Archive for August, 2009
…and Andrew Sullivan Probably Isn’t, But…
Several things make Andrew Sullivan a great blogger. One is his immediate, visceral approach: he says what he thinks about something in any given moment. Another is his intellectual honesty: he will say “I was wrong” when new information prompts him to correct or adjust something he’d said. A third (and by no means the last) is his human touch: he lets his emotions show, he comes across as a real person and not a calculated media persona.
Add to this the fact that I also agree with him on just about every substantive issue and it’s no wonder he’s one of my favourite bloggers. What are those issues? The Media. Iraq. Sarah Palin. President Obama. Health Care. Torture. Gay Rights. Israel. And many others.
Whoah, wait a minute — Israel? Absolutely. And why not? As far as I can make out, Sullivan thinks that all of the West Bank and Gaza should become a proper, independent Palestinian state, and so do I. As far as I can make out, Sullivan doesn’t think that Israel has any business building anything at all on territory it conquered in 1967, and neither do I.
No, I don’t have any problems with Sullivan’s positions on Israel/Palestine.
And I most certainly don’t have the slightest problem with his position on torture, nor with his powerful and necessary criticism of how the issue is dealt with (or not dealt with) by the NYT and WaPo.
But sometimes I’m bothered by some of his symbolism and language. One example: the “some of my best friends are Jews” moment he had recently (which I posted about here). Another example: a point made by his colleague Jeffrey Goldberg about Sullivan being amused by things Jew-baiters write.
And so I do have a problem with this: “The fight for America to remain a torturing nation is resilient. It’s what the neocons believe in: the torture of terror suspects, especially Arab or Muslim ones…”
Now just hang on a minute. “Especially Arab or Muslim ones”? How could you possibly know this, Sullivan? What other categories (non-Arab/non-Muslim) of terror suspects has America been dealing with in recent history, the treatment of whom recommended by the “neocons” might have allowed for an observation of contrast to justify this accusation? There is simply no basis for it. It’s a specious, gratuitous smear. It appears that Sullivan is so disgusted by the neocons that things which he merely imagines become, for him, reality. But – and this is the crucial point – the reason they become reality for him is that, as a result of his prejudices, they seem probable to him.
Sullivan uses the word “neocon” a lot. In the mouths (or pens or keyboards) of some people, this is code for “Jew”. I have always been, and I remain, willing to give Sullivan the benefit of the doubt; it is easy enough, after all, to see why a guy who considers and calls himself a “conservative” would want a way to distinguish between his world view and that of a set of people he so strongly (and rightly) disagrees with. But when I see it juxtaposed in this way with a completely baseless, gratuitous smear that quite clearly has no relation to any kind of reality at all, and that, moreover, and perhaps more to the point, conjures a set of prejudices that many who use the word “neocon” in as code for “Jew” would happily impute to those they so name, I begin to wonder: what are Sullivan’s real feelings about Jews? (In reality I began to wonder that quite a while ago.)
I’ll tell you what I think they are. I say this in full recognition of the very real possibility that I could be completely wrong. I say it in full recognition that it’s based merely on having read the guy’s blog, not on having met him, much less spoken to him at length. So, I could be wrong, but here’s what I think: I think Sullivan thinks that while Jews had a rough time of it up to and, especially, including the Second World War, they’ve since been in the ascendancy and today are doing so well that we really needn’t worry about them. Let’s support the downtrodden by all means, and fight against racism that is directed against disenfranchised minorities, but the Jews, my God, they’re rich and powerful; they practically run US Foreign Policy through AIPAC, they practically control Hollywood and Wall Street, and we really don’t need to worry on their behalf.
It sounds harsh, and maybe it’s too harsh, but I find that’s really the best I can credit Sullivan with at this point. I wouldn’t call him an anti-Semite. But is he a Jew-baiter?
Well, he was amused enough by an image of Anne Frank in a keffiyeh to link to a post about it on the blog Little Green Footballs, giving his own post the chortling title “LGF Bait”. Now think about this. Sullivan is a very sophisticated man. Think about the name Anne Frank, or the image of her face: what do these things connote? Of course. Jew. Now think about Sullivan’s use of the word “bait”. And now ask yourself: is it really believable that a guy like Sullivan could have decided to do that post, and link to that image, and title his post as he did, all without the idea of “Jew Bait” ever occurring to him? It’s impossible to imagine. I think Sullivan thought his title very clever and funny indeed, that’s what I think.
Update: I’d neglected to mention how Sullivan had been quite captivated by Ron Paul during the last Republican primaries. I only once met someone who was actually loony enough to be a proud Ron Paul supporter. In almost the same breath that that person declared his adoration of Ron Paul, he also managed to reveal that he was a raving anti-Semite. Not that, knowing what one does about Ron Paul, this was in any way a surprise. (I excused myself from the table in order to avoid punching the man in the face. Later it occurred to me that I probably should have taken the latter course of action.)
Donald Boström is an anti-Semite
Hey, Google: Donald Boström is an anti-Semite. Donald Boström is an anti-Semite. Donald Boström is an anti-Semite. Donald Boström is an anti-Semite. Donald Boström is an anti-Semite. Donald Boström is an anti-Semite. Donald Boström is an anti-Semite. Donald Boström is an anti-Semite. Donald Boström is an anti-Semite. Donald Boström is an anti-Semite. Donald Boström is an anti-Semite. Donald Boström is an anti-Semite. Donald Boström is an anti-Semite. Donald Boström is an anti-Semite. Donald Boström is an anti-Semite. Donald Boström is an anti-Semite. Donald Boström is an anti-Semite. Donald Boström is an anti-Semite. Donald Boström is an anti-Semite. Donald Boström is an anti-Semite.
Just saying. I mean, freedom of speech, right?
Magical Movements at the Jewish Chronicle
In the Spectator we find this note from Martin Bright, posted yesterday:
I was delighted, not to say honoured, when Stephen Pollard approached me to become the political editor of The Jewish Chronicle.
Wait a minute. Can this be true? How does approaching Martin Bright help Stephen Pollard become the political editor of the JC? And at what distance from Martin does this strange effect fully take hold on Stephen?
(Via Norm)
One Understands What One Wants to Understand
Norman Geras hits a nail on the head in this post. And a very important nail it is, too. You’ll have to read his whole post (it’s short) to know what he’s talking about, but what I’m talking about are these words of his:
Many of Israel’s critics not only don’t know it; they seem to have no capacity for grasping why Israelis should feel this way.
Bingo.
Actually there’s a bit more to it than just that, which I think Norm intends to communicate between the lines. It is of course not actually believable that most critics of Israel literally inherently lack the capacity to understand why Israelis should feel threatened. Many of them have, after all, the capacity to ‘understand‘ those who want to mass-murder Jewish babies.
No, it’s not that today’s Groanistas couldn’t understand Israeli fears. It’s that they don’t want to, because understanding Israelis would get in the way of being able to fully savour their marvelously gratifying Israel-bashing addictions.
That’s Bullshit, John Murtha!
The big story at the moment is how the House of Representatives has been caught trying to slip some nifty new jets for itself into a military spending bill. This comes only a few months after this very same House lambasted industry execs for their luxurious travel habits. The public outcry over the House’s hypocrisy has barely begun to build to its inevitable crescendo yet already the House has hastily withdrawn its little scheme. That says something. The Huffington Post reports:
“If the Department of Defense does not want these aircraft, they will be eliminated from the bill,” said Rep. John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat who chairs the panel that approved the additional spending.
Oh Murtha you fork-tongued old pol, you. You know damn well that the Pentagon never wanted those planes; you and Nancy and all your other House cronies did.
But the best is this:
Murtha said the newer jets were needed to replace older aircraft with safety and maintenance issues that cost a lot more to operate.
So without further ado, without so much as even trying to put this supposedly so important case for safety and cost-savings to the public, you are now rushing to drop these “needed” plans and embrace, instead, a fleet that has safety issues and will cost the public more as well. Yeah, right….
Not Quite The Prez’s Talking Points
Ben Smith of Politico last week picked up something that subsequently got lots of coverage in the blogosphere: right-wing screamer Bill O’Reilly’s “ode” to President Obama.
Barack Obama, a youngster in Hawaii without his parents around, has toughed it out and become one of history’s great stories, no matter what happens going forward, what he has achieved in his 48 years is simply astounding. Consider the odds. The United States is a nation of more than 300 million citizens. Only one person is currently the Commander in Chief. That man had no fatherly guidance, is of mixed race, and had no family connections to guide him into the world of national politics. That adds up to one simple truth that every American child should be told: “If Barack Obama can become the President of the United States, then whatever dream you may have can happen in your life.
Ben Smith says this is “language that could have come out of the president’s campaign talking points.”
Not all of it, Ben. Not this: “of mixed race”. That little phrase betrays an awful lot about Bill O’Reilly. For who talks like that, after all? Who says things like ”mixed race” these days? People who are either openly racist, or uncomfortable talking about “race” because they because they are secretly racist. Birchers. Birthers. Klansmen. Confederate-flag-flying sons of bitches all over the South. And Bill O’Reilly.
The point – O’Reilly’s point, at least — about Obama isn’t really that he’s got one white parent and one black parent. The point is that he’s black, and whether that’s because he’s got one black parent or two is of no consequence.
There’s nothing wrong with making a big deal out of Obama’s being black, because it is a big deal. It’s huge. The first black President of the United States. When he won the elction, I was among the millions who were overcome with the emotion of that moment, and, literally, cried tears of happiness for that reason alone.
There are few black people (or African-Americans if you prefer) in the US who have no non-African ancestry. There are many who have a white parent or grandparent. No normal, reasonably well-adjusted and reasonably non-racist person today calls these people “mixed race”. They are black, or African-American, and that’s just how it is. The reason O’Reilly can’t talk about it in normal language is because he’s got a deep problem with it.
Child Abuse, or Just Using One’s Child?
As has been widely reported, Sarah Palin had this to say (on her Facebook page) late last week:
The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
Is Sarah Palin abusing her youngest son? Or is she merely using him?
Crazy GSK Merger Madness in 2001
In the course of my work I came across this article by the Vice President of IT Strategy of the pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline. Mr. Elfering begins:
GlaxoSmithKline, like many big companies today, was born of a merger in 2001 between GlaxoWelcome and SmithKline Beecham.
This amazes me. I had no idea that more than one company was ever born of a merger between GlaxoWelcome and SmithKline Beecham – not to mention all of them in the same year!
Or did Mr. Elfering really mean: “GlaxoSmithKline, like many big companies today, was born of a merger; in our case it was between GlaxoWelcome and SmithKline Beecham in 2001″?
Of course there are many other ways one could word it, too, to give the meaning I think Mr. Elfering was probably aiming at.
It was the Groan, not the Beeb
Today on Facebook someone tagged me with this BBC 100 books meme. Fine, but first of all, it wasn’t the BBC, it was the Guardian. Maybe it was the Beeb who said that probably most people will have read only six of those 100, on average. And maybe not; I’ve not the time to find out. Certainly that would mean the Beeb has an extremely low opinion of the public as readers – an opinion that need not necessarily, for that, be mistaken.
I thought I’d have a look see how many of them I’ve read. The results are below — forty-seven and a half. And a half? Yup. Look, they’ve put in there, as one entry, the “Complete Works of Shakespeare”. Hey, no fair — that’s a whole buncha books. I’ve read some of them, so I’m giving myself a half for that entry. (Note that Hamlet has its own entry. Oh well — if they want to count Hamlet twice, then so shall I.)
Where a “(?)” appears, that means I’ve never heard of the book. A “(yuck)” means I not only haven’t read it; I don’t want to. (I would read the others I’ve not yet read, had I the time.) Books that I started and abandoned are indicated as such (and not counted towards my score of 47.5).
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – Yes
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – Yes
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – No
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – No (yuck)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – Yes
6 The Bible – Yes
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – No
8 1984 – George Orwell – Yes
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman – No (?)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – Yes
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – Yes
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy – No
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller – Yes
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – Soe
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier – No
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – Yes
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk – No
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger – Yes
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger – No (?)
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot – No
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – No
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald – Yes
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens – No
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy – Yes
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – Yes (meh)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh- No
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Yes
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck – Yes
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll – Yes
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame – Yes
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy – Yes
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens – Yes
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis – Yes
34 Emma – Jane Austen – No
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen – No
36 The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – Yes
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hossein – No
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres – No
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden – Yes
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – Yes
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell – Yes
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – No (yuck)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez - No (abandoned)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving – Yes
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins – No
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery – No
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy – No (abandoned)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood – Yes
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding – Yes
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan – Yes
51 Life of Pi – Ann Martel – No
52 Dune – Frank Herbert – No
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons – No
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – No
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth – No
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon – No (?)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens – No
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – Yes
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon – No (?)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Yes
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck – Yes
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov – Yes
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt – No (?)
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold – No
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas – No
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac – Yes
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy – No
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding – No
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie – No
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville – Yes
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens – No
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker – No
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett – Yes
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson – No
75 Ulysses – James Joyce – No
76 The Inferno – Dante – No
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome – Yes
78 Germinal – Emile Zola – No
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray – Yes
80 Possession – AS Byatt – No
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – Yes
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell – No
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker – Yes (meh)
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro – No
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert – No
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry – No
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White – Yes
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom – No
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Yes
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton – No
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – Yes
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery – Yes
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks – No
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams – Yes
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole – No
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute – No
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas – No
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare – Yes
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Yes
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo – Yes
Proving a Thing Isn’t There
Today Norm has a post whose thrust and conclusion I completely agree with, but in which he says something that surprises me. It is this:
But there’s no defensible intellectual basis for the claim that institutional collectivities can’t coherently apologise for past wrongs when those issuing the apology bear no blame for the wrongs in question.
The claim mentioned here is one I disagree with just as Norm does. Moreover, it is likely that Norm has successfully refuted every intellectual basis for that claim with which he’s been presented. But how can he know that a defensible basis for the claim doesn’t exist? You can show me a thousand black crows, and you still won’t have proved that there is no such thing as a white crow.
Blog Split
I’ve moved (or rather copied) the technology items posted up to now to a new blog, as tech doesn’t really fit in here. So in the future technology won’t be among this blog’s topics; I’ll do my tech blogging over at the new place.
Was I Wrong About AT&T Blocking Google Voice?
This article presents some convincing arguments that it wasn’t at AT&T’s behest that Apple blocked Google Voice from the App Store. I had made that assertion based on something I’d read in an authoritative source that was worded as if the author had reason to know this for sure. But this sounds persuasive, too:
AT&T has been the logical scapegoat in the App Store rejection, and surely over time the inclusion of the application on the iPhone could eventually lead to a reduction in minutes used by AT&T’s customers. But while AT&T may have voiced some displeasure to Apple over the application, the service provider has done nothing to remove vestiges of the application from the rest of its network–they haven’t denied the application from other devices (BlackBerrys), nor have they blocked access to the Google Voice Web application (www.google.com/voice).
…
But, really, if it was solely AT&T looking to block Google Voice’s entry into the App Store, couldn’t Apple simply certify the application for international markets but not release it in the U.S. store? There have been plenty of instances in which Apple has certified applications in the United States but not made them available internationally. (Skype in Canada, anyone?) Surely Apple could do the reverse, if it was interested.
By the way, that last paragraph is an interesting point in itself, quite apart from the whole Google Voice thing. I don’t live in the US, and I do sometimes chafe at having to do without things that American online consumers, of not only the App Store but other services as well, have access to.
Like Google Voice, for example.
Richard Ingrams: Illiterate and Can’t Abide Jews?
A Harry’s Place post has reminded me of this old page of Richard Ingrams drivel in the Guardian, in which he begins, “As a seasoned commuter, the scene was a familiar one.” Well may you wonder, Dear Reader, how a scene can be a seasoned commuter. I’m afraid I can’t help you.
I believe I can, however, tell you why, further down the page, Ingrams writes this:
I have developed a habit when confronted by letters to the editor in support of the Israeli government to look at the signature to see if the writer has a Jewish name. If so, I tend not to read it.
I think it’s because he just doesn’t like Jews (as a rule, that is; it goes without saying that some of his best friends are Jews). Still today; six years later, he mentions when people are Jewish even when it’s not relevant to anything.
Is Richard Ingrams anti-Semitic? Who knows. But if it walks like a duck…
The Cops are One Thing; the State is Another
Andrew Sullivan has a series of posts (for example, here; there are a number of others and you should follow The Daily Dish, Sullivan”s excellent blog) on what he’s calling the “police state” in the US. The cases of police brutality and abuse of office he catalogues are horrifying and disgraceful, and yes, they are anti-democratic. But do they show that the US is turning into a police state?
Normblog argues that Sullivan goes much too far. There may be an increasing number of abusive policing incidents, but this does not yet add up to the US being a police state.
Norm’s is one argument: one of degree; things may have gotten worse, but they’re not that bad. Norm is right, of course, and it’s certainly a very important point. But there is another argument against concluding from all these policing incidents that the US has become a police state: not one of degree, but one of kind. For the condition of “police state” to obtain, these various police actions must represent the policy, or at any rate something essential about the nature, of the central state — in this case, the Federal Government of the United States. Do they?
Hey BusinessWeek: That’s not a Why, it’s a That
In this article, James Cooper writes:
Continued weakness in the labor markets is sure to limit the strength of the recovery, especially in the second half, but it will not prevent an upturn from taking hold. History shows why. In each of the past four recessions, GDP growth has always turned up before payrolls have. In fact, the lag has been increasingly greater since the 1973-75 recession, when payrolls hit bottom one quarter after real GDP did. In both the 1981-82 and 1990-91 downturns, employment didn’t hit bottom until three quarters after real GDP’s nadir. And after the 2001 recession, it took seven quarters for jobs to stop falling.
He says that labour market weakness will not prevent a recovery from starting, and promises to explain (or rather, have history explain) why this is so. But he doesn’t keep his promise: there follows no explanation as to why. There is only a recounting of historical evidence that this is usually how it goes.
Declining Standards at The Economist?
I agree with every word in The Economist’s leader this week on what Obama needs to do about Israel and Palestine.
Well, not every word. One I disagree with is the second-to-last word in this sentence:
The American president may think he has enough on his plate without worrying about the dog’s dinner simmering away in the corner: the sickly Middle East peace process, with its often nauseous ingredients.
I wonder how the writer knew that the ingredients are feeling nauseous. Did he ask them? Were they looking a bit green around the gills? And did he go in-depth with his reporting and find out what it was that was nauseating them? I myself have always found some of the ingredients of the Middle East peace process to be nauseating. But that they themselves are also feeling nauseous shows just how bad things are.
Two other words I don’t agree with occur in this sentence:
[The leaders of the Arab world] could also push much harder to help reconcile the two Palestinian groups—and, by the by, insist that Hamas unambiguously disavows violence and, at least de facto, says it accepts Israel.
“Disavows” should have been the subjunctive, ”disavow”, and, likewise, “says” should have been “say”.
What’s going on at the Economist? Have the summer interns taken over the shop?
