11.1.03

VVV Memo to all left-of-center political bloggers: Stop reading Ben Shapiro's blog! The over-the-top outrage and juvenile ad hominems that greet every one of his posts are positively embarrassing to those of us who like to think there's such a thing as reasonable liberal discourse.

Oh, and it wasn't funny even the first time you said the real reason he's a virgin is because he can't get laid. I'm glad you're striking a blow against restrictive sexual mores by ridiculing anyone whose sexual habits don't meet with your approval.

Ben needs to grow up, but so do his critics.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 20:37 -- link --

10.1.03

VVV

Did You Catch That? So shouldn't I celebrate the news that TV shows have more dialogue? Yes, if the talk is there to communicate ideas. Yes, if it means that packing more talk into limited air time means that talk is receiving more emphasis, more pride-of-place, as I have always thought it should have in our understanding of relationships. But not if the dialogue flies by so fast that it cannot be fully processed or even, in many cases, literally comprehended. The general ideas may get through: I'm sure fans of "Gilmore Girls" and "West Wing" can recount each show's plot and theme. But I suspect that their understanding is gleaned from the general march of scenes and the gist of dialogue -- rather than from the subtle nuances of phrasing and the precise wording or sequence of ideas.

I've noticed this speeding-up phenomenon in my own treatment of written materials. The volume of stuff I have to process for academic reasons (not to mention all the additional reading I do for fun on the Brunching board and blogs and the news) has led me to read faster. This isn't speed-reading, where through practice I learn to process things faster and more efficiently. Rather, I sacrifice close and careful comprehension for speed. I let the author do the work of making her ideas jump out to me, and if something is opaque my eyes slide right over it, preferring to keep going and hope I'll come across something more comprehensible than stop and dig into what I've already seen. When I read something that draws me in and makes me slow down, pondering sentences and basking in their meaningfulness, I feel off-balance. I feel like I'm being delayed, wasting time. This really hit me in August, when I re-read The Silmarillion. The last time I had read it was in high school, back when I could spend a month going through a book rather than counting on finishing it in two days. Back then I had been upset at having to reread the Thomas Covenant books at skimming pace because I had a paper on them due in a couple weeks. On my most recent reading of The Silmarillion, it seemed hollow. Maybe some of it can be chalked up to rosy nostalgia about the book, or sociological dissatisfaction with Tolkien, but I think much of it was my reading style. I'm too used to having to sift a mound of crap, that I can't slow down and appreciate it when I've got a known masterpiece in front of me.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 13:08 -- link --

VVV Steve Bates, in an e-mail to Body and Soul about corporate versus independent bookstores, argues:

It is also a matter of what books get published, and, indirectly, what books get written in the first place. Publishers, especially smaller ones, but even large ones to some extent, must publish works they can sell through Barnes and Noble, Borders, etc. If a book, however well-written and attractive to readers, has no chance of being sold to a large outlet, it may well not be published at all. Authors who make their living writing books are aware of this, and tailor their books accordingly. Of course there are myriad exceptions to this simplification, but in principle, the hegemony of large corporate bookstores actually reduces the range of content available to the reader through any bookstore whatsoever, no matter how physically large a store's shelf stock may be.

This argument doesn't seem to make sense. You can find a lot more different products at Wal-Mart than you could at a small independent general store, so it seems like the same should be true for books.

The argument seems to rest on the idea that a big bookstore is less likely to want to sell a given book than an independent store would be. Ceteris paribus, I think the opposite would be true. Let's assume we're talking about a book that's not obviously "well-written and attractive to readers," since one of the basic principles of capitalism is "if enough people want it, someone will sell it to them."* A small store has only its own inventory to work with would seem to be more risk-averse. The threshold at which they're willing to keep something in stock is lower. If one out of every ten thousand book purchases will be Coffee Mugs of the 1930s, and your store has room for five thousand books (I have no idea if those numbers resemble actual bookstore inventories, but the point remains the same), you probably won't take the chance of stocking it. But if your centralized warehouse serving thousands of stores has a couple million books' worth of shelves, you'll want to take 200 copies of Coffee Mugs. I don't know much about the book business, but I wouldn't be surprised if all the small independent stores are just buying from large wholesalers (as happens in the grocery business), so the effect of replacing a bunch of independent stores all getting their stock from Joe's Book Warehouse with a bunch of Barnes and Noble outlets isn't as big as you'd think.

At the risk of making unsubstantiated psychoanalyses of Mr. Bates, I think his comment on his book-buying habits -- he purchases "stridently liberal or antiwar political books" -- suggests why he may think that large corporations are less likely to publish the kind of literary variety he's interested in. I think, however, that the profit motive ("we don't care what it is, if people will pay for it, we'll sell it") trumps the book industry's political ideology or class interest every time. And I'm not convinced there ever was a heyday of non-corporate booksellers offering a wide anti-establishment selection. If anything, the growth of the radical movement in recent years (anti-WTO protests and all that) has created a visible market for such books, which the logic of capitalism would impel bookstores to try to fill.

*Of course, corporations don't always do the best job of figuring out what consumers want. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant -- one of the greatest modern fantasy novels -- was rejected by every fantasy publisher, and only got published because Stephen R. Donaldson heard that one of them had gotten a new editor, so he re-submitted. But I don't see any reason that big corporations would be better or worse at this than small stores. At most, a more fragmented market means you have more chances for at least one store to pick up a book.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 01:40 -- link --

8.1.03

VVV Submission to the will of God is a common theme in a lot of religious thinking. The purpose of human life, in this conception, is becoming an agent of God's plan, surrendering individual desires for a higher purpose. Expressions of this general idea can range from the strict and comprehensive code of conduct seen in Orthodox Judaism to the ego-destruction of Buddhism. Assuming there is a God, this seems to make perfect sense -- if there is an omniscient and benevolent force out there, it would be illogical hubris to think you know better than it does. And submission fits nicely with the "free will" explanation for the existence of evil -- humans are given free will and thus are able to choose between rejecting and accepting God's perfect plan for the world.

To many people this is an appealing possibility. Katie, an atheist fascinated by faith, states it well:

From whence comes my envy of the faithful, and what is it really? I think it must be wrapped up in the appeal of submission. Isn't that what "Islam" means, roughly sort of? The passage from TSV [The Satanic Verses] even brings the sexual element into the submission of faith (in the command to open and in the apparition of the divine as "tentacles of light"). Art also requires submission, as argued by the Salon article I read that worried about a new tyranny of personal preference in art that could ultimately lead to choose your own adventure style movies, rather than submission to the vision of the artist. Maybe the appeal of faith for me would be like the appeal of art, except the truth you try to yield to wouldn't be some fleeting piece of it, but It, essential. A survey in the Onion A.V. Club a few months ago asked entertainers to say whether or not they thought there was a god. Most of the secular humanist types in the onion article were saying that the hardest thing to do was to believe that you were responsible for yourself, but for those of us who were raised to be rationalists, that's not hard at all. The idea that there is no God and I make my meaning is my broccoli and tofu. Something would be miraculous about being able to know one thing and yet believe the opposite, to make yourself bend to an idea rather than constructing the idea yourself...

Submission can, seemingly paradoxically, be liberating. In an article about Paganism, Peter Jensen, Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, told the Sydney Morning Herald "The Christian religion says there's one god. He rules the world, and our business as human beings is to put ourselves under His rule and that's where true freedom is found and particularly the freedom to serve others." While he took a lot of flak from the folks on Witchvox for that comment, and I can't vouch for what he meant by it, there is a sense in which submission can bring freedom. It lifts a burden of responsibility from the submitter's shoulders, assuring him or her of being on the right track.

Of course, many people find the notion of submission repulsive. It sounds quite a bit like slavery. Being at one with a greater power means giving up your individual identity. And it seems at odds with the idea of free will -- why would God give us free will in order that we could give it up?

I prefer to think of the relationship between God and people as being like jazz performance. A jazz chart, unlike a classical chart, is underdetermined. The composer gives a skeleton of the piece, but there is a great deal of leeway for improvisation. Nothing dictates what the soloist has to play. Yet there is still a framework, chords and rhythms that the soloist has to work with, so that a jam session doesn't turn into a meaningless cacophony of people all playing their own thing. While there are bad solos, there is no one ideal lick. The composer builds in uncertainty about how it will sound, and the band starts playing with similar uncertainty. Thus the musicians can submit to a plan without giving up their freedom and their individual perspectives.

God doesn't want to dictate our every move. He wants to give us a framework and see what we'll do with it.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 20:16 -- link --

7.1.03

VVV

Daschle Decides Against Presidential Bid Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) announced today that he has decided not to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, preferring to challenge President Bush and the Republicans from his post in the Senate than from the presidential campaign trail.

This is a very good development. The crowdedness of the Democratic field is going to be one of the party's biggest hurdles in the race. Bush, with no challengers and a white house pulpit, will be able to take advantage of the necessary infighting during the Democratic primaries to reestablish his post-September 11 image as "a uniter, not a divider" who is above partisan squabbles. Further, Daschle's checkered history as the leader of the opposition -- recall the "how high should we jump?" Democratic Senate and the midterm election debacle -- make him a poor candidate to challenge Bush (not that any Democrat is a good candidate). Now if only Dick Gephardt, Al Sharpton, and Joe Lieberman would follow suit.

There will, of course, be plenty of comparisons to Al Gore. But I think other than being a high-profile likely contender who has dropped out ostensibly for the good of the party, there aren't a lot of similarities. For one, Daschle (as mentioned above) has been rather wishy-washy in opposing Bush -- for example, he initially dismissed the comments by Trent Lott that, when pursued, became a huge embarassment for the Republican Party. Gore, on the other hand, returned from a much-needed break from the spotlight with criticism of Bush so fierce that he at times traded his intellectualism for partisan rhetoric. And on the issue of the crowded field, Gore would have the opposite effect from Daschle. Rather than further splintering the party, Gore would have commanded such a huge lead that most candidates would be forced out early (barring any sort of upset in New Hampshire or Iowa). Gore's problem was that, by creating a 2000 rematch, he would have violated the conventional wisdom that says the Democrats need a new face, as well as handing the Republicans a list of sound bites about how he's a sore loser who won't go away. It's better that they're both out of the race, but for different reasons.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 13:50 -- link --

6.1.03

VVV There ought to be an option to downgrade your software if you decide you don't like it. I updated AIM today because thix box that popped up every time I logged on kept harassing me about it. But I hate the new look of it, with its big colorful extra row of buttons on the bottom and its AOL symbol floating behind the buddy list. Speaking of which, it also annoys me the way AIM upgrades add links to AOL everywhere. I don't need an AOL shortcut on my desktop.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 20:26 -- link --

VVV

Animal Fans' Secret Recipe Is to Boycott Restaurant People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the animal welfare group, begins a global boycott on Monday of KFC to seek an improvement in the lives and deaths of 700 million chickens who become the chain's fried meals every year. With fat people trying to sue fast-food restaurants for helping to cause their obesity, the group hopes to tap into the growing public criticism of a fast-food diet as well as the concern over farm animal welfare. Instead of following the slow path of pushing for changes in regulations, the group wants restaurants to enforce immediate changes by telling farmers they will not buy chickens raised and slaughtered under current conditions.

I like strategies like this, which resembles campaigns to get people to stop buying sweatshop products or start buying "fair trade" coffee (as well as boycotts of Disney for its gay-friendly policies, though obviously I'm completely opposed to the goal of that campaign). The first impulse of a lot of people across the political spectrum, when they see a practice that they think is wrong, is to say the government ought to pass a law against it. This attitude invites a sort of surrender to the market's status quo, assuming that the problem is the inevitable result of market forces, and that what's needed is some outside intervention to force the unruly economy into the right shape. What PETA's anti-KFC campaign and others do, however, is to work with the market and use its built-in mechanisms to achieve a progressive goal.

I'm not saying that regulatory approaches are bad. In some cases exercising the power of demand doesn't or can't work. In others, regulation and market-based change go hand-in-hand -- for example, when the government enforces labeling requirements that enable citizens to more effectively exercise their market power for promoting organic food. But philosophically, strategies that work with the system rather than railing against it are more appealing.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 17:26 -- link --

VVV Brad DeLong, via Calpundit, points out this ESP Test. It's pretty neat, and the explanations that visitors have proposed make entertaining reading (although they make me wonder how prevalent the belief that a computer can be watching you is -- if they really had that kind of technology, we could dispense with this silly mouse and keyboard). What really baffles me, though, is how it's possible for the test to be wrong.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 12:39 -- link --

5.1.03

VVV I finally watched Fellowship Of The Ring last week. Discussing with Amanda how well the movie fit with how I remembered the books made me realize a few things about how I twisted the story in my own mind. Lord Of The Rings is an excellent story, and I never blatantly violated anything J.R.R. Tolkien said. But there are some philosophical inclinations in the books that I seemed to be subconsciously rebelling against, both in my imagination as I read and in my remembering of the books. For example, the spectacular flying dragon firework stretched its credibility in my mind. I had thought of Gandalf's fireworks as more or less mundane fireworks like we would use on the 4th of July, but which seemed much more magical and spectacular to hobbits who had no familiarity with such things. I can't fully explain why it seemed wrong for Gandalf to be using his magic simply for entertaining people, but it did.

More significant was my picture of the orcs. The movie's orcs were too dirty and deformed. I imagined them being ugly, of course, but on some level my imagination accorded them a certain amount of dignity. I had trouble with the idea of a race of beings that exists only to be evil. I wanted to put the orcs in a category closer to the humans who fought for Sauron, or wolves and ravens -- creatures enslaved to evil, but capable of existing as legitimate beings on their own. I have this sort of fantasy about the orcs settling down to farm the less desolate parts of Mordor after Sauron's final defeat.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 21:41 -- link --