Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

You have to love a paper entitled The Deadweight Loss Of Christmas. It is further proof of why microeconomists are the world’s favorite people.

(Via Ideoblog, by way of Concurring Opinions)

I’m trying to think of how to delicately recommend against reading Joan Didion’s latest (for which she won a National Book Award). Some disjointed notes:

Didion’s 1960’s-era writing is brilliant for laying out a particular style of analysis, but if it suffers from anything it is a remarkable self-absorption. Didion is obviously a depressive, and I can’t imagine that 1960’s-era Joan Didion is anyone I would want to spend time with. I enjoyed reading her books from then, but those books in all likelihood had an editor.

She moved into the 90’s and clearly had come out of her funk — in much the same way that I hear Woody Allen is out of therapy for the first time in 50 years after marrying Soon-Yi Previn. It’s not clear that Woody — for all his brilliance as a filmmaker — would have been a fun guy to spend time with around the era of Annie Hall or Manhattan. The films repay endless viewings, in large part because the medium was well-chosen.

The Year Of Magical Thinking is Didion’s memoir of her husband’s death and daughter’s hospitalization (which eventually became her daughter’s death). Didion has become unmoored, understandably so, without the stabilizing presence of a husband who had been by her side for 40 years. She and John Gregory Dunne spent more time with each other even than most married couples did: they were both writers, and they both wrote at home. They were literally by each other’s side 24 hours per day.

So I feel great sympathy for Didion. I’m sad to say, however, that great sympathy does not automatically translate into a great reading experience. The Year Of Magical Thinking is a great diary of Didion’s glimpse into nothingness, but it’s a diary that probably shouldn’t have been published.

I say this with some hesitation, because I wonder whether Didion’s book would be more valuable to me if I were suffering through great loss. It is probably highly valuable to widows and widowers, but even that isn’t especially clear to me: in large part The Year Of Magical Thinking is about how little sense the world makes for her anymore: people die for no good reason, and there is no magic bullet to make us feel better. There is even no magic bullet to forget about our loved ones; Didion writes of being constantly pulled down into a “vortex” of thoughts about Dunne as soon as she starts to think about anything. One thing leads to another, and eventually she is destroyed by her own memories. There is no light at the end of the tunnel in this book, which isn’t exactly giving away the ending: not only does Didion telegraph this, but her 60’s-era writing style would suggest precisely this lack of sense or relief.

Perhaps it’s just my own temperament, but I am much more drawn to Didion’s impersonal writings — those dealing with politics or something that we might call “theory.” She’s not theoretical except in a few scattered passages here and there (including some in Magical Thinking about the sociology and history of grieving), but what she’s building — in her own personal way — is a particular way of looking at the world and picking apart its workings. She’s good at it. I hope she returns to it. In the meantime, I think we can lay down the diary of her grieving and leave her to grieve; this book was more for her than it was for us.

Encouraging news: there’s a chance we’ll find out that some of the people being prosecuted on terror-related charges were subject to illegal wiretaps from the NSA. In which case there’s a chance that the wiretaps may come under Supreme Court scrutiny.

I realize I’m getting ahead of myself, but this seems like good news.

If you encounter a web page containing a flash animation that is just a little video control wrapped around a (presumably QuickTime or MPEG) movie — such as, for instance, “Lazy Sunday” — what’s the easiest way to extract just the video from inside and save it off to disk? Presumably the embedded video control is just making another HTTP GET request, right? Or is it more complicated than that?

I’ll play around a little with Ethereal to see if I can get an answer. I’d love to hear if there’s some more systematic way of getting the inner video content.

P.S.: Well, the Ethereal approach worked. I’m not sure where it originated — maybe in Javascript, maybe in the Flash — but the page makes a GET request to an URL containing the movie, which you can then download without the Flash crappity-crap. I’m not sure how broadly useful this trick will be. To make it work more generally in Ethereal, I need to figure out one little thing: large files will tend to have a large number of frames labeled “Continuation or non-HTTP traffic”, so all I need to figure out is which frame contains the original GET request corresponding to all those continuations. That GET request will presumably be the one containing the URL for the video.

After a heartbreaking chapter about his membership in the exhausted embers of American socialism, George Packer writes this meaning-packed little passage:

The longing persists — call it socialism, comunity, the Beloved Republic. For Irving Howe it was “as needed by mankind as bread and shelter.” Orwell felt the same way: “[E]specially since the French Revolution, the Western world has been haunted by the idea of freedom and equality  . . .  Nearly everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds emotionally to the idea of human brotherhood.”

We are learning to live without the word. Born in the eighteenth century, did the idea die in the twentieth? Or has it only been supressed, deformed in our time into the motivational speaker, the cyber-community, the fact that we all watch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire at the same hour? In the age of capitalism’s triumph over every other ism, we see its exceesses, we might even object to its injustices, but we no longer have anything to set against it. For seven years I labored in the ruins of an idea that had once been associated with giants — Eugene Debs and Big Bill Haywood and Mother Jones — an idea that had once had the power to attract millions. No idea has risen to take socialism’s place — and yet it’s clear how badly Americans could use one. Every year wealth and power grow more concentrated, the blessings of the unregulated market less equal. But we’ve had to accept it as inevitable, like continental drift or tooth decay. The irony is that just when we need a serious challenge to global corporate capitalism, the old beliefs are discredited and the energy for new ones spent. People all over the world now cling to personal hope in the market’s power to change their lives without a larger collective hope of transformation. If we’re going to be saved, we will be saved separately, at a profit.

(Emphasis mine)

I don’t know if I’ve seen a better synopsis of what many of my liberal friends believe, and why it is that we keep losing, than this passage from Blood of the Liberals:

Not even the quadrennial bad news from the outside world could shake me out of my complacency. Nothing confirms righteousness like defeat. The rest of the country just kept getting stupider and meaner. Someday, it would recognize its error and embrace our beliefs.

What could better represent how most liberals view Bush and his supporters? It’s not that there’s a legitimate difference of opinion between Democrats and Republicans, and it’s not that we’re doing anything wrong. In fact, we have the facts on our side; it’s they who are just either

1. stupid, or
2. disinterested in politics, and occasionally
3. racist.

In my weaker moments, I feel this way. But I need to shake myself out of it, if only because we will continue losing elections if we feel this way. Yes, I truly believe that President Bush misled the nation about the urgency of going to war; I believe that others who insist on the President’s rectitude were just not paying attention when the buildup to war was happening. So I’m not going to claim that both sides have equally valid positions; what’s the point in holding an opinion if you think it could just as easily be replaced by another? However, I think that too often we use our derision of the other side as an excuse to change nothing about how we ourselves are running campaigns.

It’s far too easy to think that most conservatives are just lying or misled — lying if they’re conservative leaders, misled if they’re the majority of the electorate that voted for Bush. And it gets us no closer to winning elections.

I’d be fascinated to see someone study the American public’s latent racist attitudes toward terror suspects. In particular, I’m fairly certain that the public would have a far easier time legislating the torture of Arab suspects than it would allowing Tim McVeigh or the Unabomber to be tortured. Perhaps remove it one level: present Americans with carefully constructed, fake newspaper articles about suspected terrorists, and lay out the suspects’ backgrounds. Some of them would be white Americans, some black Americans, some white Europeans from obscure terror groups like ETA, some white Europeans from famous terror groups like the IRA, and some Arabs. Actually, throw in some Asians, because it’s rare for us to even conceive of Asian terrorists; the closest we come is the Japanese mafia.

Now, walk the experimental subjects through a series of questions about these terror suspects. Do they deserve to die? The government is considering a series of measures against them — sometimes call it “torture,” sometimes use words like “waterboarding” that the subjects may know about without actually defining that those terms mean, and sometimes be explicit about what “waterboarding” and other such terms entail. Now ask whether those measures are justified.

It seems pretty clear to me that darker people will get harsher treatment than white folks, that Asians — as a group that’s less traditionally associated with terrorism — will get the least punishment, and that Arabs will get the most. I wonder if anyone’s actually carried out this study.

One of the guys who captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960, Peter-Zvi Malkin, died this year, and the Times has a fascinating obituary for him. I’ll have to read Malkin’s book Eichmann In My Hands. I already meant to read Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, so now Malkin goes on the list.

Friend Stevie recommended a long while back that I read George Packer’s book Blood of the Liberals. I’ve seen Packer’s name a lot recently, in the context of his new book The Assassins’ Gate; apparently Packer spent a lot of time on the ground in Iraq, and changed from a rather prominent left-wing hawk to his now-anti-war stance. I want to get Packer in to talk at work, so I thought I’d start digging through his books. He has quite a number, it seems. (One of them is named after Cambridge’s Central Square. The photos on the cover make me very sad; I miss Boston more by the day, despite how much fun I’m having in D.C.)

Blood of the Liberals is a near-perfect blend of the personal and the political. Packer’s grandfather was George Huddleston, a Congressman from Birmingham, Alabama who represents for Packer a lot of the contradictions in modern liberalism: desegregation versus states’ rights, support for the common man against bigness (whether corporate, governmental, or otherwise), and at the same time a belief that government is sometimes necessary.

Packer’s father, by contrast, was a pointy-headed academic. He grew up as a shy Jewish boy and moved into the ivory-tower life after some time spent in World War II; Packer paints the war years as rather uneventful for the senior Packer — indeed little more than a pause from his books. I felt a lot of empathy with the dad; I was the same way when I was a kid, and I’m sure that if I went off to fight a war I’d be mailing home to ask for books and magazines just as much as Packer Sr. was.

I also drew a lot from Packer’s portrait of his father, because in that portrait Packer seems to have discovered why liberals keep losing elections. Packer Sr. was an Adlai Stevenson man — Stevenson, the charismatic, brilliant loser. In a better world, Stevenson would have been our president, but in this world he lost the race twice. The term egghead became popular because one of the Alsops tagged Stevenson with it.

And ever since Stevenson, says Packer, liberalism has been dominated by rather bloodless intellectuals who can’t argue persuasively against the bread-and-butter issues that let Republicans win. Before anyone points it out, I will note that I am one of these bloodless intellectuals, which is why the book resonates so strongly with me on that point. The common thread among these intellectuals, says Packer, is a love of abstract debate, and the belief that human problems can be solved by the judicious application of reason — that we can all get along and solve our issues without yelling or fighting. That’s fine and good, and as far as it goes it’s no more modern than Jefferson. The Jeffersonian strain is one of the key strands that Packer identifies in liberal thought.

Where it starts losing elections, he says, is when the intellectuals start to take it over. Discussions shift from individual people — this man lost his land, this man’s family is starving because of government policies — to larger universal themes like freedom, equality, justice, and the rule of law. That last one digs particularly deep in me, because it is one of the deepest principles that I hold: a belief in the Bill of Rights is, to me, essentially a belief that no one is above the law and that there is an inviolable sphere around us, separating us from our government.

This adherence to principles loses us elections. It lost Stevenson the election against Eisenhower when he stood up for fairness and impartiality in the anti-Communist witchhunts; he himself was a strong anti-Communist, but he framed his beliefs in terms that Nixon could tear apart.

Obviously we can see this strain today. Those of us arguing against the Administration’s powers in the war on terror are arguing for what seem to us natural principles that have governed the nation from the start — freedom of speech, the 4th Amendment, the right not to have a confession coerced from you through torture (and hence, through a conservative extension of the principle, the right not to testify against yourself). I happen to think that we’re not even arguing bloodlessly for these things: to us, it’s clear that if you let the government torture someone, there’s no good way to stop them from torturing others, and eventually torturing you.

But this doesn’t play with the public. The public is more concerned with outcomes than with processes. If the public doesn’t feel safe, it will not vote for abstract principles that seem to help their enemies. We could argue for civil liberties all we want, but Republicans will always come back with the argument that they’re helping protect us from terrorists. When it comes to a battle between safety and our Constitutional freedoms, safety will always win.

This, at least, is the message that Packer seems to be sending so far. His diagnosis does seem spot on. And his delivery is just right: he cuts back and forth between an impersonal political tale — how liberals have ended up in the mess we’re in — and a personal story about discovering his father’s and grandfather’s role in it all. It is at once autobiography and political cautionary tale. I’m amazed that he could pull it off.

After I’ve read Packer, I have a couple books that I need to pick up: Dan Carter’s The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics; Carter’s From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994; and maybe Jacob Hacker’s Off Center : The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy. The latter has always struck me more as a polemic than as a piece of historical scholarship, so for now I’m more drawn to Carter’s books; I heard him describing The Politics Of Rage on the radio back when it came out a decade ago, and I’ve meant to dig it up ever since.

I really want to understand how liberals have gotten so trounced. I imagine race — particularly LBJ’s signing of the Civil Rights Act — is a big part of the answer. As Lee Atwater put it:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

(Via Wikipedia)

Maybe figuring out how we got here will help us stop losing elections.

Not sure if people noted this, but there was a fairly big break in the Padilla case. Padilla, you’ll remember, was an accused “dirty bomber,” captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan and held in a military prison because the government claimed that he posed a continuing threat to the United States; he was accused of plotting all kinds of terrorist attacks in the United States. A little while ago the 4th Circuit affirmed that the President has the right to detain U.S. citizens in military brigs when they are believed to be waging war domestically against the U.S. Indeed, as Eric Muller noted at the time,

It is difficult to overstate the significance of Judge Luttig’s ruling. With nothing more than congressional silence to go on, Judge Luttig endorses the proposition that a President may single out an American citizen, grab him on American soil, and do something close to making him “disappear.”

But the case is slowly winding its way through the courts, and it looks like it’s going to get cert from the Supreme Court. And the government apparently believed that they had bad odds on appeal. So they asked the 4th Circuit recently to vacate their earlier (that is, the 4th Circuit’s earlier) decision — the one that gave them such broad powers in the war on terror. Only they didn’t provide any reasons for the vacatus (I didn’t realize that this was the noun form until I read it in the 4th Circuit’s decision, which I’ve cached; I suppose it makes more sense than to use “vacation”). They just claimed there was an emergency and asked the court to buy their argument. The court didn’t. In fact the court was fairly explicit that they’re pissed. Among other things, they wrote

And these impressions have been left, we fear, at what may ultimately prove to be substantial cost to the government’s credibility before the courts, to whom it will one day need to argue again in support of a principle of assertedly like importance and necessity to the one that it seems to abandon today. While there could be an objective that could command such a price as all of this, it is difficult to imagine what that objective would be.

So this is a big win for us. It gives me hope that somewhere — somewhere — within the system, there is an escape valve to stop an out-of-control executive branch. Maybe the Supreme Court really does realize the important role it plays, and the Court really will not allow such reckless disregard for the rule of law to continue. Even though the 4th Circuit, apparently, has no problem advancing the cause of dictatorship.

In a moment, I intend to write about a book I’ve been reading recently, with some thoughts that I think are related to how my side views Padilla, and how this probably says a lot about why we’re losing.

Just saw the above. It’s well-structured, interspersing interviews with real people with a clip of the company’s CEO speaking before stockholders. The ironies are pretty crisp: the CEO talking about how much money he saved Wal-Mart the night before by splitting a hotel room with another executive; he saved $200 for the company that way, he says. Cut to a stat: the CEO makes more than $20 million annually. Cut to the CEO explaining how much good his company does for its employees, then interview a ton of those employees to show that they can’t afford to feed their kids, that the company union-busts, and — perhaps most outrageously — that it makes health insurance too expensive for its employees, so that they’re forced to turn to state aid to take care of their families. And Wal-Mart encourages them to do this. All while the company makes record profits every quarter.

The movie slips in a few places, like fairly heavy-handed cinematography: when they’re telling us something encouraging, the soundtrack is almost campy. When they’re interviewing one of the good guys, the camera is low to the ground, looking up at the subject. It’s cheesy, but I’m sure it’s also effective.

3.5 to 4 stars out of 5.

P.S.: I was proud to note, in the credits at the end of Wal-Mart, that it was sponsored by Campus Progress and the Center for American Progress, among others.

 . . . was never actually real, as everyone knows. But the thing that I think a lot of people miss, including Frank Rich today when he thinks he’s roundly trouncing the GOP, is that by even debating whether there’s a war on Christmas, we’re more likely to lose. Republicans know the whole thing is a fiction, but they invite us to debate them so that we can call into question premises that no one doubted before the Republicans brought them up. They used the same technique during the war in Iraq; suddenly it became our job to explain why we shouldn’t invade Iraq, and we were totally caught off guard. Or John Kerry, who had to explain why he wasn’t a coward, even in the face of a Purple Heart. No one is expecting to have to defend these things, so the Republicans almost win by default.

The only way we win is if we don’t even play their game  . . .  and come to think of it I’m not even sure we win then. I wonder whether a prolonged strategy of saying, “They’re just avoiding this or that issue” is going to work. If Fox News continues spouting about the war on Christmas, do we have any choice but to respond to it? If we join the “debate,” we play by their rules, but if we avoid the debate we let them spout over the public airwaves without competition.

It’s a tough battle. I’m curious how we win it. Maybe we just have to go on the offensive about what’s actually ailing the country. That requires more guts than we’ve had before now.

An anonymous GOP senator is apparently blocking the intelligence-appropriations bill, to forestall voting on Kennedy’s and Kerry’s amendments that would require CIA reports about secret U.S. prisons in Europe.

Presumably this senator is worried about the prospects of those amendments passing. Otherwise he would allow the vote to go through and the amendments to get shot down, right?

Legal people: if it’s true that the NSA was combing through mountains of data looking for terrorists domestically, how is that not a general search that the 4th amendment was explicitly intended to forbid?

I’m kind of in love with ThinkProgress and Media Matters. They’re interesting combinations of standard blogs and actual news sources. Whereas a blog — such as, oh, I don’t know, this one — are normally dudes reading the New York Times and writing their opinions about it, ThinkProgress and Media Matters provide large quantities of original fact-checking and reporting.

As time goes on, it wouldn’t surprise me to see this happen more and more often. At the very least, I expect that these two blogs would encourage others to do more fact checking of their own. But I also expect that ThinkProgress and Media Matters will start getting phone calls from people who want to report confidential news to them.

I should probably mention here that the Center for American Progress and the American Progress Action Fund — the former a 501(c)(3) and the latter a 501(c)(4) which produces ThinkProgress — are my employer. I make it a habit of not mentioning my employer (when I have one) on this site, but CAP itself is making no secret of my employment.

Needless to say, all the opinions expressed on this site are mine, not CAP’s, APAF’s, ThinkProgress’s or anyone else’s.

I see on the front page of the New York Times that Manohla Dargis calls Munich “By far the toughest film of Steven Spielberg’s career and the most anguished.”

Maybe so. But if Munich doesn’t end with totally unmotivated absolution in some way — preferably with a doe-eyed youth — then it is not a Spielberg film. The man always lets his most crass, mock-populist Hollywood instincts get the better of him, and by now I’ve had enough.

I feel not the least bit sad about saying this, since Spielberg probably has enough money by now to build a space shuttle that captures the sun and flings it directly at my house.

Bruce Schneier links to a super-interesting interview with an OpenSSH developer. Granted, it’s only interesting if you use ssh, but you ought to.

(more…)

I’m glad ThinkProgress said it:

This is about following the law. Why is that so difficult to understand?

Likewise for the Plame case. We hold the moral high ground, and we should never forget that. The other side is implicitly defending lawbreaking. For all their talk of following the “rule of law” in other countries, they are extraordinarily lax about it in our own country.

The Washington Post confirms that the Bush administration knew they wouldn’t get FISA approval; what they were trying to do was manifestly illegal.

It seems to me that at least two things are quite obvious:

1. They could have sought Congressional approval for what they were doing, but they didn’t seek it; and
2. they knew they were breaking the law.

Is there any way around these conclusions? Shouldn’t some heads start rolling? If President Bush approved these wiretaps thirty times, as he says he did, shouldn’t his head roll first?

Canada is way cool.

(Via Wonkette)