Accidental Blogger

Nasty politics disguised as Holy War

Rolling Stone magazine recently had a four page article describing in some detail the craziness ("batshit," Matt Taibbi said), hypocrisy, ignorance, religious zealotry and ruthlessness of the newest GOP presidential candidate, Michele Bachmann (R-MN). Not much is new there for those who have followed the antics of Bachmann, another sweetheart of the Tea Party wing of the Republican party.  

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and, as you consider the career and future presidential prospects of an incredible American phenomenon named Michele Bachmann, do one more thing. Don't laugh.

It may be the hardest thing you ever do, for Michele Bachmann is almost certainly the funniest thing that has ever happened to American presidential politics. Fans of obscure 1970s television may remember a short-lived children's show called Far Out Space Nuts, in which a pair of dimwitted NASA repairmen, one of whom is played by Bob (Gilligan) Denver, accidentally send themselves into space by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" inside a capsule they were fixing at Cape Canaveral. This plot device roughly approximates the political and cultural mechanism that is sending Michele Bachmann hurtling in the direction of the Oval Office.

Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions. She believes that the Chinese are plotting to replace the dollar bill, that light bulbs are killing our dogs and cats, and that God personally chose her to become both an IRS attorney who would spend years hounding taxpayers and a raging anti-tax Tea Party crusader against big government. She kicked off her unofficial presidential campaign in New Hampshire, by mistakenly declaring it the birthplace of the American Revolution. "It's your state that fired the shot that was heard around the world!" she gushed. "You are the state of Lexington and Concord, you started the battle for liberty right here in your backyard."

I said lunch, not launch! But don't laugh. Don't do it. And don't look her in the eyes; don't let her smile at you. Michele Bachmann, when she turns her head toward the cameras and brandishes her pearls and her ageless, unblemished neckline and her perfect suburban orthodontics in an attempt to reassure the unbeliever of her non-threateningness, is one of the scariest sights in the entire American cultural tableau. She's trying to look like June Cleaver, but she actually looks like the T2 skeleton posing for a passport photo. You will want to laugh, but don't, because the secret of Bachmann's success is that every time you laugh at her, she gets stronger.

And there is more. The colorful language notwithstanding, Taibbi's facts on Bachmann are mostly accurate. But the most important part of the cautionary diatribe comes at the end of the article when he warns that  given the sentiments of a large part of the electorate, a Bachmann presidency is not unthinkable in the current political climate.

It could happen. Michele Bachmann has found the flaw in the American Death Star. She is a television camera's dream, a threat to do or say something insane at any time, the ultimate reality-show protagonist. She has brilliantly piloted a media system that is incapable of averting its eyes from a story, riding that attention to an easy conquest of an overeducated cultural elite from both parties that is far too full of itself to understand the price of its contemptuous laughter. All of those people out there aren't voting for Michele Bachmann. They're voting against us. And to them, it turns out, we suck enough to make anyone a contender. 

The Dunning-Kruger effect has been evoked in reference to Sara Palin who has been making a fool of herself before half the nation, while at the same time dazzling the other half with her charm and down-to-earthliness since her debut on the national political theater in 2008. Taibbi rightly points out that Bachmann is a more earnest, determined and likely-to-succeed version of the Palin phenomenon.

Here's the difference between Bachmann and Palin: While Palin is clearly bored by the dreary, laborious aspects of campaigning and seems far more interested in gobbling up the ancillary benefits of reality-show celebrity, Bachmann is ruthlessly goal-oriented, a relentless worker who has the attention span to stay on message at all times. With a little imagination, you can even see a clear path for her to the nomination.

 

Palin may be intellectually lazy and no longer interested in being president or vice president. But her searing ambitions and love of the limelight have not dimmed. She may not wish to be the queen but I doubt that she is ready to relinquish her perceived role as the kingmaker. I don't think Palin is going to fade into the sunset just because another right wing Tea Party glam girl is the rising star, at least not before she demonstrates her adroitness with a sharp elbow. For example, Bachmann announced her presidential plans on Monday in her home state of Iowa. Coincidentally or not, Palin lands in Iowa on Tuesday ostensibly to promote her film biography. The fact that she may be there for more than a cinematic interlude is apparent from this report. Just as Palin had headed for New Hampshire on the same day as Mitt Romney  (the front runner in NH) announced his candidacy there, she is following Bachmann to Iowa where the latter has just emerged as the winner of a straw poll of Iowa caucus goers and is tied with Romney among GOP voters. Get ready for Republican roller derby!  

 

Criticism of Islam: free speech vs hate speech (Razib)

Razib at Brown Pundits.

A few people have asked me about the Geert Wilders’ affair. If you don’t know Geert Wilders’ is a right-wing Dutch politician prone to making inflammatory remarks about Islam. He’s been brought to court on the grounds of whether his comments violated the speech laws in much of Europe, which sanction inciting or hateful speech.

The main issue as an American that one always has about these sort of things is that because of the First Amendment and the way it has been interpreted our social norms are such that in regards to speech we are exceedingly liberal. Prosecuting Wilders would not be an issue in the United States. Rather, it is much more likely that he’d be marginalized and ignored as a kook.

From my perspective the main problem with prosecutions for hate speech in relation to Islam and immigrants in Europe is that these attempts seem like banning lying; it’s a nominal and symbolic salve on the underlying diseases. Additionally, one must note that the attacks are focused on Muslim immigrants in particular, who from what I can tell have shown (in part) the greatest concerted collective resistance to becoming absorbed into the “European consensus,” as it has evolved.

Some of Wilders’ statements are so extreme and strange that I can’t but help believe that he’s working the Overton window. And from what I’ve read his strategy has worked, the whole center of gravity of public discourse has shifted in the Netherlands and much of Europe. The very fact that Wilders was acquitted is probably a reflection of this, as the enforcement of these laws often is a signal of public mood.

Overall I think there are several issues in Europe which must be addressed in the near future which are relevant to the rise of the right-wing sentiment:

- The likely unworkability of the European “super-state” because of cultural incompabilities

- The nature of employment regulation in Europe which discourages labor market mobility and fluidity

- The welfare state predicated on a common set of values affinity across lines of class and age not always compatible with a multicultural order

- The cultural insularity of many minority ethnic groups in Europe, especially Muslims, vis-a-vis the mainstream

And that’s the tip of the iceberg. The main problem is that because of the nature of politics many of these issues are neatly reduced into catchphrases. Muslim populations in Europe complaining of racism neatly neglect that black Africans who are not Muslim probably experience as much racism, but are not the locus of social unrest or panic, in part because they don’t pose a coherent challenge to Europe as it is. Anti-immigrant voices neglect the fact that even if all immigrants left tomorrow Europe would still be facing massive structural problems because of the reality of their demographics, as fewer and fewer young people are supporting large populations of economically inactive older pensioners.

(Since I was one of the people who asked Razib to comment on the ruling by the Dutch court, I have his permission to copy the post here.)

20 obsolete English words that should make a comeback

This link is for the purpose of deliciating and jargogling Dean. (h/t: Abbas Raza)

Pakistan: End of the affair? (omar ali)

First published on 3quarkdaily.com

We have been here before, but it is being said that the unhappy marriage between the Pentagon and GHQ  has deteriorated further and once again, those watching this soap opera are wondering if this union can last? Writing in Al-Arabiya, GHQ’s own Brigadier Shaukat Qadir says that the US appears tobe “gunning for Pakistan’s top generals”, who are said to be bravely resisting this latest perfidious American plot against General Kiyani.  And why is the US trying to undermine the good General? Because at a meeting with President Obama he made clear  “ that this soft-spoken, laid-back, easy-going general, far from being overawed by the privilege of meeting President Obama, would still give back better than he got.”

This interesting article (I highly recommend reading it twice to get the full flavor) can be read in a number of ways, all of which are worrisome. One is to assume that Brigadier sahib means exactly what he is saying. That there is some core Pakistani interest that General Kiyani bravely insisted on defending, and for that sin, he is now being systematically undermined. Note that Pakistan’s elected government did not decide what this core interest is supposed to be, nor was it consulted before General Kiyani decided to defend this core interest against US imperialism. In fact, Brigadier sahib hints that the elected regime may include “powerful individuals who have no loyalty to this country and its people”. No, this core interest, for which Kiyani sahib is supposedly willing to risk a clash with the United States (and by extension, NATO, Japan, etc) is defined by GHQ, as it has been for decades.

“Strategic depth”, it seems, is alive and well and we can live with bombings, insurgencies, electricity shortages and all sorts of economic and social crises, but we cannot live without strategic depth.  For the sake of this strategic depth, we kept the Taliban alive and made sure the new American-installed regime in Afghanistan would not stabilize. And when the Americans leave (something that everyone in GHQ seems convinced is happening very soon), we will restart a civil war in Afghanistan, with “our side” led by the Haqqanis and Mullah Omar. This war we expect to win in very short order, after which we will move on to our Central Asian Nirvana. Having antagonized all the hardore jihadis by siding at least partially with the US, we are now to antagonize the US and its allies by sticking by the Taliban. This is known as GHQ's "Sau Gunndey tey Sau CHittar" strategy". * The problems with this approach are manifold and include:

Move Over Barney, Here comes the Fracosaurus (Sujatha)

There's been plenty of rainbows and peaceful green fields juxtaposed with happy faces and natural gas logos and clip art on the TV ads from the Marcellus Shale Coalition. But some companies have been taking this a step further. Catch 'em young is the motto, so here comes the Fracosaurus, or actually Talisman Terry .

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

"Community outreach efforts in shale communities target adults first, then high school students and finally the elementary set, said Larry Michael, the executive director for workforce and economic development at the Marcellus Shale Education and Training Center at the Pennsylvania College of Technology in Williamsport.

When the Marcellus Shale industry arrived, "The initial priority was to put in programs to get people off the unemployment rolls," he said.

Now, his team is working at the high school level, offering curriculum and training to teachers over the summer. It will begin the elementary-education rollout sometime after the summer."

As far as coloring books go, the literary content never outweighs the need to provide a scribbling surface for your toddler, while infusing them with a healthy, subconscious dose of whatever propaganda you are agreable to dishing out.  Maybe this is aimed more at the parents than the crayon-wielding demographic. If they are old enough to read the words, they are past the 'color within the lines' simplicity of accepting whatever they are told without question. A kid-friendly coloring book might help convince them that it is not all about profit and environmental pollution, but about energy independence and 'conservation'. 

Pakistan arrests CIA informants

This news is being presented in many cases in a slightly misleading manner, since it is more likely that they have just picked up everyone connected with Waziristan manzil, not just the CIA informants. But maybe some of them are CIA informants and that has pissed off the Americans. Meanwhile, the jihadis are pissed because GHQ is considered too pro-american. This is called GHQs brilliant sau gundey tey say cHittar strategy.

i.e. Opting for one hundred lashes and one hundred onions; for those who have not heard the story, a man was to be punished and was given the choice of eating a hundred onions or getting a hundred lashes. He opted for the onions but after 3-4 thought this is too hard and switched to lashes, but after 5 of those, he switched again to onions..he ended up with a hundred of both.

Whatever they do will not satisfy either the jihadis or the Americans...they would be better off picking one side and sticking to it...But but but..picking the jihadis would mean no more green cards and sons studying in Wharton. Picking the US would mean betraying Islam, Pakistan and the two-nation theory.

What would Jesus do?

Sentences for Dummies: How to Judge a Book by its Title (Dean)

Stanley Fish's latest book has not surprisingly generated a large number of reviews. Etc. It is How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, and it aims apparently to help the reader to write and read sentences. I have read and continue to enjoy Fish's literary theoretical work and his later work applying the insights and principles gleaned from his literary work to law and professionalism in academia, but I probably won't get around to reading the new book, because I'm not interested in how to write a sentence. I am interested in what Fish has to say about how to read one, but for that I'll revisit his earlier literary work, such as Self-Consuming Artifacts or Doing What Comes Naturally.

How to Write a Sentence is indeed a kind of how-to book. An endless stream of how-to books and similar works that purport to explain aspects of the world in terms fit for dummies gluts the market. Many are easy to spot. They sport titles — with Fish's latest, both a main title and a subtitle — that commence with an interrogative. A random assortment: Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddeon; Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America; Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps — and What We Can Do About It [a two-fer!]; What the Gospels Meant; Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, and so on. Publishers evidently hope to attract a large prospective readerships' desire to know "how..." or "what..." or "why..." something is the case, or "how to..." do something.

Sometimes in lieu of an interrogative, titles — often those of popular non-fiction books — feature colloquial sounding phrases to attract the demotic reader. Fish (or his publisher) took this approach with There's No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It's a Good Thing, Too, and also with Is There a Text in this Class?, the latter being a rare example of the device not merely being used to sell books, but to illustrate the point of the author's thesis. Among the works of James Gleick, one of my least favorite authors whose books I've never read, is What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier (the interrogative approach) and Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (folksy). I wish authors would discontinue the practice of "dumbing down" (a self-consuming reference, to be sure) their titles in these ways. One of the reasons, I admit, that I don't want to read Fish's latest is its embarrassing title. (Yet I really admire TNSTAFS: AIAGT,T, precisely because of its blunt, outlandish matter-of-factness.)

By focusing on sentences, rather than novels, poems, styles, or genres, and by aiming to produce a user's manual, rather than a more traditionally scholarly lofty but useless tome, Fish has assumed a task that makes it difficult to reconcile his deep love and knowledge of literature with his own canny skills at writing and argument. (One reviewer, Lee Epstein, questions Fish's authorial skill, claiming Fish is "an undistinguished writer." It would be easy, too easy, to demonstrate how Epstein is wrong, and that he himself is no Sir Thomas Browne.) Take the opening sentence to this paragraph from the first chapter of Fish's book:

One nice thing about sentences that display a skill you can only envy is that they can be found anywhere, even when you're not looking for them. I was driving home listening to NPR and heard a commentator recount a story about the legendary actress Joan Crawford. It seems that she never left the house without being dressed as if she were going to a premiere or a dinner at Sardi's. An interviewer asked her why. She replied, "If you want to see the girl next door, go next door." It is hardly surprising that Joan Crawford had thought about the importance to fans of movie stars behaving like movie stars (since her time, there has been a sea change; now, courtesy of paparazzi, we see movie stars picking up their laundry in Greenwich Village or Brentwood); what may be surprising is that she could convey her insight in a sentence one could savor. It is the bang-bang swiftness of the short imperative clause — "go next door" — that does the work by taking the commonplace phrase "the girl next door" literally and reminding us that "next door" is a real place where one should not expect to find glamour (unless of course one is watching Judy Garland singing "The Boy Next Door" in Meet Me in St. Louis).

I take issue with the premise of the first sentence that one reads for the satisfaction of appreciating, even envying, the occasional witty aphorism or retort. Yet that is Fish's point. He wants to collect a good sentence and "put it under a microscope and examine its innermost workings."

The obsession with sentences infects his reviewers, too. The NPR story begins, "Most people know a good sentence when they read one..." Epstein proclaims, "The only sentences that stand alone — that is, that are not utterly dependent on what has come before them — are the first and, to a lesser extent, the last sentences in a composition." Simon Blackburn concludes, "Sentences matter, perhaps more than anything else..." Adam Haslett confesses, "I would count myself among [those] who fell in love with literature not by becoming enthralled to books they couldn't put down but by discovering individual sentences whose rhythm and rhetoric was so compelling they couldn't help but repeat them to anyone who would listen..." It is disconcerting to witness so many self-proclaimed admirers of good writing allow their appreciation of the manifold variety of literary texts to be reduced to a fetishization of the linguistic molecule. The wink-nudge afforded by an overused trope — scholarly writing presented as operator's manual — is no relief.

India's Global Push

Not just call centers and technology outsourcing; there is also a lot of song & dance to the phenomenon.

 

Wanted: A good hangman

India is hardly the land of non-violence that the legacy of Gandhi seems to suggest. Murder and mayhem, intentional or inadvertent, are commonplace. But this trend in the criminal justice system is heartening.

Women in council: a better option for avoiding distractions?

After the latest tawdry tale from our nation's capital where yet another male politician has been caught indulging in an unwholesome pastime (cyber-flashing, in this case), some are wondering whether all too often men + power equals recklessness. Not many powerful women have been embroiled in sexual scandals or exercised such poor judgment in their personal behavior as the now very long list of offending male politicians from both parties. Women are not necessarily more sexually pure than men; they just know when not to throw caution to the wind. Also, they enter politics for different reasons than most men do.

Two stories here and here.

Less interestingly, I got into a long discussion on Facebook based on two articles on Anthony Weiner, one  by Juan Cole and the other by Glenn Greenwald. Since I haven't taken the permission to post the other comments, I am reproducing only my side here. It is easy to fathom the actual line of backing and forthing that went on. I am separating the comments by ***, each a response to something someone else said in the thread.

 (cartoon by Jack Ohman)

 

Bending the Curve (Sujatha)

Having recently read the book 'The Hippocratic Myth' by M.Gregg Bloche, the striking subtext states "Why doctors are under pressure to ration care, practice politics and compromise their promise to heal". The author makes a convincing case for his thesis that the current political and economic climate and laws push doctors into juggling contradictory roles as caregivers and cost-cutters, in effect making a sort of mockery of the Hippocratic oath's injunction to 'enter every house only for the good of the patient'.

And yet, the costs of maintaining this kind of selfless, patient-centered care keep rising year after year, till it becomes all but unaffordable to the richest. At what point does it become necessary to bend this curve away from exclusivity towards inclusiveness? What are the costs we will incur, as a society, and can that cost be borne?

One anecdote in the book is about a daughter fighting to maintain the expensive drug regimen her 80+ year old mother needs to survive. "Who are these doctors to ration my mother's care?", to paraphrase her words as she argues that they cannot assume that her mother still has a foot in the grave, even without the drugs that she needs. The mother went on to a full recovery and more years of life, despite having had a life expectancy of about a week when the crisis occurred.

Another is a heartrending story of a low income pregnant mother whose cancer is missed in time because the physician attending didn't feel that a CT scan was warranted until it was too late and led to a cascade of events that crippled her. She might have been able to retain more faculties if it had been caught sooner.

The common thread was that of the doctor acting as a gatekeeper to the spending and clearly highlights an area that is now beginning to be discussed seriously, even as demagoguery about cutting back on Medicare, death panels and more are waved in front of voters to push them either towards the Democrats or Republicans.

The discussion has now started in earnest, as it well should, despite all the simplistic notions being flung around.

This NYT op-ed by Rita Redberg outlines many of the procedures that Medicare covers without questions asked, colonoscopies, prostate cancer screenings, drug-coated stents, all in patient populations that derive no significant benefit from having these procedures, and other inefficiencies in the payout model to private suppliers that currently run up a tab 75-150 billion dollars.

So how do we reconcile the outcry that is sure to be raised when there is a push to move from such procedures towards better preventive care and 'evidence-based' medicine based on appropriate epidemiological recommendations? We already see evidence of it in the backlash against the recommendation that women not at hereditary risk for breast cancer postpone mammograms till the age of 50, rather than starting them at age 40.

In the battle of emotion and personal anecdotes with nebulous abstract statistical analyses, it will always be the former that wins. It's so much easier to be dispassionate about some other larger amorphous group's health than one's own, or one's near and dear.

And yet, bend the curve we must, if the costs are to be contained. This means the unpleasant discussion about rationing care, trying to ensure that the broadest swath of people are covered by the limited budget, rather than trying to cover all treatments for all people.

Some experiments are already starting, like setting up ACOs (Accountable Care Organizations), but the recent evidence for their effectiveness isn't encouraging, suggesting relatively little savings and higher costs and inconveniences to providers than expected.

There were other ways suggested, as well, and provided for in the Affordable Health Care Act, but it remains to be seen whether these will help move the spiralling health care costs into a zone where rises are under control. Only then can a rational discussion ensue on how to dispense medical care to the larger public without making doctors violate the Hippocratic oath to provide the best care they can to the individual patient.

30 years of the AIDS epidemic: An alarming rise of infection among a new group

This year is the officially recognized 30th anniversary of the HIV /AIDS epidemic in the USA. The focus on the disease is once again in the forefront - its spread, its prevention and its treatment have revealed many new medical facts about the virus, some hopeful and others frustrating. There is still no effective "cure" for the condition and afflicted patients continue to die although contracting HIV infection is no longer viewed as an immediate death sentence. Various groups have been identified as "at risk" at different times, beginning of course, with gay men and IV drug users in the early days of the epidemic. However, AIDS has gradually spread among other demographic groups, including heterosexual women. Secrecy and shame are often factors in hampering an accurate assessment of the true extent of the spread of the disease in certain groups. One group, considered relatively safe from HIV/AIDS in the past, Asian American women, has now been shown to have a sharp increase in the rate of infection in recent years. The problem for these women may be further complicated by the Asian community's resistance to admitting and therefore treating the condition which is considered a huge cultural stigma. The report here. (Link via Razib)

(I would like to point out that this report relates only to Asian American women who were until recently considered "safe" from HIV / AIDS. In Africa and Asia the epidemic has targeted men and women in almost equal numbers, irrespective of sexual preference)

Post 9/11 priorities

Here are a few stories recently in the news that illustrate the priorities of our politicians and government agencies when it comes to spending public money.

A United Airlines flight from Washington DC to Ghana made a mid-air U-Turn because of a fist fight between two irritated and uncivil passengers. The disturbance was deemed "serious" enough for the plane to require a F-16 fighter jet escort. Before landing, the plane jettisoned $50,000 worth of fuel in order to reduce the weight of the aircraft to a landing-worthy level. We do not know how much it costs to send up an F-16 into the air.

A suicidal man drowned in San Francisco Bay over the Memorial Day weekend while police and firefighters who were summoned there stood by and watched. Fire officials claimed that recent budget cuts prevented them from attempting a "water rescue."  

Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey who prides himself for being a fiscally responsible politician and has suggested wide ranging pay cuts and reduction in benefits for school teachers and state employees, flew in a state helicopter to his son's baseball game. The brand new helicopter is meant to be used for medical and Homeland Security related emergencies. It costs $2,500 per hour to fly the helicopter.

The US & Pakistan: more on what Omar has been telling us

The volatile detritus of America's disastrous cold war diplomacy in South Asia - Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker.

3 QD Science Prize, 2011

The 3rd annual competition for the best science writing on blogs and e-zines is now open at 3 Quarks Daily. If you have read an interesting science post in the last 12 months, please consider nominating it. For details of the rules and deadlines, see here.