March 7, 2005
Tipping, turning, non-returning point
"The Iraqi elections, imperfect as they were, convinced some American leaders that the Iraqi people had reached a point of no return — quite literally turning a corner in the direction of democracy."
- ABC, "Has Iraq Passed a Tipping Point to Peace?"
Not only was this literal, it was quite literal. Wow.
In fact, if we count the headline and the lede of this story, this is also sort of a triple mixer, as the title of this post suggest. I say again: wow.
Maturing child
Lakoff says that conservatives look at developed nations as adults and developing nations as children -- which makes the UN [especially the General Assembly] ridiculous, because it's mostly composed of children and often tells the adults what to do.
In a NYTimes editorial:
"Nigeria is changing," says Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the country's finance minister. She suggested thinking of America and the West as the parent and Nigeria as the child: "If your child has been doing bad things - drug abuse or alcohol - and they come to you and say, 'My mother, I want to change; please help me,' would you say, 'No'? Would you say, 'You are hopeless; you can't change'?"
February 20, 2005
Three times something equals bullshit
thinkness was sad to not have found any more triple mixers recently. Sad no more:
"It's got to be the beginning of a thaw. It's like a family that got a divorce. You have to kiss before you go to sleep."
Why would a human ever say this? Why the hell would the NYTimes ever print it?!
February 17, 2005
Dear Democratic hay-makers,
Can you please make a demagogic, heart-string-tugging ad about how Republicans are eliminating the poor mustang from the American West?
I'm thinking basically a live-action Disney scene where helicopters scare a bunch of horses into a truck and the protagonist-type young horse is getting kicked and stuff by the scared, bigger horses. [Don't show any cobwoys participating -- they're too sympathetic. Only machines do the dirty deed.] Weave a real 30-second narrative, here. It should feel like the terrible stampede scene in Lion King, and be as manipulative as Johnson's daisy ad, but better produced.
February 12, 2005
The quiet majority
Last week I was driving home a friend of mine, a law-school grad who clerks for a federal judge, and he remarked that most legal journalism was garbage -- inaccurate, simplistic, and uninteresting. One story that was bugging him was a recent case in which a law was found constitutional, but a particular application of the law in error. The newspaper coverage implied that the law was found unconstitutional, which was grossly incorrect.
I'm currently reading Follow the Story -- a book on how to write non-fiction, by former WSJ front-page editor James Stewart -- and he includes this bit:
February 10, 2005
Mickey's dope architecture
So it turns out that Celebration, Florida -- the Disney-designed planned community -- is not as lame as I thought it'd be. This Slate photoessay shows that it's actually got some pretty good urban/suburban design. It might even [gasp] help to improve the shitty public design in vogue in America.
February 8, 2005
Idiotic design
Michael Behe, one of the "scientific" leaders of the intelligent design movement [as opposed to one of the overtly religious leaders who push Behe's ideas], wrote a really just quite stupid op-ed in the NYTimes.
The first problem is that he says, "a critic recently caricatured intelligent design as the belief that if evolution occurred at all it could never be explained by Darwinian natural selection and could only have been directed at every stage by an omniscient creator. That's misleading."
What a shitty form of arguing.
Criminals aren't crazy, they're evil!
Previously thinkness blogged about a very relativist trend in Europe in which psychologists are beginning to think that criminality is an a priori sign of craziness. They said this conception didn't necessary change the way we should treat criminals, but it still seems a significant cultural difference to me.
The NYTimes is now reporting on some psychiatrists who are going in the opposite direction, saying that some of the worst criminals, the real psychopaths, are actually "evil." Again, there are not necessarily very specific suggestions about how this changes the criminal justice system.
February 6, 2005
And now, ladies and gentlemen: Lakoff the Genius
So it was slightly dodgy of thinkness to start filing posts into a category without properly defining it, so here it is:
I'm starting a new category called Lakoff the Genius. I read his book Don't Think of an Elephant and it significantly affected the way I look at politics [as it has for many people; not like I discovered some obscure hermit, or anything]. The book is short and good, but you can really get the gist of it from the first chapter, which is posted online.
You can get the real important part of the gist right here:
Continue reading "And now, ladies and gentlemen: Lakoff the Genius"
Conservative environmentalism
Last week Slate highlighted the trend of environmental-minded neocons, who are now advocating green policy and even driving hybrid cars. It makes sense for them: they don't want to feed tons of money to Saudi Arabia's conservative, autocratic regime [among others].
Now the Washington Post has a very similar story about evangelical Christians who are down with environmentalism, except they call it "creation care," because "environmentalism" sounds like faithless, secular, liberal shenannigannery to them.
February 1, 2005
Time-to-time correctness
Jack Shafer remembers that "even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day." [The quote is immortalized when sampled [from some British something-or-other I can't identify] at the end of the track Planet of the Spheres on Orbital's Brown Album, possibly my favorite album of all time. One unofficial Orbital website is consequently called Stopped Clock.]
January 30, 2005
A novel about oneself
So over the past 2 weeks, thinkness has seen three movies, all of which have been a bit emotionally overwhelming for me: The Anniversary Party, Before Sunset, and Sideways. It's strange, I don't necessarily usually seek out movies like that, but all three of these films have left me spent, a little jittery, a bit shell-shocked. I also thought they were all quite good. [Anniversary Party - excellent; Before Sunset - quite good; Sideways - outstanding.] Am I becoming an emotional lightweight and undiscerning?
Although there were ostensibly nothing in particular that linked these films, they seemed to me to be a troika, a group of three powerful waves from the wake of one giant passing ship, each of which crashed over the deck of the USS Thinkness. While thinking about them moments ago, I realized [with an assist from the official roommate of thinkness] that all three movies are about writers who have just completed autobiographical novels. Isn't that weird? What should I make of this?
Let's get together and feel alright
This very interesting account of the opening of the World Social Forum reminds thinkness of an old topic that I meant to post about. In constrasting the WSF with the World Economic forum, Samuel Loewenberg mentions that the WEF has been getting slightly softer in recent years, this year holding a panel called, "Why rich countries can't buy happiness."
January 25, 2005
Understanding versus sanity
thinkness just had a weird thought while washing the dishes: one can easily analyze life a little too closely, and there's some arbitrary line -- different for different people at different times -- past which we don't want to go. This is so vague; I'll get into the example that brought me into this.
Say you look at a child and are overwhelmed with the cuteness of this creature. This is a beautiful moment, a connection with not just a human but with humanity, a type of bond that keeps us [and children] from being alone. Wearing a different hat, you could say that this is obviously just some evolutionary response -- humans have evolved so that children are cute, and that adults are vulnerable to their cuteness. And then you say, Shut up, brain, I was having a nice moment. The world works better for me when I don't think about that. Which is what gave me at least a little deeper understanding of conservative political thinking.
Party Pooper
One Fed chairman apparently said his job was to "take away the punch bowl just when the party gets going."
Damn dismal science.
Also, it seems that Paul Krugman is a card-carring Lakoffnik. [He says Alan Greenspan is a "stern father" when it's a Democrat putting his shoes up on the Oval Office desk.]