Category Archives: Current Affairs

Slate magazine reports on this Sunday’s NYT magazine cover piece in which the writer is embedded in Iraq. It notes the harrowing challenges our soldiers face:

There soldiers must "play killer, cultural anthropologist, hearts-and-minds winner and then killer again" among an ambivalent-at-best populace while fighting a mostly homegrown insurgency that uses civilians as shields. The company’s 26-year-old captain confides, "I’ve got too many geeking out, wanting to go off the deep end and kill people," saying he "wished he could buy 20 goats and let the boys beat and burn them and let loose their rage."

Alex Gourevitch, in a letter to N+1 Magazine Issue 6, writes about how the left’s obsession with environmentalism might be exhibiting the very politics of fear they detest with Bush’s War on Terror. Excerpt (not online):

Environmentalism is a left-wing politics of fear because it rests on the deeply fearful idea that only an overwhelming threat to our physical and collective health can inspire us to “transcendence.” Threats to the very conditions of life, rather than social controversies over power and distribution, come to motivate political engagement — an engagement that presumes setting to one side inequality and unfreedom as the central categories of political contestation. As Slavoj Zizek says, “Popular imagination is persecuted by the visions of the forthcoming ‘breakdown of nature.’…It seems easier to imagine the ‘end of the world’ than a far more modest change in the mode of production.”

Strikes me as relevant to all types of leadership: Leaders galvanize the troops by exaggerating the consequences of inaction, or overstating the importance of the cause to begin with.

When Elizabeth Kolbert, staff writer at the New Yorker, spoke at Claremont on climate change, she rather absurdly said, “I don’t need to convince you that global warming is the most pressing moral cause for your generation.” Look, I believe in most environmental issues, and think we need to deal with global warming in a proactive manner, but enough with the shrieking and doomsday overreach. Three billion people live on less than two dollars a day; 790 million people are chronically undernourished; 1.1 billion people lack daily access to clean water; etc etc. I don’t know about you, but poverty strikes me as a much more pressing moral issue than global warming.

A few weeks ago, The Atlantic Monthly opened up 125 years worth of archives on the web for free! That means you can read all past and present Atlantic for free whenever you want!

So, for those new to the Atlantic: Plan on spending a long, Saturday night by yourself, sifting through reams of high quality content on politics, culture, books, international relations, and more. You won’t be disappointed.

In the most recent issue, two articles of note.

James Fallows offers an excellent layman’s explanation of how, exactly, China is “subsidizing America’s way of life.” If you’ve ever scratched your head after reading articles that talk about China sitting on American dollars, read this article.

And Caitlin Flanagan, one of the funniest and wittiest writers alive, looks at the Today show and Katie Couric. It’s a stellar analysis from Couric’s start at Today to her disasterous run so far on the evening news. Here are two grafs:

The Today show creates a bond with its overwhelmingly female viewers because so many of them watch it, as I did, during one of the most psychologically complex and lonely—and most emotionally fulfilling—times of their lives: their tenure as mothers to small children. Indeed, one reason the show is so successful and profitable is that long ago its producers realized that American households follow a rhythm: early in the morning, there is a great bustling of activity as the working members of families propel themselves out of the cocoon and into the cold world of commerce and adult preoccupation, and then there is a quiet settling down, once the cars have backed out of the driveways and the neighborhoods have been drained of their breadwinners. This is a delicate moment for any mother who spends her days home with children: on the one hand, the number of household residents who feel they own a piece of her has just diminished; on the other hand, she’s been left behind with the babies and the pets.

It is into this emotional void that the Today show’s second hour comes to the rescue, trumpets blaring: out go the first hour’s reports on war and politics and economic trends, and in come pieces on family and shopping and decorating. “The men are gone,” the show seems to tell us. “Now we can talk about the things we love”: the exact way to sneak vegetables into the diet of a finicky toddler, the trick to putting aside a little money for a family treat, the essential components of a first-aid kit for the car—all the minutiae of running a household, presented without irony or scorn by hugely compensated media celebrities. It is the loneliness of at-home motherhood—the loneliness for other adults, for the adult way of life, for the work clothes and schedules and employment itself—that makes the hosts of the Today show crucial.

Last weekend I spent one full day at a liberal event / conference and one full day at a conservative event / conference. They were unrelated but happened to be on consecutive days. It was fascinating to get inside the heads of people who are leading the political movements on both ends of the spectrum.

The line of the weekend came at the conservative event, where one person said: "Organized and wrong beats unorganized and right, election after election." Translation: We may have the better ideas, but if we don’t organize ourselves we’re still going to lose.

It sparked a somewhat related idea. Sometimes we get so enamored with our ideas — so convinced of their moral goodness! — that we forget about actually trying to convince those who do not just "get it".

The more obvious something is to you, the worse a persuader you are to the uninitiated. Because of its obviousness to you, the harder it is to really truly actually understand how someone arrives at the idea through deliberation versus common sense snap judgment.

Assuming you seek to convert skeptics, the best evangelists, then, are not necessarily the most passionate believers in the cause / product, but rather those who took some convincing in order to see it your way.

In other words, an environmental organization that seeks to engage new, uninvolved people in their movement should hire someone who used to be an uninvolved person. Someone who needed to be persuaded, as then they can employ the same logic unto others. Yet I’m guessing most environmental organizations are headed by life-long tree huggers, who probably have a hard time seeing the world any other way.

Matthew Yglesias has a good article in the Washington Monthly about the follies of Tim Russert’s approach to interviews on his very influential TV show "Meet the Press". It captures something I’ve blogged about which is the obsession people seem to have about whether you’re changing your mind, as if it’s the ultimate sin. We prize consistency to a fault. James Fallows summarizes:

The default assumption of many Meet the Press sessions — which has spilled over to the be default assumption in this election-cycle’s unfortunate debates — is that if you say something (about taxes, Iraq, global warming, what have you) in 2008 that represents any shift from what you said in 1996 or 2001, you’re presumptively a liar or fraud. Thus the dramatic on-screen graphics comparing your words from then with your words from now, and thus the closeups to see whether the politician is stammering or losing his cool under this scrutiny. The problem is (as Yglesias devastatingly lays out): sometimes a changing position means you’re craven. And sometimes it does not. The world changes. New information emerges. Life goes on. Whether — and why — a politician has ever changed position is part of what we need to know. But it’s not the only thing that matters — or in most cases, the main thing. To quote one of the Atlantic’s founders,

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

Exactly.

In an old post of mine titled Changing Your Mind in the Executive Suite, Dave Jilk left a smart comment:

As with most things, there is a balance, and one builds a record over time of foolish consistency, changing with the wind, or general steadfastness with an open mind. It’s the record over time and over many instances that matters.