We have an interesting illustration of how the internet is changing the nature of political punditry, in the form of the ongoing spat between Joe Klein and the liberal blogosphere. Bloggy triumphalism can be tiresome, and the MainStream Media aren’t going to be replaced in the foreseeable future, if only because they actually put a great deal of effort and resources into real reportage. You know, calling people on the telephone, traveling to places where interesting things are happening, stuff like that. Annoying as they may be at times, the MSM are still the primary source for information about what is going on in the world.

When it comes to opinionmongering, though, we are faced with a completely different kettle of fish — ones with sharp teeth and short tempers. Journalism requires work, but anyone can have an opinion, and most everyone does. Not everyone has opinions that are interesting, or the ability to defend them persuasively using information and rational argument. That, in principle, is why we have pundits in the first place; they are supposed to be better-informed than average, and generally capable of intelligently articulating the opinions they have. The best pundits, presumably, should be those that have the most interesting opinions, and are the best at explaining and arguing for them.

Problem is, these are subjective criteria. What typically happens in the MSM is that, by some quite mysterious process, an editor or publisher decides that some particular person with opinions would make a good pundit, whether its because of the sparkle of their prose or the cut of their jib. A column or regular TV appearances are granted. And then, amazingly, they’re in forever. Rarely are columnists fired for not making sense; once they claim that status, they tend to keep it, no matter how pointless or uninformed their work turns out to be. It’s as if the NBA drafted players straight out of high school, but then they never had to play a game; they all just received long-term contracts, with salaries based on how good they look during lay-up drills and dunk contests. Maureen Dowd will be taking up space on the New York Times Op-Ed pages for decades to come.

Blogs work on a different model. Despite various well-documented biases and ossification of hierarchies, the blogosphere is still largely a meritocracy, in which success is driven by the free market of links. Say things that are interesting, well-informed, and thoughtfully presented, and someone will link to you. Word will spread, and you can be a success. Admittedly, you can also be a success by spouting complete nonsense, if you do it in a way that enough people approve of. The point is not that what rises to the top is exclusively meritorious; it’s that merit is one of the ways in which you really can rise to the top.

Joe Klein, longtime columnist for Time magazine and anonymous author of Primary Colors, is doing his best to inadvertently prove the dramatic superiority of the blog model for developing pundits. Klein has never been a favorite among lefty bloggers; although purportedly liberal himself, he comes off more as a smug apologist for accepted Washington consensus than as a shrewd analyst. On the Iraq war in particular, he’s shown something other than courage; in fact, what ever the opposite of courage is, he’s pretty much shown that. Now that the war has turned out to be a disaster on all fronts, he insists that he was against it all along. Which is funny because, in all of those columns he regularly penned for our largest-circulation newsweekly during the time when the wisdom of going to war was actually being debated, he forgot to mention it. He was asked about the issue point-blank at the time, by Tim Russert on Meet the Press, and replied “This is a really tough decision. War may well be the right decision at this point. In fact, I think it–it’s–it–it probably is.” Somewhat short of a full-throated denunciation.

But what’s a little weak-kneed simpering among friends? You don’t have to go on the Sunday talk shows every week, and in a few months whatever you said at the time will be forgotten anyway. But now Klein has embarked on a new adventure — he’s blogging, as part of Time’s group effort called Swampland. We begin to perceive the outlines of an actual conversation; there are comments on his posts, and other bloggers can link to him and offer critiques (with explicit citations) practically in real time. And they’ve been calling Joe Klein on his crap. (Or, I should say, “calling him on his shit,” since one of the standard fallacies wielded against bloggers is that they shouldn’t be taken seriously because they use curse words.) It’s like all those young draft picks had to suddenly start playing games, and not against the Washington Generals, either.

The results haven’t been pretty. Atrios, in particular, has been tireless in combatting the idea that mainstream journalists are just liberal mouthpieces, and is quick to point out how often supposedly-liberal pundits like to carry water for Republicans. Most journalists probably do self-identify as liberals — but, much more relevantly, they are part of the professional political class. With a few notable exceptions, they tend to cozy up to power, and try their best to reflect the conventional wisdom of their friends in the same class. Smart political operatives have learned to play them like very loud fiddles, so that the desired message can be broadcast under the cover of neutral journalism.

Continue reading ‘The Tremulous Punditosphere’

In Sunday’s New York Times, Julie Bosman has an interesting article about a mini-crusade to keep an award-winning children’s book off library shelves. The book, “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, won this year’s Newbery Medal, and is taking flak because of a single word, which appears on the very first page. That word is (and I hope any children reading will cover their eyes) scrotum.

So what is this filth that threatens to infiltrate children’s libraries? Well, the word apparently arises is the following context

The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

The Times article contains a number of quotes from librarians that I found pretty silly

“This book included what I call a Howard Stern-type shock treatment just to see how far they could push the envelope, but they didn’t have the children in mind,” Dana Nilsson, a teacher and librarian in Durango, Colo., wrote…

“I think it’s a good case of an author not realizing her audience,” said Frederick Muller, a librarian at Halsted Middle School in Newton, N.J.

Andrea Koch, the librarian at French Road Elementary School in Brighton, N.Y., said she anticipated angry calls from parents if she ordered it. “I don’t think our teachers, or myself, want to do that vocabulary lesson,” she said in an interview.

Ms. Nilsson, reached at Sunnyside Elementary School in Durango, Colo., said she had heard from dozens of librarians who agreed with her stance. “I don’t want to start an issue about censorship,” she said. “But you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.”

“At least not for children,” she added.

What exactly is going on here? Around fifty percent of the people who might read this book will have already found, after a casual inspection, that they possess a scrotum. If one wanted a natural way to talk to one’s children about what their body parts are and what they are called, surely having one crop up in a kids book would provide that. There is certainly nothing sexual about a dog being bitten on his scrotum (unless he specifically asked the rattlesnake to do it, and was found tied to his kennel with silk scarves. But I digress.). And telling a child that a scrotum is a particular body part that either they or their classmates possess does not seem to be necessarily sexual either.

Is it thought that keeping the name of the body part secret will make them less likely to realize that it can be used for Satan’s work?

The author is understandably, to my mind, confused by the kerfuffle.

Reached at her home in Los Angeles, Ms. Patron said she was stunned by the objections. The story of the rattlesnake bite, she said, was based on a true incident involving a friend’s dog.

And one of the themes of the book is that Lucky is preparing herself to be a grown-up, Ms. Patron said. Learning about language and body parts, then, is very important to her.

This is what really gets me about censorship. Nobody would argue that the children’s section of the library should contain hard-core pornography, but I wish people weren’t so touchy as to squash things that might trigger, and help nurture curiosity. I would have thought that any teacher worth their salt would welcome a child initiating “that vocabulary lesson”. Micromanaging a child’s environment to this level, where one tries to avoid their knowing what perfectly natural body parts are called, strikes me as, well, you know, what a scrotum contains - bollocks!.

For the first time in years, Hillary Clinton says something honest and funny that made me smile. Is it surprising that the media don’t know how to react, and run around in rapidly shrinking hermeneutic circles in attempt to make sense of this phenomenon? No, it is not surprising.

It’s a joke, people! A pretty good joke, actually. Good for her.

Salon’s K-Chronicles provide something to think about whenever you listen to the simplistic world-view of our President

Doesn’t Keith Knight know it’s unAmerican to try to understand how other people might view this country’s actions? You’re either with us or against us man; no questions asked!

I hope you haven’t had your fill of outrage recently, because here’s some more.

Benson Bobrick is an author who has written an uncontroversial history of astrology, according to a review in today’s New York Times Book Review. However, the reviewer of this book is not content to remain uncontroversial.

Dick Teresi, perhaps best known to physicists for co-authoring The God Particle with the wonderful Physics Nobelist Leon Lederman, seems determined to get a reaction out of his readers, even if it comes at the expense of science and demands that he embarrass himself.

Get this for starters

In the early 20th century, experimenters demonstrated that randomness rules: physicists found that particles are unpredictable; geneticists discovered that evolution is fueled by squillions of chance mutations. Yet today superstring theorists insist they will reconcile the lumpy, acausal quantum world with the smooth determinism of relativity; and neo-Darwinists emphasize natural selection, a god-like mechanism that sorts through mutations and chooses only the optimal ones. To them, every feather, fetlock and pubic hair bristles with meaning.

Never mind that theories that seamlessly incorporate both quantum theory and special relativity - Quantum Field Theories - are the best tested theories in the history of science. And if I have to go over the mountain of evidence for evolution or the silliness of the phrase “neo-Darwinists” one more time, my head may just explode. Yes, incorporating gravity is a challenge, but Teresi’s statements of why he doesn’t like current attempts to do this just show his ignorance.

There is true irony here also

So when the playful and innovative historian Benson Bobrick writes in “The Fated Sky” that 30-40 percent of the American public believes in astrology, I am shocked. Why so few, given the raging apophenia among our scientific elite? Astrology, the belief that human lives are ruled by the stars and planets, is no nuttier than current cosmological models, which feature an “anthropic principle,” giving our puny, three-pound brains a central role in the universe.

No, Dick, the real problem is that the willful twisting of hard-won scientific progress by people like you leads to such raging rates of belief in pseudoscience and nonsense.

Yes, there are a few scientists talking about the anthropic principle in the context of some string theory ideas and cosmology. However, if you followed these issues at all, you’d know that the vast majority of cosmologists (your use of the phrase “scientific elite” is another gem that tags you as a crank in this area - and you’d know that as well if you kept up with what the vast majority of professional biologists and physicists are up to) do not find this a compelling idea and are working hard on the science that has brought us such remarkable success in recent decades.

Teresi’s anti-science comments continue all the way up to the end

Modern man can choose from a veritable smorgasbord of Type 1 errors: string theory, neo-Darwinism, cosmology, economics, God. Astrology is as good as any, and Bobrick demonstrates that it has a rich, colorful past to draw upon. As for me, I answer to a higher authority.

Cosmology includes our understanding of the expansion of the universe, of the origin of the cosmic microwave background radiation and its detailed structure, of the origins of the light elements, and of how large-scale structure formed in the universe. And these are just some major highlights. Teresi seriously seems to be comparing these accomplishments to astrology. I much preferred Michael Behe comparing Intelligent Design with Astrology.

And who is this higher power Dick. I guess it might be some kind of God, although given the incredible arrogance of your ill informed take on modern biology and cosmology, you might just be referring to yourself.

Needless to say, I am extremely disappointed with The New York Times for assigning someone like this to write a review, or at the least with the fact that no editors flagged the self-serving off-topic agenda of what was submitted. It is hard enough to keep up one’s energy for taking on the torrent of nonsense spoken about the rational world these days, without having to deal with generally respectable publications dropping the ball.

Like any sensible man, I would happily give up physics in a heartbeat if I could be James Bond. Sure, the hot foreign spies, the perfect martinis and the miraculous tailoring are all part of the draw. But, of course, it’s all about the gadgets really.

Now I’ve always assumed that the gadgets in Bond movies aren’t real - I just thought that well thought out special effects and some fake blades/bullets/electronics made them look like they were doing the jobs they were supposed to do. So I was amazed to read an article in The Guardian reporting that the Aston Martin used in Goldfinger and Thunderball just sold for over $2 million, partly because most of its gadgets are in working order!

Driven by Sean Connery, the car boasts built-in Browning machine guns, tyre slashers, an oil slick ejector and a retractable rear bullet-proof screen.

Really? These are actually features of the car? (I had a model of this particular car as a kid and so am very familiar with the features). Apparently so: the guy who demonstrated it fired blanks from the machine guns and said

“If there had been real bullets in the guns I would have taken out the whole front row of these people who have more money that most countries do.”

(and don’t pretend you weren’t tempted).

Well, now I’ve got to figure out how to get me one of these Bond cars (Clifford, I’ll ask around to see if they’ve got a Bond bike that folds up into a watch for you). And it’s got to be a good one - not one of those stupid 70s car/boats that Roger Moore drove - it’s a Connery or a Brosnan for me.

Lest you be thinking that all the original features can’t have been real, I’ll leave you with this

Other gadgets include three revolving number plates including the registrations 007JB and JB007.

But a passenger ejector seat with removable roof panel has been replaced with a standard seat.

Mum, Dad, Sara - if you read this and you’re stuck for what to buy me next Christmas …

One thing’s for sure; if I do decide on this career change, having been a scientist will give me remarkable options when choosing my Q.

Via Marginal Revolution, a link to the Girl Power campaign of the Swedish Ministry of Health and Social Affairs. Click here and wait for it to load; it’s a Flash demonstration of how you turn a photo of an (already attractive) young woman into magazine-cover material.

The campaign is supposed to draw attention and criticism to the overly sexualized nature of advertising and the media more generally. It suffers a bit from the self-undermining impulse of many such campaigns, by itself relying on overly sexual imagery to get attention. But it’s nice to help people distinguish media fantasy from reality.

Update: the site was also linked at Feministe, who point to a couple of other examples — Greg’s Digital Archive and Glenn Feron.

No, this isn’t another post about the Bush administration. Rather I’m pointing you to an exquisite rant by Dinos Chapman about how artists love to lie about their sex lives.

The rant is of the type that one can only find in a British newspaper (meaning that it is bile filled and has some inspired profanity) and was in part provoked by an article titled “Creative types have more sex”. Here’s a taster

What a pile of crap. Those responsible should be shot. Better still, they should be forced to have several thousand sexual partners. Preferably schizoid artists, bad, ugly, psychotic ones. Then shot.

Enjoy!

Abbas Raza at 3 Quarks Daily, just before kindly linking to my martini post, mentions a recent BBC documentary, Jonathan Miller’s Brief History of Disbelief. Not sure how I will ever get to see it, but it sounds great; very similar in spirit to the Moments in Atheism course I taught with Shadi Bartsch some time back. The synopses look about right:

Shadows of Doubt
BBC Two Monday 31 October 2005 7pm-8pm
Jonathan Miller visits the absent Twin Towers to consider the religious implications of 9/11 and meets Arthur Miller and the philosopher Colin McGinn. He searches for evidence of the first ‘unbelievers’ in Ancient Greece and examines some of the modern theories around why people have always tended to believe in mythology and magic.

Noughts and Crosses
BBC Two Monday 7 November 7pm-8pm
With the domination of Christianity from 500 AD, Jonathan Miller wonders how disbelief began to re-emerge in the 15th and 16th centuries. He discovers that division within the Church played a more powerful role than the scientific discoveries of the period. He also visits Paris, the home of the 18th century atheist, Baron D’Holbach, and shows how politically dangerous it was to undermine the religious faith of the masses.

The Final Hour
BBC Two Monday 14 November 7pm-8pm TBC
The history of disbelief continues with the ideas of self-taught philosopher Thomas Paine, the revolutionary studies of geology and the evolutionary theories of Darwin. Jonathan Miller looks at the Freudian view that religion is a ‘thought disorder’. He also examines his motivation behind making the series touching on the issues of death and the religious fanaticism of the 21st century.

I’m happy to see Baron D’Holbach in there, although a little surprised that Hume’s name wasn’t featured more prominently. And it’s too bad that he discounts the role of scientific discoveries; my own theory is that the mechanics of Galileo and Newton was actually much more influential in the development of atheism than people tend to believe.

Also interesting was this quote from the interview with the director, Richard Denton:

BBC Four: Were you surprised to find the first American presidents were so sceptical about religion?
RD: I was incredibly struck by their quotations - these guys wouldn’t even get considered as candidates if they said anything like that now. And I was depressed by that because it made me feel that we have not made a great deal of progress since the Age of Enlightenment. If anything, we’re going backwards at the moment.

Ain’t it the truth.

So at noon today I went to hear Robert Fisk give a talk on campus, only a five minute walk from my office. It was exciting to me since Robert Fisk’s is a voice I know well from his reporting and excellent writing as a foreign correspondent for the Independent (the British newspaper, not the Santa Barbara free one). His is a voice I’ve learned to trust, and who can be relied on for considerable depth and vision in his pieces. In fact, until I learned of Juan Cole’s excellent blog Informed Comment last week (I sat with him in a day long meeting I reported on here) -which I recommend- his was pretty close to the only voice that I trusted to tell me what is really going on in the Middle East.

So to learn (from a graduate student here in Physics, Tameem Allbash [thanks!]) that he was on campus was a pleasant surprise, and I thought it was rather odd that I did not notice the announcement. Surely this will be a huge event, and I should R.S.V.P. to someone, and arrive on time to make sure I get a seat. Right? Wrong. There was harldy any advertising (actually I saw none at all.) So in fact, there was a huge crowd (standing room only) in a huge open air square on the USC campus when Michael Moore came last year, and there were people standing at the back for lack of seats at the really large Presbyterian church, where George Galloway came to talk (I reported on it here). Now both of these guys came with a message that I actually (largely) agree with (and yes, people get angry and confused and not listen to Galloway because of who he is and who we’ve been told he is…..), but this guy, Robert Fisk, is really it! This guy has had 30 years experience in the region, and is everyday on the ground in Iraq, dodging bullets to report to us what is going on. He’s interviewed all sorts of people on all sides of the political divide(s) over many year. This is the guy for whom there should be fighting in the aisles to get tickets and seats to hear him talk.

So I showed up, and… there was about 50 people. Actually, I think I’m being generous in this estimate. Amazing. Just amazing, and sadly ironic. (You can’t excuse it all by saying that the people in the USA don’t know him as he is from the UK, because that’s the point. Given that there are so few clear voices on the issues he talks about, more people should know about him….)

Well, moving on from that shock, let me tell you a little about what he had to say. Let me say at the outset that he’s written a new book, and he was (in that apologetic manner that we British are so good at when it comes to money changing hands) promoting it. From what he said in the talk, I’m happy to tell you to go out and get it if you are interested. (Perhaps I should have bought a few copies and got them signed and sold them on to you, but I did not.)

This won’t be a complete report, but just some bits here and there to give you an idea of what he was saying, and how he said it. If you ever hear that he is talking somewhere near you, please consider going to hear what is really going on in the Middle East because frankly, it is at least as bad as you’ve feared.

One of his themes was, as he put it

refusing to follow the narrative laid down by our betters

and by “betters” he is referring, with tongue in cheek, to our political leaders, the Bush- and Blair- types; the Rumsfelds, Powells, Rices….. you get the idea. He spoke of the book as being a tribute to his father, with whom he did not see eye-to-eye (his father was mostly sympathetic to politics that the speaker did not agree with), but who nevertheless he had a lot of respect for, chiefly as a result of actions (or rather refusing to do certain actions) during the Second World War. In fact, the title of the book (”The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East”) came partly from the inscription on the back of one of the medals his father wore proudly every November 11th (Remembrance day in the UK - the analogue of Veteran’s day in the USA). Fisk of course questions the very notions in the title.

He says that the book is depressing, and was hard to write. He has poured in a lot of himself into this book, as you can tell from the strains in his voice as he talks about parts of it. Another excellent quote I managed to write down from him was about reporters in the region:

We should all carry history books in our back pockets; the reporters notebook should be a secondary concern.

And of course he is right, and painfully so. One cannot understand what is going on there without looking at the history of the region, particularly the “fine” work done there by the Western powers in the last century or so. To know the history is to see and recognize the same mistakes that were made in the past being made there again with eerie accuracy. He gave many examples. Some large scale some small. The large scale involves recalling the invasions by the British in that area of the world on a number of occasions, and the politics that was going on at the time, and the similarity of the situations and arguments. The small scale involves noting that the first British soldier to be killed by “insurgents” during the occupation was in 1920, near or in Fallujah. Many years later, he as a reporter, drove near the spot where the first American soldier to be killed by a roadside bomb during the occupation had fallen, in 2003. He saw his blood still on the ground. It was in Fallujah, not very far from the 1920 spot.

Continue reading ‘Refusing To Follow The Narrative’