Today on the Dish, we took stock of Egypt. Claudio Gallo sounded a despondent note, Robert Springboard listed businesses owned by the army, and Marc Lynch sized up Obama's options. Mark Thompson identified Washington's pickle, Joshua Foust found Yemen a ripe candidate for revolution, protesters relieved themselves in creative ways, and coffee revolutionized the Middle East. We caught up with Southern Sudan, Richard Posner pinned down why autocratic governments fail, and Iran's Green Movement got involved with Egypt.
Patrick zoomed out on Glenn Beck's spat with Bill Kristol, Goldblog parodied, and Conor pushed back against Frum on Bush's torture arrest. We eulogized the Democratic Leadership Council, Conor would have asked Obama tougher questions than O'Reilly, and Hendrik Hertzberg urged Ron Reagan to run. Our collective heads hit the desk for voters who still think Obama is a Muslim, and Conor considered local governments, reenvisioned Social Security, and picked at public employee unions. Britain banned sex for a low IQ, Conor evaluated teachers, and Serwer skewered Pawlenty on repealing repeal. Profits don't apply to libraries, Huff-Po owned the search engine optimization, and more voices in the blogosphere are better. Christopher Guest made funny, non-P.C. commercials, Tony Comstock blogged for Atlantic, and prostitutes loved Blackberrys. Intelligence wasn't only in the eyes, skyscrapers kept housing affordable, and Pippi Longstocking's house, horse, monkey and gold held many political secrets.
Tweet of the day here, quote for the day here, email of the day here, creepy furniture watch here, app of the day here, MHB here, FOTD here, VFYW here, and VFYW contest #36 here.
David Bell compares Egypt's uprising to famous revolutions throughout history. He argues that "the crucial point to keep in mind, as events in Egypt unfold, is that ... the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 may still just be getting started":
Egypt probably does not face the prospect of an Islamic Revolution in the next few months. But if Mubarak falls and is replaced by a weak, unstable series of governments that cannot restore order or deliver serious social and economic reforms -- and thus quickly lose credibility and legitimacy among the population -- then a different, far more radical revolutionary movement may yet develop. And despite the current lack of a charismatic leader for such a movement, one could quickly emerge out of the torrent of events. In July 1789, Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton were unknown lawyers; Jean-Paul Marat an unknown doctor, known to most of his acquaintances as something of a crackpot. Within four years, they had emerged as leaders of the most radical revolution yet seen in history.
(Photo: Egyptian anti-government protesters hold a huge national flag as they gather at Cairo's Tahrir square on February 8, 2011 on the 15th day of demonstrators against the regime President Hosni Mubarak. By Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty Images)
A few years ago, Virginia Republicans passed a developer friendly bill mandating that each locality designate an “urban development area” in which medium-density construction would be permitted. It doesn’t require that higher density structures actually be built, but it does require that they be permitted. Similarly, it doesn’t require that mixed-use development be built, but it does require that it be permitted. Naturally, a conservative Virginia state legislator has teamed up with a local Tea Party group is looking to overturn this and has founded an outfit called the Campaign for Liberty in defense of stringent development restrictions.
Stephen Smith, who has a good post on this, seems surprised. But there’s really nothing surprising about it. Freedom-talk is an important influence in American rhetoric, but it—and especially its self-consciously antiquarian cousin liberty-talk—has nothing to do with any analytically respectable conception of freedom.
It would be more accurate to say that freedom and liberty talk don't necessarily have anything to do with an analytically respectable conception of freedom, and I certainly think Yglesias is right to call out opposition to more freedom in land use decisions. Nor does the story he flags surprise me. Growing up in Orange County, California, one learns rather quickly that cities dominated by Republicans regularly impose unnecessary restrictions on land use, pass petty laws about the hours one is permitted to walk on the beach, and generally engages in what can only be called a central planning model of economic growth.
The average suburban homeowner is a vocal proponent of property rights until the day when a nearby landowner wants to build an apartment complex on his property. Then the right not to live near renters is treated as sacrosanct.
Edward Glaeser has a great piece on the future of skyscrapers, in the new Atlantic issue:
Growth, not height restrictions and a fixed building stock, keeps space affordable and ensures that poorer people and less profitable firms can stay and help a thriving city remain successful and diverse. Height restrictions do increase light, and preservation does protect history, but we shouldn’t pretend that these benefits come without a cost.
...The cost of restricting development is that protected areas have become more expensive and more exclusive. In 2000, people who lived in historic districts in Manhattan were on average almost 74 percent wealthier than people who lived outside such areas. Almost three-quarters of the adults living in historic districts had college degrees, as opposed to 54 percent outside them. People living in historic districts were 20 percent more likely to be white. The well-heeled historic-district denizens who persuade the landmarks commission to prohibit taller structures have become the urban equivalent of those restrictive suburbanites who want to mandate five-acre lot sizes to keep out the riffraff. It’s not that poorer people could ever afford 980 Madison Avenue, but restricting new supply anywhere makes it more difficult for the city to accommodate demand, and that pushes up prices everywhere. ...
In the post-war boom years between 1955 and 1964, Manhattan issued permits for an average of more than 11,000 new housing units each year. Between 1980 and ’99, when the city’s prices were soaring, Manhattan approved an average of 3,100 new units per year. Fewer new homes meant higher prices; between 1970 and 2000, the median price of a Manhattan housing unit increased by 284 percent in constant dollars.
Alexis has an interactive timeline of skyscrapers.
Here's an interesting frame for the difference between America, Germany, and Sweden: every society has a different relationship to "the triangle formed by reverence for the Family, the State and the Individual."
Americans favour a Family-Individual axis... suspecting the state as a threat to liberty. Germans revere an axis connecting the family and the state, with a smaller role for individual autonomy. In the Nordic countries... the state and the individual form the dominant alliance.
That's the argument in a paper called "Pippi Longstocking: The Autonomous Child and the Moral Logic of the Swedish Welfare State."
It hails Pippi (the strongest girl in the world and an anarchic individualist who lives without parents in her own house, with only a monkey, horse, a bag of gold and a strong moral compass for company) as a Nordic archetype.
The Nordics celebrate the role of the state in setting individuals free from family obligations. Traditional conservatives, in contrast, have seen the discipline of the market as an effective way to deepen and reinforce marital fidelity and intergenerational obligations. In a more affluent society, however, these family bonds almost inevitably fray, and marriages are built on shared consumption preferences rather than the specialization of men in market labor and women in household labor. This helps account for the marked decrease in marriage rates among the poor and near-poor in the U.S., for whom the welfare state and market wages reduce the urgent need for a partner and high incarceration rates reduce the potential supply.
The problem, of course, is that marriage and the pooling of resources that it entails appear to be crucial to upward mobility. One possibility is that the hunger for upward mobility will spark a cultural shift in the direction of increased marriage rates. Another is a turn in a statist, Nordic direction, in which marriage rates never return to the norms that prevailed in the midcentury U.S. and the state steps in with more redistribution.
He outlines a third way too.
One weakness in American political discourse is a tendency to speak of Europe as if every country therein buys into the same model. But that continent clusters a lot of extremely prosperous countries, each with its own policies and cultural canvas. Studying them is useful wherever one falls on the political spectrum. Obviously the American right is very hostile to the Swedish welfare state. On the other hand, "an anarchic individualist who lives without parents in her own house, with only a monkey, horse, a bag of gold and a strong moral compass for company" kinda sounds like a childrens book Ayn Rand might've written.
So this image purports to be a series of composites of the average woman from various countries and ethnicities. I was struck by how attractive they all are. This makes some sense when you think about it from an evolutionary perspective. But I think it’s also a little surprising because it’s not how we typically use the word average.
Paul Bloom's excellent recent book explains this phenomenon in more detail:
[W]hile average faces look good, they don't look terrific – the most attractive faces are not the average ones. (When you do these morphs, you get a fine face, but not one with movie-star good looks.)
After quoting Franklin Delano Roosevelt's claim that "the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service," The Economist's Will Wilkinson explains why he was right:
In any productive joint enterprise, there’s a question of how to split the gains from cooperation. Our native sense of fairness tells us that our shares should be roughly proportional to the value of our contributions. But distributive fairness doesn’t automatically prevail. What we actually get—whether we get a fair share or get used—depends on our bargaining power. Individual workers with few options hardly stand a chance against managers backed by massive capital. Workers are most likely to get a cut that reflects the value of their contributions when they band together and bargain collectively...
The thing is, public-sector unions don't work like this. They aren't bargaining against capitalists for a fair cut of the cooperative surplus. They're bargaining against everybody who pays taxes and/or benefits from government spending.
The question of distribution in democratic politics isn't about splitting up jointly-produced profits. It's about interest groups fighting to grab a bigger share of government revenue while sticking competing groups with the tax bill. Because of the sheer size and relatively uniform interests of the group, public employees constitute a politically powerful bloc with or without unions. As the percentage of the labour force employed by the government rises, the heft of this group only increases.
The limited time I've spent covering public employee unions makes me think that Wilkinson is right when he notes that "a bit of public-employee union busting at the state and municipal level wouldn't leave government workers vulnerable." Beyond civil service protections, they'd enjoy the gains that accrue to people when the narrow interests they care a great deal about are adjudicated by legislative bodies with no corresponding lobby on the other side.
Even if you think that's wrong, it's hard to look at the experience in California without concluding that public employee unions enjoy too much clout under the status quo. And even progressives whose first priority is making government function better ought to recognize that their policy interests don't align with them.
Marc Lynch insists that the Obama administration hasn't given up on political reform in Egypt:
Despite the rapid consensus that Suleiman has been designated as America's man in this process, any acceptance of his role is likely by default rather than design. The administration clearly does not want to allow Suleiman and Mubarak to revert to the status quo ante, or to consolidate a new nakedly military regime.
Nobody in the administration has any illusions about Suleiman's likely intentions to revert to the old familiar games of the Egyptian national security state: dividing and co-opting the opposition, selective repression, stoking fears of Islamists, playing for time while evoking a desire for normalcy, offering token reforms which can either be retracted down the road or emptied of meaning, and protecting the core perogoatives of the regime. The Egyptian military seems to have a winning game plan, and it doesn't include the fundamental reforms for which Egyptian protestors or the Obama administration have called.
He goes on to list the "ways to communicate that there is real muscle behind the words of 'unacceptable,' before those words fade into easily ignored background noise."
Max Simon reviewsConfession: A Roman Catholic, an iPhone app that walks Catholics through the confessional process, now approved by the U.S. Catholic Church:
It offers a "personalized examination of conscience for each user," the church says, and for $1.99 it offers an express lane for making up for your sins. With password-protected profiles, the app also offers users the option to "choose from seven acts of contrition as well as add sins not listed in the standard examination of conscience." So what button do you press to confess you're a man of the cloth who touched little boys in their no-no places?
Of course, the conspiracy goes deeper than Beck has yet revealed; I'm hoping that, in coming days, if the Freemasons, working in concert with Hezbollah and the Washington Redskins, don't succeed in suppressing the truth, that Beck will reveal the identities of the most pernicious players in this grotesque campaign to subvert our way of life. I can't reveal too much here, but I think it's fair to say that Beck will be paying a lot of attention in the coming weeks to the dastardly, pro-caliphate work of Joy Behar; the makers of Little Debbie snack cakes; the 1980s hair band Def Leppard; Omar Sharif; and the Automobile Association of America. And remember, you read it here first.
Above Mickey Kaus surmises yes, and Bob Wright forcefully insists no. On this one, I agree with Bob, and I've never understood why seeing the United States military invade a country and establish a democracy would inspire revolutions elsewhere. It was never ignorance of democracy's existence that was stopping other Arab populations from rising up – and it isn't as if "get invaded by America" was a viable strategy or a desired thing elsewhere.
Had Iraqis risen up and overthrown Saddaam Hussein, I understand how that might've inspired similar actions elsewhere. But that's not what happened. (Incidentally, Mickey Kaus has been hired by The Daily Caller, where he'll now be blogging, though it doesn't seem like the transfer has happened yet.)
I've been asking why we associate eyeglasses with intelligence. A reader adds a wrinkle to the debate:
Glad you've highlighted this issue, and I agree with your reader that there is something to the correlation between near-sightedness and IQ, and the review of vision development was quite helpful. However, a second and primary variable s/he does not address, which I believe is fundamental to the illusion of this correlation, namely the very nature of IQ itself.
Similar to the hot controversy surrounding The Bell Curve in the 90s, these questions tend to overlook the way IQ tests are designed. As a neuropsychologist who has administered hundreds of these measures, I can tell you that their structures reflect a deeply embedded bias toward intelligence as a function of reading skills (as well as white middle-class backgrounds), both directly and indirectly.
If I had a dime for every kid I've had in my office who could read a blue streak, but could not make eye contact or could not empathize with others or who could not let go of obsessions or could not grasp simple numbers (while still calculating the syntax of algebra to beat the band), I could retire easily. Conversely, I have had students in my office at a much much lower rate (maybe one per five hundred) who were sharp as tacks, personable and comfortable in their social worlds, inventive and clever, but simply had trouble reading quickly. This profile is not well represented in the general population, but Sally Shawitz (pre-eminent researcher on dyslexia at Yale) has noted anecdotally that those who have such profound trouble learning to read - and translating basic symbols like letters (augmented by interference from the right brain during reading) - are consistently well-adjusted and balanced individuals.
Trust me; though myopia does correlate highly with measured IQ as we refer to it, it decidedly does not correlate with real intelligence. The failure is not in our vision - or lack thereof - but in our measures. There is a slow but steady effort to make changes in the tests, but the key is the pace. Meanwhile, we limp along, dragging these poor kids into increasingly misguided notions of their capabilities and of themselves.
Noah Millman is imagining how it might be replaced:
A key component of the real rationale for a “retirement age” is paternalistic: we can’t trust that people will plan properly, so we need to socialize some economic risks, and we can’t afford to provide “social security” – i.e., lifestyle insurance – from cradle to grave. So we compromise: we provide that insurance to the elderly, who are more vulnerable in aggregate and have less time to “make up” for past mistakes in planning, and withhold it from everybody else. And the result, undoubtedly, is some misallocation of labor resources. But the aging of the population makes that misallocation a bigger and bigger problem, which will require us to revisit that compromise in some fashion.
And there are lots of ways to revisit it. The “raise the retirement age” solution is a relatively regressive one, as Matt is fond of pointing out. But we could revisit it by being less-paternalistic and more progressive. For example, we could enact something like a Guaranteed Minimum Income and abolish Social Security entirely, saying, in effect, we’d rather not provide lifestyle insurance at all (if you want a comfortable retirement, then you’d better plan for it) but we don’t want anybody to live in conditions of true poverty, elderly or not. The strongest arguments against such a scheme are, again, paternalistic – that providing a no-strings-attached income to working-age people creates a very bad incentive structure for individuals who are poor planners, a set that overlaps substantially with the set of people living in poverty.
I must say that this appeals to me. I definitely want there to be a government provided safety net – or universal social insurance if you prefer – that takes care of folks who cannot care for themselves, or those who fall on hard luck, or whatever. But I want to focus redistributed income on actual poor people. I understand why Social Security was adopted, and it was tremendously successful at decreasing poverty rates among the elderly. That's great. But at this point I can't help but wonder why we're redistributing money from poor working people to elderly rich people, given that shifting demographics and a society radically different from New Deal America makes it more burdensome every year.
These are tentative thoughts offered on a hugely complex subject. And I certainly don't want to scrap Social Security without replacing it with something. But if I had a system to design now it would look a lot different.
Sudhir Venkatesh reports on how the prostitution industry has changed, including the ubiquity of Blackberrys and the rise of Facebook. Money quote:
It’s hard out there for a pimp—especially now. Changes in the sex industry have rendered them superfluous. I met 11 pimps working out of midtown Manhattan in 1999, and all were out of work within four years. One enlisted in the military; two have been homeless. Only one now has a full-time job, working as a janitor in a charter school. I asked one of them how pimping experience helps him in the legit economy: “You learn one thing,” he said. “For a good blow job, a man will do just about anything. What can I do with that knowledge? I have no idea.”
I'm delighted to report that filmmaker Tony Comstock is guest-blogging for James Fallows this week. Here's an interesting line from his introduction:
We live in an age when extremely graphic, often lurid or even upsetting sexual imagery is but a mouse click away, while at the same time, images that explore and celebrate sexuality in the context of love, commitment, and mutual pleasure are vanishingly rare. This is something that bothers me, and it's something I've devoted a good portion of my professional life to trying to change.
Reading people's complaints about Super Bowl commercials, I'm struck by the feeling that what people are really upset by is the basic fact that the capitalist profit motive is an amoral drive. Yet since that can't register as a scandal -- capitalism, you see, is good! -- we instead use vague, almost meaningless sentences like "in poor taste." The joke of the Groupon commercials, after all, is the foolishness of people who think commerce can be a form of social good. The joke makes no sense unless you accept the disconnect between selfish-desire (purchasing) and social good (charity).
Side note, Christopher Guest directed them! Monika Bartyze explains the ad concept:
[T]he ads didn't reveal that the site was hoping to help these causes. They're raising money for each cause in their "PSA Parodies," and will match donations up to $100,000 for the three featured charities -- Rainforest Action Network, buildOn and the Tibet Fund. On top of that, the site is prepared to offer credits up to $100,000 for those who contribute to Greenpeace.
Pejman Yousefzadeh says that I misunderstood and thus mischaracterized his post – that he wasn't at all using accusations of anti-Semitism to bully people who write about Israel and foreign aid. I'll take him at his word, adding only that a lot of others interpreted his post as I did. Doesn't mean we were right, though. Perhaps I'm jaded by having seen this sort of thing before. The last time Yousefzadeh appeared on the Dish, Andrew wrote, "In a response brimming with gratuitous hostility towards yours truly, Pejman Yousefzdeh nevertheless makes a few points worthy of response." That's about how I feel. I'm baffled by the gratuitous hostility, hyperbolic accusations and poor reasoning on display in the initial post.
But there is a nugget of useful debate that can be salvaged. What he and I still disagree about is whether bloggers have a responsibility to Google authors they stumble across, wade through their body of work, and assess their motives before linking or excerpting one of their blog posts. I don't know any blogger who employs that standard, and while I concede that known motives can be a factor in assessing whether something is worth linking, actively launching motive investigations would be a bad idea: it puts the emphasis of discussion in the wrong place, and the extra labor involved in highlighting unfamiliar voices would disincentivize it. The professional blogosphere needs more unfamiliar voices, and fewer link-policemen.
Robert Krulwich backs away from the disturbing project of artists/designers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau who make meat-eating furniture, like a fly-eating clock and a mouse consuming coffee table:
They say their furniture is just a newfangled version of all those nature shows on television that show animals hunting in the wild. Having a clock on your wall that "hunts" flies is a kind of theater. ... I suppose they are right to make us think harder about who we are and what we want, but I worry a little that Auger, Loizeau, the engineers at Bristol Robotics and robot-makers generally get so excited by the daring novelty of their designs that they fail to notice that they've crossed a line.
"We want robots to be able to get their own energy from the environment," says Professor Melhuish. Fair enough. But giving robots a taste for flesh seems just a touch wrong-headed.
"If I was a traitor I would have stayed by the swimming pool in my house in the UAE," - Wael Ghonim, head of Google's Middle East operations, interviewed about his role in spurring the Egyptian uprising and subsequent detainment by security forces.
More disturbing than Pawlenty's unworkable proposal for reinstating DADT or defunding repeal is that even in 2012, a Republican primary candidate might feel it necessary offer disdain for gays and lesbians as a selling point. Ultimately, though, it feels a little desperate, a way for a relatively bland candidate to distinguish himself from his more colorful rivals.
Iran's opposition group is hoping to hold a "peaceful rally" next Monday, February 14, in support of protesters in Egypt. The country's opposition "green" movement would like to "declare support for the popular movements in the region, in particular, the freedom-seeking movements of the people of Egypt and Tunisia," said a letter from Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, two of the rally's organizers and presidential candidates that ran against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009.
Iran has typically denied permits for public rallies, but Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini has vocalized support of protesters in Egypt and Tunisia. The request for the rally has yet to be approved.
The approach by Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi for a permit to march on 25 Bahman (14 February), three days after the regime's celebration of the 1979 Revolution, is seeking to "blow fresh breath" into the opposition movement. After months of disappointment and frustration --- arguably, going back to this same point last year --- the hope is to show that there is still hope. Of course, the big question is whether this surge in discussion is occurring inside Iran as well.
And like Egypt and Tunisia, social media is there to help:
Alex Knapp has some interesting historical notes on federalism in his latest effort to blog Liberty And Tyranny. He also writes this:
I actually don’t think that state and local government reflect their local constituents better. The fact of the matter is, people don’t really care much about local governments except when they’re screwing something up. I guarantee if you stopped 30 random people on the street in a normal sized suburb, they wouldn’t be able to name their mayor, City Councilmen for their district, or their State Representative. I’ll bet they CAN name the mayor of the nearest big city; the name of their governor, and the name of the President.
That last part is true. But local government does reflect prevailing local preferences a lot better than does the federal government. When I lived in Park Slope, I couldn't have told you the name of the people on my community board. But I'll bet a majority of them were in favor of mandatory recycling, as did most of my neighbors.
And I'll hazard that's a lot less common in the City Councils of the Sun Belt's exurbs, even though the people there have no idea who represents them in local government.
If something were to go wrong in that exurb, a concerned citizen could climb into his car, drive to City Hall on a Wednesday night, stand up before a local access television camera, and explain to the mayor and everyone watching the exact nature of the problem. It's no wonder the response is often better than dealing with the feds. Most people underestimate how much change they can effect at the local level.
A group of Iowan Republicans was made to watch the Obama interview Conor analyzed earlier. I laughed at the host's reaction when most the group admitted to believing Obama is a Muslim. The host begins, "now do you understand the implications of what you're saying here," which made me think he was actually going to challenge the group's false belief. But, no, instead he wants them to know "what the media is going to say about this group and about Iowa Caucus voters in the future." Fox News and Sarah Palin have caricatured the rest of the media as liberal and deceitful. Telling these voters, and Fox viewers at home, that the media will attack them for believing an untruth does nothing to dislodge the lie:
National Review's Rich Lowry is surprised that GOP voters think Obama is Muslim. Kevin Drum's head hits the desk:
Both Lowry and Bill Kristol have gone after Glenn Beck for his nutball conspiracy theorizing over the past week about caliphates and the Muslim Brotherhood. That's good news, because someone on the right needs to do this. Now it's time for them to do the same to anyone who helps prolong the maybe-Obama-is-a-Muslim-maybe-he's-not-it's-kinda-hard-to-know meme. Then they can work up to disowning Sarah Palin.
What an interesting feud. Both men are willing to use the ugliest kinds of propagandistic nonsense as a cudgel against ideological adversaries. The ironic result is that in their current contretemps, each is capable of landing devastating blows merely by pointing to indefensible stuff the other has actually said in the past.
Richard Posner speculates as to why autocratic governments fall:
Over a long period of time, democratic and quasi-democratic nations change profoundly, but the change is gradual. Dictatorial regimes change in fits and starts, so that most of the time they seem more stable than nonauthoritarian regimes. They experience punctuated rather than incremental change.
There are several reasons. The obvious one is lack of information. A government that uses intimidation, surveillance, and control of media to quell dissent deprives itself of good information about the population’s concerns. People keep their concerns to themselves out of fear. Grievances are driven underground, to fester. Not having a good handle on what people want, the government risks being blindsided by a sudden explosion of repressed anger. Repression also fosters conspiracy; fearful of expressing themselves publicly, people learn to form secret cabals; they become experts at dissimulation.
Hendrik Hertzberg reviews the HBO documentary on Reagan by Eugene Jarecki, and weighs in on its main interviewee, Ron Reagan, only son of Nancy and Ronald:
He’s now a fit and youthful fifty-two, with no particular career. I wish he’d run for office. I don’t know where he lives, but I suspect it must be someplace where being a liberal Democrat (which he is) isn’t a big liability. Ron has a lot of his late father’s easygoing, nonhostile likeability, without the vagueness and the offputting (to me, though I know many found it charming) heh-heh inanity. Ron has often been quoted as saying he could never be elected to anything because he’s an atheist. To which I say: come to Manhattan.
... Frank Mankiewicz once told me (I hope I’m remembering this right) that back around 1948 or 1950, he (Frank) and his fellow members of the Beverly Hills Democratic Committee considered drafting Ronald Reagan as their local congressional candidate. They decided against the idea because they thought Reagan was too liberal to win. How different history might have turned out if they had not made that monumental blunder. Reagan probably would still have become President, but he’d have been “our” President, if you get my drift. We’d probably have gotten single-payer!
Wow - no landmarks to speak of here! All we have is the ratty architecture, the rusty metal roofs, and the turquoise ocean a couple of blocks away. Even the one tree is rather nondescript. So it's wild guess time again. I'm going to go with my first hunch - Belize City, Belize.
Another writes:
This is somewhere in the Barrio de Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz neighborhood), Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. Appears to be a Third-World, crowded city (even if it's in a fast-emerging economic giant), palm tree, black mold on walls, large city on hills above the ocean.
Another:
VASP Airlines in Brazil used to have a flight that stopped in every city along Brazil's coast (and a few in the interior). You paid for the legs you wanted, it was ridiculously cheap, and the perfect thing for a poverty jet-setter like me. Once I spent a couple days in Sao Luis, Maranhao, in 2004. I was drunk the whole time, I think, so my memory isn't so good for exactly where this was. But this really looks like the historical district of Sao Luis.
Another:
I lived in Chile for two years. The roofs look like Chiloe or other old cities, but the other building materials don't quite match up. The decaying buildings certainly match Valparaiso, where termites devour the old wooden homes, but it could also be damage from the recent earthquake. I could say Concepcion, but that would be too obvious, and given the obvious age I am going to guess Valdivia, Chile.
Another:
Sanya, China? This is a wild guess but I was just there last week. There's a ton of construction going on there right now and that looks like bamboo scaffolding in the photo. The air looks a bit too clean for China though, so I'm probably off!
Another:
Port-au-Prince, Haiti, mostly because the scaffolding and roofless houses bring to mind the earthquake of January 2010. The seaside location would fit, and so would the mouldy façades sugesting a humid tropical climate.
Another:
The red object in the sky is interesting. At first glance, I thought it might be someone parasailing, but upon closer inspection, I think the object is tethered to one of the tall antennas. Maybe a weather balloon? If so, perhaps the picture is taken from near one of the Universities in the Haitian capital, where they do research on weather patterns ... Universite d'etat d'Haiti?
Another:
I have never participated in VFYW, although I track it somewhat compulsively every week. I don’t have the time to obsess over Google Maps to find exactly the right window, so I live vicariously through those who do! But I’ll throw out Havana, Cuba. The once-lovely buildings now in decay to the point of collapse reminds me very much of photographs forwarded, with great sadness, by Cuban friends.
Another:
Krasnovodsk, Turkmenistan? It looks like a scene from the film "White Sand of the Desert," so I'll go with the Turkmen version of Cabo. The water in the background is the Caspian Sea.
Another:
You guys are getting really good with these hard-to-figure-out photos. I have no clue to be honest. But the image reminds me of two movies: "Lord of War" and "Casino Royale". In the latter, there's a scene where Bond is chasing an international bomb-maker in Madagascar:
In Lord Of War, Nick Cage is meeting with a Charles Taylor-type thug in a city that looks like some place in Liberia. So I am leaning heavy towards a place in or around Africa.
Im going to take a guess at either Monrovia, Liberia or Freetown, Sierra Leone. Im not even going to attempt to look it up on Bing Maps or Google Earth. I doubt either website is spending much resources mapping the streets of either country.
Another:
I don't think Google Street view will be unavailable for this kind of place. The sea is blue enough to be Carribean quality but the style of the buildings is decidedly non-Latino (and anyway, that would be a repeat of last week). I'm picking the Gaza Strip because of the poverty-striken air of the place, a place of constant destruction and an imposed severe shortage of building materials. I'm picking Rafah because it is the only Gaza Strip town I can think of without looking up and also because I recently took a Google Maps arial tour while familiarizing myself with the geography of Egypt, which has been in my thoughts for obvious reasons.
I have no striking or moving anecdote, having never visited Gaza. The Palestinians I encountered in Jerusalem were almost universally kind and gentle towards me when I visited, with an openness I found amazing given that they had every right to be mistrustful.
I have previously gotten Dili, Sarajevo and Madrid right (I found the right window in the case of Madrid), so I'm hoping that eventually I'll have enough cities to make up for the lack of moving stories!
Another:
That must be Zanzibar, Tanzania. The metal roofs, the algae-stained walls, the small glimpses of the Indian Ocean and the Pemba Channel, the TV aerials - classic Zanzibar. Kudos to anyone that can figure where exactly it is, in that tangled mess of a stonetown. This is a place that I visit often, as an archaeologist of the ancient Swahili, the ancestors of the people that built these towns.
Correct city, but several readers were more specific. One writes:
The mouldy stucco, the rusting sheet metal roofs, the rickety awnings over the windows, the high belevedere to the left that would sit atop an interior building courtyard, the glimpse of the bright sea all speak of Zanzibar and Stone Town. My guess was confirmed with a quick search that brought up the view at Fotolia. Several years ago we spent a magical week over Xmas on Zanzibar in a small beach house of the Indian Ocean side.
One reader - and this week's winner - was just a tad more detailed:
My boyfriend and I are still competing every month to see who guesses each VFYW closest to the actual location. I was on a roll for a few weeks, but since then he's won two months in a row! It's been just about as long since I've submitted my guess to the blog, so I'm hoping this is the lucky charm I need to come out on top this month ;)
One of the things I love about VFYW is that you discover so much about the world and even find new places to add to your list of must-visit destinations. This week's was no exception. Something about the scenery and buldings made me think this was in the Middle East or Turkey. Luckily, I stumbled upon a photo of Stone Town, Zanzibar, and knew I had a great lead. It took a bit of searching, even after I found this photo (available on dozens of stock photo sites, but without a clearly identified location in Zanzibar). A search for "balcony views in Stone Town" led me to the Shangani Hotel and this view, which I'm guessing is just around the corner from this week's contest photo.
In an excellent post on teacher evaluation, Jim Manzi brings his characterisitic analytic clarity. Since he writes from the perspective of someone outside the realm of partisan debate his arguments are unlike anything you've likely seen – do read the whole post. I'm going to excerpt one part that interests me:
The goal of an employee evaluation system is to help the organization achieve an outcome. For purposes of discussion, let’s assume the goal of a particular school to be “produce well-educated, well-adjusted graduates.” The question to be asked about this school’s evaluation system is not “Is it fair to the teachers?” It is not even “Does it measure real educational advancement?” Ultimately, all we should care about is whether or not the school produces more well-educated, well-adjusted graduates with this evaluation system than if it used the next-best alternative. In this way, it is like a new training program, investment in better physical facilities, or anything else that might consume money or time.
The fairness or accuracy of the measurement versus some abstract standard is the means; changing human behavior in a way that increases overall organizational performance is the end. To put a fine point on it, if a teacher evaluation that is based on a formula that considers only blood type, whether it is raining on the day of the evaluation and the last digit of the teacher’s phone number is the one does the best job producing better educated and adjusted graduates, then that’s the best evaluation system.
That seems exactly right to me. And it helps explain the inherent tension between teachers unions and the rest of us. Unions exist to protect the interests of their members. Even in the best case scenario, that means lobbying for an evaluation system that maximizes fairness to the people being evaluated. As citizens, our primary goal should be creating the best education system possible, even if doing so sometimes means (for example) that the teacher most desserving of a bonus doesn't get one. Saying that there is a conflict between the common good and the ends of teachers unions isn't a condemnation of the latter. It's just a fact. And everyone seems to understand the basic concept if you talk about prison guard unions.
Noah Millman has a post reacting to Manzi, and it too is worth reading.
Evaluations establish the principle that there is such a thing as performance in the first place. A great deal of discussion nowadays in education revolves around the idea that what we need to “fix the schools” is great teachers. But if that’s what we need, we’ll never do it. What we need, instead, are mechanisms for getting marginally better performance, year after year, from a teaching pool that remains merely adequate.
One bit of low-hanging fruit for achieving that goal, meanwhile, is the ability to dismiss the bottom 5% of teachers in terms of performance. Not only are these teachers failing comprehensively in their own classrooms, but their mere presence has a corrosive effect on an entire organization – on the teachers, on the students, on the management of the school. But right now, firing these teachers is essentially impossible. For all the difficulty of doing a rigorous evaluation in order to improve teaching performance across the board, I suspect it is a whole lot easier to identify the worst teachers in the school. If that could be done, the pressure to be able to terminate them would be significant, and that could do a lot to improve school performance right there.
I think most people are able to pick out the very best and very worst teachers in any school they observe closely. More here.
Yesterday I wrote that the Egyptian "military profits handsomely from the current power structure." Planet Money reports that one "reason for the military's peaceful response" is because "the military owns virtually every industry in the country." Egypt expert Robert Springboard lists some of the businesses run by the armed forces:
...car assembly, we're talking of clothing, we're talking of construction of roads, highways, bridges. We're talking of pots and pans, we're talking of kitchen appliances. You know, if you buy an appliance there's a good chance that it's manufactured by the military. If you ... don't have natural gas piped into your house and you have to have a gas bottle, the gas bottle will have been manufactured by the military. Some of the foodstuffs that you will be eating will have been grown and/or processed by the military.
I finally got around to watching Bill O'Reilly's Sunday sitdown:
As Dish readers know, I am a critic of President Obama's health care bill, the fact that he continues to wage the War on Drugs, and especially his abysmal record on civil liberties. I also think many of his most strident critics on the right are loony, whether it's Dinesh D'Souza's claim that he's a Kenyan anti-colonialist, or Andy McCarthy's notion that he is allied with radical Islamists in a Grand Jihad against America, or Rush Limbaugh's various portrayals of him as a plotting, foreign seeming man bent on damaging the United States.
The interview above helps illustrate how the talk radio right's strategy is likely to backfire. Unlike a coherent, forceful critique of Obama's policies, an emphasis on his supposed otherness works on many Fox News viewers only until moments like the one when he sits down across from Papa Bear on Superbowl Sunday... and appears to be a perfectly pleasant, reasonable-seeming, unmistakably American man – one who maintains his cool, friendly demeanor, is respected by O'Reilly, and can even talk football.
It's hard to be scared of that guy. And while the cognitive dissonance isn't ever fully acknowledged or processed, the gulf that separates the loony right's portrayal of Obama from how he comes across to the average person can only result in most people dismissing a line of attack on which the right spends a lot of its time and energy.
A final thought.
Bill O'Reilly is allegedly a tough interviewer and Fox News a hostile network. But only if your idea of toughness is rhetorical bluster. It's ironic that a guy like me – the scourge of Mark Levin and his ilk – would've asked President Obama incomparably tougher questions had I been given a sitdown with him.
A High Court judge in Britain bans sexual activity for a man with an IQ of 48:
Mr Justice Mostyn said the case was “legally, intellectually and morally” complex as sex is “one of the most basic human functions” and the court must “tread especially carefully” when the state tries to curtail it. But he agreed that the man, known only as Alan, should not be allowed to have sex with anyone on the grounds that he did not have the mental capacity to understand the health risks associated with his actions.
Cory Doctorow recently excerpted part of this speech by author Philip Pullman, on how profit mechanisms don't apply to libraries:
That branch – how much money did it make last year? Why aren’t you charging higher fines? Why don’t you charge for library cards? Why don’t you charge for every catalogue search? Reserving books – you should charge a lot more for that. Those bookshelves over there – what’s on them? Philosophy? And how many people looked at them last week? Three? Empty those shelves and fill them up with celebrity memoirs.
E.D. Kain takes the opportunity to co-opt and pledge allegiance to reinvent Arnold Kling's concept of civil societarianism:
Profit is fine, as far as motivations go, but it leaves out a whole host of other human compulsions and needs and desires. Public libraries are a good example. How can we determine their value? All they do is cost in strictly financial terms. Some might argue that we should in some form or another privatize our libraries, or at least make them self-sufficient rather than rely on tax dollars. Of course this, like so many other privatization schemes, is hugely regressive and undermines the entire purpose of a public sphere to begin with. Which is perhaps the point. Or take prisons – is efficiency and cost-saving really a reason to turn incarceration into a profit-driven industry? ...
All institutions are prone to failure, corruption, capture, the temptation of power, rent-seeking. Human endeavors are littered with predictable and unpredictable calamities alike. To break it all down into these stark black and white terms – private sector good, government bad – misses the way we exist in real life, in these little patches of reality we inhabit. I would mourn the loss of my public library before I would mourn the loss of any number of corporations. Maybe that is selfish of me. If so, so be it.
But I think part of creating a civil society is crafting a democratic consensus, redistributing wealth, and attempting however clumsily to build a world that is at once as free and as fair as possible. I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. I don’t think taxes are theft. I think of taxes more as a mandate – if you want to be a part of society you have to buy in.
Updated 2/8: Just to clarify, Kain's version takes a left-wing approach to Kling's original right-wing version of civil societarianism.
I was just thinking yesterday that though Aol has lots of content and plans to make a lot more, I never think to go there, apart from heading to one of its brands, such as Engadget. Portals are burned toast. Making content for search is not, I believe, a growth strategy, as the more Google becomes personalized and successfully seeks out signals of quality and originality, the more SEO will die as a black art. So to execute on its content-and-advertising strategy, Aol needs brands with engagement. Huffington Post is that. [AOL CEO] Armstrong needs someone who understands that the critical sphere of discovery for content will more and more be people: peers links, not algorithms; Arianna gets that.
But hasn't search engine optimization always been at the heart of HuffPo's dominance? Jack Shafer illustrates that eloquently:
There is no celebrity slide show beneath her tastes and no SEO trick she won't employ if it will get her traffic. As colleague Noreen Malone noted yesterday, and I tweeted, the HuffPo pulled off one of the greatest acts of SEO whoring in the history of the Web yesterday.
If you Googled the query, "What time does the Super Bowl start," the first return was a HuffPo "article" titled "What Time Does The Superbowl Start?" And lest the search engines miss the germ of what was clearly a trending question, the first three paragraphs of the HuffPo posting read:
Are you wondering, "what time does the Superbowl start?"
It's a common search query, as is "what time is the super bowl 2011," "superbowl time" and "superbowl kickoff time 2011," according to Google Trends the evening before the Super Bowl.
It's easily answered too. Super Bowl 2011 will take place on Sunday, Feb. 6, 2011, at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time and 3:30 p.m. Pacific Time.
Ambinder pens a eulogy for the Democratic Leadership Council. Chait opines:
I always had mixed feelings about the group. I think it was about half innovative effort to counterbalance traditional Democratic interest groups, and half naked effort to suck up to corporate America and/or give contentless messaging cover to red state Democrats. But for the main part, the DLC disappeared because its work was over. The remaking of the Democratic Party begun by Clinton held in place.
As usual, The Daily Show uses clips to great effect making many of the same critiques of cable news I bring in bloggy format. Here's Jon Stewart's take on the retirement of Keith Olbermann:
[N]ow that the protesters -- and the international community, led by Washington -- have convinced Hosni Mubarak it's nearly time to leave, they've displeased both sides. Mubarak is ticked because he's being forced out by a putative ally. The opposition is upset because it's not happening immediately. ...
Instead of joining in full-throated support of the protesters, the Obama Administration has helped take the wind out of their sails. That may be smart if, as some in the U.S. military believe, the great bulk of the Egyptian population is apolitical and only wants a job that can put food on the table. In which case, good move. But if the flames of democracy we saw last week flicker into embers as the fire is banked, to the detriment of nascent Egypt's democrats -- and to the benefit of Osama [Bin Laden] -- maybe not so much.
After noticing stories about President Bush being threatened with arrest if he travels in Europe, and cancelling a trip as a result, David Frum writes this:
It’s hard to know how much of this story is true, and how much is fundraising bluster. But if even a small portion of the news is true, President Obama has a duty to speak up and to warn foreign governments that further indulgence of this kind of nonsense by their court systems will be viewed as an unfriendly act by the United States. It is one more reminder of why the concept of an International Criminal Court is such an invitation to mischief.
And for those inclined to enjoy the mischief: Just wait until somebody serves an arrest warrant in Luxembourg on ex-President Obama for ordering all those drone strikes on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
I am inclined to enjoy the mischief, and I don't much care if someone serves an arrest warrant on ex-President Obama either. Perhaps I'm being shortsighted. I'd like to hear a longer argument from Frum that isn't aimed at people who want the other side's partisans in jail, but not their own side's partisans.
International prohibitions on torture are a good thing. President Bush acknowledges that he ordered torture, though he doesn't use that word. But I don't want to have an argument over whether he's guilty or not. What interests me is the idea that even if he broke a longstanding law it's outrageous "mischief" to arrest him. Is that Frum's position? I'd prefer my presidents to be constrained by the law, and I don't see how that happens if arresting confessed lawbreakers is verbotten. Maybe a past president sitting in a jail cell would encourage future occupants of that office to show more respect for the law. Why is that attitude wrongheaded? What does Frum want to happen when a president breaks a law as serious as ordering torture? Does he want US presidents to be above the law? Isn't that an invitation to mischief?
According to official results released yesterday, nearly 99% of voters in Southern Sudan opted for secession last month. Elizabeth Dickinson reads the reaction of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir:
Why all the conciliatory talk? After all, this is the same Bashir who many analysts feared would cancel the referendum -- or reject its results -- pushing the country back to the brink of civil war. What gives?
In short, all the carrots that U.S. diplomats are offering the Sudanese president seem to be working.
Among the prizes for Khartoum are a U.S. promise to remove Sudan from its list of terrorism-supporting states and a possible visit by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to theSudan Tribune. Earlier this month, U.S. State Department officials also signaled that they would be ready to begin normalization following Sudan's acceptance of the vote.
That's great news for the south; as FP contributor Maggie Fick recently explained, normalization with Washington holds great appeal for Bashir -- in fact, it's a big part of his international agenda. So he's likely to yield to U.S. pressure if it pays off. Bashir's speech [Monday] gets Southern Sudan over one big hurdle toward declaring independence, which it is expected to formally do this July.
The punchline here, sadly, is that normalization is a carrot that can really only be deployed once and so if we use it on behalf of Southern Sudan, our leverage over Darfur runs very thin.
(Photo: A Sudanese man stands and shouts with joy as Sudan's governing body declares the final results of the southern Sudan's independence referendum in Khartoum on February 7, 2011. Southerners voted overwhelming in favour of secession, with nearly 99% of the vote, against a backdrop of acclaim for the process from international monitoring and observing bodies. By Ashraf Shazly/AFP/Getty Images)
Frank Jacobs explains how "in German, you can tell with some degree of certainty which general area someone hails from by the way they tell the time at quarter past ten."
In your post about the bread helmet, you wrote, "A moment of levity amid the violence". You don't explicitly say so, but it seemed implied that this photo is from Egypt. The flag in the background actually belongs to Yemen (although the flags are nearly identical). That picture was taken at an anti-government rally in Sanaa, Yemen on Thursday. I actually learned that because another blog I frequent, BagNewsNotes, which analyzes political photography, also featured the photo. I found it interesting that the same photo warranted an in depth (and perhaps overly serious) review on one blog I love and a humorous roundup on another. The internet never gets old.
Anyway, as far as actual levity, I came across another piece of headgear while writing this email and thought it would make Andrew feel much better. Keep up the great work!
Elissa Lerner reviews a new history book, "Coffee Talk," by Morton Satin, which traces coffee's roots in the Middle East and beyond:
In addition to spates of resistance by Muslim clerics, coffee also met with resistance from the Church, which denounced the beverage as a devil's drink and attempted numerous prohibitions. Eventually however, in a hip move (perhaps presaging Pope Benedict's blessing of Facebook?) Pope Clement VIII sanctified coffee, saying, "We will not let coffee remain the property of Satan. As Christians, our power is greater than Satan's, so we shall make coffee our own." And to complete the Abrahamic trifecta, once coffee was no longer excoriated by the Church, it was a Lebanese Jew who brought coffee to England. He opened the first coffeehouse in Oxford, thus inaugurating the storied relationship between university students and coffee.
Joshua Foust feels Yemen is a better candidate for political reform than its neighbors:
[T]he protesters in Yemen are not demanding revolutionary change. Unlike those in Tunisia and Egypt, the Yemenis, based on their more modest demands and more orderly protests, seem to want some reforms and a peaceful, eventual transition of power--something the country's government seems willing to accept
Returning from Tahrir Square, Claudio Gallo sounds a despondent note:
Tahrir Square now appears as a popular fair: songs, dances, slogans, and "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love". People rise to prominence for their fiery wit, but their beautiful and interesting words, avoid any practical solution. ...
Boys returning home from Tahrir Square have disappeared, taken by officers of the Mukhabarat, the Egyptian intelligence service. The same intelligence service that was controlled by Omar Suleiman, now the Vice President who is leading so-called transition from the Mubarak regime. The dream of a democratisation of Egypt, the dream of this spontaneous insurgency is being shelved by a regime that knows how to change to remain the same.
Bill Kristol sensibly wrote that when Glenn Beck "lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society." This - surprise! - sent Beck into a rage. Steve Benen zooms out:
In the case of U.S. policy towards Egypt, the dynamic is well beyond left vs. right. Instead we're seeing (a) those in the U.S. who support the protesters, their calls for sweeping democratic reforms, and Mubarak's ouster; (b) those who support Mubarak and fear his unknown replacement; and (c) those who believe caliphates run by zombie Islamists, the Illuminati, and the Loch Ness Monster are coming to steal your car.
Earlier commentary on the Republican split over Egypt here.
Today on the Dish, the uprising slowed, Chris summed up today's atmosphere and political developments, and Patrick picked apart the manufactured safety of the Egyptian army. The Muslim Brotherhood promised not to field a candidate in Egypt, and Reuel Marc Gerecht didn't find them a grave threat. We assessed the mystery of assasination attempt of Suleiman, Scott Lucas parsed the opposition talks and feared Tahrir as a tourist trap, and Palin weighed in with some gibberish. Salwa Ismail translated Egypt's class war, revolution rippled in Bahrain, Ammar Abdulhamid didn't foresee an uprising in Syria, and Parmy Olson calculated Egypt's bill for shutting down the Internet. Beinart advised Israel to get used to Arab democracies, Frum urged America to resume its food aid to Egypt, and protesters laughed off the Kentucky Fried Chicken scandal. Sheila Carapico captured what television couldn't, Limbaugh mocked roughed-up NYT reporters, and the US could have restored internet service in Egypt.
Palin tried to trademark her name, AOL acquired the Huffington Post, and Julian Sanchez didn't appreciate balancing metaphors. Conor remembered Reagan at 100, explained why bloggers avoid Israel, and joined Joyner in ragging on the right's dependence on Rush. Glenn Greenwald reminded us of the travesty of Guantanamo, James Gibney analyzed militarized nation-building, Jeb Bush might run, and judges favor lawyers and a more complex legal system. Plundering the lottery isn't as lucrative as consulting, grain production mattered, and Andrew took a couple more days to get better. L.A. supported long-form writing, Bristol planned to pen a memoir, and marriage is a science of its own. Nick Denton reads his news on Facebook, Scientology still creeped us out, and a Dish reader explored the science of looking smart.
Cannabis Closet: Family Feud edition here, Superbowl's best commercials here, single-serving blog of the day here, headline for the day here, VFYW here, MHB here, and FOTD here.
