Breakdown of the special relationship · Nov 20, 2009
Obama’s neglect of Britain gets noticed.
Useful idiots? Nah, just idiots · Nov 19, 2009
The Spectator on Neil Kinnock’s (and, more broadly, Labour’s) relationship with the Soviets.
Good books · Nov 18, 2009
I posted earlier about this list. Here it is in full:
The final list was:
BOOKS OF THE 1940s
1. Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex (Le Deuxieme Sexe)
2. Marc Bloch: The Historian’s Craft (Apologie pour l’historie, ou, Metier d’ historien)
3. Fernand Braudel: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (La Mediterranee et le monde mediterraneen a l’epoque de Philippe II)
4. James Burnham: The Managerial Revolution
5. Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe)
6. Albert Camus: The Outsider (L’Etranger)
7. R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History
8. Erich Fromm: The Fear of Freedom (Die Furcht vor der Freiheit)
9. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklaerung)
10. Karl Jaspers: The Perennial Scope of Philosophy (Der philosophische Glaube)
11. Arthur Koestler: Darkness at Noon
12. Andre Malraux: Man’s Fate (La Condition humaine)
13. Franz Neumann: Behemoth: The structure and practice of National Socialism
14. George Orwell: Animal Farm
15. George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-four
16. Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation
17. Karl Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies
18. Paul Samuelson: Economics: An introductory analysis
19. Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism and Humanism (L’Existentialisme est un humanisme)
20. Joseph Schumpeter: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
21. Martin Wright: Power Politics
BOOKS OF THE 1950s
22. Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism
23. Raymond Aron: The Opium of the Intellectuals (L’Opium des intellectuels)
24. Kenneth Arrow: Social Choice and Individual Values
25. Roland Barthes: Mythologies
26. Winston Churchill: The Second World War
27. Norman Cohn: The Pursuit of the Millennium
28. Milovan Djilas: The New Class: An analysis of the Communist system
29. Mircea Eliade: Images and Symbols (Images et symboles)
30. Erik Erikson: Young Man Luther: A study in psychoanalysis and history
31. Lucien Febvre: The Struggle for History (Combat pour l’histoire)
32. John Kenneth Galbraith: The Affluent Society
33. Erving Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
34. Arthur Koestler and Richard Crossman (eds): The God That Failed: Six studies in Communism
35. Primo Levi: If This Is a Man (Se questo un uomo)
36. Claude Levi-Strauss: A World on the Wane (Tristes tropiques)
37. Czeslaw Milosz: The Captive Mind (Zniewolony umysl)
38. Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago
39. David Riesman: The Lonely Crowd
40. Herbert Simon: Models of Man, Social and Rational
41. C. P. Snow: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
42. Leo Strauss: Natural Right and History
43. J. L. Talmon: The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy
44. A. J. P. Taylor: The Struggle for Mastery in Europe
45. Arnold Toynbee: A Study of History
46. Karl Wittfogel: Oriental Despotism: A comparative study of total power
47. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen)
BOOKS OF THE 1960s
48. Hannah Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil
49. Daniel Bell: The End of Ideology
50. Isaiah Berlin: Four Essays on Liberty
51. Albert Camus: Notebooks 19351951 (Carnets)
52. Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht)
53. Robert Dahl: Who Governs?: Democracy and power in an American city
54. Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger
55. Erik Erikson: Gandhi’s Truth: On the origins of militant nonviolence
56. Michel Foucault: Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the Age of Reason (Histoire de la folie a l’age classique)
57. Milton Friedman: Capitalism and Freedom
58. Alexander Gerschenkron: Economic Backwardness in Historial Perspective
59. Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere)
60. H. L. A. Hart: The Concept of Law
61. Friedrich von Hayek: The Constitution of Liberty (Die Verfassung der Freiheit)
62. Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities
63. Carl Gustav Jung: Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Erinnerungen, Traeume, Gedanken)
64. Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
65. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie: The Peasants of Languedoc (Les Paysans de Languedoc)
66. Claude Levi-Strauss: The Savage Mind (Le Pensee sauvage)
67. Konrad Lorenz: On Aggression (Das sogenannte Boese)
68. Thomas Schelling: The Strategy of Conflict
69. Fritz Stern: The Politics of Cultural Despair
70. E. P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class
BOOKS OF THE 1970s
71. Daniel Bell: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
72. Isaiah Berlin: Russian Thinkers
73. Ronald Dworkin: Taking Rights Seriously
74. Clifford Geertz: The Interpretation of Cultures
75. Albert Hirschman: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
76. Leszek Kolakowski: Main Currents of Marxism (Glowne nurty marksizmu)
77. Hans Kueng: On Being a Christian (Christ Sein)
78. Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State and Utopia
79. John Rawls: A Theory of Justice
80. Gershom Scholem: The Messianic Idea in Judaism, and other essays on Jewish spirituality
81. Ernst Friedrich Schumacher: Small Is Beautiful
82. Tibor Scitovsky: The Joyless Economy
83. Quentin Skinner: The Foundations of Modern Political Thought
84. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago
85. Keith Thomas: Religion and the Decline of Magic
BOOKS OF THE 1980s and beyond
86. Raymond Aron: Memoirs (Memoires)
87. Peter Berger: The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty propositions about prosperity, equality and liberty
88. Norberto Bobbio: The Future of Democracy (Il futuro della democrazia)
89. Karl Dietrich Bracher: The Totalitarian Experience (Die totalitaere Erfahrung)
90. John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman (eds): The New Palgrave: The world of economics
91. Ernest Gellner: Nations and Nationalism
92. Vaclav Havel: Living in Truth
93. Stephen Hawking: A Brief History of Time
94. Paul Kennedy: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
95. Milan Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
96. Primo Levi: The Drowned and the Saved (I sommersi e i salvati)
97. Roger Penrose: The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning computers, minds, and the laws of physics
98. Richard Rorty: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
99. Amartya Sen: Resources, Values and Development
100. Michael Walzer: Spheres of Justice
Twenty years of liberty · Nov 09, 2009
The Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago today. The European War of 1914-1989 did not spontaneously end, just as Communism did not spontaneously vanish.
Instead, let’s give well-deserved credit to (1) four decades of US containment of the Soviet Union, (2) the international institutional framework created by the US at the end of WWII (“Pax Americana”), (3) Ronald Reagan, who had strategic vision, courage and luck, (4) the US military buildup of the 1980s which the Soviets could not ultimately match, (5) European leaders like Margaret Thatcher, for going against their own chattering classes (6) spiritual leaders like Pope John Paul II, who encouraged the Poles not to be afraid, (7) the Helsinki process, which contrasted the Soviets’ lofty rhetoric with their totalitarian practices (8) to reform-minded Communist leaders like those in Hungary who ever so subtly explored the perimeter of the possible (9) to Mikhail Gorbachev, who neither intended nor did he (initially) anticipate this outcome, but who did the right thing, when push came to shove, by not interfering, and thus prevented blood shedding of epic proportions, and (10) to dissidents, whether famous or not, successful or failed, for simply trying to uphold human dignity in the face of one the most seducing, yet pernicious, utopias ever.
Last but not least, three cheers to the institutions of liberal democracy and free market capitalism. Their absence doomed the Communist experiment, despite the feverish hopes of assorted naïfs and lunatics around the world.
Jokes · Nov 09, 2009
Credit were credit is due.
Q: What do Tupperware and a walrus have in common?
A: They both like a tight seal.
Q: What has three teeth and sixty feet?
A: The front row at a Willy Nelson concert.
Q: What is the new O.J. web site address?
A: slash.slash.backslash.escape
Q: What did the lesbian frog say to the other lesbian frog?
A: They’re right! We do taste like chicken!
Q: What did the banana say to the vibrator?
A: What are YOU shaking for? She’s going to eat me!
Q: What is the difference between erotic and kinky?
A: Erotic is using a feather….kinky is using the whole chicken.
Q: What do you call a gay dinosaur?
A: Megasorass
Q: What is the difference between Michael Jackson and a grocery bag?
A: One is made of plastic and is dangerous for children to play with … the other is used to carry groceries.
Q: How can you tell if you’re at a bulimic bachelor party?
A: The cake jumps out of the girl.
Q: What do a clitoris, an anniversary, and a toilet have in common?
A: Men always miss them.
Q: Why do so many women fake orgasm?
A: Because so many men fake foreplay.
Q: What’s the difference between Bill Clinton and the Titanic?
A: Only 1500 went down on the Titanic.
Q: What’s the new game they’re playing in the White House?
A: Swallow the Leader.
Q: How can you tell if your wife is dead?
A: The sex is the same but the dishes pile up.
Q: Why doesn’t Mexico have an Olympic team?
A: Because everybody who can run, jump, and swim are already in AmericA:
Q: How are twisters (tornadoes) and marriage alike?
A: They both begin with a lot of blowing and sucking, and in the end you lose your house.
Q: What’s the difference between a blimp and 365 blow jobs?
A: Ones a Goodyear. The other is a great year.
Q: What’s the difference between a golf ball and a woman’s G-spot?
A: A man will spend 20 minutes looking for the golf ball.
Q: What’s the difference between a whorehouse and a circus?
A: One is a cunning array of stunts…...
Q: How do you suprise Helen Keller?
A: Leave the plunger in the toilet.
Q: Why can’t Frankenstein have children?
A: Because his nuts are on his neck.
Q: What’s the difference between a bitch and a whore?
A: A whore sleeps with everybody at the party, and a bitch sleeps with everybody at the party except you.
Q: Who is the most popular guy at the nudist colony?
A: The guy who can carry a cup of coffee in each hand and a dozen donuts.
Q: Who is the most popular girl at the nudist colony?
A: She is the one who can eat the last donut!
Q: What has 6 legs and turns in a paddock?
A: A ram doing a ewey
Q: Why did God create man?
A: Because you can’t cut the grass with a vibrator.
And now, for something completely different
The only substitute for good manners is fast reflexes.
If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
Boycott shampoo! Demand the REAL poo!
Black holes are where God divided by zero.
All generalizations are false.
Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.
Sometimes I wake up grumpy; Other times I let him sleep.
I didn’t fight my way to the top of the food chain to be a vegetarian.
Give me ambiguity or give me something else.
A premature obituary · Sep 09, 2009
The New Criterion features a review of and reply to Sam Tannenhaus new book The Death of Conservatism.
“On the one side,” he [Tannenhaus] writes, “are those who have upheld the Burkean ideal of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions. On the other are those committed to a revanchist counterrevolution, whether the restoration of America’s pre-New Deal ancient regime, a return to Cold War-style Manichaeanism, or the revival of pre-modern family values.” In recent years, he concludes, the “revanchists” have gotten the upper hand over the Burkeans, and have thereby run the conservative juggernaut over a cliff and into irrelevance. In an entry that gives the reader a flavor of some of the exaggerated rhetoric contained in the book, Tanenhaus writes that, “Today’s conservatives resemble the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology.”
The argument that contemporary conservatives are reactionaries or revanchists is wrong on its face. The market school of economics cannot be dismissed because it is critical of the New Deal or of Keynesian policies, nor are free-market thinkers reactionary in any sense of that term. Tanenhaus does not inquire seriously into the reasons why conservatives are uneasy with the welfare state, why some see in it a threat to liberty and others an encouragement to the breakdown of the family and self-government. The market revolution of the last thirty years, moreover, contributed greatly to world prosperity over that period, to the fall of Communism, and to much else that was beneficial besides. It may be true that the current economic crisis presents a challenge to market thinking, but it certainly does not vindicate central planning or the welfare state, and there is nothing about that challenge that justifies the conclusion that market economics is dead.
It is certainly true, as Tanenhaus says, that conservatism as a political doctrine has its flaws and weaknesses, which are magnified when it is judged in the immediate aftermath of a lost election or in isolation from alternative approaches to public life. When judged in relation to liberalism, however, modern conservatism takes on a more favorable outlook. Many of the sins Tanenhaus attributes to conservatives—overly zealous attachment to principle or ideology, unwillingness to adapt to change, impatience with popular opinion—are on display as much or more among liberals. If Tanenhaus or anyone else wishes to see liberalism in action, he might venture on to an elite college campus where only liberal and leftist views are permitted peaceful expression, or out to Sacramento or up to Albany where liberal Democrats, long in control, have spent their states into near bankruptcy. The liberal faculty and public employee unions that control those institutions and jurisdictions have not exactly distinguished themselves for their far-sighted and open-minded leadership. As for New York and California, the public employee unions that control the Democratic party, and thereby the state governments, have exploited the prosperity of recent decades to build up huge government establishments that will no longer be affordable in the forthcoming era of austerity, especially as taxpayers and businesses flee to other states like Texas and Florida that have followed more conservative paths. As California and New York unravel, voters will undoubtedly turn to conservatives to restore levels of growth and prosperity sufficient to fund their social programs and educational systems. Liberals will come to understand that in order to fund their programs, they will have to tolerate conservatives and conservative policies. That will be a hard and painful lesson for liberals to learn.
Read it all here, and better yet, subscribe to the New Criterion!
A new German disease? · Apr 20, 2009
Obamaphilia, that is. And a transient one, argues Claus Christian Malzahn in Spiegel. He explores some of the reasons why Germans oscillate between extremes of love and hate vis-a-vis American presidents:
Indeed, all this love and hate of American presidents is not simple heartfelt interest or true partisanship. Rather it would seem to reveal the basic traits of the authoritarian personality which seeks to project its own aggressions and deficiencies onto others, while preserving its own preternatural innocence and rightness. Can that instinct on the part of Germans serve Obama well in the long run?
When Bush was in the White House, not a day passed in Germany when someone wasn’t making the wildest claims, hurling the vilest insults or spreading the most outlandish conspiracy theories about the United States and his administration. But there was little risk involved in these statements which helped boost the German feelings of superiority and innate self-righteousness.
Americans live in a society which of course celebrates commerce and selfishness — but behind the bluster, a mere inch beneath the surface, there are often huge reservoirs of idealism and selflessness in individual Americans. We Germans, however, live in a world which in ways is much fairer and more organized for the public good. Yet, so many of our experiences from the Thirty Years War onwards have contributed to a hard egotistical core which lurks just beneath the dutiful surface of the national psyche.
Losonczi Agnes: Sorsba fordult történelem · Apr 17, 2009
Balo Gyorgy Fregoli, 2007. július 9.
“A helyzet megjelenítése helyett hadd idézzünk fel egy képet, fantáziakép, de szereplői és az egyes történetek valósak. A hosszan kígyózó százakra, majd százezrekre tehető sorban itt öten állnak egymás mögött a kárpótlási hivatal előtt.
Elől áll a deportált zsidó ember, a haláltábor túlélője. A háború alatt mindenétől megfosztották, családját megölték.
Mögötte a csendőr, aki 1944-ben részt vett a zsidók deportálásában, és ezért a háború után évekig börtönben ült.
A csendőr mögött egy zsidó munkaszolgálatosból lett rendőr áll, aki 1945-ben a csendőrt letartóztatta, később ávós lett, a koncepciós perek idején saját társai megvádolták, megkínozták, börtönbe vetették.
Mögötte áll az az ’56-os forradalmár, aki egy pártembert mentett meg a lincseléstől, a lakásában bújtatta. A forradalom után mégis börtönbüntetést kapott ellenforradalmisága miatt, mert a pártember ellene tanúskodott.
A forradalmár mögött az a pufajkás áll, aki az ellenforradalmárok felszámolásakor ellene tanúskodott, majd katonatisztként a vád szerint baloldali összeesküvésben vett részt, és több év börtönre ítélték, így ő is koncepciós per áldozata lett.”
Losonczi Ágnes Sorsba fordult történelem.
Tax facts (2006) · Apr 15, 2009
Summary: The top ~3% pay half of all taxes. The top quarter pays almost 90%, and the bottom half pays essentially no taxes.
| % of total AGI | % of income taxes | Avg tax rate (%) | |||
| Top 1% | 22 | 40 | 23 | ||
| Top 5% | 37 | 60 | 21 | ||
| Top 10% | 47 | 71 | 19 | ||
| Top 25% | 68 | 86 | 16 | ||
| Top 50% | 87 | 97 | 14 | ||
| Bottom 50% | 13 | 3 | 3 | ||
| Top 50% | 87 | 97 | 14 | ||
| Bottom 50% | 13 | 3 | 3 | ||
| Top 25% | 68 | 86 | 16 | ||
| 2nd quartile (top 26-50%) | 19 | 11 | 7 | ||
| Bottom 50% | 13 | 3 | 3 | ||
Source: IRS
The share of the top 10% has been climbing relentlessly:
Source: CBO via Mark J Perry
Tuning a cello · Mar 08, 2009
Sometimes a 13-year old does it better than a pro. Strange, but true.
Cello tuning from Koen Brader on Vimeo.
Cool · Mar 08, 2009
The Renaissance had a word for it: sprezzatura, the quality of apparent ease that the perfect courtier brought to all his high-wire acts: swordplay, flute-playing, poetry-writing, singing, lovemaking. A later articulation of the same quality: A hundred years ago Vaslav Nijinsky, when asked how he managed his gravity-defying grands jetés, said “I merely leap and pause.”
Recklessness, abandon, sang-froid, talent: Fifty years ago it was called “cool.” It still is.
Thus WILLARD SPIEGELMAN starts his article What Postwar California Gave to Art, Design and Culture. Niiiice writing.
I am fan of the mid-century esthetic – in music , movies, architecture and design. Of course it was not limited to SoCal, even though LA was one of its centers, where
European émigré artists and intellectuals, having escaped Nazi Germany, had set down roots. New postwar prosperity led people to move west. After a decade of the war effort, industry resumed, offering new materials for civilian products. The stars were aligned. Industrial design, film and television, painting and jazz all bloomed in the desert. A new aesthetic emerged.
U2's "No Line on the Horizon" · Mar 08, 2009
Jim Fusili reviews U2’s latest album, “No Line on the Horizon.” The band continues to be very inventive, even after three decades in the business. Interestingly, just the day before reading this review, I bought “Zooropa” after hearing “Numb” on this fascinating video:
New York 2008 from Vicente Sahuc on Vimeo.
I am a fan of electronica, and Zooropa is quite good.
Ruining charity · Mar 07, 2009
Naomi Schaefer Riley wrote an op-ed in the WSJ about the attempts by left wing activists to extort charities into paying for liberal causes and ignore donor intent. I think liberals should set up their own charities and talk up rich donors and ordinary folks into donating for the causes they hold dear. The snag is, research shows conservatives are more likely to give to charity (liberals love spending other people’s money, as Nicholas Kristof, perhaps inadvertently, suggested). As Arthur Brooks pointed out:
Strong families, church attendance, earned income (as opposed to state-subsidized income), and the belief that individuals, not government, offer the best solution to social ills are the factors that determine how likely one is to give.
Charities help make American life more vibrant and diverse than Europe’s.
What makes Americans give billions each year is not pressure from activists or government mandates. It is a diversity of interests, freely chosen and passionately pursued.
Given conservatives tendency to donate and the – so far sacrosanct – principle of following donor intent, it is understandable that left-wing activists view charities as (1) bastions of much hated individualism, capitalism and consequently conservatism, and (2) a resource to tap for the benefit of their clients and to pay for their fantasies of re-engineering human nature into collectivist mold.
The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy begins its report with the premise that a grant maker “best serves the public good by contributing to a strong participatory democracy that engages all communities.”
Really? What about the foundations founded to save whales or cure heart disease? Do they need to contribute to a participatory democracy? And who decides if a foundation is giving to a “marginalized” community anyway? The idea, put forward in the report, that giving grants to “large cultural or educational institutions” doesn’t benefit minorities is offensive. Black people don’t go to museums? Hispanics don’t go to college?
In a letter to the WSJ editor reader L.C. Grant points out the connection to the overarching left-wing goal of Europeanizing American life:
Regarding Naomi Schaefer Riley’s “Philanthropy and Its Enemies” (op-ed, March 3): Americans give more to charity than do people in almost any other part of the world (as well documented in two books by Arthur C. Brooks), so the assaults on charitable giving and on charitable institutions are hard to fathom in a time of economic crisis. Tampering with a charitable formula that works, and one that is very highly correlated with the happiness of givers, makes little sense. The only explanations for this all have negative consequences: the Europeanization of American charity, the conversion of charity into entitlement, or the emphasis on the perceived fairness of charity instead of real results.
Limiting the tax deductibility of charitable contributions by the rich clearly follows the European social welfare state model. Europeans generally give very little time and money to charity because they pay very high taxes and consider it to be the state’s responsibility to take care of the needy.
For those Americans who feel as heartened by writing a check to the IRS as they do writing a check to their favorite charity, the European approach may be appealing.
Efforts by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and the Greenlining Institute can be understood in the context of entitlements and fairness. Forcing charities to allocate a certain percentage of their grants to various minorities (based on race, gender, sexual preference, etc.), in effect, converts discretionary allocation of charitable dollars into entitlement payments to specific groups of victims. The end result, as with limiting the tax deductibility of contributions, will be less dollars given to charity and an unhappier population. Apparently that’s OK, as long as favored groups, including community organizers, receive a larger percentage of a much smaller charitable pie.
President Obama’s tax proposals and the efforts of the NCRP and Greenlining will, without a doubt, reduce charitable contributions and will push us further toward a European social welfare state model, to the detriment of both givers and receivers.
I agree with Brooks (again) · Feb 24, 2009
David Brooks:
The political history of the 20th century is the history of social-engineering projects executed by well-intentioned people that began well and ended badly. There were big errors like communism, but also lesser ones, like a Vietnam War designed by the best and the brightest, urban renewal efforts that decimated neighborhoods, welfare policies that had the unintended effect of weakening families and development programs that left a string of white elephant projects across the world.
These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell. These writers — some left, some right — had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.
Before long, I was no longer a liberal. Liberals are more optimistic about the capacity of individual reason and the government’s ability to execute transformational change. They have more faith in the power of social science, macroeconomic models and 10-point programs.
Pundits and kibbitzers · Feb 15, 2009
I was impressed by an op ed by Eliot Cohen in the WSJ and I will quote liberally from it:
[...] government pays only intermittent attention to talk on the outside. To a remarkable extent, in fact, government talks only to itself.
Officials in the foreign policy and defense worlds go through vast quantities of official data, briefing papers and talking points. They meet urgently with one another. They fly to foreign capitols and back in a few days. They telephone and email incessantly. Every day in the office I spent hours reading a three- to six-inch stack of intelligence, plus all the other cables, messages and memoranda that are the lifeblood of the Department of State. I scanned the press clips, reading an opinion piece rarely, usually when it was written by someone who had a track record for good judgment. By and large, the buzz on the outside was just that — a background noise of which I was dimly aware, unless it was either unusually nasty, or unusually perceptive, which often merely meant that it fit my own views.
Most commentators have a radically imperfect view of what’s going on. Those on the inside, including at the very top, know more, though less than one might think.
[...] it’s even murkier on the outside. “Occasionally an outsider may provide perspective; almost never does he have enough knowledge to advise soundly on tactical moves,” Henry Kissinger once remarked. Or as the White House correspondent of one major national newspaper once confided to me, “We really don’t have a clue what’s going on in there.”
[...]
What, then, is a pundit to do? The best commentary has an impact, less because it offers new ideas (most ideas have been considered, however incompletely, on the inside) than because it clarifies problems or solutions that the insiders have only vaguely or incompletely considered. A tight, well-written, and carefully reasoned examination of a policy problem will bring into focus an issue that the officials have not had the time, or often the literary skill, to capture precisely. That kind of analysis is very much worth reading.
Invariably, a pundit will prescribe solutions. In doing so, he should follow the advice of the late Raymond Aron, the wisest French policy intellectual of modern times: Never criticize a policy unless you can convincingly depict a better course of action. Aron, like many of the greatest commentators on policy, had virtually no experience in government, but great empathy for those in a position to decide. Empathy — the capacity for imagining what it is like to be the other — is an essential quality for the thoughtful pundit. Policy makers, of course, prefer sympathy, which is soothing, unnecessary and often harmful.
[...]
High-quality commentary reaches audiences (including those overseas) who may not affect daily policy making, but whose opinions matter in subtler and longer-term ways. Well done, it sharpens a larger discourse — and besides, it’s more therapeutic than shouting at your television set. A prudent commentator should be modest in his aspirations, conscious of his limitations, and sparing with his exhortations.
Jeb Bush on education · Feb 15, 2009
From yesterday’s WSJ:
What comes through when Mr. Bush is asked about education is how radical his views are. He would toss out the traditional K-to-12 scheme in favor of a credit system, like colleges have.
“It’s not based on seat time,” he says. “It’s whether you accomplished the task. Now we’re like GM in its heyday of mass production. We don’t have a flourishing education system that’s customized. There’s a whole world out there that didn’t exist 10 years ago, which is online learning. We have the ability today to customize learning so we don’t cast young people aside.”
This is where Sweden comes in. “The idea that somehow Sweden would be the land of innovation, where private involvement in what was considered a government activity, is quite shocking to us Americans,” Mr. Bush says. “But they’re way ahead of us. They have a totally voucherized system. The kids come from Baghdad, Somalia — this is in the tougher part of Stockholm — and they’re learning three languages by the time they finish. . . . there’s no reason we can’t have that except we’re stuck in the old way.”
Influential books of the 20th century · Jan 25, 2009
The Times Literary Supplement has a ranking of the most influential books of the second half of the 20th century:
The special relationship gets shaky · Jan 05, 2009
An interesting article in the Times of London about the threats to the special relationship: the relative underperformance of British troops, the lack in the British political elite of the will for vigorous intervention and Obama’s lack of anglophilia.
Perhaps most important of all, the military alliance between Britain and America – which has cemented the political alliance since the First World War – is beginning to crack. I am told that a report circulating at the highest level in the Ministry of Defence concludes that there are now serious doubts in Washington about the effectiveness of the British Armed Forces. Senior military figures are said to have been surprised, and shocked, by feedback that arrived in Whitehall last month. Described as “highly sensitive”, it raised questions about the worth of the UK contribution to US-led operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It showed that the Americans don’t value us much,” one source told me. “Britain’s military ability is no longer rated as highly as we thought it was.”
The message has filtered across to the Foreign Office, too. At a diplomatic as well as a military level, concerns have been raised about the quality of British troops and equipment. Too often, the Americans complain, they have had to ride to the rescue of the Brits, rather than being able to rely on them as equal partners. There are question marks in Washington about Britain’s political commitment to military engagement: Mr Brown will not be forgiven if he fails to send substantial numbers of troops to support an Obama surge in Afghanistan.
“The US generals think the Brits need to be taken down a peg or two – that we have not performed well in Basra and Helmand province – and that has trickled up to the Pentagon,” says a Foreign Office insider. “It’s not terminal but it’s an important warning to us that if we are going to trade on our military partnership we are going to have to raise our game.”
King of California · Jan 03, 2009
Just watched this Sundance-indie movie, in which a mentally disturbed dad (Michael Douglas) and his precocious daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) discover each other during a frantic treasure hunt outside of LA.
The cinematography is stunning, particularly when enjoyed in 24fps Blue-ray on a large screen.
Vaclav Klaus, bete noire · Jan 03, 2009
Le Monde published a scathing non-interview with Vaclav Klaus. Why non-interview:
- “ Un entretien pour Le Monde ? Non.
- “??”
- “Non, n’insistez pas. Vous êtes de gauche, et si fanatiquement proeuropéen.”
That portrait that emerges is — no doubt unintentionally — that of a vigorous free marketeer, a lucid critic of the excess of the eurocracy and a courageous dissident. The flavor of the article is similar to descriptions of Nixon in the US press ( sans Watergate for the time being), that is, an intelligent man despised by the bien pensant elite and who is consumed by his rage and other demons.