Nerdy fandom_Texas Book Festival 2010

Texas Book Festival_Karl Marlantes and James Fallows

Lucky duck.

From Fallows

Health-Care Reform, the Morning After – Politics – The Atlantic.

Fallows quoting a reader who has been denied insurance coverage by private insurers because of a chronic condition:

Until tonight, I have been a Democrat because of people like Gingrich and Bush, Palin and Pawlenty. After tonight, I am an Obama Democrat in the sense that my grandparents were Roosevelt Democrats. For all the problems with HCR, for all the compromises and deals and disappointments and inefficiencies, tonight the Democrats stood up and took a political risk to say that I deserve medical coverage, that it’s no longer okay to treat my health as sad but acceptable collateral damage in a Social Darwinist system. That’s why this moment matters to me.

“…I am an Obama Democrat in the sense that my grandparents were Roosevelt Democrats.”

That about sums it up.

Mark those 21 march calendars!

219-212.

I have nothing to say that James Fallows, Ezra Klein, among many, many others haven’t said. In fact, Fallows says it so well that I’ll let him do the talking (next post). There’s a one-man live band playing French folk music outside my window, walking the street. A man with a trumpet and a cassette player. Love spring in Paris.

Plug for The Atlantic.

I no longer watch TV news, unless it’s C-SPAN (I’m serious), I rarely use Facebook, almost never on Youtube, AIM, or (visible) on GoogleTalk. I find those things very time-consuming, and terribly unproductive. But that’s not to say that I’m productive at all. No, I just let my time get sucked away by The Atlantic’s bloggers.

Blogger #1: James Fallows. He’s the reason I really started reading the Atlantic and its blogs. Writes on a wide range of topics, including on China, because he was there for a few years. When in Beijing, he was the only Western journalist I found palatable. NYTimes made me so angry that, as a result, since Beijing I’ve found myself reading it much less. And I almost never read their international news analyses.

JF articles leading up to and on the day of Tiananmen (六四) were fantastic, very balanced. I don’t completely share the opinion, but I like that he shows the different sides of the argument. While I’m at it, there’s also a good series by PBS on Tiananmen that’s really worth watching.

A series on the 高考, climate change and China’s investment in renewable energy, US and the Shanghai Expo, random things like cross-cultural exchange, good writing (I ended up buying the book, haven’t read it though), calling out Paul Krugman. Don’t have time to link to everything. Much more. Boiling frogs, God Bless America, presidential speeches, security theatre. Actually I’ll look for some security theatre stuff later.

Blogger #2: Ta-Nehisi Coates (pronounced ta-na-ha-zee, I think, not like tennessee, haha). It’s actually a bit strange that I read TNC because so much of what he talks about is stuff I either don’t understand, or in which I have no interest. That said, I learned about watermelons + fried chicken (more here), Magical Negro (with a great comments thread), Cosby conservatism, among many other things from his blog. And the BIGGEST draw of his blog is the open comments section. It’s really phenomenal, which is almost clichéd thing to say because all of his readers say the same thing about his comments section. It’s true, though. I spend more time on his comments than on his posts, especially the ones on football, the Civil War, or music because I don’t much understand/care about the topics themselves. A quick comparison of TNC’s comments section and that of, say, David Brooks at the NYTimes reveals just how incredible is the overall tone of TNC’s comments section.

It’s even harder to sum TNC up. On the Atlantic redesign, they labeled him ‘Culture’. Yeah, no. Culture makes me think of Maureen Dowd, which is NOT AT ALL a correct comparison. Here’s a random selection, with blog post titles:

Listening to Gangsta Rap With Your Kids

Not Sexy Asian, Math Asian

I Just Remembered Chris Matthews Was White

One of the best recent series on parenting and punishment, more, more, and more.

Recently they redesigned the website, and people were really irked. But within a day or two, the Atlantic people modified the redesigned site in response to what readers wanted. The response was incredibly fast and very much respected their readers. And of course the bloggers kept people posted about what was going on. In fact, yesterday I emailed Fallows about the redesign and mentioned the disappearance of topic tags. He promptly replied and said that that would be part of the next round of tweaks. I also emailed TNC about a comment being blocked, and was unblocked by him within 30 minutes. Like I said, responsive.

It’s the only magazine that I’ve ever subscribed to, with the exception of a brief (pretentious, imho) Economist stint during which I read almost none of the magazines that piled up in the mail. I hope The Atlantic does very well for a very long time.

On history.

I have very little (and nothing new) to say about history. But I do appreciate it more and more. I’ve always loved studying history because it was fun and really not that difficult. The unique elation one feels from getting a superb grade for a paper submitted with three minutes to spare is fantastic! Clearly I’m pleased, but at the same time, I’ve lately wondered why the humanities are important. I suspect that part of the difficulty rests with a society that focuses on making profits and measurable progress. But I’ll save my views on capitalism for another time. And each time I return home and meet the med school friends (congrats!), bme people, engineers, even architects, I wonder whether I’m wasting time and talent on fluff. Yes, fluff. The less-gifted study history and art, the more-gifted take on the STEM fields, right? At least that’s the mindset of many Asians.

But back to history. I’m reading The Embarrassment of Riches by Simon Schama. Schama discusses the founding myth of the Netherlands as a land and people set apart; sounds familiar, yeah? Also, I read an article the other day in the Atlantic about the Mugwumps and the state of politics in the 1880s. David Frum puts the current political discourse in perspective thusly:

You think Rush Limbaugh or Keith Olbermann talks harshly? Listen to this campaign speech from 1880:

Every man that tried to destroy the Government, every man that shot at the holy flag in heaven, every man that starved our soldiers, every keeper of Libby, Andersonville and Salisbury, every man that wanted to burn the negro, every one that wanted to scatter yellow fever in the North, every man that opposed human liberty, that regarded the auction-block as an altar and the howling of the bloodhound as the music of the Union, every man who wept over the corpse of slavery, that thought lashes on the back were a legal tender for labor performed, every one willing to rob a mother of her child—every solitary one was a Democrat.

That was Robert Ingersoll, one of the most famous orators of his day, stumping for the Republicans. Think of him when people tell you that today’s political discourse has sunk below the standards of the hallowed past.

The point itself has been made again and again. We all probably knew at some point that Charles Sumner (Ma) was rather severely beaten by Preston Brooks (Sc) in 1856 (yay Wikipedia for names/dates). And the Brooks-Sumner affair was recently resurrected courtesy of Congressman Joe Wilson (thanks to TNC for the point), also of South Carolina.

So that’s what history does, I think. Again, the point has been pounded to near-oblivion, but still, I find it true. History, in a big sense, gives context and keeps us level-headed.

But there’s also the personal side of history. Again, I must reference TNC. Two things. First, in December (?) there was an article about hair cuts for black men and one on history, white guilt, civil rights, and racism. I was pretty lost in both conversations (I spent more time reading the comments section than the article itself. Unlike most comments sections, TNC’s commenters are insightful and well-written. No trolls.) I have never in my life thought about where black men (and women) get their hair cut. I have also never felt justified in saying anything about civil rights/slavery in the US because I feel so disconnected from that history. History is emotional. That’s willy-nilly, touchy-feely, but I’m not sure how best to describe it. I cannot study Mao Zedong’s policies, listen to Joan Baez sing about Tiananmen Square (though I disagree with her to some extent), read about the Cultural Revolution objectively or passively. I hold strong opinions about these issues. I imagine that it’s the same for Americans and civil rights/slavery. Knowing little to nothing, I cannot jump into this issue, though many people who seem to know little to nothing about China throw out their ideas on highly-public forums, which is terribly irritating to me. Thank goodness for level-headed observers like James Fallows (also of the Atlantic :)).

Be it history, general, or history, personal, people must be aware of it for it to have any import. Yet humanities departments continue to atrophy.

I got a good, nerdy laugh out of this:

Courtesy of the inimitable James Fallows:

As the world financial crisis spread after the 1929 stock market crash, the flow of gold became highly unbalanced. The United States, with its undamaged industrial-export base (and its determination to collect on wartime loans to the Allies) was piling up gold. So were the French, for various reasons of their own. This meant big trouble most of all for England, which was losing gold and therefore had to imposes a domestic credit squeeze. You could put it that way — or you could write this:

“Unknown to most people, much of the gold that had supposedly flown into France was actually sitting in London. Bullion was so heavy — a seventeen-inch cube weighs about a ton — that instead of shipping crates of it across hundreds of miles from one country to another and paying high insurance costs, central banks had taken to ‘earmarking’ the metal, that is, keeping it in the same vault but simply re-registering its ownership. Thus the decline in Britain’s gold reserves and their accumulation in France and the United States was accomplished by a group of men descending into the vaults of the Bank of England, loading some bars of bullion onto a low wooden truck with small rubber tires, trundling them thirty feet across the room to the other wall, and offloading them, though not before attaching some white name tags indicating that the gold now belonged to the Banque de France or the Federal Reserve Bank. That the world was being subjected to a progressively tightening squeeze on credit just because there happened to be too much gold on one side of the vault and not enough on the other provoked Lord d’Abernon, Britain’s ambassador to Germany after the war [WW I] and now [1930s] an elder statesman-economist, to exclaim, ‘This depression is the stupidest and most gratuitous in history.’ “

This paragraph is from Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance, recommended here previously. There are many touches I love in this passage, from the “small rubber tires” detail and mot juste “trundling” term, to the vivid real-world description of how grand policies worked in practice, to the perfectly used quote at the end. No larger point here; just worth noticing admirable examples of explaining the world.

Sarah Palin and Katie Couric

I’m lazy and lacking in time, and I’ve had so many satisfying conversations with Chad about this that I won’t again expound.  So I lift James Fallow in whole.

Videos here.

To be serious about Palin and Couric

26 Sep 2008 07:00 pm

Gov. Palin’s comments about Russia seem to have drawn more attention than any other part of her interview with Katie Couric. I think this is mainly because .. well, they just sound funny. “As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space” and so on.

But, no joke, it is worth spending a little time on what, specifically, we have learned about Palin and her limitations via her attempted answers to Katie Couric.  After the jump, three specimens  — one about Israel, one about financial markets, one about domestic spending — that, as I mentioned after the Charlie Gibson interview, indicate that Palin is disqualifyingly ignorant of the fundamentals of public policy.

After thirty years of meeting and interviewing politicians, I can think of exactly three people who sounded as uninformed and vacant as this. All are now out of office. One was a chronic drunk.

George W. Bush is in a completely different and superior league to what we’ve seen from Palin. When people made fun of his inexpressiveness in the 2000 campaign (and onwards), it was because he mispronounced words or used cliches. It was nothing like the total inability to express any coherent thought on any issue outside “values politics” that Palin has revealed. (And to be fair: she can talk clearly and with nuance about those values issues, from abortion to prayer, and about some Alaskan questions.)

Details after the jump. The crucial point, of course, is that Palin did not put herself in this position. Her running mate did.
___________

1) Sarah Palin on “second guessing” Israel

Couric: You recently said three times that you would never, quote, “second guess” Israel if that country decided to attack Iran. Why not?

Palin: We shouldn’t second guess Israel’s security efforts because we cannot ever afford to send a message that we would allow a second Holocaust, for one. Israel has got to have the opportunity and the ability to protect itself. They are our closest ally in the Mideast. We need them. They need us. And we shouldn’t second guess their efforts.

Couric: You don’t think the United States is within its rights to express its position to Israel? And if that means second-guessing or discussing an option?

Palin: No, abso … we need to express our rights and our concerns and …

Couric: But you said never second guess them.

Palin: We don’t have to second-guess what their efforts would be if they believe … that it is in their country and their allies, including us, all of our best interests to fight against a regime, especially Iran, who would seek to wipe them off the face of the earth. It is obvious to me who the good guys are in this one and who the bad guys are. The bad guys are the ones who say Israel is a stinking corpse and should be wiped off the face of the earth. That’s not a good guy who is saying that. Now, one who would seek to protect the good guys in this, the leaders of Israel and her friends, her allies, including the United States, in my world, those are the good guys.

What’s the problem here? Two extremely glaring ones. The first is that Palin has obviously been given the slogan “don’t second-guess Israel’s security efforts” and is clinging to it all the way down, even when she can’t amplify or explain it under questioning.

The far more profound worry is that knowing who “the good guys” are is the first, rather than the last, step in making foreign policy decisions — especially those with the snarls that involve Israel, Iran, nuclear proliferation, preemptive strikes, and so on. The United States should know what it stands for — and the physical security of Israel is obviously one of those things. The chilling fact is that in the interview itself, Palin betrayed no awareness that there could be an analytical step beyond identifying “the good guys.”

2) Sarah Palin on the financial crisis:

Couric: If this [bailout bill] doesn’t pass, do you think there’s a risk of another Great Depression?

Palin: Unfortunately, that is the road that America may find itself on. Not necessarily this, as it’s been proposed, has to pass or we’re going to find ourselves in another Great Depression. But, there has got to be action – bipartisan effort – Congress not pointing fingers at one another but finding the solution to this, taking action, and being serious about the reforms on Wall Street that are needed.

Of course, talking about “another Great Depression” is like talking about “another Holocaust.” So many fundamentals have changed in each circumstances that an exact repetition is inconceivable.

On the Holocaust front: the rise of Israel, the transformation of Germany, the fact that one Holocaust already occurred, etc.  On the Great Depression: the acceptance of Keynes, the rise of institutions specifically designed to avoid cascading worldwide deflation, the fact that one Great Depression has already occurred, etc.

There is no sign, listening to Palin, that she has any idea of what another world depression might mean, how loaded a term “another Great Depression” is, how this relates to what John McCain or her Republican party is saying and doing, or anything else involving public finance.

I submit: no one could have read a novel (Grapes of Wrath), seen a  movie (Cinderella Man, to choose an easy one; or Annie, or Of Mice and Men or Bonnie and Clyde or All the Kings Men or They Shoot Horses Don’t They), or read any history book about the Great Depression and have said these things. Implication: Sarah Palin has never seen or read, or never absorbed, any such material.

3) Sarah Palin on America’s budget choices (this is a passage that Andrew Sullivan and many others have identified):

Couric: Why isn’t it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries? Allow them to spend more, and put more money into the economy, instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?

Palin: That’s why I say I, like every American I’m speaking with, we’re ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it’s got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade — we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation.

At face value, this is incomprehensible. More than that, it suggests a person whose previous two decades of adult life have not equipped her to absorb the briefings she is no doubt receiving about the big, obvious issues in the campaign: the market crash, health care proposals, tax plans.

Two natural reactions are: to laugh at the “Putin rears his head” part, and simply to avoid concentrating on the rest. But given her candidacy for national office, neither of those is enough.

I am not aware of any other current figure in national politics — by which I mean any member of the Senate or House — who would do a worse job under questioning. There could be some I don’t know about. But they’re not on a national ticket.