Off The Cuff Thinking
Are there two distinct “political” or “worldview” tendencies based on biology?
The current Democratic and Republican parties do not define either liberalism or conservatism in terms other than the liklihood of re-election. The political parties exist only for their own self-interests, the public’s interest be damned.
The political parties are too self-centered to actually realize and put into play what might actually work in their interest because of the “public be damned” attitude of both.
The two party system has rendered “the house divided” a reality.
Both parties have doubled down on their ill-considered bets and the house will win.
But what is the house betting on? It’s safe to say the house is betting on both losing, but when the house wins, who wins? My guess is ultimately nobody because that is who the house ultimately represents… if all have placed their bets on one side or the other.
What happens to those who didn’t bet? These are the ultimate losers. Or, if some definition of political unity could be written, they would be the ultimate winners… and as such could lessen the penalty of the losses on the extremes.
So perhaps the middle — those who do not place a bet — are the ultimate winners. And because they are, those who did place a bet will not suffer the extreme punishment of winner take all.
Why and how could this be so? Precisely because the middle bet simultaneously that the extremes were both right and wrong. The only way is for one or the other of the extremes to be completely correct. How likely is that?
It’s not very likely because the extremes are, in reality, very similar. Let us take for example the extreme ID view that all reality was created at once and universal truths can therefore never change AND the opposite extreme view that reality is always changing and that there are no universal truths.
At least, I think these views are presented as opposite. Is that correct?Opposites are very unique things in that they have nothing in common and when combined yield something neutral. It is only by accepting grey as the outcome of all colors that opposites make sense.
Thus grey would be the color of utopia, would it not? It is, as well, the color of moderation. Therefore there might be a connection between moderation and utopia. Is it as much a fantasy to wish for a moderate world, accepting of all as it is to wish for one ruled by either liberal or conservative values? Which of the three would be the worst? The second worst?
Is the thing most wrong with the middle is that it lacks conviction and the fire of certainty? Is that lack what makes it appealing to some?
Posted by Donna B. in a haze of fuzziness and wonder.
Twitters from Brueghel
The landscape on Twitter today, with Iran’s opposition going down in flames while many of us watched ball games and ate and laughed, was this picture and the two poems written about it.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
Musée Des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
The Cooperative Option
Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota may just have headed off a looming congressional health-care stalemate by proposing a “third way” solution — private cooperatives. Ezra Klein lets Sen. Conrad speak for himself:
The G-11 group, which is the members of the Senate, Republicans and Democrats, chairmen and ranking members of the key committees, who’ve been given the overall responsibility to coordinate health care reform in the Senate, asked me 10 days ago to come up with something to bridge the divide […]
The co-op structure came to mind because it seems to fulfill at least some of the desires of both sides. In terms of those who want a public option because they hope to have a competitive delivery model able to take on the private insurance companies, a co-op model has attraction.
And for those against a public option because they fear government control, the co-op structure has some appeal because its not government control. It’s membership control, and membership ownership.
Also the co-op model has proven very effective across many different models. Ocean Spray in the cranberry business, and Land of Lakes in the dairy business, and Puget Sound in the health care business.
Read the whole thing for a lucid brief explanation of how health coops would work and the various options for organizing them so that their pools would be big enough to be viable and competitive.
Where did this idea come from? I’ve done a fair amount of health care reporting, and this is the first I’ve heard of it.
I guess it came out of conversations in my office after we were asked to see if we couldn’t come up with some way of bridging this chasm. Part of it is that we’re so used to cooperative structures in my state. They were begun by progressives, they came out of the progressive era. And they’re so successful in our state. So I can’t really say we came up with some brand new idea. We just thought about our own experience.
I hope Maxwell, who ran a cooperative for years, will come in on this post and take it from here.
“There’s An Awful Picture of You Guys . . .”
“. . . on my website,” was what I heard Nathan say. But no: he’d said “awesome.”
Awful or awesome? A little of both, no? I look like I’m about to pop Toto into my basket. J looks great, though, as always.
Ligo Dojo is growing. It is a nonprofit that serves at-risk kids from the Durham juvenile justice system, seamlessly mixed in with a diverse batch of regular students.
To look at these two, you’d almost think they had a life!
Twitter Guilt
I think I got into my first real Twitter jam session last night — those polyphonic volleys where you have to run and leap and snap each other’s responses out of the air like a dog playing Frisbee or an orca voguing for fish . . . where you have to track the threads of the conversation by weaving like an undercover detective through the throng of unrelated tweets, and where the elements of the exchange overlap like the parts of a fugue or canon. And you’re trying to channel big ideas through a 140-character aperture. It’s a distinctly new kind of mental challenge that takes about eight metaphors to surround and approximate. If it’s most like any one thing, it’s probably playing jazz in a small combo in a noisy club, straining to hear, not knowing what your fellow musicians are going to play next, but all trying to keep the original melody at least distantly in mind.
So if I was having fun and exercising my brain, why do I feel guilty?
For one thing, I kicked off the thread by going over to Anchoress’s and starting a fight with her. A friendly fight; we may disagree some of the time but it is (I daresay) with mutual affection and respect. I felt that my political allergies were getting unbalanced and that I needed to go roll in some nettles on the right. What drives me nuts on both sides is the way demonizing Bush seems to require deifying Obama, and in turn, demonizing Obama seems to require . . . well, gushing over capitalism, lately. (And if you recoil from gushing over capitalism, it must mean you hate capitalism and side with those who want to destroy it and bring on socialism . . . no, no, NO!) The rhetoric itself leads to paranoid black-and-white hyperbole like calling Bush, or now Obama, a “tyrant” poised to end presidential term limits and free elections, and painting an idealized, Norman Rockwell picture like this one of the glories of yeoman free enterprise that airbrushes out the megacorporate excess and fraud. (Or, on the left, a socialist-realist wall mural depicting the Peaceable Kingdom of multiculturalism — Latina lesbians in overalls! — painted on some desolate urban underpass.)
So why do I feel guilty about such an observation? Because I realized that I am not the audience for blog posts of this sort. They’re publicly posted, of course, the way a patriotic brass-band concert might be held in a public park, but it’s not polite to disrupt such a concert; if the oompah of Sousa sets your teeth on edge, just leave. Criticizing such posts is as mean-spirited and irrelevant as fisking some other country’s national anthem. People on the right (and left) write these posts for each other. They’re hymns of agreement, they’re meant to rouse and rally and tune resolve. They’re tuned to a pitch I cannot hear, or can’t hear without distortion. In other words, it’s none of my business, and to go over there just to aggravate myself is rude. Of course, that’s not what I go for; I go for goosebumps, like this and this. I think I should keep my aggravation to myself instead of putting it on gratuitous display.
But there’s another kind of Twitter guilt I’m feeling that’s harder to define. An intense conversation can’t be called a waste of time, so that’s not it. What is it? It feels reckless, irresponsible, heady, to be throwing big ideas around like that. Too much reward for too little work? Shame at having given in to the temptation to hold forth on things I know nothing about? (How grandiose one can be in miniature!) Twits rush in where angels fear to tread? There was a kind of unearned intoxication . . . Ah! I know where I recognize this feeling from!
The hung-over morning after a college bull session.
UPDATE: And now I can pinpoint it a little further: although I write about ideas a lot — in many cases, they’re all I’ve got — I’m wary of them. I have a little bit of a “no ideas but in things” bias. Ideas are like hot-air balloons: they can easily get untethered from the earth and float bloatedly away. Sometimes Twitter is like a collective balloon release.
Good God Almighty, I’m Free and Vast!
The proposed, or threatened, preventive-health initiatives “almost certain” to be part of Obama health reform — “nutrition counseling, obesity screenings […] wellness programs at workplaces and community centers […] more time in the school day for physical fitness, more nutritious school lunches […] more bike paths, walking paths and grocery stores in underserved areas” — are striking some as a nanny-state intrusion on their freedom.
More time in the school day for physical fitness? I’m shocked! Isn’t that what, back in the red-blooded all-American ’50s, used to be S.O.P. under the names of “recess” and “physical education”? Isn’t that the lack whereof is particularly harmful to boys??
As for the rest of it, any attack on the costs of health care has to include, at the very least, incentives for healthy behavior (“though the exact savings are debatable”). As you’ll see in the upcoming post I’m slowly stitching together out of my doctor sister’s e-mails, the current diseases of the American lifestyle are a huge part of what every physician sees.
I am well aware that fitness, slimness, not smoking, and eating organic food are elite luxuries (I myself can’t afford the latter). And I don’t mean to put irony or snark into that. Obama’s finger-shaking-scold quality annoys me when it crops up. (His own lapses are more endearing.) I suppose freedom includes the freedom to behave badly and destroy yourself, or it isn’t freedom. It’s your own damn business, unless you’re forcing secondhand smoke down nonsmokers’ lungs or drunk-driving into a carful of middle-school soccer players.
But Newt recently quoted John Adams as saying only religious people could be trusted with a democratic government. Conservatives, or classical liberals, often quote Edmund Burke’s magnificent words:
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites…in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
How do you practically reconcile the freedom to behave badly with the expectation that bank-breaking medical care should then fix you up? (It’s plenty complicated, because — here comes an understatement — not everyone who’s sick brought it on themselves, nor does abstemiousness guarantee health. Fitness guru James Fixx dropped dead while running, and the founder of Rodale Press croaked right on the Cavett show while bragging about his healthy lifestyle. However, we do know that smoking, inactivity, and diet-triggered diabetes are killers.) I mean practically — not just saying that we ought to have more weight-loss prayer groups. Just because you don’t like Obama, it doesn’t mean he’s wrong about . . . recess.
~ amba
Monetizing Thrift
You might remember that back in 2007, a couple of Democratic congressfolks tried to “survive” on $1/day so as to better understand the eating habits of the underprivileged. It was kind of a silly experiment, but led to some memorable blog posts – see for example here.
Well, a couple of enterprising Americans have come up with pretty thorough, healthy meal plans that come close to meeting that standard – and are making money off of it. Cook for Good is the more prominent of the two, but the Manhattan-based Three Dollar Dinner (written by a producer of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy) seems to be coming on strong.
~ Maxwell
The Tragedy of the Oceans
The noise produced by the global warming debate often overwhelms other environmental issues. I find this unfortunate, because some of these issues matter a great deal and are arguably equally urgent, if in a quieter way. For example, take fish.
There is little doubt at this point that overfishing is greatly impacting the quantity of fish in our oceans, particularly those fish that people actually like to eat. Farmed fish are a long way from being a solution to this problem, being quite inefficient to produce and a source of pollution themselves. They are also arguably unethical to produce, for many of the same reasons as factory-farmed chickens. Once basically a free good, fish in high-development areas have also become prohibitively expensive
In this article, the cookbook author Mark Bittman (who incidentally writes and edits a good and generally fun food blog, Bitten), ruminates sadly on the great difficulty of buying “sustainable” fish. His approach boils down to buying fish very carefully, and eating it a good deal less than he used to. Which has implications he does not address: fish is one of the only reliable sources of the essential fatty acids DHA and EPA, which are crucial for brain development and heart health. As go the fish, so do we.
~ Maxwell
UPDATE: Maybe I should cheer up a bit. Ray Hilborn offers some context.
UPDATE: Regarding amba’s question in the comments: I found it striking that both Hilborn and the activists referred to the same source for their statistics, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. The following graphic is from page 51 of the UNFAO’s The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2008.
So the actual picture here is more complex than either the professor or the activists claim. On the one hand, overexploited/depleted/recovering marine stocks seem to have plateaued at 25%, at least for now. But underexploited stocks are on a fairly rapid decline, while fully exploited stocks have hovered around 50% for thirty five years.
So I guess the picture right now seems less depressing, but more tense. Things could break either way, it seems.
Ambiance 