Month: January 2015

Introducing The Sensorium of B.H. Obama

I suppose it’s a rarity for someone to get two posts in a row on here, but this is a fine reason to break rules. Cross-posted from FPR:

Pete Davis made his debut on this blog [ed — that blog] this week, with an essay on the poisonous politics of The West Wing. But he’s not just a writer or community reformer. Today he has released The Sensorium of B.H. Obama, written by Davis and Paul VanKoughnett. I had the pleasure of seeing it at a private screening last weekend, and even my right-wing companions enjoyed the heck out of it. For a short description, we’ll let the creators speak for themselves:

In the early months of 2015, a young United States President named Barack Obama made a fateful decision. Frustrated by the endless pressures of his thankless, dead-end, white-collar job, Obama delivered his State of the Union speech and disappeared– to America’s heartland – Lawrence, Kansas – where he began the great work of which he’d always dreamed. But with the lamestream media and the forces of Washington politics-as-usual hot on his tail, could this plucky POTUS deliver the change he believed in?

It’s a wonderfully original, creative movie with a heart of gold and a Joe Biden impersonator. Without further ado:

(Check out their production company here and here)

Pete Davis on the West Wing mentality and how it’s ruined Washington’s Millennial politicos

Over on the porch:

The act of “engaging” with national politics has come to resemble more and more the act of watching The West Wing, as political media – from MSNBC to POLITICO – focuses in on the internal dramas of the Beltway kings’ courts. After you have watched all the episodes where Josh Lyman wheels and deals his way to another win, you can turn on the real news and watch talking heads discuss how Mitch McConnell’s or Valerie Jarrett’s next move might give their team a win, too. It’s no surprise that political statistician Nate Silver joined ESPN last year: his meteoric rise over the past elections was the final keystone in the complete ESPNification – with its wins and losses, points and scorecards – of American political journalism.

Viewing hundreds of millions of Americans who are not Washington insiders as useful only for votes and campaign donations is not an idiosyncrasy of Jim Messina and his fictional counterparts on The West Wing— it’s endemic to Beltway politicos. As Theda Skocpol pointed out in her wonderful book Democracy Diminished, we have moved from a “membership democracy” to a “management democracy” in the past century. A once-thriving national network of participatory federated societies – which involved routine local activities in small town chapters which cascaded bottom-up into member-driven state conventions and influential national offices – gave way to a politics where we send our checks in to D.C. managers, who engage in democracy for us. The West Wing will be a perfect historical artifact of this age of political management.

Go read the piece, it’s great.

Conservatives for secular morality and cultural relativism

Not cool, Austin Petersen:

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This is from his public page. What’s a little Catholic bashing to establish your Cool Atheist bona-fides? It’s apparently news to Judge Napolitano’s former producer that the Holy Father isn’t quite on board with the liberal paradigm. I wonder if he’s told his former boss he’s a member of the “cult of Christ.”

Let’s reassure him by noting that there are some liberal Catholics trying to sanctify Charlie Hebdo, and claim that Western Civilization depends on the protection and dissemination of publications like it:

The attack on Charlie Hebdo was an assault on Christendom. Magazines that publish sophomoric cartoons mocking religion are, paradoxically, part of the Body of Christ – if perhaps its lower intestine.

We also have conservatives like the neocon Herodotus Victor Davis Hanson engaging in a little moral relativism, which should cheer an atheist like Petersen:

Unfortunately, when we look to prominent defenders of the Western faith in free speech, we find too often offenders.

Start with Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League. He recently made a series of silly statements about the terrorist attack in Paris. The gist was that the slain Charlie Hebdo staffers were nearly as much to blame for their deaths as were their killers, given their gratuitous blasphemy against the Islamic religion.

Does Donohue believe that satirists who poke fun at Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Judaism — and there are many, including the editors of Charlie Hebdo — are in similar mortal danger worldwide? Would Donohue wish such crass artists and writers to be?

These are both examples of the disturbing tendency after the Paris attacks of shutting down anyone who’s observed a cause and effect relationship between the cartoons and the murders. Indeed, against anyone who has dared to point out that words and pictures have consequences. Should the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists have been murdered in the name of Islam for drawing stuff? No, of course not. But they were. Can we handle that?

What people like Pope Francis, Pat Buchanan, and Bill Donohue, in descending order of erudition and kindness, have pointed out is that disrespect for religion has bloody consequences. A defining feature of the revolution in France, which established the secular order under which Charlie Hebdo has been allowed to flourish, was the massacre of priests, for example.

Now, not even Donohue wants to go back to those bad old days of “theocracy.” He’s quite clear that he doesn’t support blasphemy laws; apparently he’ll make a big stink if you even ask him to. But if he did, who cares? Are we going to pretend Bill Donohue really has the ability to tip elections, enact massive speech-curtailing laws, call pogroms, or whatever it is that makes him haunt these people’s nightmares?

On the other hand, multiculturalism, cultural relativism, European self-abasement, whatever you want to call it, is not irrelevant. It’s directly related to France’s problems. Which is why it strikes me as cowardly and unreflective that conservatives and libertarians are jumping to the defense of a naked, value-free public square that has been useful for nothing so much as prioritizing Islam at the expense of Christianity. (more…)

The Benedict Option for the underground

The last bit from David Keenan’s piece, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” in the January issue of The Wire:

“We need a new art that is almost sociopathic in its evasion, in its willingness not to be liked; a non-consensual art that refuses to market itself, that negates that old art world and free music chestnut about creating a space where dialogue can take place. At this point we need to shut down dialogue, halt conversation, put down the iPhone. We need a ruthlessly stratified, exclusionary, hermetic, refusenik art, one that takes its form and its content from the precise, awkward, barely translatable contours of the persons making it as opposed to a happy-clappy magpie approach to SoundCloud mixes, YouTube clips and rips of obscure vinyl. These days we are all fans … and music made by fans ends up uninteresting. Or at least unchallenging, and somehow subservient to our fandom. We need critics, too, who aren’t afraid to be unpopular, to be actually critical, and to write for the good of the culture rather than for the validation of their would-be friendship circle.

The future of underground music exists in the margins, in the one-offs. It’s time for lone voices, barely decipherable ones, in fact. The underground has disappeared but somewhere out there solitary cells are forming. Next time around, the revolution will not be liked, retweeted, favourited or followed back. In 2014 the underground is dead. Long live the underground.”

They aren’t underground by any stretch, but I feel like it would be somehow negligent of me not to note that The Band Perry played in the new Congress this afternoon.

Review of The End of Power

The End of Power by Moises Naim is the most interesting book I have read in a while.  It advances the simple thesis that power, defined as “the ability to direct or prevent the current or future actions of other groups or individuals”, is declining.  The way I prefer to put it, the choice set of our leaders has become more constrained.

Naim argues that power, not just political power, but corporate and military power is declining.  A thought experiment can be as follows.  Compare Barack Obama to a 13th century king.  While Obama undoubtedly commands more resources, his choice set is fairly limited.  There is constant pressure applied by various interest groups which constrain him.  A 13th century king, on the other hand, has a wider choice set.  He likely has a few advisors, but is largely free to act in any way he so chooses.

Naims thesis can be interpreted as a generalized form of the trend toward political decentralization that some have documented.  In fact, Naim discusses such political decentralization, both arguing for and admitting the inevitable political innovation.  He puts his thesis in grandiose terms, comparing the coming innovation to the Greek city state democracies and the French Revolution.

What Naim didn’t include was an explanation of why power is ending or a judgement of whether such an end is a good thing.  I’ll try to provide a brief account of both.  First, the world can be imagined as a series of networks representing the relationships between people.  The further intertwined the networks are, the less power individuals have.  They are constrained to follow the rules put in place by those in their networks.  In other words, the decline of power is inevitable as the world becomes more interconnected.  This is a good thing because making actions predictable is a necessary, though not sufficient, step for long term planning and economic development.

Naims book is also interesting because he represents the power elite.  He was both a former executive director of the World Bank as well as editor in chief of Foreign Policy.  The book has a blurb by Bill Clinton on the front.  Other reviews include The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and George Soros.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in changing forms of governance and politics more generally.

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The rise of the mega-title: How gratuitous, list-filled names optimized books for Internet age sales, conquered the market, and made titles more boring

An interesting trend has developed in the world of books over the last fifty years. The emergence of the excessively long and overly informative book title has been swift and decisive. Once a rare style of titling, it now fills best-seller lists and Amazon search pages like sand fills a bucket. It took no prisoners. It came, it saw, it search engine-optimized.

Complete with a colon marking the break between the work’s main title and a subtitle attempting to indicate its content, the trend of the new literary mega-title isn’t going away anytime soon. If you’re someone who even occasionally shops for new books, then surely you know what I’m talking about.

Here are a few examples from current popular titles:

Gridlock U.S.A.: How America’s Traffic Problems Damage our Health and Wealth

Please and Thank You: Why Manners Matter More in a Digital World

Have you read or heard of either these books? Probably not, because I just made them up, as you might (or might not) be able to tell. It took me all of ten seconds. They were the first things that came to mind. Yet if you saw them prominently displayed on a Barnes & Noble shelf tomorrow they’d fit right in. Book titles seem to be getting longer and simultaneously worse.

Lest you think I am overreacting, or that I am whining about some imaginary trend in book naming (although I certainly am whining), I took a look at New York Times bestseller lists over the years. In the nonfiction category, which is particularly at risk for this type of title mumbo-jumbo, 80 percent, or 12 out of 15 selections in the most recent hardcover list, are of the mega-title variety. They total a whopping 137 words altogether, or just over nine each.

Going back twenty-five years and taking a peek at the nonfiction NYT list from December 1989, I find seven out of fifteen names, or 47 percent using colons for a grand total of 120 words, equal to eight words per title. There’s a trend emerging.

Turning the dial back yet another twenty-five years, the December 1964 nonfiction list yields ten winners with only three containing subtitles. The entire group clocks in at thirty-one words, a paltry three per book. Moreover, two of the three titles with colons pertain to biographies along the lines of Harlow: An Intimate Biography by Irving Shulman, which made the cut at a mere four words. (the NYT lists used can be found here.)

Three words per title is how you get it done. It’s simple and classy and doesn’t jam some garbled condensed summary onto the cover. The 1964 list contains such mouthfuls as Markings, Reminiscences, and The Kennedy Wit while 2014 boasts the quick and efficient Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War Two’s Most Audacious General and You Can’t Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it?

These are not book titles, they are short essays. Fifty years ago, two-part titles functioned merely to stylishly identify what category of book you were actually looking at. Today we get full-blown sentences worthy of a third grade English exercise following the colon (e.g. Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.) A book title is not the appropriate place to demonstrate your command of comma use.

So why did this trend emerge in the first place and why has it become so dominant, so fast?
(more…)