Bandarlog


	15% of our oil... ...flows at the mercy of this guy. The heretofore creeping Chavista revolution has advanced to a gallop, but you won't hear much about it in the American press. Literally. The National Assembly recently passed a law changing the seal of the country. Chavez's young daughter supposedly asked her father why the horse on the Venezuelan seal is depicting as galloping to the right. The horse should, she said, like Venezuela under Chavez, gallop the the left. Shit like this makes calling french fries "freedom fries" look postively statesmanlike by comparison. [Ben H.: 4/1/06 12:56]


	Why Can't The French Just Get Along? Chirac just went on national TV to say that the government will hold firm against the strikers (or more accurately, will cave in to them on all substantive points but decline to kiss their asses publicly as demanded). I don't really care about what this means for France -- the country has for some time been over, fini -- but it's wonderful for Dao, whose web site has been breaking traffic records and will break new ones as the country collapses further. My realization of how fully France is finished has changed my attitude towards living here. When we were here from 2001 to 2003, I really tried to blend in and speak French as perfectly as possible; I felt acutely embarrassed when American tourists were nearby, acting American. Now I prefer to speak English, and feel much closer to the Americans who come through. I feel farther from the French, whose descent into surreal paranoia has ceased to be anything but funny. I feel bad for my French friends (who are sane) but I just can't muster any pity for the others, especially those who most radically refuse to deal with the modern world. When bums ask me for money in the subway (they have colonies in almost all the stations, unlike in New York) I now think of going dada on their asses. I learned that the French word for parsnip, panais, rhymes with the bum's refrain, tu peux me dépanner?, which basically means "can you help me out?". I'm thinking of carrying three or four parsnips around with me so I can pull them out and say "Des panais? des panais? Oui! Servez-vous!" [Doug: 3/31/06 14:29]


	Why Can't We All Just Get Along? Oh Yeah, Now I Remember Jill Carroll: "I was treated very well, it's important people know that," she said emphatically. She added: "They never threatened me in any way." Something else that it's "important for people to know": Ms. Carroll, a freelance journalist, was kidnapped on Jan. 7 in western Baghdad as she was leaving the offices of Adnan Dulaimi, a hardline Sunni Arab politician whom she was trying to interview. Her interpreter, Allan Enwiyah, 32, was shot dead at the scene. [Ben A.: 3/30/06 22:41]


	Cruel, But Accurate "Cabernet Sauvignon by the glass? Damn son, I told you I was loco!" [Ben A.: 3/30/06 20:45]


	French gefriggage Q: How many French does it take to change a light bulb? A: What is zees change? [Ben H.: 3/30/06 06:32]


	Hume, Mill, James ... Quine! This, in the pharmaceutical business, is called titrating to toxicity. James I am embarassed to admit that I have read almost no James, other than brief and unremembered snatches of "Pragmatism" five or so years back. My ignorance of pragmatism is even worse given that my dad is a serious Peirce scholar, and I've never read more of him than "On a New List of Categories," which is Transcendental Deduction hard. The section of James you cited, Doug, sounds great. When I finish my current high-literature clone dystopia novel, I will give a look. [Ben A.: 3/28/06 21:27]


	The Danger For France Today's strike + demonstrations show that France is pretty much gefrigged, but it's premature to say that this condition is total or irreversible. The French aren't uniformly stupid, and if enough evidence were shoved up their noses that rigid anti-entrepreneurial étatisme led to wretchedness, they would assent to reforms. The danger is that they won't reach the (remarkably high) threshold where this assent would take place. They certainly won't get there in the next year, and that's why in my opinion it's crucial that Sarkozy not get elected a year or so from now. His election would be just as fractious as W. Bush's was in the U.S., and the leftists here, unlike those in the U.S., would actually be able to block anything the government tried to accomplish. At the end of Sarkozy's 5-year mandate exactly the same gridlock would be in place (only more bitter and more violent after another half-decade of economic stagnation) and some socialist halfwit would be elected to replace him. A much better scenario would be for a socialist halfwit to be elected immediately next year; five years of unambiguous evidence of the kind in question might do the trick. ("The 35 hour work-week didn't lower unemployment? Let's try 30 hours!") So it's a dangerous turn of events that, as of today, Villepin's political career is over: as Chirac's heir apparent he was the only person who could have roughed up Sarkozy in the "primaries" and left him weakened going into the election against Segolene Royal. The best thing would be for Chirac to resign in disgrace this week -- the record of his presidency can hardly become any more disgraceful, after all -- which would lead to Segolene winning the ensuing special election. Unfortunately there is zero chance of this since Chirac's vanity would lead him to acquiesce in the most horrible suffering for his country if it meant he personally would save an iota of face. Unless his senile dementia has started attacking the vanity center of his brain ... but I'm grasping at straws. [Doug: 3/28/06 11:30]


	Regarding Ben A's Book Plea Dude, have you read William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience? I am loving it. I don't think anyone in the last 100 years has combined as well as James the ability to get straight to the point of a philosophical issue, to evoke (almost to paint) the various positions on the issue, to acknowledge what's sure to be right in each of the positions without bogging down in mushy middle-of-the-roadism, to be interesting without being polemical. Hume, Mill, James ... is there a next term in anglophone philosophy? (I can understand if some would deny James his place alongside Hume and Mill on the grounds that he left us no solid system, that "pragmatism" doesn't have the heft of empiricism or liberal utilitarianism. But I reason this way: all philosophy since Mill has been a kind of muddling and groping, and James performs this muddling and groping so much better than anyone else that he deserves one of the highest places in the canon.) For just one example of cool stuff in this book, here's a passage about the intellectual forebears of the self-help positive-thinking literature in the United States. I was fascinated to see its roots down beneath the "New Age" layer, and also heartened to see that James has the same ambivalent-but-ultimately-positive reaction to these forebears of Steven Covey that we (Ben A and I) have to the master himself. One of the doctrinal sources of Mind-cure is the four Gospels; another is Emersonianism or New England transcendentalism; another is Berkeleyan idealism; another is spiritism, with its messages of "law" and "progress" and "development"; another the optimistic popular science evolutionism of which I have recently spoken; and, finally, Hinduism has contributed a strain. But the most characteristic feature of the mind-cure movement is an inspiration much more direct. The leaders in this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind. Their belief has in a general way been corroborated by the practical experience of their disciples; and this experience forms to-day a mass imposing in amount. The blind have been made to see, the halt to walk; life-long invalids have had their health restored. The moral fruits have been no less remarkable. The deliberate adoption of a healthy-minded attitude has proved possible to many who never supposed they had it in them; regeneration of character has gone on on an extensive scale; and cheerfulness has been restored to countless homes. The indirect influence of this has been great. The mind-cure principles are beginning so to pervade the air that one catches their spirit at second-hand. One hears of the "Gospel of Relaxation," of the "Don't Worry Movement," of people who repeat to themselves, "Youth, health, vigor!" when dressing in the morning, as their motto for the day. Complaints of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many households; and more and more people are recognizing it to be bad form to speak of disagreeable sensations, or to make much of the ordinary inconveniences and ailments of life. These general tonic effects on public opinion would be good even if the more striking results were non-existent. But the latter abound so that we can afford to overlook the innumerable failures and self-deceptions that are mixed in with them (for in everything human failure is a matter of course), and we can also overlook the verbiage of a good deal of the mind-cure literature, some of which is so moonstruck with optimism and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained intellect finds it almost impossible to read it at all. The plain fact remains that the spread of the movement has been due to practical fruits, and the extremely practical turn of character of the American people has never been better shown than by the fact that this, their only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy of life, should be so intimately knit up with concrete therapeutics. To the importance of mind-cure the medical and clerical professions in the United States are beginning, though with much recalcitrancy and protesting, to open their eyes. It is evidently bound to develop still farther, both speculatively and practically, and its latest writers are far and away the ablest of the group.[45] It matters nothing that, just as there are hosts of persons who cannot pray, so there are greater hosts who cannot by any possibility be influenced by the mind-curers' ideas. For our immediate purpose, the important point is that so large a number should exist who can be so influenced. They form a psychic type to be studied with respect. [Doug: 3/27/06 11:41]


	The Art of the Nasty Review As practiced by Jonathan Yardley. [Ben A.: 3/27/06 02:22]


	Surely it's blue M&Ms that need to be removed... [Ben A.: 3/25/06 02:34]


	He should have asked for M&Ms with the red and green ones removed! [Ben H.: 3/24/06 11:50]


	The Travelling Echo Chamber Cheney's staff advises hotels to preprogram TV's to Fox News before his arrival: The Smoking Gun. [Doug: 3/24/06 11:06]


	Charlie Kaufman was Always a Genius Here is an early work -- a spec script for a non-existent sit-com called depressed roomies. Enjoy! [Ben A.: 3/22/06 23:59]


	Talkin' The Peace Our president's career as a peace-talker goes way back. [Doug: 3/22/06 03:14]


	It is Not Enough to Have a Theory of Market Failure, One Must Also Have a Theory of Government Success* Ayn Rand, I must confess, gives a very nice version of the public choice argument in a chapter of Atlas Shrugged entitled "The Aristocracy of Pull." She depicts a party of well-connected business-people and regulators trading favors, organizing resources, and basically lording it over the unconnected. The point: one does not get rid of power or injustice by creating a powerful state apparatus to redistribute income. Rather, one replaces one aristocracy (the wealthy) with another (the politically connected). As Ben H notes, history does not suggest that nationalizing a country's oil industry proves a decisive benefit to the commonweal. Rather, state ownership tends to enable corruption, self-dealing, and the concentration of economic and political influence. This is a fine line for opponents of economic redistribution to advance: the very act of creating a state appratus capable of distibuting wealth simultaneously creates a power source that will inevitably be captured by powerful interests, and will then become even less egalitarian (and certainly less growth promoting) than an unregulated market would have been. A quote, I believe, from culture hero Michael Munger Needlessly Antagonizing Doug* "Prime Minister Koizumi is one of my best buddies in the international arena, and when we sit down, we talk the peace. I find it interesting that he is a peacemaker with me on a variety of issues, and yet my Dad fought the Japanese. And I'm sure many of your relatives did, as well." --Need you ask the source? [Ben A.: 3/22/06 01:59]


	I Got More Hits Than Sadaharu Oh Congrats to Japan on their victory in WBC over Cuba. Disappointing that US couldn't win, but thank goodness Japanese prevented Fidel from walking off with a propaganda victory! [Ben H.: 3/21/06 08:18]


	Singer, You Twat! Guys like Singer, airy theorists, try to show the practicality of their ideas by using concrete examples. After a lifetime of airy theorizing, however, they don't realize that they know very little about the real world. Singer cites as an example against strng property rights: Two families acquire similar looking acreages of Texas grazing lands. One is fortunate: their land has oil beneath the surface and they become fabulously wealthy. One is unfortunate: their land has no oil, and despite working as hard as their neighbors, and applying similar intelligence, they remain poor. Sorry, Pete, that example is just a little too good. For perhaps the very moral reasoning Singer cites, in most jurisdictions, subsurface mineral rights are handled under a different and separate property regime than regular land rights. Certainly, it would be quite unusual to get subsurface rights when you purchase grazing rights. But let's go with Singer's example for a second. How did the lucky farmers figure out they had oil under their land? I get the sense from Singer's example that maybe his knowledge of the "real world" in this case comes from watching the opening credits of The Beverly Hillbillies. Jed Clampett's lucky shot notwithstanding, generally running a farming operation will not by itself uncover oil. So the "lucky" family will have had to get into doing (expensive) seismic imaging; or more likely would have been approached by an oil company that would be willing to do exploration but only to the extent they could own and have economic benefit of most of what they find. Singer glosses over the question of who he thinks should own the oil. Because if nobody owns it, it will not get exploited. Maybe he thinks the state should own the oil? Well, this isn't exactly a scandalously heterodox position. In many countries with robust capitalistic economies, subsurface rights default to the ownership of the state. However, in countries where they remain under state ownership (rather than being sold to a high-bidding private company to exploit), society does not wind up better off. State-owned oil monopolies like Pemex, PDVSA, Aramco, and Petroecuador are the most inefficient, corrupt, and pollution oil companies there are. Facts, Peter. I know they are a pesky concern for a brain like yours, so perfecly tuned to derive universal truth from first principles, but sometimes it helps to know them. [Ben H.: 3/21/06 07:24]


	Depressing Thought That Struck Me In Bed This Morning George W. Bush will be president for almost three more years. [Doug: 3/21/06 03:13]


	Boooring! That's a allegation that could be lodged against Peter Singer's snooze-a-rific second essay on equality, or, with equal justice, to my criticism of the same. Should I even bother? Meanwhile, we have a much more interesting article by Will Wilkinson about his dreamed-of health care reforms. For discussion. [Ben A.: 3/20/06 20:23]


	World Baseball Classic It's a cliche of spring training that pitchers are ahead of hitters at this point in the season. So it does not surprise me to see Korea run a hot ptiching streak (abetted by fine defensive play) into the semifinals. I was, however, simply appalled that the magnificent Dominican squad (Ortiz, Tejada, Pujols!)lost to Cuba. Abajo Fidel! [Ben A.: 3/19/06 00:44]


	Ephemera I watched the visually striking but ultimately unsatsifying V for Vendetta with my good friend J this evening while our respective better halves were workgng or recuperating. Although ideologically noxious in these times, it earns a solid B as spectables and as a showcase for Hugo Weaving and the elfin-cute Natalie Portman. The real event of the evening came after the movie, when we retired to a bar decorated with a tank of luminous jellyfish. How fricking cool is that? It is, indeed, a golden age. [Ben A.: 3/19/06 00:37]


	Kitchen Porn No doubt, Doug, retaining Whirlpool appliances in the kitchen of a new American apartment counts as a gesture of rebellion against fashion. But to do the same in a French kitchen? Could it not be read as a defiant endorsement of American values, keeping these full-size, energy-guzzling works of Midwest metal-bashing industry? Compensatory Frenchy-Praising I've been going through a particularly heavy movie-going period recently, to th extent my travel schedule has permitted it. I bash things French so often on this blog, to the point of turning it into a schtick that I feel I should seize upon any opportunity that life presents me to praise something French. IFC Center last weekend held a screening (and talk by the director) of Cedric Klapisch's Poupees Russes. Now, probably this doesn't qualify as Great Movie, but it is witty, thoughful, and (shockingly, this) optimistic. I also liked the movie to which it serves as sequel, L'Auberge Espagnol, though this last suffered from a sort of overtone of complacent celebration of EU-forged "European-identifying" youth culture. An English Fate I shall evermore condole with the English, who must see their national teams beaten over and over again in sports that the English themselves invented. First Team USA blows it in international basketball competition (behind the Argentines no less!!); now Team USA gets bounced out of the World Baseball Classic (we don't even get a showdown with the Cubans!). What gives? Ben A., let me tap your baseball wisdom. To what do you attribute the remarkable success of the South Korean team? Here's my theory: any pitcher with even marginal Major League stuff can with a sufficiently non-traditional delivery succeed at baffling naive batters for a certain period of time. Think of the South Korean staff as kimchee-flavored Fernando Valenzuelas... [Ben H.: 3/18/06 12:55]


	Book Recommendation I would recommend reading Anna Karenina again. [Doug: 3/16/06 16:10]


	Shocking The Bourgeoisie The whole piss-christ blasphemy angle may no longer elicit anything but yawns, but Dao and I are contemplating doing an installation that will send the American upper middle class into paroxysms of disgust. (Members of this group may wish to stop reading here.) We are considering a cheap way of expanding our kitchen counter such that the old sections will be left as-is and not match the new countertop. As if that's not enough, we will be retaining the previous owners' Whirlpool appliances. [Doug: 3/16/06 16:08]


	The Vile Pin-head That's what we call him on the desk here. I recall reading somewhere that the Vile Pin-head wrote, in addition to his pretentious poetry, a biography of Napoleon, and that he considers Napoleon a personal hero. I can imagine how Napoleon would handle striking students. Somehow, though, I don't imagine the Vile Pin-head will give the strikers a whiff of grapeshot (or even teargas). [Ben H.: 3/16/06 10:12]


	Poetic Justice For The Chief Poet I don't know whether Bush-backers in America are savoring the comeuppance of one of their erstwhile bugbears, and I hesitate to mention it because it's more than they deserve. But here it is. You remember Dominique de Villepin, the oleaginous foreign minister and published poet who strutted around the U.N. telling everybody how stupid the American's Iraq plan was, without suggesting any credible alternative for dealing with Saddam? (He was right about America's plan, of course, but my point is that he preferred to grandstand rather than to warn America in a friendly way about the colossal blunder it was about to make.) Well Villepin is now the prime minister here, and his government is in a crisis -- if the demonstrations are especially violent today, maybe even a fatal crisis, although this is a long shot -- about his anti-youth-unemployment measure, known as the CPE (contrat premiere embauche). Like Iraq was in 2003, youth unemployment in France is problem too bad to ignore, something has to be done. So he forces through this law to allow a new type of work contract for young people, basically a timid half-measure that follows the bureacratic approach of making the system more complicated rather than less ... but whatever. The point is that the left has whipped students into shutting down most universities (see below) and there are big marches scheduled Thursday and Saturday. The head socialist Francois Hollande, a smug fuckwit of a class far beyond Al Gore's, snipes daily about how the law must be repealed (and Villepin, who's made the law a personal crusade, shamed). Villepin gets red with rage at the Assemblee National -- but you don't have any alternative plan to deal with unemployment! In short, he is suffering exactly what he put the American warmongers through. [Doug: 3/16/06 07:33]


	Orgy of Feeling and Secret Ballots Margaret Thatcher is almost certainly a bete noire of the French strikers. She understood the way the leaders of protest actions can use their inexorable sentimental momentum to enforce radical behavior on individuals who might otherwise demur. The Iron Lady promulgated a law requiring unions to hold a secret ballot before initiating a strike action. She further made it the government's responsibility to cover the costs of the ballot (if I recall correctly), making it harder for the unions to resist the law. As you might expect, the frequency of industrial actions declined markedly. From one defeated reader of technical literature to another Here's a recommendation for you, Ben. Thackeray's Barry Lyndon. Granted, it's not an entirely serious book, but there you go: I am not an entirely serious person. [Ben H.: 3/16/06 07:30]


	France Student Strike Update My friend who teaches at Censier (Paris III) invited me to the student and teacher general assembly meetings yesterday. They're effectively strike committee meetings, but are called general assemblies because they purport to speak for all the teachers or students. In fact the dynamic is such that nobody can speak out against the strike or its main tactic, the barricading of the university. It was highly interesting to see the dynamic -- most professors in the hallways had an "enough already" attitude toward the strikers, but once they get in the general assembly, the professional leftists start their speechifying and their French always-side-with-the-people-on-the-barricades reflex sets in. If one is French one just cannot bring oneself to abstain from voting "solidarity", even with the most arrant dolts. My friend was one of two teachers to vote against the strikers (out of about 70 who showed up). Votes are taken by counting raised hands; my friend pointed out that this sort of cows people into going along with the majority. The student meeting was even more revealing. I can definitely understand the kids' frustration, since the political class, and their parents' generation in general, has let them down terribly by bequeathing them this crappy economy. But of course the power structure (of the unions' student wings and of the professional leftists in the faculty) has set things up to hand the students these bogus villians they can rail against -- the "patronat" etc. Student members of said power structure got up in front of the amphitheatre with a microphone and made exactly the sort of speeches you'd expect, i.e. not a single word expressed against the strike, much less for the legislation in question. You'd be booed out of the room if said any such word there, once what Nietzsche called the "orgy of feeling" was underway. Revealing tidbit in Le Monde about these group dynamics: the student assembly at the university in Tours did a secret ballot on the question of whether to continue classes, and they voted 3918 to 500 to end the strike. The pro-strike anti-CPE people labeled the vote "illegitimate" (on what grounds we are left to imagine) and they continued the barricade. [Doug: 3/16/06 04:32]


	Recommend Me A Book: An Illiterate's Plea In the past six weeeks I have read 1.5 books. That's pathetic. The new gig bears some responsibility, as it requires me to read technical literature in some quantity.* This knocks down my desire to read anything longer than two paragraphs in the evenings. Another factor is the cursed world wide web, which provides an endless assortment of entertaining paragraph-length ephemera. It's like eating cheetos for dinner, tasty but not nourishing. The last time this happened, Doug saved me by recommending Anna Karenina. That's what I need now: a book that is both so good that it stays with you forever and that is also a total page-turner. If I set myself to read the next thing in the queue, I will just bog down and end up watching re-runs of Battlestar Galactica on bittorent. Doug, Ben H, any reader out there, save me from this with the recommendation of a compelling, high quality book. Today: did you know RNA can form receptor-like structrues that can bind small molecules and operate kind of like negative transcription factors? And that this suggests that life may have existed on earth before the evolution of proteins*? Dude, it's true). [Ben A.: 3/16/06 00:15]


	Brilliant Microsoft redesigns the ipod package [Ben A.: 3/15/06 23:17]


	None Can Defeat Mansfield! The Deborah Solomon Interview: DS: When was the last time you did something that required physical strength? HM: It's true that nothing in my career requires physical strength, but in my relations with women, yes. DS: Such as? HM: Lifting things, opening things. My wife is quite small. DS: What do you lift? HM: Furniture. Not every night, but routinely. [Ben A.: 3/15/06 22:48]


	Ex Nihilo Collective Duties Good question, Ben. Like usual, I don't have an answer. However, I can point to an answer Robert Nozick provides to the related question of whether a state has any legitimate powers that are not grounded in rights and duties that individuals have towards each other in the absence of a state. For the legitimate powers of a protective association are merely the sum of the individual rights that is members or clients transfer to the association. No new rights and powers arise: each right of the association in decomposable without residue into those individual rights held by distinct individuals acting alone in the state of nature. (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p.89) Not that I agree with the anti-chance ogres, but I suspect the response to your criticism, Ben, would be that many individuals strive for a life free of excessive volatility of utility. In point of fact, most economic/financial models assume that people's objective function are of a form that is increasing in return and decreasing in volatility. These individuals might look to the state to insure against adverse chance. The role of the state does not stem from a moral objective but rather a practical objective. Not a line of argument I find persuasive, of course... which argues against your proposition (1). On the other hand, opening one's eyes in any American corner store and witnessing the profusion of scratch-off games and Lotto variants should empirically prove your proposition (1). Human beings love a certain kind of chance (high chance of negligible loss against low chance of enormous gain). [Ben H.: 3/14/06 21:43]


	Sors Immanis et Inanis There's no question, Ben H, that you are correct to sense in Rawls a protestation against luck. This strand becomes yet plainer in later, and lesser egalitarians who place the equalization of luck at the very center of social policy. This is, I think plainly nuts. And it’s nuts even if one believes that social justice = the social insurance scheme you would select from behind the veil of ignorance. To take the two nearest objections to hand: 1. Even were luck equalization practicable, it is not obviously a policy one would choose from behind the veil of ignorance 2. Luck equalization is obviously not practicable, but is rather the ne plus ultra of impossible and quixotic policy objectives Even though not terribly interesting on the merits, the luck-egalitarian position is emblematic of a very strange aspect of modern liberal political theory: namely, the vast disjunction between the demands of individual morality of social responsibility. This is not typical. Aristotle thought we as individuals were trying to live the good life, and that the city existed for the purpose of enabling the good life. Hobbes thought we were all trying to avoid violent death and humiliation, and that the state secured this protection (a protection which, as it happened, required the inculcation of many new habits of mind). In the long history of human thought, however, no one has ever argued that one should take as one's personal moral objective the project of equalizing luck. And rightly so. It is hard to understand what would it even mean to do attempt this. Yet, post Rawls one saw numerous theorists (Cohen, Dworkin, Rakowski, Arneson) arguing that this very equalization was a primary moral responsibility of government. It’s an interesting question: can duties arise solely from the formation of a state that have no pre-governmental source or parallel? [Ben A.: 3/14/06 03:49]


	Michael Kinsley Brings Us First Sentence Of Greenspan's Memoir "Although developments in human biology are always — and, in the view of many experts, perhaps not un-including myself, quite properly — subject to a variety of interpretations, the evidence does tend to suggest, with only a limited amount of ambiguity, that I was born." Still my vote for best writer on the web. [Doug: 3/13/06 07:28]


	I Love You To Death Abstinence has place in sex education, no matter what Blue State libertines say. Just tell me how a condom could have prevented this venereal death. [Ben H.: 3/12/06 20:31]


	If You've Got It, (Don't) Flaunt It I think you hit on an important insight, Ben. If the value of positional goods and status is grounded in the workings of the brain (as opposed to being a pure abstraction, like justice or fairness), then we ought not be looking for a very pure result like "complete equality of status." We ought to be guided by the more empirical result apposite to a problem of animal behavior. Another way in which egalitarians are misguided in their attempts to deal with what is, even if they don't talk about it in these terms, status inequality is that they concern themselves principally with earning (income) and having (wealth). People do not share with others their precise income and wealth numbers, even if income and/or wealth may servce as pre-requisites to the acquisition of positional goods and status. What is visible to others is consumption. If egalitarians really wanted to alleviate the unhappiness inflicted by inequality, they ought not to start by trying to level income and wealth, but rather to persuade those with high incomes and wealth not to spend so freely on positional goods. I think they would have a better chance at this endeavor than at trying to get people to accept equal incomes or to give away their accumulated wealth. It seems to me that acquisitiveness is a more deeply ingrained human trait than display, not to mention more central to economic efficiency. Could egalitarians not try to inculcate in the wealthy an ethic of modesty rather than to try to entirely remake the economic system? Unfortunately, many egalitarians don't even stop at economic leveling. No, they aim for nothing less than the elimination of luck from the sphere of human affairs. Am I crazy to read into John Rawl's work an impassioned denunciation of luck? BUt trying to expunge the influence of luck or to counteract is even crazier than trying to re-educate man to ignore the profit motive. Luck isn't a mere artifact of human behavior but rather woven into the very fabric of the universe. You might as well build a political philosophy in opposition to gravity. Of course, it isn't just egalitarians who have a problem with luck. Many very lucky people, endowed with great skill or born into the right family or wealthy from being in the right place at the right time try to ignore (rather than eliminate) the role of luck. We all prefer to think whatever success we've achieve is due to our efforts rather than to luck. We'd all prefer to win a game of Scrabble by uncorking a creative bingo than by having the good fortune to pick a Q and to be able to play something obvious like QI/QAT. One can accept that luck injects life with a certain irremediable unfairness and in wisdom and magnaminity refrain from gloating over a QI/QAT victory; or one can side with the egalitarians and burn the Scrabble board. You know which course I take... [Ben H.: 3/12/06 02:33]


	Positional Goods, Considered Less Polemically Curse you, Ben H, for being the voice of reasoned moderation! You are absolutely right to correct me. People are motivated by status, and feelings of low status or being hard done by have a reality that should not be dismissed as mere envy. Some evolutionary biologist, if I recall, spins the story that sensitivity to relative position is sensible and adaptive in the zero-sum hunter societies of early man. The thought being that in a society with limited positive sum collaboration, inequality just is evidence of injustice. If the chief has more hyena meat, it must be because he stole yours. Evolutionary just so stories aside, I’ll say again, you’re right. Consciousness of status is a real a human concern as consciousness of hunger. The Limits of the Positional Goods Argument: Equality vs. Propinquity One problem with the positional goods argument for equality is that it doesn’t really support equality at all. Rather, it supports a whatever distribution reduces the damage of positional goods comparisons. Almost certainly, one will get to this point long before equality is reached. What the positional goods arguments, and I think most arguments for redistribution (for example, on social cohesion grounds) really support is not equality of outcomes but nearness of outcomes, or propinquity. A mistake of redistributionists is to pursue the goal of propinquity with the moral fervor that is actually appropriate to matters of justice or fairness, where equality is required. [Ben A.: 3/11/06 22:09]


	What do I think about it? I have been writing a short book about it (about the disease of which it is a consequence). Or maybe a long essay, depending on how much I want to think about potential cures for the disease. I'll post a draft when its pieces are in place, maybe in a week, although it's in French and consequently chock full of mechanical errors. [Doug: 3/11/06 14:30]


	2006(8) Doug, what do you make of this? The last time Harvard students occupied University Hall, it was to demand a "living wage" for the janitors. French students occupy the Sorbonne to demand for themselves a guaranteed living. [Ben H.: 3/11/06 13:40]


	Self-Congratulation Best recent scrabble bingos: LAUWINE, TECTITE, ALEURONS. Unfortunately SUMPTUARY is too long to be likely (great word though). We also played QI / QAT for 66 points, which shows how dominant the luck factor has become thanks to OSPD4. This factor is far more likely than i'm-wasting-time-playing-this arguments to make me stop. I think I will uninstall the game as soon as I play one dream bingo, which I now define as OUGUIYA, FARTLEK, or OIDIOID. [Doug: 3/11/06 07:59]


	Inequality Neither of you needs me to tell you that I, too, agree with the article. But just so this doesn't turn into a dull litany of assent, I want to at least register some doubts I have about Ben A's dismissal of the positional goods problem. Considered in the abstract, the pareto-optimality argument Ben A makes should trump the positional goods counterargument. And when listening to egalitarians moan about context-sensitive consumption and positional goods, one does get the sense that these are terms of convenience defined with the express purpose of refuting sound arguments in favor of inequality; sort of the ethics equivalent of imaginary numbers. On the other hand, the empirical data on hedonic value suggests that human beings' hedonic calculus is quite quirky. A moment's thought tells you that hedonic value isn't susceptible to simple arithmatic. Your average American has hundreds of times the consumption of your average hunter-gatherer but is he hundreds of times as happy? If so, did human beings evolve with a hedonic scale that has enough dynamic range to encompass the hunter-gatherer state of the world and Brave New World of the technological advanced consumer state? Is our hedonic scale like Nigel Tuftnell's amplifier -- it doesn't stop at ten but rather goes to eleven? It is much more plausible to think that our hedonic scale is calibrated to our direct experience of our own historical states of well-being and those of our peers. The strange but ineluctible conclusion of this line of reasoning is that simply seeing somebody else living very well can lower a person's level of happiness. Likewise, the timing of one's own level of well-being over the lifecycle has important consequences for happiness. Have a really great time in your adolensence and your hedonic scale is forever screwed up. Ben A, didn't you once quip that you wanted to sue your parents for not abusing you; for if they had, you could wake up every morning now and rejoice that no one would sodomize you that day? If human beings experience satisfaction as a relative quality, then branding disgruntlement with inequality as "envy" may partake of the same definitional deck-stacking as using "positional goods" as a rhetorical weapon in support of egalitarian political goals. That said, I suppose you can't strictly argue in favor of egalitarian redistribution on this basis. You might just argue that the wealthy should live behind high walls and refuse to give house tours to the New York Times Magazine. Forget about estate taxes and progressive income taxes. The answer is sumptuary laws! [Ben H.: 3/10/06 17:09]


	Inequality and Scrabble (Considered Separately) Regarding the inequality article: I read it; I have little to say about it, but this is due as much to my general agreement with it, as it is to my policy of demurral when it comes to invitations to react to academic philosophers. I vote, as always, for equal opportunity, e.g. for estate taxes on the rich and for increased spending in poorer school districts. I do have something to say about your suggestion of reclaiming scrabble. The basic idea is sound and if I had more energy maybe I would put the scalpel to the dictionary (just as I might follow through on my project of trimming the Simpsons canon, by finding a rationale for declaring all episodes post-1995 or so as apocryphal). But the idea of banning two-letter words is crazy: you wouldn't be able to line up words laterally and it would be a drag trying to place words that you found in your rack. It's a better idea just to supply all players with a list of valid two-letter words. Another way to improve the experience is to just play the game anagrams, which Carl V showed to me and Dao (of course he kicked our asses). I believe we played what's called the "fanagrams" variation on the Wiki site. Recommended. [Doug: 3/10/06 16:41]


	When More is Worse: Schmidtz on Inequality David Schmidtz, one of my favorite current philosophers, has an essay “When Inequality Matters" on the excellent* “Cato Unbound” website. At his best, Schmidtz offers a rare combination of thoughtfulness, and blunt, surprisingly personal prose.* If you have time to read the Schmidtz essay, I would be interested in your thoughts. Those of you who do not follow analytic political philosophy may not know that for the past 30-odd years, equality has exerted a strange fascination on the field. There is even a literature known in the business as “The Equality of What,” devoted to the question of what type of thing society should be in the business of equalizing: is it money, deficits or benefits due to luck, access to opportunity, or something else? This focus always struck me as odd. For while the standpoint of morality does require a certain uniform consideration -- a willingness to treat equal cases equally – the equal distribution of goods does not seem the obvious first, second, or forty-fifth requirement of personal or social morality. What is bad about hunger is not that someone, somewhere is getting fed. And for inequality to matter, it must be the case that more can be worse. More is not usually worse. Wealth, in particular, is almost the paradigmatic example of something where more is better. If I unearth an enormous diamond tomorrow, inequality has risen, but my gain has not been anyone’s loss. So when does in inequality matter? Zero sum games, or competitions, are classic examples. If I gain the right to vote 100 times in the next election, or am provided with brass knuckles in advance of my next boxing match, my gain can reasonably be described as another’s loss. But who loses, exactly, if convicting a certain class of people for murder requires the unanimous assent of 35 jurors, instead of the usual 12. It is hard to identify the loser, but this seems an intolerable inequality. Possible response: your intuitions are a poor guide; this inequality is permissible. Possible response which I like quite a bit better: there are some aspects of equal consideration which cannot be violated without offense to human dignity. This is the egalitarianism I would like to see developed. It is no doubt true that in various situations inequality has adverse consequences. The entire cottage industry on positional goods (short version: did you know that people could get jealous?) seems to draw most of its energy from the unstated prior objective of justifying income redistribution. Indeed, as a wise woman observed, if you get a Lamborghini so you can drive faster, that will makes the haters even madder. Unless the emotional states of the envious count heavily in the scale of moral value, however, it is hard to care much about that. It may also be true that inequality past a certain level strains social cohesion. If so, that provides a fine reason for equalizing policies. It fails to provide, however, evidence that equality can be a good in itself. That’s what egalitarianism claims, and that’s what I believe. Cato earns a serious demerit for trotting out Peter Singer* for one of the response essays. What will a doctrinaire and unreflective utilitarian say about equality? I am absolutely in suspense! Elizabeth Anderson has a blog for crying out loud, and you couldn’t get her to write a response? As a simple matter of self-defense, philosophers need to stop including Singer in these discussions like he’s some kind of evil genius of moral theory. He’s embarrassing, and preference satisfaction utilitarianism is an embarrassing theory. Just let’s everyone pretend it never happened and move on. * Here’s an example from his essay “The Meaning of Life”: Nozick's The Examined Life begins with an observation that we fly through life on a trajectory mostly determined before we reached adulthood. With only minor adjustments, we are directed by a picture of life formed in adolescence or young adulthood. Nozick concludes that book by wondering what the fifteen year old Nozick would think of the person he grew up to become. Interesting question. Why might we want an answer? Consider what Nozick says in an earlier book. "The young live in each of the futures open to them. The poignancy of growing older does not lie in one's particular path being less satisfying or good than it promised earlier to be--the path may turn out to be all one thought. It lies in traveling only one (or two, or three) of those paths." I believe I understand. Every day, doors click shut behind us, on paths we might have taken, on meanings life might have had. No matter. The Zen insight, in part, is that meaning emerges not from picking the right door so much as from paying attention--the right kind of attention--to whatever path we happen to be on. Maybe it is easier for me, because the paths I envisioned when I was young were all pretty grim compared to the path I ended up on. In one of the possible worlds closest to this one, the end of the millennium finds me delivering mail in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. The turning point in this actual world occurred almost exactly twenty years ago, when I had been a full-time mailman for nearly five years, and as I was waiting for the Post Office to transfer me from Calgary to Prince Albert. I already had bought a house. While I was waiting, though, I signed up for a night school course on Hume's Treatise. (After nine years of taking courses, I was near a science degree. I hoped to finish before leaving town, so as to have something to show for all those years. I needed a humanities elective, and Hume was the only option on the night school schedule.) By the time the transfer came through, later that semester, I knew I could no longer be a mailman. Had the transfer come through a couple of months earlier, or had that time slot been occupied by some other course, then as far as I know I would still be a mailman today. I would not have gone to night school; Prince Albert had none. The Many Blogging Sins of Ben H* Ben H, if you feel guilty for light posting, than I should retire to a monastery... Reclaiming Scrabble The centrality of ZA, QI, QAT, XU, CWM and the like kill the fun of scrabble for me. What would be the effect -- dare I suggest it? -- of banning 2 letter words entirely? [Ben A.: 3/10/06 02:52]


	ZA ???? It's a black week, in my opinion, for online scrabble. The site ISC.ro switched over from the OSPD3 to the OSPD4 dictionary. OSPD3 is already a horrendous hodgepodge (or olio, to put it more usefully) but I've assimilated the most useful parts of it (e.g. most of Robert Burns' dialect which is inexplicably valid). Now we get OSPD4. Complaint 1: it seems to be a conservative extension of the dictionary; the opportunity to jettison the total crap from the dictionary (HAE, GAE, MAE, TAE? JATO? FOZY?) was missed. Complaint 2: QI and ZA. These words make the Q and Z ridiculously easy to play, so that there's no longer any justification for their 10 point value. This just increases the luck factor in the game. Not to mention: ZA? It's supposed to mean "pizza". To the best of my recollection, this abbreviation achieved currency for a six-week period, in the dormitories of certain American colleges, in 1991 or 1992, and was never heard again. It's REDONKULOUS that this word is now anointed for eternity as a valid scrabble play. Very slight redeeming factor: FARTLEK. P.S.: thanks to Curbed for introducing me to the word "redonkulous", which apparently has come to prominence via the Fox show The OC. I don't think it's in the OSPD4. [Doug: 3/8/06 15:33]


	Up In The Air Sorry for light posts. Have been living in Airworld for the last week. As of tomorrow afternoon, I will have been to Heathrow 6 times in 7 days. [Ben H.: 3/7/06 18:58]


	A Meditation on the Speed Limit The kids are all right. [Ben A.: 3/5/06 11:38]


	Odd Photo Seriously, Doug, it's obvious that you can't give aspiring percussionists actual cymbals without first subjecting them to extensive training! Iraq and the Post I think the Post editorialist is insinuating what you say. However, I don't think it is quite so absurd as you make it out. The wire services, whittled down by years of downsizing, rely heavily on photos provided by local (Arab) stringers. It has been alleged on a number of occasions that these stringers rely on tips from insurgents. The stringer gets a large (for an Iraqi) payday and the insurgents get publicity helpful to their efforts. The wire services aren't themselves part of this corrupt bargain, but they do exhibit a certain negligence in failing to spot evidence of "staging." The phenomenon is not restricted to Iraq; the same thing appears to go on in Israel, the most famous being the . (which the French media had a role first in propagating and later in uncovering). Nidra Poller wrote an excellent article for Commentary magazine that puts the al-Dura affair in the context of the routine manufacture of intifada footage by Palestinian stringer; unfortunately it is behind the subscription wall. [Ben H.: 3/4/06 12:01]


	Odd Advertising Photo Of The Day Threatening to crush childrens' heads is a good career move? For what career exactly? I was afraid to click on this Slate ad ... [Doug: 3/3/06 03:56]


	Re-energized I mentioned last May that I went to this martial-arts-based exercise class in New York and it had an incredible effect on my energy level. The martial art in question was "ba gua" or "ba gua zhang". Well, with my energy level hovering near zero basically since my re-ex-patriation to France, I used the magic of Google to find a guy who teaches it in Paris. Bingo: my energy level immediately shoots up. I don't know what it is about this kind of exercise, or if something peculiarity in my own physiology makes me an atypically good candidate for it, but its effect is in a totally different category from any other workout I've ever done, yoga included. This tends to confirm that my what's-wrong-with-France essay is superfluous and that Carl V's three word answer is sufficient: They never exercise. (Thanks again to David L for initially convincing me to try it out!) [Doug: 3/2/06 20:50]


	Iraq About the only thing that is clear about the Iraq adventure is that it has cost our country about a quarter trillion dollars and 2,000 lives. I'd say that it is clearish that it has been a disaster. Maybe a miraculous turnaround is about to occur. Let's hope so. The panic in that NY Post opinion piece is palpable, though, even if you factor out everything that makes the Post the Post. (Is it just me or did its author really insinuate that Western news photographers are collaborating with suicide bombers?!) It will be interesting to see, in the case that no turnaround occurs, how long it takes the majority of hawks to admit that the war was a bad mistake. I believe I'm on firm ground in saying that this eventually happened with Vietnam, and that took something like 5 - 10 years after the fall of Saigon for it to happen. Who knows though. The Iraq question may keep eliciting responses like the one you get when you ask Dao's colleague Jean-Francois (the sometime right-hand-man of the Le Monde CEO) whether the French Revolution was a good thing: "It's too early to tell." To bring it back to Nietzsche, it might be interesting to note (depending on how busy you are) that he was talking about the French Revolution in that fateful passage that would wipe out university-level humanities in the English-speaking world a century later: As happened lately, in all the clarity of modern times, with the French Revolution, that gruesome and, closely considered, superfluous farce, into which, however, noble and enthusiastic spectators all over Europe interpreted from a distance their own indignations and raptures so long and so passionately that the text disappeared beneath the interpretations: so a noble posterity could once again misunderstand the entire past and only thus perhaps make the sight of it endurable. -- Or rather: has this not already happened? have we ourselves not been this 'noble posterity'? And, in so far as we comprehend this, is it not at this moment -- done with? It is insane to extrapolate this thought so that all texts disappear beneath their interpretations, but isn't he right about the French Revolution? And might the same be true of Iraq, with so many mutually incompatible narratives (Freedom vs. Dictatorship, Christianity vs. Islam, Neocons vs. Realists, Oil Interests vs. everything else) that it's ultimately impossible to say what really happened there? [Doug: 3/2/06 18:58]


	So Nietzsche, We Agree, Is the Precise Opposite of Clay Aiken When I look back at that quote, Doug, there's no possible way you or anyone could have understood the point I tool it to make. A problem of the aphoristic style, or at least a lame presention of another's aphorism. And maybe I can this moment of agreement and good will to raise the topic of Iraq. Just what am I to make of articles like this, and blog posts like this? I supported the war in Iraq, but maybe it was Yosemite Sam foreign policy. Yet I get the sense that the reporting on the situation in Iraq partakes of some Yosemite Sam overreaction as well. Can't we at least get agreement on the presence or absence of civil war? Varmint, I'm a gonna blow you to smithereens! [Ben A.: 3/2/06 09:18]


	Just Acting Gay? I wish that I'd been able to guess your interpretation of that Yeats line -- that's the problem with the aphoristic style, you can read almost anything into it. Needless to say, its Nietzsche's own problem too, and part of the reason why so many people who read quotes out of context wind up thinking he's an outright monster, and why people like me wind being on a hair-trigger to defend him. Given what you took Yeats to mean, I have to say I agree. Nietzsche's tremendous criticism of existing ideas and culture isn't matched by any plan for a replacement. He does sort of gesture wildly -- over there! hardness! nobility! overmen! yes-saying! Coincidentally enough, part of this essay I'm (still) writing on France's malaise is a take-down of the heavily-advertised latest novel by the "pope" of French literature, Philippe Sollers. In it, he takes himself to be the reincarnation of Nietzsche and to have found the path to French renewal, namely a renunciation of morality and a heightened aesthetic appreciation. There are two main problems with this path for France, one attributable to Sollers alone and one shared with Nietzsche. The first is that the contemporary Frenchman is the Last Man and thus as far as possible from any Nietzschean path. Sollers ignores this, and lets himself say things like "France is the country Nietzsche would choose to live in today if he were reincarnated", because ... well, because he is basically a fool. Secondly and more importantly -- what you said, Ben A. He just says "Be gay! Love your fate! Let your will for eternal recurrence resonate throughout the" whatever. Well, thanks a lot, but how do I get to this plane of happiness from where I am, this spiral of economic and psychological decline that France is in? By a supreme act of will? Again, thanks a lot. [Doug: 3/2/06 04:43]


	It was a partial goad, I admit, but not solely. Yeats was actually a great fancier of Nietzsche, and passed translations around his Dublin circle. And it cannot be that Yeats begrudges Nietzsche his atheism, his sense of the tragic, his prediction of the inevitable downfall of cultures, or his endorsement of gaiety in the face of the same. As you point out Doug, these are all views Yeats shares. So what could Yeats mean, and what could I have meant by thinking his comment "perfect?" Yeats’ intention will remain a mystery, but I liked it because I have always found something forced, almost manic, in Neitzsche’s constant avowal of gaiety. And it was this quality – true gaiety as the clear light of the stars, Nietzsche’s as the glow of the “insane moon” – that Yeats captured. I would not swear to it, but I think even Nietzsche himself somewhere (perhaps when writing on Emerson?) notes that his gaiety is not the genuine article. [Ben A.: 3/1/06 22:50]


	Don't Use The Necronomicon As Your Nietzsche Textbook [post previously titled "God yay! Atheists boo!"] I know that you (Ben A), knowing that I have little to say on the topic of pop music (not that don't love your posts on the subject!), are just trying to goad me with that Yeats quote there into a pro-Nietzsche defense, and I'm happy to oblige since I can't sleep (too much coffee). One of the great unanswered questions of modern America is whether its adolescent Nietzsche boosters (you'll find them in the "Objectivist" clubs) or its glib Nietzsche detractors (they'll be wearing the "'God is dead — Nietzsche' —'Nietzsche is dead — God'" T-shirts, to which someone observed the only appropriate response was "'Some are born posthumously' — Nietzsche") are the more annoying. If the Yeats quote you cite is "perfect" in any way, it's as an example of the embarrassing off-the-markness of the latter group's comments. Let me explain the off-the-markness of the T-shirt quote first, to show what I mean. It makes it seem that Nietzsche was boasting of having seen through the empty myth of God, à la Dan Dennett and his "bright" dullards, or for that matter à la Ayn Rand and her high-school cult. But Nietzsche was simply stating a cultural fact about the Europe of his time. If I may go to the video tape: "The greatest recent event — that 'God is dead', that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable — is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe." (The Gay Science, section 343) Nor did Nietzsche predict that the result of this atheism would be everyone sitting around Dan Dennett's tea table eating biscuits and agreeing how cool the amygdala is. He said it would be catastrophic war. On both the observation of the present and the prediction of the future, Nietzsche was simply right. The wars came; and Christian faith in France and Germany simply disappeared. (Perhaps the bible-study folks who wear those T-shirts can be excused for not knowing this on the grounds that they cannot find Europe on a map.) Now for the Yeats snark: If it had been written next to the passage I just cited, it would have some merit. I would still question whether Yeats was the best person to write it — Mr. Rough Beast Slouching to Bethlehem is complaining about bats and owls??? — but section 343 does have some gloom in it, yes. Here is the key point though: Nietzsche's whole body of work is overwhelming cheerful, and is peppered with attacks on gloominess! He called himself an adept of the gay science, or the mirthful science if you prefer, but not the bleak science. You can justly criticize Nietzsche for lots of things, like his misogyny, like his failure to spell out a positive alternative to the society of mediocrity he criticized, like the overwroughtness and longwindedness of Zarathustra — but to think that he has a gloomy owl-and-bat fixation is simply not to have read him. It's a particularly cringe-inducing mistake to accuse him metaphorically of a disbelief in stars, when stars are in fact a central and positive metaphor in his own writing. Take the key passage from Zarathustra that Francis Fukuyama made central to his famous book: "I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves. Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man. 'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man, and blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest. 'We have invented happiness,'say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth... One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion. No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse. 'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink... One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health. 'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink." Well, I don't want to make this defense too long; I realize that I'm violating the blog format and that I should restrict myself to statements of the form "Yay God! Boo atheists!" Let me just add that I can't imagine what passage of the Genealogy Yeats would have written his quote next to — I know that book well; it's more closely-argued, analytical, and un-aphoristic than most of his books, and has its share of anti-gloominess sentiment. [Doug: 3/1/06 04:00]


	And On The Subject of Pop Music You’ll have a hard time finding a more desperate, unconvincing defense of a rap song than Jonah Weiner’s comments on Clipse: Clipse's real coup is that they are fully conscious. Much like Kanye West, Clipse have whipped up a stew of exquisite contradiction and soaked in it. This is nowhere richer than on "I'm a Hustla" where Malice loses his characteristic cool and snarls at a police informant: Your race is betrayed On the bottom of the food chain, I spit on your grave You the modern day African capturing slaves How you live with yourself? You can't escape your face I put it in the street, they can't escape the taste There's a dark irony here: Who is the one "capturing slaves," after all? Is it the snitch who helps district attorneys fill prison cells, or is it the dealer who amasses a desperate clientele of addicts? It's a dense moment—one that the pronoun "you" leaves ambiguous—that highlights the album's stone-faced insight into an inner-city economy where black success depends on the exploitation other blacks. Point number one: Any sentence beginning “Much like Kanye West…” must end “is an idiot.” Point number two: This doesn’t sound ambiguous to me. Rather, it seems that the informant is the modern day African slaver, placing the rapper rapper/criminal in the privileged and delightful dual role of victim and transgressive outsider. It’s a nauseating moral position, and it’s almost certainly the intent of the authors. Point number three: “Clipse’s real coup is that they are fully conscious.” Point number four: People will go on and on about the complexity of Shakespeare’s portrayal of Shylock, or whatever; better just to admit that enjoyable art, even great art, can be immoral. The Jew of Malta is a great play, but not because of subtle moral shading. Great artists do not generally imbue their works with evil of the more idiotic sorts (white power!) simply because being an idiot does not conduce to the production of great art. Plenty of great art, however, endorses wickedness. That’s to be expected, fallen creatures that we are. It is less to be expected that an entire genre primarily serve to evoke vicarious enjoyment of wickedness (misogyny, criminality, egotism). That covers a lot of rap music, and it’s creepy. [Ben A.: 3/1/06 00:31]


	Perfection "But why does Nietzsche think the night has no stars, nothing but bats and owls and the insane moon?" --W.B. Yeats, on the margin of his copy of The Geneology of Morals source [Ben A.: 2/28/06 23:45]


	A Message For You, Dan Doctoroff The Olympic torch embers have barely cooled, EPO-stained syringes still litter the bathrooms of the Athletes' Village, but it isn't too soon for Olympic hangover to begin for Turin. Standard & Poor's just downgraded the city's credit rating from AA- to A+. The city's debt-to-revenues ratio shot up from 150% in 2003 to 230% today, largely due to spending for the Olympics. But, hey, at least the city now has a luge course -- a key part of any multimodal transportation infrastructure! Two weeks of attention for 30 years of debt. It's a bad trade. Dan Doctoroff, you listening? [Ben H.: 2/28/06 17:27]