Political Currency

some venting of polemics about the greek crisis

2011-11-02T08:24:00.002-05:00

So, while I should really be doing other work, I cannot contain myself anymore. Greece has turned into one of the most frustrating questions in politics so far, and I am not happy.
Be warned, this is merely an opinion piece containing frustrated thoughts rather than intelligent answers to the Greek question. If you don't care about such a thing, read no further. If you do, alas, I ask you to dive in full-force...

Let me first talk about me – because that’s what I do best. So here it goes (John French, you have been warned about the polemics of this piece!).
As a German, I am frustrated with a disorganized, selfish, and corrupt Greek government that has steered toward this crisis for years. And, quite honestly, it surprises me that everybody else is so surprised. I am sure if one of the powerful men at the ECB had taken a calculator to the Greek budget, they would have found out a lot sooner! This needed to be said, because everyone, on the left and right is obviously forgetting about this. What this is NOT to mean is that this is somehow the fault of the Greek people, who are suffering from this more than we can imagine. But I will get back to that.
I am also frustrated with angry arguments about German neo-imperialism in Europe (I am looking at you, BBC, and at you, fellow Europeans!). Germans like to forget about their strength sometimes, no doubt, and they obviously like to forget about how much their political actions (if there’s political action at all) affect the smaller states in Europe. This is a problem – maybe even one that is by its nature unsolvable – as the powerful in this world tend to take what they want. What THIS doesn’t mean is that I simply approve of the rescue packages and austerity measures, because of the way they affect the Greek people. But I think Greece needs to rethink and deal with governance and government – badly.
Finally, I am incredibly frustrated with the American political debate, which has found a way to sweep its own mess under the rug by complaining about the Europeans and claiming that their mess is even bigger. And their response is even worse. Really? I remember a certain decision of Congress back in ’08 against bailing out the banks. Guess what happened. Right, they got bailed out anyway, because Hank Paulson thought he knew what’s best better than the representatives of the American people. Oh, and then there were all the bonuses, courtesy of your average, hard-working Joe Blow. And the subsequent unemployment. And why? Because the government decided to – for years – ignore what was coming, decided not to regulate what should have been regulated. And who suffered? The people! Sound familiar…?
Now, this is not about me pointing a finger at the Americans. It’s just me telling them to be a bit quieter, if you see what I mean.

As an American in the making, I am frustrated with the slowness of the response in Europe. I am frustrated with the fact that everyone needed to finish their vacation before an emergency meeting could materialize (Really?!). And I am frustrated that over a year has passed since sh*t hit the fan in Greece, and the big Euros have let it simmer, like it’s nobody’s business.
I am also appalled by the short-sightedness of the bail-out packages, and the blatant unwillingness of the big Eurocrats to understand the kind impact that this will have on the average person in Greece. It’s this kind of “these lazy bums deserve it” mentality that really gets to me. It’s racist and disgusting, and it has nothing to do with what actually happened.
Ms. Merkel should have asked the banks to participate, since they were involved in the Greek mess as much as in the American mess. The banks could have afforded it, since they had just received several bail-out packages from the European taxpayers. The German government would have had the power to make such a decision, as did the American government. It was their choice not to do it. A choice that seems as much ridiculous as it is cruel towards the Greek people.
Finally, we are dealing with a democratic deficit in the European Union. The Euros have refused to add what was due already more than ten years ago: a political roof for the House of Europe. Without stronger political stability, the people will never be able to gain trust in the European decision-making process. But the deficit is not just vertical but also horizontal – between the Euro-members themselves. The smaller countries don’t stand a chance against the larger, richer, and stronger members. And as much as I sympathize with the Germans who feel like they keep bailing out without cashing in: This is what we committed to when we committed to the EU. It’s like a marriage, we cannot just commit in good times. If it doesn’t work for us that way, maybe we need to think about divorce, or an economic prenup – which would change the whole arrangement, of course.
So, there’s much to think about structurally with regards to Greece and the European Union. And I am not just talking about softly scratching our heads: Some hard thinking needs to be done right now, so we can avoid further collision courses – financially and politically.

A final word on the referendum in Greece: After reading up on it some more, I applaud this less than I initially did. I found this Greek commentary quite convincing: http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite3_1_01/11/2011_412707
I think us Lefties have an easy time applauding something that is happening far away. While I think the democratic voice of the people is exactly what is missing in imposing austerity measures from the outside, I am honestly scared for the Greeks! Aren’t you?

September 11

2011-09-11T13:45:00.000-05:00

Ten years ago today, I found out that something awful had happened from a friend via ICQ. (Today, we would probably see news about how the news spread through "social media," but that wasn't a term anybody was using yet). We did not know exactly what, and we did not know how bad it was, and nobody really knew how we should be reacting, in practical terms.

I was still in college, and my first class of the day was cancelled. At that point, this was probably a decision taken for the sake of safety as much as anything else (since, again, we didn't really know what was going on). Later in the day, though, another professor chose to go ahead with class, but to spend the time talking about what was happening. I think in general we all preferred this; it seemed better to be with people and get close to something like our routine than to sit in our dorm rooms pasted to CNN.

After a while, the conversation turned to what kind of response we could expect to the attacks. A number of people, the professor included, were worried that, in the confusion and emotion of the moment, there was a real risk of a hasty and indiscriminate military response. (It was in those first few days that commentators on TV were saying things like "bomb somebody, dammit!" So that's the kind of thing we had in mind). I don't think most of us would have ruled out military action as possibly appropriate, but we wanted to feel sure that it was done in the right way and targeted at the right people, and we worried that the pressure to "do something" might outweigh the better judgment of the people making the decisions.

Now, I am portraying this conversation as a more well-considered and moderate in tone than it probably actually was. But this was the basic idea. There was one student in the class, though, who was very upset about the way we were talking about this. I remember her saying, "Why shouldn't we be talking about punishing somebody for this?" Again, I think the concern was that only the right people be punished, not that nobody should be, but for one reason or another that distinction was not coming across. After class was over, I saw this student out in the hall, talking with a classmate, still visibly upset; the next time we met, she had dropped the class.

I would still maintain, ten years on, that the concern we were expressing was a real and important one— and that, to some extent, our fears were borne out by subsequent events. Not more than a week later, someone took a copy of the Koran in our university library into the restroom and urinated all over it. A woman from Egypt was assaulted on campus. In Phoenix, a few hours south, a Sikh man was shot because he wore a turban. And the U.S. invaded Iraq, all ostensibly because of what happened on September 11. So the response, both public and private, was very often not what we would have hoped.

At the same time, though, I thought at the time, and still think now, that this student's reaction to our conversation represented a failure on our part (and maybe especially on the part of the instructor). I think we were right, in the substance if not always the presentation of what we said, but my point is that being right isn't enough. We have to find ways to have these conversations that don't force some people out of the conversation. We have to find ways of talking about important issues that are not dismissive or disrespectful, and that don't reduce those we disagree with to caricatures. "Winning" an argument is not productive if all it accomplishes is to make the person you are arguing with feel that he or she has to keep his or her opinions quiet.

I know I'm not saying anything new here, and that my point here can be, and has been, reduced to cliche's like "reasonable people should be able to disagree reasonably." But this is one of the things I always think of when I think about that day. I was nowhere near the attacks themselves, and I didn't know anyone who was directly affected, and so my experience was shaped by that distance (literal and figurative). But I still think this is a point worth reiterating. It is not one I make simply to support an abstract principle like civility or respect for others. It is that I think our failure to do this has hurt us, and will continue to do so. If we are going to frame every political debate in terms of who is or is not a "real American," who does or does not really love their country, who is or is not a stupid or terrible person for thinking as they do, we will continue to be unable to find solutions to very real problems.

I certainly don't think this problem started with September 11, but it seems clear that with that day and the events the followed it has gotten much, much worse. September 11 was a tragedy the likes of which I hope I never see again. That September 11 became a point of division between Americans is a tragedy far more insidious, but of no smaller scale. So, with all the talk today about not forgetting, let's also not forget that in the long run we are all in the same boat, and that nobody will be better off if it sinks.

Gender and Inequality on Campus

2011-08-29T22:49:00.000-05:00

In a recent New York Times piece, Lisa Belkin outlines what she sees as a problem with the way women in college behave with regard to sex, and suggests (or at least implies) that this behavior encourages men to think of women in negative and destructive ways. She suggests that while it might seem like young women today are more in charge of or comfortable with their sexuality, in fact by putting it on display more readily they are encouraging men to think of them in terms of sexuality alone. Belkin says that while great progress has been made in the classroom, with women present in equal or greater numbers and much more confident in presenting their ideas,

"What stunned me was what was happening outside class, where women seemed not to have budged in decades. In social settings and in relationships, men set the pace, made the rules and acted as they had in the days when women were still “less than.” It might as well have been the 1950s, but with skimpier clothing, fewer inhibitions and better birth control. "

Belikin backs up these claims by citing a number of genuinely horrifying incidents, including the infamous incident at Yale last year in which fraternity pledges circled the campus chanting "No means yes, yes means anal." (The fraternity was suspended for five years, which seems totally inadequate to me).

There are some problems with Belkin's argument, problems which are clearly summarized by Amanda Marcotte in this piece in Slate. The essence of the problem is that Belkin takes it for granted that the visibility of women's sexuality necessarily means they will receive less respect. As Marcotte puts it,

"The belief that female sexual expression is uniquely dehumanizing is a double standard, no matter how much you dress it up in feminist language. Instead of condemning young women for the length of their skirts, why not use that energy for condemning anyone who would think that a woman is lesser-than because she wears a miniskirt? "

I think Marcotte states her position well, so I'm not going to try to add anything to that aspect of this debate. Instead I want to draw attention to another aspect of Belkin's piece, one which she does not directly address. Belkin made her observations about gender on campus while teaching at Princeton, her alma mater. He piece is framed around her surprise at the way things had changed (or hadn't) since her time as a student. At one point, she notes,

"Initiations at my former Princeton eating club now include women dancing in their underwear and a sick room, complete with an on-call emergency medical technician for those who can’t handle the drinks that fuel that dancing."

Similarly, she later notes that

"The center of social life on the campus is Prospect Street, home to mansions that house the eating clubs, many of which were still all male when I was a student, and now are all co-ed. 'When the guys go to the Street they are laid-back, casual, like they are going to class,' he said. 'But the women come in, in short cocktail dresses, makeup, high heels. Sometimes it can be like if you’re a girl and you don’t dress up, there’s a social expectation that you should dress up and you should appear sexually available.'"

What seems to receive no attention here is the institution of the "eating club." The implicit premise of Belkin's analysis here is that the fact that the clubs are now co-ed should lead us to expect that they are more egalitarian, but that in fact women's position within the club is still vulnerable if not outright subordinate. In other words, she takes it for granted that the problem with the clubs before was that they were explicitly exclusive; doing away with the exclusion, therefore, should do away with the problem.

The thing is, though, the whole point of institutions like Princeton's eating clubs is to generate hierarchies and inequalities of status. Even if things were entirely egalitarian within the clubs (and some of them might very well be a lot closer to that than Belkin describes here— she does tend to paint them all with the same brush), the clubs exist to draw distinctions between their respective memberships.

My point being, there are institutions operating here that not only take for granted but actively produce inequalities in terms of social status. Why should we be surprised if one of the lines along which they do this is gender? I have absolutely no data to say one way or the other, but I would imagine that race, sexual orientation, etc. are also at least sometimes reflected in the way these clubs do things. We should not take it for granted that gender relations and gender inequality are somehow detached from the more general patterns or social interaction that exist within any particular environment. If an institution or organization, whether a university or a corporation or Congress, operates in an egalitarian manner, probably gender relations will reflect that. If it operates in a way that depends upon or actively reinforces inequality or hierarchy, then gender relations will tend to reflect that. I don't think that you can somehow pull gender out of the broader context in which it is operating and ask people to apply different rules to that particular aspect of their lives. If we accept that it's okay for some groups of people to exclude others, or that social status should be tied to membership in exclusive organizations, then we shouldn't be surprised when that acceptance of inequality manifests itself in terms of gender.

Libya and "Winning"

2011-08-22T20:25:00.000-05:00

As I write this, it seems as though Muammar Qaddafi is no longer in charge in Libya; while the fighting continues to some extent, the NTC apparently controls all but some parts of Tripoli and the big questions with regard to Qaddafi is where to find him. (Fun fact from the NYT article in that last link: "Colonel Qaddafi’s last public appearance was on June 12, when he was photographed playing chess in Tripoli with the visiting president of the World Chess Federation, Kirsan N. Ilyumzhinov, an equally eccentric if less powerful personality from Russia who claims to communicate with aliens from outer space").

I do not have anything especially intelligent to say about what happens now in Libya— whether the rebels will be able to unite and make the transition from military force to government, incorporate the Gadadfa (Qaddafi's tribal group), institutionalize party competition in a country that hasn't had it, or figure out how to deal with Libya's oil and the revenue from it. Not to mention figuring out a way to deal with Qaddafi collaborators that neither lets them off the hook nor paints them with too broad a brush. These are the kinds of problems one sees after any internal conflict, and solving them is always complex. I will say that I think the fall of Qaddafi is unequivocally a good thing, for everybody, at least in the long run.

What I'm mostly interested in is how we assess the role of NATO in the conflict. This has, of course, been controversial, in pretty predictable ways. Initially portrayed as a humanitarian intervention to prevent Qaddafi from slaughtering his own people, it pretty quickly (and also predictably) grew to involve the active provision of military support to the rebels, if only through air strikes. In the U.S., the was controversial in part because war costs money, and in part because it seemed to suggest the possibility that we would become involved in yet ANOTHER conflict in the Middle East. All of that makes sense; it is incredibly hard in practice to draw the line between "intervention" and "participation," and making a long-term plan was essentially impossible. It was also not at all clear how the world was going to deal with Qaddafi if the rebels had lost.

In a piece on his blog on the Foreign Policy website, Dan Drezner lists NATO (if perhaps provisionally) as one of the "winners" in Libya. His argument:

Quick, was the 1999 Kosovo operation a NATO success or a failure? During the operation, it seemed like a failure, as a) everyone thought it was taking too long; and b) the operation expost the operational gaps between the U.S. and European forces. After Kosovo ended, however, it seemed like a victory... because it was. This operation parallels the rhythms of the Kosovo intervention, but in many ways represents a bigger victory. The UK and France shouldered a greater share of the burden, there were no casualties in the alliance, and this operation directly led to regime change (whereas Kosovo had only an indirect effect on Serbia). As Blake Hounshell has observed, at the cost of $1 billion, Western involvement was totally worth it.

What's interesting to me about this is the point about how perceptions of the intervention in Kosovo changed over time. Really, there's nothing surprising about that, and we'll probably continue to re-assess these things. But it made me think about the question of what counts as a "win" in a situation like this. It's frequently been said that part of the problem with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that we don't know what "winning" would look like, but I'm thinking more generally about the standards we have for judging the actions of major powers involved in conflicts against/within smaller or less powerful countries. It seems that in such cases, "winning" has to mean a complete and utter (and fast rout of the enemy. The fact that the conflict in Libya was stretching out for "so long" (the first protests began, by the way, in February, which means it has been six months— not so long for the overthrow of a 40-year-old dictatorship) seemed to many to show that NATO was again being "ineffective." Some called for a greater intervention, and some for a total pullout, but there was clearly a sense of dissatisfaction which, it seems to me, has to be rooted in the assumption that once the U.S. or Europe decide to intervene, all resistance should immediately crumble or be obliterated.

And let's be clear that this scenario is in fact possible. We could make use of weapons that are impossible to withstand; we don't. (Which is obviously very good). So, by definition, any intervention since the end of WWII is intended as, in some sense and to some degree, limited. It is supposed to be the application of the minimum necessary force to achieve some specific goal. When that goal is not well-specified or sufficiently concrete, we get into trouble, but that seems to be the at least implicit reasoning. (Otherwise, why not just blow up everything and everyone in our way?)

So, the way we formulate military interventions seems to be at odds with the way we think and talk about winning. We want to use less force than we have available, but we want it to look (or maybe feel) like we are using everything we've got.

Case in point— a statement from John McCain and Lindsey Graham:

"Americans can be proud of the role our country has played in helping to defeat Qaddafi, but we regret that this success was so long in coming due to the failure of the United States to employ the full weight of our airpower."

One result of this is that we don't tend to credit NATO with the win in situations like Kosovo or Libya. Obviously, NATO did not end Qaddafi's reign by itself— arguably, the organization was not even the most important player. But the NATO action was never formulated to make that happen; it was designed to provide sufficient assistance to the rebels to overcome their most significant disadvantages (the lack of air power chief among these) and thereby let them do most of the work on their own. Today, it seems like it did that. But if we want "winning" to illustrate "our" strength against "their" weakness, our assessment will always be colored by that.

Government and Community

2011-07-24T13:22:00.002-05:00

The ongoing (read: frustratingly endless and endlessly frustrating) debate over raising the U.S. debt ceiling is mostly framed in terms of a difference between the parties over whether the federal budget should be balanced through cutting costs or increasing revenue (which means mostly, though not exclusively, raising taxes). And obviously it is that, to a large extent. But I would like to present the issue in slightly different terms (see also my earlier post, "I like taxes," for a related argument).

Essentially, the Republican position on this issue is that the people with the most money should not have to pay for services for people with the least. There is usually (but not always) an assumption underlying this that the people who use government services use them because they are lazy, incompetent, or dishonest, and are essentially living off the sweat of others (the classic, if extreme form of this is the image of the "welfare queen"). Part of this attitude is explained by the fact that many people think only of the direct payment of welfare checks when they think of "government services" (for instance, see this piece, which notes that half of all people who benefit from government social programs believe they have never done so), when in fact there are many such services that virtually everyone would like to see continue. Part of the explanation for this attitude is also simply misinformation about the recipients of such programs (for instance, most single mothers on welfare do have a job).

But what I want to call attention to in this post is the idea of politics that underlies the more or less libertarian position on this debate. In this model, the political community is an unfortunate necessity; because we cannot trust some people to behave properly, we need a coercive authority (the government) to enforce law and order. Anything that government does beyond this is more or less illegitimate.

So, the fact that Americans are members of the same political community is, ultimately, an unfortunate thing. In an ideal world, one with no bad people in it, we would not need to form such communities at all; we would exist as more or less isolated individuals— or at most isolated households. Therefore, the closer a political system allows to come to that ideal, the better.

So what I want to ask is: is this really an ideal that we want to approximate? Do we really want to structure the world that we live in based on the assumption that we'd all rather not deal with each other, that we have no sort of moral or ethical obligation to each other as human beings? That living in a community at all is essentially an imposition forced upon us by a few (hypothetical) bad apples?

I also want to know how such an attitude can be squared with anything that could reasonably be called "patriotism." How is love of country consistent with the rejection of the idea that we have a greater (or at least different) moral obligation to members of our own community? What they are saying, in other words, is that they love America but could care less about other Americans— that any proposed obligation toward other Americans is a ploy to take away their money. With that assumption, it's hard for me to understand what these people mean when they say they "love their country."

What I am saying, in other words, is that the position now represented by the Republicans, and in particular the Tea Party faction, in the debt ceiling negotiations is rooted firmly in the belief that as Americans and as human beings we owe each other nothing. Thus their position not only makes no economic sense (see, e.g., this piece in The Economist), it is, to my mind, fundamentally immoral.

"We do not say that a person who does not involve himself in public life is minding his own business; we say that he has no business here at all."
- Pericles

Pouring out a drop of wine…

2011-05-02T09:08:00.001-05:00

I'm guessing that I'm not alone in feeling incredibly weird about what has happened over the past 12 hours. Bin Laden, a mass-murdering bastard by anyone's standards, was killed in an attack ordered by the President. Shortly after it was announced, thousands celebrated; I even got a call from a close friend "congratulating" me, thinking that I would be partying.

So I find myself, probably like many, with conflicting feelings: a feeling of satisfaction and relief that Osama is dead, that justice has in some way been served; immediately feeling uncomfortable about taking satisfaction in the death of another, regardless of how wicked he may have been; subsequently feeling disloyal to those for whom his death is justifiably a moment of closure and cause for joy; and, finally, a general discomfort with the "rah-rah-rah" jingoism that has immediately followed the announcement.

Were the death of Bin Laden the end of the war(s), then I think there would be no conflicting emotions and I would be out on the streets celebrating. But it's not: as far as our foreign policy is concerned, this does not change anything (except, perhaps, temporarily increase our threat levels). But it's not simply that celebration seems premature which I find so odd, so bizarre, about the reaction. It's that somehow the celebration seems to demean the accomplishment.

I want to say that a justice-loving people (whether or not we Americans are truly a justice-loving people) does not necessarily love or celebrate the murdering of a murderer; we don't enjoy the means through which justice is achieved. In fact, I think that we must somehow detest those means, hate that they are required, even while using them and using them unapologetically. I have no qualms with Obama's order to capture Bin Laden. I would have rather him been taken alive and forced to stand trial, but that's no matter; I think the world is better with him dead. However, I don't think that should be cause for partying. It seems as though genuinely celebrating the accomplishment of revenge in some way justifies the initial act that we are avenging. Doing that turns the whole thing into a game that we've won, a score that we've settled, as if we were happy to be playing in the first place.

But we aren't. Or, rather, we shouldn't. A couple weeks ago I celebrated Passover with my family. For the uninitiated, one of the things Jews do on Passover is to pour out a drop of wine from our glass for each plague visited upon the Egyptians while the Jews were enslaved. The idea behind this is that while we take great joy in our liberation and freedom, we take no joy in the suffering of our oppressors; we drink, but because we know what was required, we don't drink from a full glass. This, I think, is a profound idea to which we should aspire. I think we are capable of both retribution and meditation, of feeling righteous without being joyous. Instead of celebrating Osama's death, shouldn't we curse him once more for forcing us to be murderous, for forcing us to come to his level, and for forcing us to play this game that we (should) hate to play?

Or am I being naïve?

I Like Taxes

2011-03-23T19:18:00.002-05:00

This is something I've been thinking about in the wake of the labor dispute in Wisconsin. It seems clear, given the fact that, as it turns out, the generous pensions and medical benefits given to public employees in the state don't cost taxpayers anything, as well as the fact that the state legislature was able to pass the bill limiting collective bargaining without considering it a budget resolution, that this was not really about avoiding a financial crisis for the state government. It seems rather that it was about a certain idea of what government should do (as little as possible) and what it shouldn't.

I am by no means the first person to suggest that this was more of an "ideological" goal than a fiscal one. But I want to think about what exactly the "ideology" in question is in this case. It is, of course, about "small government," but what is the value of a small government supposed to be? For somebody like John Locke, it was that limiting the power of government could prevent abuses. For Adam Smith, on the other hand, it was essentially about efficiency-- there are things the government does not do well, he argued, and so it will be better for the majority of people in the long run if it doesn't try to do those things. It seems to me that the argument about the appropriate size of government in the U.S. in recent years has confused these two arguments, so that we now see inefficiency as undermining our freedom. If, say, government-funded education is not the most cost-effective-- which might be true-- the problem isn't simply that it costs a lot, the problem is that our freedom to decide how our children should be educated is being infringed upon.

This way of thinking tends to assume that the only way you can have input into the way an organization does what it does or makes decisions is if you fund it, and have the ability to stop funding it by making a choice as a consumer to make a different choice about what to do with your money. In other words, it assumes that the right, only, or best way to control how any organization works is through the mechanism of the market, though competition between "firms" all of whom want to "sell" you stuff. "Freedom," in that formulation, is nothing other than having competition for your dollars.

I am not the first person to say this, either-- Habermas talks about the "colonization" of politics by the logic of economics. And it's really beside the point I want to make here. But where that point connects to this is in the underlying assumption that government is, by definition, unfair competition. It is necessarily coercive because it is not subject to competition-- no matter how democratic it is.

And this relates to the assumption that I think underlies a lot of the "small government" rhetoric we hear of late: that any and all money given to government is taken unfairly, and any and all money given to government is wasted. Therefore, it is always better to give money back to the people, to cut taxes, to reduce spending. Smaller is always necessarily better, not because we're afraid of the government engaging in abuses of the kind that worried Locke, but because government, since it does not obey the logic of the market and act like any other "firm" offering a service, is abusive by definition.

All of which sort of skips over the other part of the classic liberal argument, which is that we need government. We need it because life without it is likely to be exceptionally unpleasant, and we need it because it is the only way that certain things are going to get done at all (even if we can think of ways they might get done better).

I thought of this recently while driving from Indiana into Illinois. All along the freeway in northwestern Indiana were billboards asking: "'Illinoyed' by high taxes?" and suggesting that the solution would be to move to Indiana. We were driving in the midst of a snow storm, and the moment we crossed into Illinois, the roads, which had been slick and snowy, were cleared. I, personally, think this is worth paying taxes for.

And that's the thing. Government does stuff. It does more stuff than most of appreciate. And for many of these things, it is the only way they are going to happen.

The same people who are demanding smaller government tend to be people who valorize life in small towns (thinking of Sarah Palin here, but she's not alone in her Wasilaphilia). Part of the reason for this is always that in small towns, people know each other and help each other out when needed. People in small towns take care of one another. This is true, and it is indeed a good thing. But most of us don't live in small towns-- we live in cities. And that is only going to get more true in coming decades. So we can run our political institutions as if we all lived in little towns. In big cities, we don't have the kinds of social networks that exist in small towns. In cities, government is how we take care of one another. It is not there just to keep out the barbarians at the gate or build lighthouses. It provides a way for us to take care of one another without knowing one another personally. Could it do a better job? Obviously. Should we watch it carefully to make sure it does not overstep its bounds in doing this? Of course. But that doesn't mean we want to try to do without it. If you think your tax dollars are being spent poorly, there are things you can do about that; the solution is not to do away with taxes altogether.

You want to take the government apart, fine. But let's not pretend it's about freedom from an abusive overlord. This is about the idea that we should not have to take care of each other, that we should be free to let others fend for themselves, that we owe our community and other people in it nothing whatsoever, that we are entirely without obligation to the people around us. If you believe this, okay, but let's get it out in the open and stop acting like these arguments are not fundamentally, irretrievably selfish. And if you don't think this way, if you are not comfortable saying that you have no moral obligation of any kind to the people in your community, then pay your damn taxes, participate in deciding how they get spent, and act like a member of a community.

The Necessity of Failure: The Problem With For-Profit Education

2010-12-02T12:07:00.001-06:00

The recent revelation that more than 45% of students who have graduated from the Kaplan colleges are in default on their federal student loans, and the fact that Congressional action may result, have focused new attention on for-profit higher education. Setting aside what I think should be some pretty obvious objections to the commodification of education, I think that the inability of graduates of these institutions is not simply a problem with the way they do what they do, but rather a problem that is inherent to the whole idea of for-profit education-- one that cannot be overcome.

In any "traditional" university (and I am casting a wide net with this designation, including any institution NOT run for profit), it is in the interest of everyone involved-- students, faculty, administration-- that some students fail. Failure, to put things in strictly economic terms, is what makes degrees scarce and therefore valuable.

Put another way, a degree from any institution is only meaningful if not everyone can get one. Employers, and the market in general, use a college degree as a shortcut for evaluating potential employees. It is perfectly possible that a person without a degree in say, computer science is qualified for a job as a programmer, but to know that a company would have to test each employee individually, a time-consuming and expensive process. The degree allows them to assume that the individual has certain basic skills (and what counts as "basic" will vary tremendously) without actually confirming it. Obviously, this is not a perfect indicator, and every employer has probably had the experience of hiring someone who in fact cannot do what their educational credentials suggest. But a college degree is usually the best indicator available.

One of the factors that affects how well a degree does this work, of course, is the institution that it comes from. At least some of our sense of what makes a "good" school is how much we can count on its graduates having the knowledge and skills we expect. So, it makes sense that (at least in principle) the "best" schools are the most selective: having the best-prepared students coming in should, all other things being equal, mean that the best trained graduates come out. (That "all other things" are never actually equal does not undermine the logic of the argument).

But the difficulty of getting IN is only part of the story; the difficulty of getting OUT is also important. Many have bemoaned the fact that many state universities have very high rates of turnover-- that is, a large proportion (from 40-60%) of students who start do not finish. This does not seem to me to be a problem, though; these universities are less selective (in general) in terms of who they admit, but they can compensate by being more selective in who they let out. Even though it's easier to get in, therefore, we can still assume that a degree from such schools means something, because not everyone who is accepted can actually get one.

(The converse of this is in fact the situation at some of the "best" universities; having staked so much of their reputation on being extremely selective in admissions, they cannot afford to let many people fail; thus Harvard is infamous for grade inflation. So, where the state schools are selective on the back end, these kinds of institutions are selective at the front. I would actually argue that that the former is a better approach in general, but setting that question aside, a degree from either should be meaningful because not everyone can get one).

If, however, we have a situation where an institution is not selective at EITHER end of the process-- that is, anyone can get in, and anyone can get a degree once their in-- the degree itself becomes a very poor indicator of anything but the ability of the student to pay tuition.

This is precisely the situation of the for-profit university. Maximizing revenue means getting as many students as possible to enroll, and then keeping them enrolled. Failing students is still in the interests of the students and, at least in principle, the faculty-- the former because it makes their degree more valuable, the latter because it improves their reputation as scholars and instructors. Failure, however, is NOT in the interests of the university administration, whose goal, explicitly, is not education in itself, but profit. Without at least the possibility of failure, the degree earned by these students is not meaningful to the outside world; hence the inability of so many Kaplan graduates to repay their student loans. Most unfortunately, this is true no matter how hard the students actually work, how much they learn, and how much the faculty care about teaching them.

This is not, of course, to suggest that there are no problems with the traditional model. Anyone who has been a student at a research university is aware of the problems created for students by faculty focused on raising their prestige as scholars (which, of course, the institution requires). Nor am I unaware of the fact that for-profit institutions, not only by being less selective in their enrollments but also by pioneering methods of distance education and online instruction, make college accessible to people who, for reasons that might have nothing to do with their ability, like being a single parent, would not otherwise be able to enroll. But it is precisely these people who are being, in a very real sense, cheated by the fact that the degree they earn is unlikely to bring either respect or opportunity. This is, I would argue, an inevitable outcome of the for-profit model and the elimination of failure that this model entails.

Venting my anger at Thilo Sarrazin

2010-08-29T22:24:00.003-05:00

Seriously. I cannot believe it. Thilo Sarrazin has been throwing around racist remarks about immigrants in Germany for some time now. And maybe I shouldn't even encourage people to give this any more attention than it deserves, but it's just too - i don't know - contemporary? important? inflammatory? Or just too goddamn outrageous. Especially because now he has published a book about it. A complete, big, fat brown and stinking collection of his intolerant thoughts and messages and feelings about Germany. A big, fat brown and stinking collection of cliches about minorities that have become part of our society. How they slow us down, undermine us, take our money, will overtake our identity, change our religion. Sound familiar? And that very book is being published less than a century after the last racist brown-out in Germany, and in the midst of a questionable integration debate, as well as a failing debate on EU expansion which has successfully alienated Turkey as an ally and future EU member at the gates of the middle East.
That's right, I am mad. I am mad because this man is setting back the immigration discourse in Germany by decades. And he is encouraging the media to shine a light on all these crazy racist madmen in Germany that until now only dared to come out at night and spook around a bit at the sidelines of the political discourse. Instead, Sarrazin is literally leaving a stinking, brown "turd of racism" in the midst of the German political discourse, and all of us have to sit here and smell it. And, please, how could you not be completely outraged by that?!
Some people in Germany try to tell me that my living on the other side of the pond has "softened" my views on immigrants. Especially Muslim immigrants. Because America is an immigrant country and all, and a bit crazy, and a bit lazy and a bit tolerant on supposed "Otherness". Trust me, Sarrazin's comments are by no means the first time I have heard all these old cliches about Islam, "oriental culture", "lazy immigrants", and "unwillingness to integrate". These comments are also not only made by Germans or on the eastern shore of the Atlantic. I hear this stuff all the time over here, in the U.S. And I invite all Germans who claim that Sarrazin is some sort of hero to listen all the crazies on the talk shows here (or the news, for that matter) voice their outrageous opinions on the "ground zero mosque", which is actually supposed to be a Muslim cultural center run by a Sufi imam. A Sufi! (Sufism is arguably a faith that draws from various religions, not merely Islam.) No, Americans do not like Muslims any better than Europeans. But the American example has also shown that, over time, minorities can be incorporated (meaning "accepted") into whatever is considered to be the American mainstream. And it is this very example that gives me hope for Muslims in Europe as well as Muslims in America.
Some say that stopping Sarrazin in his racist remarks will cause an injury to free speech in Germany. While I'd like to note that I am convinced that this is a cliche argument in the first place, I'd like to point out that we have a representative democracy for a reason. Aristotle termed the problem "tyranny of the majority". And to counteract this tyranny, we have a constitution and a codified civil law, which entitles all women and men to be equal in front of the law, and prohibits discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, race, religion, or physical ability. And it entitles all individuals in the German state to a certain standard of living. If Sarrazin does not like that, I suggest he leave. Because whether the majority of all "indigenous Germans" (as Sarrazin would say) are racists our not, we have a law that protects all individuals in our society against racism and discrimination.
When will they ever learn? I hope to god that they have learned. We have learned.

Going going, Back back, to ‘Ronto ronto

2010-08-19T10:38:00.001-05:00

After Bush II won reelection back in 2004, I remember looking at a Canadian Immigration website and finding a newly-posted update to the effect of: "Americans interested in immigrating to Canada will have to undergo the same process as anyone else." I was very clearly not the only American looking at the website, a point that became reinforced as I talked to friends and family in the states who informed me they were "looking into" going north. Moving to Canada has long been the favorite threat of America's disenchanted progressives, as if Canada is some liberal Mecca that is just dying to grant citizenship to a bunch of Americans. I used to resent the naiveté that this view of Canada betrays, and loved pointing out that such a one-dimensional love of Canada is a result of the very ignorance that most American libs claim to be evading. Though it still bugs me, I now approach such sentiments with less vitriol because I've come to agree with them at some level. I'm not sure if I have completely drunken the maple-flavoured* kool aid and bought the idea that Canada is "as close to Utopia as it gets" as some Canadian academic has said. But, I'm not so sure that I haven't either.

I find myself mulling all this over because I have just recently moved back to Toronto for at least 3 or 4 years. It's a disorienting relocation not because it's all that different, but because it's so similar, to the American lifestyle to which I am accustomed. My friends in both countries have similar politics, are interested in similar hobbies, and live in roughly similar manners which, granted, probably says more about my friends than anything else. Still, the fact of the manner is that—and this won't shock anyone—culturally speaking, the US and Canada are probably the two most similar countries in the world. This is, of course, why Americans talk about moving to Canada: unlike Sweden, moving to Canada doesn't involve learning a new language, different cuisines, or new concepts of private property. It's like the states. But, you know, different. What's disorienting about coming here is putting one's finger on what is different and in what way its different. After all, I can wax urban elitist and go on for long stretches of time about the differences between New York and Chicago, but doing that between Toronto and an American city comes out different. Yes there are different urban attitudes, cultures, and what have you. But there is something distinctly Canadian about Toronto that a recounting of which city has the best public transit (New York), hot dogs (Toronto), or skyline (Chicago) won't capture.

Whatever the difference is—and I'll save you the suspense, I don't attempt to perfectly articulate it in this blogpost—it is certainly not the radical socialism that nostalgic liberals or reactionary conservatives in the States want it to be. Certainly, the huge efforts to achieve minimal victories in things like healthcare or gay marriage should make us appreciate a country where such things have become status quo (though, it should be said, that both did have to get fought for here too). But let's be clear that Canada has also had a military presence in the Middle East for much of the past decade, and is very much a non-egalitarian capitalist society with large pockets of institutionalized poverty associated with its long and despicably racist history with the indigenous population. Americans love overlooking all of this. I can't help but think of that scene in Bowling for Columbine where Michael Moore goes around Toronto opening doors to random homes: "In Canada, people don't need to lock their doors!" I saw that flick in Toronto actually, and I remember the audience erupting in laughter.

That being said, I am writing this the ground-level living room of my friend's house at the corner of Queen and Cameron (downtown Toronto) and I have to note that the door is propped wide open to let in the breeze, as it has been for much of the past week. For the uninitiated, Queen St. is one of the major bar/shopping strips in Toronto (not all that dissimilar from Milwaukee Ave in Chicago's Wicker Park). There's a bar across the street and a community housing complex a couple blocks down the road. I am having trouble imagining neighborhoods in American cities with as much pedestrian traffic as this one in which people would feel comfortable keeping their doors wide open as they went about their business. Is this "Canada"? I don't know, but I like it

The Bush II reelection was hardly the first time Americans strove to move north. I was talking to a buddy yesterday who pointed out that one of the largest periods of American mass-emigration was during Vietnam when thousands of Americans fled to Canada to dodge the draft (I've heard numbers estimating anywhere between 35,000 and 50,000 draft dodgers). Some of these draft dodgers would later found Roots, the pride of Canadian commerce and fashion. There was also that time a few hundred years ago when these guys wrote this declaration and then there was this war of independence broke and a bunch of people who were still big on England moved north away from the bourgeoning United States. Maybe there is something important for both America and Canada in the former's romanticizing of the latter?

This isn't anything too deep I know, but I'm sure I will come back to this.

*No, I probably won't maintain use of the Canadian spelling. This is not out of principle, but out of habit.

Everything in Moderation

2010-08-11T20:25:00.003-05:00

Recently, I was listening to a story about the "ground zero mosque" controversy. In that story, a commentator described the organization that is trying to build the muslim community center as run by "moderate muslims." This is an extremely common way of talking about Islam: we are constantly hearing references to "moderate Islam" or "muslim moderates." This is of course a term of approval, contrasting "moderate" with it's opposite, "extremist."

For some reason, all of a sudden this usage struck me. To refer to two things as "moderate" and "extreme" is to place them on a continuum. It suggests that they are versions of the same thing, or that they differ in quantity rather than quality. To put it another way, to speak of "moderates" and "extremists" is to say that there is some thing that needs moderating.

In this case, obviously, that thing is Islam. This language doesn't really imply that there are different interpretations of Islam, or different schools of thought-- or that there are simply some lunatics out there who cover their actions with a screen of piety. Instead, it suggests that "Islam" is a force, entity, or quality that is fine in small doses, but dangerous when you have too much of it. It's like saying "All muslims are crazy, but some are less crazy than others."

I realize that this is not what most people mean when they use this terminology, and I also know that some will say that this argument is trivial. But, consciously or not, I think this usage reflects certain ways of thinking about Islam in particular. We don't call people who bomb abortion clinics or hold up "god hates fags" signs at military funerals "extremist Christians," nor do we usually refer to people who don't do these things as "moderates." The latter are simply "Christians," and the former are just crazy. This reflects the fact that we don't believe that the actions of the crazies reflect something inherent to Christianity. It would of course be reasonable to describe such people as "extreme," in some sense, but not extremely Christian. To do so would--rightly--offend the millions of Christians who think an interpretation of their faith that justifies murder and hatred is simply ludicrous. In contrast, we seem perfectly okay with thinking, at least implicitly, that the issue with suicide bombers, etc. is that they are "extremely muslim," and that the problem would be solved if only they would be a little less muslim.

Finding a better way to think about these issues will have to involve finding a way to talk about them that doesn't carry with it the assumption that Islam is, deep down, the problem. Terrorists are not more muslim than others; arguably, they are very much less so.

why boycotting BP won't change anything

2010-07-08T09:04:00.003-05:00

Let me set the record straight: I am a very recent convert. When the gulf spill first happened, I had the same instinct as the next person: I wanted to vent my anger! I purchased "Boycott BP!" stickers and asked my friends via Facebook status update to do the same. So I am not condemning anyone with that exact same instinct. But at the same time I think the gulf disaster should be a wake up call for all of us and make us understand that a life style change is in order.

Boycotting BP is an understandable but way too easy solution to the problem. Why?

Because there are plenty of other sinful petrol giants out there that we are throwing our money at without thinking twice about it. Remember Shell and its 1995 campaign to blow up its Brent Spar drilling platform in the North Sea? We all boycotted Shell then. Shell backed down. Did it end offshore drilling? Did we sell our cars? No way!

Because most gas stations with the BP label don't even belong to BP anymore. They belong to local owners and families, who are being hurt by the boycott. In order to hurt BP, we need to boycott what actually belongs to BP, and as with any other multi-national corporation, that is really, really tough to find out.

Because the problem goes deeper. If we don't start drastically decreasing our dependence on fossil fuels, we will have many more problems than an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Our planet is already sweating in the face of all the greenhouse gasses we release 24/7, which will result in more environmental disasters, such as severe storms (remember Katrina?) and flooding in some places and droughts in others.

It's tough to quit driving in a society that is so extremely dependent on cars. It is tough to give up your car if it has been - through a recession, a lousy job market, and a dwindling bank account - the only status symbol you've been able to uphold, especially if by age thirty you're practically expected to at least have a house, a dog, two kids, and a box full of expensive jewelry. But maybe we don't have to completely give up our cars if we understand that every time we fill up - at BP or elsewhere - we encourage those guys up there - in their air-conditioned offices with a view - those guys that inhabit the most expensive apartments in the nicest neighborhoods around the world - we encourage them to justify yet another cruel and dangerous way to extract the world's last remaining oil resources.

To truly end this, our way of consciousness has to change. We have to start perceiving all processes in the world more holistically. BP is not an independent evil-doer in a world of benevolent petrol giants. It is merely one example of the ruthlessness of the oil industry. And even if we don't all ride our bikes tomorrow, it is important that we understand - and pick our battles accordingly.

why the beautiful game is so political

2010-07-01T10:10:00.006-05:00

at no other time am i as strongly reminded of my national identity as during the world cup in soccer (btw - it's really called 'football' - REAL football!). i have lived in the u.s. for six years now, i am proud that my german passport says 'european union" on it before it says "germany", i study identity, nationalism, and immigration. all these things lead me to believe that i am a european citizen first and foremost, and that i have understood the fallacies of nationalism. yet, when those 11 handsome guys in their black-and-white uniforms start kicking that ball around on the grass, something happens to me. i show flag.

in all honesty, i really tried to cheer for the u.s. as well. and as the team was losing to ghana, i actually felt bad, i wanted them to win, they deserved it as much as ghana. but somehow i can't seem to chime into the u.s.a-chants with the same passion that i tell the other team: "ihr könnt nach hause gehn!" [you can go home!] when they play germany. we know since the miracle of bern, when in 1954 a country of bombed-out, guilty germans beat the unbeatable hungarian team in the world cup final and had something to be proud of in an era of german shame that soccer does magic for german identity : "wir sind wieder wer!" - we are somebody again! and this was confirmed in the 2006 world cup, in which germany didn't win the actual cup but germans somehow won back the right to proudly fly their national flag, something that your average german had abstained from doing since 1945.

i see the pictures from the "fan-mile" in my hometown berlin, where hundreds of thousands of germans gather to watch germany's world cup games on a big video screen in front of the brandenburg gate, and i get so homesick wishing that i was one of these drunken fools in black-red-and-gold-garb. i tell people to shut up when they say bad things about the german team, and i take it personal when they cheer amidst our losses. why? i really don't know!
what i do know is that germany has changed. and by that i mean it has changed recently. we all know - and certainly hope - that germany has changed over the last 60 years from a racist and aggressively imperialist nation into a (sometimes too) self-conscious european member state aware of its shameful history. but i mean something different, and soccer is a wonderful example for that. us germans religiously know all the years of germany's three world cup victories: 1954, 1974, 1990. take the most recent one - Italia '90. final in rome. germany beat... who? yes, argentina! look at all our blond, mullet-y players from 1990: Völler, Matthäus, Möller, Klinsmann and company.

and then take a good look at the 2010 german team. so, fine, there is this guy called Müller, who shot those two balls right into the english goalie's net last weekend. but other than that? Boateng, Gomez, Podolski, Asamoah? and, most importantly, Özil! a turk, no, wait, a german, well, a german-turk. well, some may say that we don't really embrace our immigrants, we just use them to win our soccer games. and some germans probably feel that way. but more importantly, this national team is a reflection of what germany increasingly looks like. and, more importantly, what it feels like!

maybe not for the older generations, but definitely for those born in the 1960s and thereafter. those who grew up next to immigrants. imagine, in Berlin's neighborhood of neukölln, a neighborhood with over 35% immigrants, german punks destroyed the german flags that many turkish and arabic immigrants had put up in front of their stores and homes in support of the german soccer team. because those immigrants were being too nationalist for them? because they were flying a german flag? nazis?

maybe this world cup germany will take another step in the right direction. after embracing itself in 2006, it will embrace its diversity. for starters, germany's diversity is embracing the flag - see all those germans of turkish and arabic descent flying their flags. now all we have to do is move on to the next round, and beat argentina just one more time! my germany jersey is ready to go, and i am greasing my voice for some passionate chanting: go germany!

Distraction

2010-06-14T21:13:00.004-05:00

I've just finished reading a short piece by Alain de Botton on the need to "relearn how to concentrate." At first, I expected this to be another in a recent string of arguments about this, the best known of which is probably Nicholas Carr's recent book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, excerpted in a recent issue of Wired, which argues that the internet, and the way in which we use it, has damaged our ability to concentrate and maintain focus for extended periods. This is not merely about habit, but represents actual physiological changes in the way our brain works. (These claims are of course backed up with that old stand-by, the fMRI). Basically, because we receive information in lots of little bits, we are losing the ability to understand or process it in any other form.

I'm not really going to deal with that level of the argument directly, since it seems like a basically empirical claim and I have no information to work with. I will note, though,that Stephen Pinker-- who does-- in a New York Times Op-Ed a few days ago argued that Carr's science is bad, and that the plasticity of the brain does not mean that it mirrors the form of whatever input it gathers.

It seems to me that de Botton is on to something a little different here, though, even if his argument is broadly compatible with Carr's. He argues that:

"The painstaking craftsmanship of a pre-Gutenberg Bible was evidence of a society that could not afford to make room for an unlimited range of works but also welcomed restriction as the basis for proper engagement with a set of ideas."

The problem he's describing, then, is not a loss of some capacity in the brain due to the quantity or form of the information we take in, but a failure to actually engage with any of it. The constant need to keep up with the flow of new information means that we fail to do much of anything with the old.

This suggested to me another piece, a conversation between Daniel Pink and Clay Shirky, which Wired positions as a counterpoint to the Carr argument but actually seems to me to be at a bit of a different level. Their discussion deals with the ways that the internet has changed how we use our free time, like the fact that at least some people are willing to use lots of their time to update Wikipedia entries, or provide code for open-source software. They mostly go on to talk about this as evidence that punishment/reward strategies are not the best way to motivate people, and to suggest ways in which businesses can use natural motivation. The discussion is a response to Carr insofar as it suggests that the overall effect of the internet might be to make us more rather than less productive. But it also addresses, to some extent, the point that de Botton is making: a concern with output rather than just input.

De Botton's argument is that we need to take time to engage with the information we take in, but a fear of missing anything prevents us from doing so. But the answer to this can't be simply to disconnect and ruminate. We do not become really engaged with information merely by having it in our heads for longer. We engage with it by using it, by doing something with it. This is what the Shirky/Pink conversation is about-- new ways in which people use what they know or the skills that they have, new opportunities for creation and production that the internet provides.

We've been talking for years now about how the internet gives everyone the chance to be heard, for better or for worse (blogs, of course, being among the foremost candidates in the "for worse" category). But to the extent that it provides people with new ways of using information, aggregating it, relating it, tagging it, making it into something (even if that something is just a blog post like this one, text with a bunch of links) it also provides new opportunities for people to meaningfully engage with the information that they take in. Obviously, before the internet people could write, draw, record, whatever for themselves, but there were much higher barriers to entry in terms of getting what one made into the public sphere, and the attraction of making one's engagement with the world into a public stance or argument is attractive. The internet makes it much more possible for more people not only to have information, but to do something with it that they find meaningful and fulfilling. Shirky and Pink demonstrate that this is sufficient motivation for most people most of the time to actually do so.

So, it seems to me that what should be encouraged is not only stepping back from the flow of information, but also, in small ways, reversing it. Shirky and Pink contrast the kinds of productive (in a literal sense) activities the describe with watching TV, which is passive, and suggest that if we spent all of the time we currently spend watching TV doing something creative, there would be a huge social benefit. You don't have to completely buy that argument, or see this as a plausible scenario, to agree that active, creative, or productive uses of time rather than passive or receptive uses can work as a countervailing force to our collective sense of fragmentation and distraction, both because they reallocate our time and attention and because they are a way of considering, using, an otherwise engaging with the information we take in.

(Note: this was composed on one computer while I installed and configured Ubuntu Linux on another. You can decide if this is consistent with my argument here or not).

Women and the Tea Party

2010-06-12T21:14:00.003-05:00

The recent primary elections in several states have been notable for the prevalence of women, both as candidates and as victors. Obviously, in many cases this doesn't mean that women will actually win office, but it still leading some sources to speculate that this trend foreshadows more successful female candidates in November.

Many of these women are part of/associated with the Tea Party movement (though this is always an ambiguous assertion, given how unstructured that movement is-- which is part of my point here. At the very least, Sarah Palin endorsed four of the winners). Some have suggested that in an election year when anti-incumbent sentiment is running particularly high, Tea Party candidates do better simply because they are able to portray themselves as outsiders; further, it's been suggested that women are more able to play this role because they don't look like incumbents-- that is, don't match the stereotypes people have of the old-line political figure. Then, too, the Tea Party has to some extent detached the social conservative?Christian Evangelical faction of the Republican party from the libertarian/fiscal conservative faction; where the former might be resistant to women candidates, the latter tend not to care as much about gender.

There might be some truth in any or all of these explanations. But this discussion reminds me of a recent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review about the relationship (or lack thereof) between political science and its findings and political journalism. Specifically, what I'm thinking of is the fairly large and consistent literature on women candidates which shows that, if they run, women do about as well as men. I.e., "women win" (see, for instance, Lynne E. Ford's Women in Politics: The Pursuit of Equality, pgs. 136-139). According to these studies, the lack of female representation in political office in the United States is a result of the fact that so few women run, not that they don't win when they do run. Part of the problem there is that something like two-thirds of Americans believe that women candidates don't win elections. This includes many party leaders, who often make (or heavily influence) decisions about who will be on the ticket (there's a piece on this, for instance, in the most recent issue of the journal Politics and Gender).

So, what we have to explain in the most recent primary elections is not that women candidates won their races, but that so many were running in the first place. It seems reasonable to me to suggest that part of the explanation is precisely the lack of structure in the Tea Party movement. These candidates are not chosen by an entrenched party hierarchy or by incumbent party leaders (indeed, these people are often opposed to the Tea Party candidates). They gain grass-roots support based on their adherence to a loose set of political principles, mostly having to do with the size of government. Without a party structure/leadership to act as a filter, the mistaken belief that women don't win elections doesn't keep female candidates out of the race, and so they are winning, just as existing data suggest that they should.

Hopefully, these successes will convince party leaderships in other parties that nominating women is not always a losing proposition.

Remembering Zinn

2010-01-29T15:09:00.005-06:00

I had the pleasure of seeing Howard Zinn speak once. I was probably around 14 and he had just released a new book. Based on his bibliography and a rough sense of the timing, the book was probably The 20th Century: A People's History, though I can't say for sure. You see, I didn't actually read the book. Nor had I read any of his books in full at the time. I was going as a young punk who was starting to immerse himself in radical politics, and the opportunity to see Zinn was an exercise in fuck-the-system-coolness. I went with my friend Marxist Mike (a nickname we affectionately bestowed upon him, and which he graciously accepted--just to give you an idea of my crowd at the time), and got to the Columbia University lecture hall in plenty of time to get good seats and to sit anxiously in waiting for what was sure to blow our friggin minds.

He talked briefly and, though it was some time ago, I do remember parts of his speech. I remember, for instance, him being a gentle speaker who spoke in a manner that put his audience at ease. I also remember his self-deprecating humor ("That law was passed in...in...I can't remember the date. Historians don't know dates, we have people look that up for us"). Not so deep, and not so substanive, but still, I remember being entertained and provoked to thought--two things the man was known for.

It was also my first experience with a brand of leftist zealotry that I would slowly grow uncomfortable and contemptuous of. Following his speech there was a significantly long Q&A section. Liberal college students and young budding radicals asked for his opinion on various political issues of the day (Columbia, the Clinton administration, etc.). Then a woman probably in her mid-40s stepped to the microphone and began chastising Zinn in a fairly incoherent manner, claiming he had abandoned his radical and revolutionary roots having bought into a comfortable place in the academy. She gave no room for response, no chance for others to speak, and was eventually forcibly removed. I later learned that no speaking engagement featuring a leftist intellectual-icon would be without one such obnoxious, semi-unhinged person for whom the occasion was simply an opportunity to lash out. My last encounter with such a person was a questioner who asked Ward Churchill in the middle of some event if he would come to her place for dinner (he didn't give an answer).

Since then I have attended more of these types of events to the point where I no longer enjoy to do so. I have also read more Zinn. I can't help but read some meaning into this formative moment in my own political trajectory. The juxtaposition was jarring: on one hand the gentle historian who told stories about the way a certain colonial village fought against unfair carriage laws; on the other hand, a militant and angry person whose passions left her with no ability to coherently fashion a spoken sentence. Why has Zinn been so crucial of a figure to the radical Left? Sure, he was an activist, but he was primarily a historian--why should this be so radical? Can we seek a revised history that is more accurate and more attentive to injustice without providing fodder for those succumbing blindly to a fanatic leftist dogma?

While we surely can, the line is a narrow and delicate one to walk. For we also shouldn't overlook the instrumental aspect of Zinn's historicism--it's not as if the man happened on these "people's histories" by accident or purely academic inquiry. He had an agenda. Did this agenda at times force him to obscure or ignore certain parts of his historical narratives? Almost certainly. Yet the difference between him and the small group of zealots who loudly attended his talks was a willingness to put together a constructive project with biases laid bare and methods made known. Whereas that woman who chastised him at Columbia that day would not let him respond or others intervene, Zinn's radicalism was put in terms of a history which invited critique and engagement. So yes, Zinn's revisionism was crucial for the development of American education and political discourse; but he as an intellectual was crucial for the development of many young leftists, myself included, who learned to treat their revulsion of injustice and inequality with the intellectual seriousness and respect such moral commitments deserve.

But here I am, fashioning polemic from a historical narrative (albeit personal and subjective). I'm sure that my recollection of the facts is shaped by my own views; perhaps Zinn spoke more militantly that day, and maybe there were circumstances behind that woman's incoherence and anger that I don't know. Were he to write my biography, Zinn would probably try to tell her side of the story.

2010-01-14T00:44:00.002-06:00

wow. really not much in the way of commentary here. except to repeat that which we already know: pat robertson is a crazy asshole.

2010-01-13T21:39:00.000-06:00

jesus christ

Its Christmas time...

2009-12-22T15:23:00.003-06:00

so a post about atheism and religion seems apt.

I just watched this debate between Robert Wright and the infamous Christopher Hitchens.
So OK, Hitchens is a bright guy and all, and on the balance his views and my own overlap to a great degree. Still, I can't help but kind of hate this cabron. There's a smugness and intellectual self-satisfaction that comes across in his writing--and in this discussion--which I find not only repugnant in terms of social decorum and aesthetics, but also annoyingly weak in argumentation and reason.

The gist of Hitchens's argument is that religion can motivate good people to do bad things, make smart people do and think stupid things, and removes moral responsibility and judgment from people and outsources it to some figment of our imagination. Furthermore, because secular morality is possible, and because secular people do good things all the time, there is no reason to believe that the good deeds which religion might motivate people to do have anything to do with their religious beliefs themselves. Religion is at best superflous and at worst destructive.

Now, Robert Wright probably doesn't do the best job jabbing back at Hitchens here, but his point is essentially that secular beliefs get people to do bad stuff all the time too. In other words, religion does not itself do good or bad on the whole, but can be used for either. It seems a pretty platitudinous point, but Hitchens--and I'll take the liberty of adding most of his ilk--refuses to accept it. For Hitchens Religion is unique in its ability to motivate evil deeds and immorality, but when it appears to motivate people to do good (give to charity, work at soup kitchens, or, as Wright points out, mobilize groups for things like the Civil Rights Movement) it is not unique. It is a pretty rhetorically slick but logically flawed argument, forcing us to ask precisely why we should accept religion's capacity to motivate people on end of the moral spectrum but not the other.

Of course, I share with Hitchens that religious belief is on the whole misguided, and that awful things happen in the name of religion all the time. But it seems that he mistakes religion as the problem as opposed to a particular form in which the problem presents itself. Is the problem that murder, rape, and slavery, happen because of religion, or because of a moral certainty and absolutism which religion encourages? In other words, it isn't one's belief in god that's so destructive, but one's belief that s/he knows unquestionably what is right and what is wrong that is dangerous. The religious wingnut who blows up an abortion clinic because the bible says that people who practice abortion are hellbound, and a political wingnut who murders "counter-revolutionaries" because Marx says that materialist dialectics render certain classes of people historically impossible--if we approach it this way, they are both motivated to do bad by a drive to moral absolutism and a lack of self-reflexivity. the fact that one was religious and one secular seems trivial.

Perhaps this is what I find so troubling about the smugness of Hitchens and the rest of the New Atheists. It's certainly not their lack of faith, because I more or less share that with them (to what extent is another post for another day). But its rather the sureness with which they criticize and ridicule others. The ability for Hitchens to assert his moral intuitions as moral facts appears bears the same lack of falsifiability that a hardline dedication to religious doctrine possesses, and its that which I find frightening and destructive.

On a sidenote, I will give credit to Hitchens that he gets correct the meaning of the oft-maligned and decontextualized quotation of Marx--"religion is the opiate of the masses"--and points out that it is not so much a condemnation of religion but a condemnation of those material circumstances which foster religious beliefs (I know other posters on this blog will find that welcoming too).

some thoughts for the holidays

2009-11-27T18:25:00.004-06:00

Eine Wahrheit kann erst wirken,
wenn der Empfänger für sie reif ist.
Nicht an den Wahrheiten liegt es daher,
wenn die Menschen
noch so voller Unweisheit sind.

A truth can only sink in
when the recipient is ready for it
It is not related to the truths therefore
that the people
are still lacking in wisdom so much.

Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914)

thanksgiving has just passed. family time. people go home, visit their families, spend quality time, give thanks as there are always things to be thankful for. however, this is quickly forgotten because the next morning everybody gets up at the crack of dawn to catch black friday's early morning deals.

though thanksgiving is not a tradition i grew up with, i have always liked it. there is the same kind of special feeling in the air that i remember from the day of christmas eve growing up as a child in germany. there is some kind of magic in the air, something special about the stillness of the day in the city when everybody is home, everybody is inside with their loved ones celebrating the fact that they have and love each other. i also like how since my very first year in chicago, my american friends have welcomed me into their families, always wanting to make sure that i would not spend the day alone on my couch, sad and lonely and thousands of miles away from my own family.

this year, however, i feel cynical. i can't help myself but think that so much of this holiday-fuzz means nothing. unlike when i was a child, standing outside at christmas eve around 11 at night after i saw my dad and grandma off to the car so my dad could drive her home after the family feast, and looking at the cold stars, taking in the absolute stillness of the night in utter amazement, I know now that the world does not stand still just because we cook turkeys and sing songs of love and peace. don't get me wrong, i cherish family time, i always will. but in the big picture, all our outpours of love and happiness around the holidays do not make the world a better place. ugliness and pain and suffering do not stop over the holidays just because it's the holidays and we suddenly remember to put the word 'love' back into our dictionaries. in fact, what matters most is what we do for the rest of the year. what matters most is who we are and the kind of role we can play in our miniature fraction of earthly space, our 'cubicle of the world' throughout our nano-fraction-of-a-nano-second-long existence in the universe.

let's face it: one person alone cannot change things in the big picture. one person alone cannot stop global warming or end world hunger or find the cure for aids or cancer. it's the small things that matter. it's a basic openness and a basic kind of respect for who we are and what we have - and especially what we take for granted: cars, apartments, money, loans, clothes, food, booze, travel. we think we deserve all this. we deserve that vacation in the bahamas. we deserve that extra paycheck, we deserve a better grade on that exam, a promotion, new stuff, new things, more money. the truth is though, and i try to remind myself of that when in agony over my own sighing bank account, we don't deserve any of this. we are privileged already because these are the things we desire instead of a daily intake of a decent amount of calories, clean water, a place to sleep, a doctor when we need one. this is not a world in which people get what they deserve. rather, most people - those who go hungry, don't earn minimum wages, don't have access to basic schooling, or even just decent humane treatment - most people don't get what they deserve. and that makes all the gift-buying and love-talking and awareness-mimicking around the holidays meaningless. because most of us will wake up on black friday and think that we really, really deserve all that extra-stuff we are going to buy on sale that we don't really need. and you know what? chances are we're buying it on credit anyway, which means that not the bank is paying for it but some poor soul in one of the world's many developing countries (say, China) by having even less. yes. the vast majority of this world's population lives in poverty so that the remaining small minority can think they really really deserve this and that. and that is not even anything we should be thankful for - it's something to feel ashamed of.

so maybe as we light candles and write cards and buy gifts and spread the love, we can just remember for a second that we deserve nothing of this but that by a strike of good fortune we were born on the sunny side of the street. that in fact it is a great luxury to have the right peace of mind to reflect on the magic and the stillness of the holidays. and that we owe it to that strike of good fortune to try to be as humble as we can, as aware as we can, as helpful as we can - always. we all owe the rest of the world - big time!

2009-11-20T10:49:00.001-06:00

In this short piece I look at the question of whether suicide bombers can be legitimately be called “martyrs,” and suggest several reasons why their actions should be seen as fundamentally different from martyrdom. For the sake of argument, I take it for granted in what follows that suicide bombers come from groups that are indeed oppressed by some majority or outside power. I try not to write about any particular case, though cases will of course suggest themselves.

A martyr is by definition passive; he neither acts nor reacts, but rather refuses to act, allowing himself to be acted upon without reciprocating. He refuses to change; he is static with regard to thought and belief. Suicide bombers are therefore not martyrs. The bomber is the principle agent of his own destruction; the martyr does not merely die for his beliefs, but is killed for them.

It is possible to think of suicide bombing as an act of resistance—and clearly it is that in the minds of the bombers—but it is resistance precisely to stasis. The situation of those who become bombers is one that forces them into inaction, into silence; they cannot act meaningfully on their own behalf. This can be an outcome of either oppression from outside or of a government that does not adequately represent some group and their interests, or both. The point is that in this situation the force to be resisted seeks a different kind of outcome, and so the mode of resistance changes also. A martyr is a victim of a power inequality in which those who have power seek to force him from stasis into action. His refusal results in his death. The suicide bomber, conversely, also acts from a position of little power, but it is power that seeks to force him from action into stasis. The bomber’s means of refusal is therefore to act, where the martyr’s is not to act.

In martyrdom, then, stasis is magnified, made total and absolute; it is stasis that becomes fatal when it meets with its opposite, action. In the suicide bombing, action is magnified in the attempt to reject stasis, to move as far from stasis as possible. The action must be the most active, the least passive possible.

In both cases, the individual is key; he or she is separated form the group whose collective identity is or is felt to be the target of persecution. But in the case of the martyr, the individual is acting (or rather not acting) of his or her own behalf; it is her own beliefs that she refuses to abandon. The suicide bomber claims to act for the collective (thought in reality he is no more representative than unrepresentative governments). In the bomber’s case, the harm to the collective is magnified by the bomber’s action. While the collective or group of which the martyr is a member may not directly benefit from his fidelity or death, they will also most likely not face greater or more severe persecution. Martyrdom affects the martyr; she brings the focus of oppression onto herself. She cannot refuse to act for someone else; the choice to remain static is necessarily a choice for the individual. The suicide bomber can claim, legitimately or not, to act for the group; moreover, he cannot personally be punished for his action. The reaction to that action, then, is diffused onto the whole of the group; all suffer a little more in the bomber’s stead.

So, the genuine martyr may have an example made of him by his oppressors, and so suffer more in place of his entire group. Oppression coalesces onto him. Martyr’s elicit a focusing or diversion of oppression onto themselves; suicide bombers elicit a diffusion of oppression onto others. This is because one may be active in the name of another, but one may be passive only for oneself. (That the martyr also often provides a powerful strengthening catalyst for his group is another matter.)

Finally, in the case of the martyr, the group identity for which she suffers is a voluntary one. She can only be called upon to renounce her beliefs because it is possible for them to be renounced. The bomber in general suffers for an identity that is ascribed; while he may be willingly identify as a member of the group in question, he will be identified as a member by his oppressors whether he is willing or not. He is not oppressed for any value or belief that he could abandon, even if he wanted to. Nor is he asked.

things are rough all over

2009-11-17T11:07:00.002-06:00

Entitled bourgeois brats are entitled bourgeois brats everywhere (or so says this entitled bourgeois brat). Anyways, my friend Bill wrote this piece in a University of Toronto newspaper a couple years ago during a large protest over tuition fees. Often I think the problem isn't selfishness but just shortsightedness, such that being "progressive" in one realm gets mistaken for progression in society as a whole. It is certainly reasonable to ask what standards or fees are fair to those receiving education; the problem is when this debate eclipses and precludes debates over fundamental inequalities in the education system as they relate to socio-economic status.

cross-referencing the working man

2009-11-17T09:26:00.003-06:00

80.000 students are protesting today in Germany: against the Bolognia Reforms, which standardized the European education system and introduced Bacherlo's and Master's degrees, Because it overstructures German university education and crams more requirements into shorter time intervalls. So students don't have as much freedom to do whatever with their own time. And against tuition fees. Because this is anti-social behavior and does not fit well into the picture of a so-called welfare state. And against overcrowded German universities. Because they are not a good learning environment. And for more money for research and teaching. And they frame all these things in terms of solidarity and socialism and the working man.

At the risk of sounding like my own grandmother, I say these kids should go home or back to their classrooms asap, open their books and try to actually do what they came to school for - learn something. How about we start with a lesson in socialism and solidarity?! How about a lesson in exploitation or self-righteousness?
German higher education is still - except for a service fee, which in most larger cities also includes a public transit semester ticket and comes to about 200 Euros per semester - about $ 300 - free! It is a service provided by the German government and hence the German tax payer to a bunch of very privileged kids, who were born on the sunny side of the street. In addition, for those whose parents are unable to support them while they go to school, the government [and, again, the tax payer] provides these kids with an interest free (!!!) loan, half of which is considered pocket money from the state, which does not need to ever be paid back! So in order for the state and society to actually be able to benefit from this - really incredibly social - system, there are a few control mechanisms that must be introduced. For example, a more crammed schedule for students, so more students can finish school more quickly to make room for other students who want to get a university education. Or time limits - for the same reason.
And an international standardization of the very complicated German university system makes sense in a tightening European Union. It makes sense for the students, too: student exchanges and study abroad programs become much more efficient that way. As someone who was lived through long-winded debates on how and whether a German degree could be categorized in the Anglo-American education system, I would have welcomed this kind of reform when I started university ten years ago.

It is just completely unacceptable for German university students to claim solidarity with the working man and lay claim to socialist ideals when they are not only demanding a free education but on top of that tell the state srew off and leave them alone for the next ten years so they can nourish their young eager minds by boozing and partying and the occasional university course. Whilst - if I may remind everybody - the working man is paying tax money for all this debauchery.

And I am not merely judging from the outside. I spent five years in Berlin in the German education system. Five years full of debauchery - and frustration. Because the classes were overcrowded, the professors unavailable, the lecture halls in dire condition, and half of the student body over 30 years old with no intention of graduating soon. I had to get out of there. And it's not that I have found my sanctuary in the American education system - because there are just as many, albeit different things wrong with it. But during my university time in Berlin, I would have gladly sacrificed a few hundred bucks of party pocket money to pay to my public university so that more professors could be hired and classrooms be improved.

What bothers me the most, however, is not my own personal beef with German higher education. Rather, it is the sense of selfish entitlement I have encountered in the statements uttered in virtually every German student protest - and, trust me, I have seen more than enough. It's a sense of entitlement that lays claim on state [and working class!] resources to be allocated to an elite group, which is later going to tap into the highest-paying jobs in society. A group that still has decent job prospects if they'd ever finish school. A group that takes all these resources for granted and tells the state - and the working class, which is financing an education its members did never enjoy - to screw off.

Socialism this is not.

2009-11-16T17:22:00.003-06:00

Never sure how I feel about tactics like these. Irving is obviously a jerk, but I don't exactly know what exposing his private information does to combat his jerkitude, except make him and his bullshit an object of sympathy. Still, I feel compelled to note that I am in no way related to the "Michael Singer" they mention...