indeed, for Patnaik himself recalled (see this NDTV discussion show) his personal experience as a Deputy Commissioner of Police during 1992-93 riots in Bombay, wherein 188 people had died in police firing over one day. His ‘entire idea’, the cop further revealed, was to control his force, because he was well aware from prior experience how things could go out of hand very easily, for if he had ordered a firing, ‘two-three hundred’ people would have been killed, and it was, in his estimation, ‘better to take some stones’.

In this keen analysis, Jyoti Punwani argues at the outset that the rally at Azad Maidan may just turn out to be historic for two main reasons. Firstly, the conduct of the police, which has in the past been “indicted for their communal conduct towards Muslims by two judicial commissions”, and secondly, “for the anger of the city’s Muslims against the ulema who organised the rally.” Pointing to the grave volatility of the situation at Azad Maidan that Saturday afternoon, “a bloody confrontation” looming, she points out that under other circumstances, or leadership to be more precise, the mob would most certainly have been fired upon. The Hindu right wing, from the BJP, the Shiv Sena and the MNS, would have preferred that, she indicates, since that has been the traditional way to deal with Muslim mobs in the city, and that the claims of a ‘soft’ approach by the police commissioner underscores the psychological militancy of the right, which often enough erupts into physical violence. The MNS, the truculent sibling of the Shiv Sena, has made much noise of the incident, and in defiance of police orders, led a protest rally on the day after Eid, following the last fasting day of Ramzan, demanding the removal of the top cop and the home minister, RR Patil. At the public gathering, also held at Azad Maidan, Raj Thackeray, the leader of MNS, squarely blamed ‘dens of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis’ from the northern states of UP and Bihar, who come in hordes to Mumbai and create ‘such problems’.   As of Friday, Arup Patnaik was replaced as Mumbai’s Police Commissioner, an action that the state administration has described as a routine administrative transfer.

Several former cops and administrators are in agreement with Arup Patnaik’s handling of the riotous mob. But many have also raised questions as to whether there was a failure of intelligence. The ousted police commissioner had pointed out that a 650 strong force was present, and it was over deployment to be on the safe side. They had inkling that things may go ‘haywire’, Patnaik said on TV, but it was a ‘bandobust’ arrangement and not securing a ‘law and order’ situation. Of the many questions that have been thrown up, the critical one is why the police had misread, or had not even read at all, the sentiments of the community at large. In fact, had central intelligence authorities not adequately evaluated the tensions in Assam? Former cop and intelligence man V Balachandran, interestingly raises this issue here, while discussing the social media blockage, and points to the fact that the central security management seemed not to have taken adequate cognisance of the strong sentiments amongst Muslims across South Asia in relation to the Assam and Myanmar events. Wondering if the Ministry of Home Affairs had conveyed anything to the states at all, he points out that the Tehreek-e-Taliban had issued a threat on July 26^th, and that it was clear community sentiments were aflame. Were intelligence agencies unaware of this? Many commentators, former cops/intelligence men and administrators have consistently pointed to compromised human intelligence networks, the increased alienation of the Muslim community with regard to the police, and the increased infiltration of right wing elements within the force. Jyoti Punwani points to this here, while raising the important issue of the attack on the cops: “Saturday’s violence by Muslim youth has shaken Mumbai. This is probably the first time that policemen have borne the brunt of the violence — of the 63 injured, 58 are policemen. What kind of mob has the guts to attack the police and think it can get away with it?” Should permission have been granted at all to the public meeting, given the potent mix of rumours, inflamed sentiments and indications of impending trouble? Was this potent mix visible to the authorities at all?

The violence in Assam and Myanmar (and the provocative social media messages) has had wider repercussions across India, as sudden spurts of threats and attacks against Northeasterners in various Indian cities began to disturbingly emerge. An exodus of Northeastern students and workers from Bangalore, Pune and Hyderabad ensued, as officials were caught unawares. (See here and here). In several areas, those who looked as if they were Northeastern were singled out for attacks. Reports of anonymous text messages threatening retaliation against the Assam violence kept coming in as Northeasterners thronged railways stations. Special trains had to be pressed into service to cope with the situation. Commentators have criticized the state governments for not doing enough to quell the fears and the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, appealed for calm on August 16^th. The very next day, central authorities placed a 15-day ban on bulk text messages and data exceeding 20 kb. The telecom industry was hit immediately and this report says, “it’s not teenagers who are frustrated with SMS restrictions”, since telemarketers will lose 30% of monthly revenues. Security agencies and the hospitality sectors have also been hit, since they employ significant numbers of Northeastern workers. The government also blocked twitter accounts of several people, including commentators whose postings appeared inflammatory.

Salil Tripathi argues here that the restrictions on messaging, the banning of certain webpages like the Pakistani reporter Faraz Ahmed’s post mentioned early in this article, is a “blunt response, monumentally silly”. The truth he asserts, is the failure of the authorities to respond in a timely and effective manner to the violence in Assam, and let ‘malevolent groups’ exploit the tensions.

A mirror-image of the Hindu right wing communal/sectarian malevolence in Mumbai, this article explores here, is that espoused by the perfume baron and Assam MP Badruddin Ajmal, whose party AIUDF, has in the recent years found their ‘political fortunes’ through ‘exploiting Muslim victimhood’ (see also here and here). He has been blamed for ‘fanning communal tensions’ and the All Assam Students Union (AASU) joined by indigenous Muslim groups, have accused him also of being responsible for the fear psychosis amongst Northeasterners across India. The current conflict in Assam has allowed him to ‘spread his net wider’, as it has similarly allowed Raj Thackeray to flex his muscle on his home turf in Mumbai.

Once again the fragility of the national fabric has been exposed by these disturbances and the associated fallout. Seething anger, dangerous undercurrents, and underlying tensions are commonplace. The tinderbox is easily ignited by pernicious politics, rumours, apathy, inaction and sectarian, communal, ethic, regional differences explode in shocking violence, affecting the nation at large in profound ways. As investigators make arrests in the Azad Maidan riots, alleging  a deeper conspiracy, the timely action of Arup Patnaik, Mumbai’s erstwhile top cop and now fall guy, is an exemplary lesson in defusing tensions and working in the public interest at large.

perceptions

Kourosh Adim. In Wind. 1996.

Photograph.

More here and here.

Tina Brown, Christopher Hitchens, Niall Ferguson, Rupert Murdoch -- What's With Our American Blindness To These Imported British Assholes?

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

The musical British invasion of the 60s and 70s brought us the Beatles, the Stones, Herman's Hermits, the Dave Clark Five, the Searchers and other great bands, who made us realize anew that American music was the greatest popular music ever, as these imports sold back to us and reminded us of our best blues and Tin Pan Alley traditions.

The journalistic British invasion of the 80s and 90s brought us Tina Brown, Christopher Hitchens, Niall Ferguson and Rupert Murdoch -- assholes all, who have lowered the intellectual tone of American journalism and brought us cheap sensationalism and provocation for the sake of provocation and nothing else.

One reason we Americans are so easily blinded by these assholes is simply their accents: Americans have always thought that the British accent denotes great intelligence. I mean, Shakespeare in a British accent sounds more elegant than played in American accents, doesn't it -- despite the fact that the accent of Shakespeare's own time was probably closer to American than Brit.

The other reason is that, because of a British liberal arts education, which is superior to its US counterpart, these folks can display remarkable erudition. Unlike most American journalists, they've actually read a lot -- enough to impress us Americans anyway.

The third reason is their intellectual smugness. We take this as a sign of their intellectual superiority, but it's nothing but an infuriatingly annoying British smug shallow high-table confidence that the Oxbridge snobs have used to condescend to us and intimidate us for ages.

The British have undoubtedly gained by the good riddance of these assholes to the US, but their gain is our loss. Let's see how deep this loss goes, by taking these assholes in turn.

1. Asshole Tina Brown. This lass edited The Tatler in Britain, where she refined her lifetime mission of producing shallow sucking-up-to-celebrities shit for snotnoses. She was then imported to the USA to run Vanity Fair, and turned this People Magazine for snotnoses into a great success, owing to an amazing number of heretofore undiscovered shallow snotnoses in America. Then she went on to edit The New Yorker, and in one fell swoop managed to traduce the tradition of an erstwhile intellectually rigorous magazine down to the level of Vanity Fair or even People Magazine. Before she came on board, one could easily spend 40 minutes reading The New Yorker. After her, it took a mere ten minutes to get through its trashy writing (Christ, this was the magazine who once upon a time had Pauline Kael as their movie reviewer; now they review any old Hollywood crap). After mucking about with the Weinsteins on the extremely shallow and short-lived sucking-up-to-celebrities-shit Talk Magazine, Tina Brown then, thank God, safely sidelined herself to her internet changeling, The Daily Beast, a perfect reflection of her shitty shallow taste, being a kind of poor man's Huffington Post (which has now also swallowed Newsweek). Of course she also wrote a book about Princess Di.

2. Asshole Christopher Hitchens. This dude came to The Nation and quickly established a tradition of high-minded leftist writing. Then came 9/11, and along with the entire US nation, he lost his moral compass. Because the Aytollah Khomeini had told all Muslims to please kill his pal Salman Rushdie, and because he was familiar with Muslim fundamentalists like the Taliban ("fascism with an Islamic face"), Hitchens became an apologist for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their neocon wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And this is a guy who revered George Orwell, and wrote a good book about him; wish that he had Orwell's moral acuity.

3. Asshole Niall Ferguson. This historian dude, whose historical thought gave him the amazing insight that the British Empire has been the main civilizing force in human history, got so excited by the Bush/Cheney wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, that he decided the American Empire could be the next great civilizing force in human history. Recently he penned a whack job on Obama in Newsweek, run by Tina Brown, that was so flawed on actual facts (really pathetic coming from a Harvard professor) that James Fallows, a fellow Harvard dude, apologized on behalf of his alumni for Ferguson's intellectual charlatanism. Tina Brown plus Niall Ferguson -- a perfect storm of British assholism.

4. Asshole Rupert Murdoch. What can one say about this pernicious individual, who with Fox News has tore an immense asshole in the innocent body of American journalism? I've said it all before, when I called him America's own Goebbels (read about it here).

When you feel yourself prone to cower before British erudition, smugness or their precious accent, consider this corrective: look how American comedians created the ultimate satire on British rock star pretension: This Is Spinal Tap, the final proof that Americans are smarter than Brits.

Weirdly enough, there's one Brit pundit import who changed for the better. Andrew Sullivan edited The New Republic at a very young age, and subsequently, very untrue to form, turned into a journalistic asset. He was one of the first in the field to make blogging a respectable field for punditry with his The Daily Dish, and as a gay Republican and Obama supporter, he may be the only sane Republican left in America.

On the other hand, there's Martin Amis. This modish, verbosity-sodden novelist and opinionist, who in his extensive oeuvre has not penned a single book as funny or as insightful as those from his pater, Kingsley Amis, has recently moved from Hampstead, London to Brooklyn, New York.

Heaven help us. With this latest British asshole in our midst, the invasion of assholes who blind us Americans with their accents, erudition and smugness, continues apace.

Who's next? Tony Blair? Hey, Tina dahlink, why don't you import him to blind us with a weekly column?

(Afternote: I have a book out, self-published at the moment, based on my many provocative posts to 3QD. It's called The Real Obama: Progressive Tiger or Wall Street Poodle? You'll never have more fun reading about politics. Only $12 -- order a copy here: lulu.com/product/paperback/the-real-obama-progressive-tiger-or-wall-street-poodle/18939747)

Mitt's "proud to be an American" tax rate

by Sarah Firisen

There once was a company Bain
That Mitt Romney runs from in vain
To prove no active role
Is clearly his goal
But to believe that is really a strain

While bailing the Olympic games out
The evidence shows he had clout
Bain's full owner it seems
But no part of their schemes
A technicality he says with a pout

We should just take good ole Mitt's word
That the lines really never got blurred
And those offshore accounts
That scored huge tax discounts?
Un-American. That's just absurd!

Nothing's more patriotic you know
Than to legally watch your wealth grow
To avoid as much tax
As you can to the max
And in Swiss banks more cash to stow

No one's prouder of country than he
It's just not where his money should be
That's the American way
There's no need to pay
When he can get away living tax-free

He says there's nothing more we can learn
By looking at past tax returns
It must be apparent
He's been quite transparent
Trust him, there's no need for concern

So does everyone have this all straight?
It's really not up for debate
The record on Bain
Is just not germane
To a perfectly legal tax rate!

Beyond Catholic: The Fight for Women

by Joy Icayan

Somewhere we got stuck in history. Condoms cause various diseases, pregnancies, the potential loss of your job, and an eternal life in hell, at least according to the leaders of my country. The Reproductive Health Bill has divided the Philippine population, made up of 80% Catholics into opposing sides, and muddled the conversation with statistics and sob stories, a crying politician, rallies, online appeals to the Creator so on, so forth. 

It’s like being in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel.

The huge outcry, coming no less, from the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines stems from some provisions of the RH Bill: first that the government would be mandated to provide contraceptives and related materials to its constituents, second that the RH Bill proposes age appropriate sex education for the youth. The purpose of the bill is basic enough: to reduce the significant number of maternal deaths in the country, to provide women a choice to plan their families, to educate people so they can become responsible about their choices.

To provide a context, more than half of the population is living in poverty.  Most cannot afford contraceptives; pregnant women often do not get decent prenatal or postnatal care. Unsafe abortions are rampant—and daily news tabloids often feature pictures of fetuses in trash cans. When they get especially brutal, sometimes they feature pictures of wire hangers and women with punctured insides—sob stories of a failed abortion.

To provide a more personal context, we grew up fearing an unwanted pregnancy most of all. It was because you had no options—it meant your future was over. You couldn’t buy condoms because you weren’t supposed to know about sex. What we learned about sex, we learned from the crumpled magazines the boys managed to get from wherever and passed around.  If you did get pregnant too early, it meant you were unchaste, dirty. Your saving grace was to get married soon. If you were the boy who got someone pregnant, it was your responsibility to ‘man up’ or marry the woman, regardless of your state of maturity. (There is also no divorce in the country.)

But contraceptives, according to our religious leaders, are abortifacients. Educating our children about sex is evil. To take the talk even further, one politician says that masturbation is abortion. (If so, I would hate to think of the daily genocides happening in the homes).

Sometimes during focused group discussions for my job, I ask people what they perceive their rights are. Children list off what they’ve learned from school – stuff they’ve memorized but barely understand, the right for an education and the right to health. The more political ones cite their right for better working conditions, an end to abuses and so forth. But always it is the women, often in economically disadvantaged communities, whose answers fascinate me. They often answer that it is the woman’s right to take care of her family. At first, I thought they were confusing rights for responsibilities, but it turns out they weren’t. Women think of themselves as mothers first, rather than as individuals, and while that may be seen as noble in every way, one can’t help but think how different it might be if they did it out of choice rather than circumstance.  If they did it out of choice every time.

It might be all about limiting perspectives—not of the middle class, because those can afford to get contraceptives or even get safe abortions whenever they want, but of the greater majority who are invisible to those who make the choices about these things. It’s about offering a more level playing field—and not imposing values inspired by the Virgin Mary or other martyred saints. It’s about saying that no, you do not have to be pregnant every time you want sex, you do not have to look at every drip of semen as a blessing, you do not even have to want to be a mother. That’s fine, and the men in suits talking about you should know it’s fine.

 

A Portrait of the Economy

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

Histories of economics tend to start with Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations, but Sylvia Nasar leads off with Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol. It’s an unusual choice, but an effective and appropriate introduction to the story she wants to tell in Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius. Dickens shows us the redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge—his conversion from pinchpenny to beneficent bon vivant. Nasar aims to redeem economics from its intellectual roots as a science of scarcity and avarice and present it as a tool for improving the human condition.

Nasar is the author of A Beautiful Mind, a biography of the brilliant but troubled mathematician John Nash. Biography, rather than economics, is the true genre of this new book as well. Economic theories and principles are sketched when necessary, but economists’ lives are rendered in full color and lavish detail.

The book’s longest chapter is given to Beatrice Webb and, by extension, her husband Sidney Webb, the founders of the London School of Economics. We follow the wealthy young Beatrice from Gloucester to London for her coming out; we learn about her long and futile infatuation with Joseph Chamberlain (father of Neville) and her sparring matches with philosopher and evolutionist Herbert Spencer at the family dinner table; there’s a bit of upstairs–downstairs drama when Beatrice becomes close with a servant, Martha Jackson, whom she later learns is actually a poor relation.

More here.

Bad Writing Award Winners Announced

Gabe Habash in Publishers Weekly:

Here are some other winners from this year’s awards. Click here for the full list of awfulness.

She slinked through my door wearing a dress that looked like it had been painted on … not with good paint, like Behr or Sherwin-Williams, but with that watered-down stuff that bubbles up right away if you don’t prime the surface before you slap it on, and – just like that cheap paint – the dress needed two more coats to cover her. — Sue Fondrie, Appleton, WI

They still talk about that fateful afternoon in Abilene, when Dancing Dan DuPre moonwalked through the doors of Fat Suzy’s saloon, made a passable reverse-turn, pirouetted twice followed by a double box-step, somersaulted onto the bar, drew his twin silver-plated Colt-45s and put twelve bullets through the eyes of the McLuskey sextuplets, on account of them varmints burning down his ranch and lynching his prize steer. — Ted Downes, Cardiff, U.K.

William, his senses roused by a warm fetid breeze, hoped it was an early spring’s equinoxal thaw causing rivers to swell like the blood-engorged gumlines of gingivitis, loosening winter’s plaque, exposing decay, and allowing the seasonal pot-pouris of Mother Nature’s morning breath to permeate the surrounding ether, but then he awoke to the unrelenting waves of his wife’s halitosis. — Guy Foisy, Orleans, Ontario

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