Added 5 or so links to various sub-groups on the linklist.

One positive note about Edward Rothstein and now I'm linking to a writer for the National Review.
I'll link to conservatives before libertarians any day.

It takes a certain kind of conservatism to understand and be interested in culture as such. Liberals, as idealists, tend to value the idea more than the thing, and culture is less about ideas than about those things they inhabit. It's about a love of things themselves not just of their meaning. Of course as far as production is concerned, curiosity needs to outpace fear, so it takes at least a certain awareness of ambiguity to actually do anything worthwhile. Making things is the opposite, after all, of sitting on your ass.

Libertarians extend the logic of liberalism to the valuing of ideas alone, seeing objects as vessels and words and images as illustrations rather than independent manifestations of a complex order. Again the simple simile: communication is like a game of 'telephone.' Moral conservatives and leftists value the game itself as a stabilizing force; whether it is grounded or not, and if so in what, is a different matter. Liberals and to a greater extent libertarians value only the product.
And after all I'm a leftist, a bourgeois leftist to be sure, but not a liberal.
---

Haiti is fucked. In the past we've played a part in this; what part we're playing now
I don't know. link

New Link.
I'll be adding a couple others soon.

My last post on Mel Gibson until I see the film.
First, I'm a not interested in attacking someone for saying anything in public that others find disturbing. I'd rather have those things out in the open than mumbled under the breath. Also, not all reactionaries are hypocrites and I'm more offended by hypocrisy than faith. The sensitivities it may be necessary to appease in a democracy are not the same as those necessary to art. I'm really not sure, for example, if there's even been a work of art produced in the Catholic world that can be seen as philosophically democratic in nature.

It's undoubtedly a perverse film. A.O. Scott refers to this, without going very far, in his Times review. Mary Gordon in today's paper calls the it "a perversion of the meaning of the event and its context." This is a theological question that doesn't interest me. Edward Rothstein does better in describing Gibson's sensibility as medieval and compares the film unfavorably to the philosophical modernism of the St Matthew Passion.
In such a perverse age, I find it annoying when liberals refuse to take account of the complex forms and meaning of violence. To say that it is destructive of the self, is to deny that many forms of pleasure act in such a way. Orgasm, as Belle will tell you, is a moment -at least- when the world vanishes. But liberalism acts as a critique not only of violence but of ecstasy. I'm not going to defend sado-masochism, since that's the subject here, but neither am I going to ignore it's power. I live in New York. Large cities are interesting places.

Rothstein, as a conservative and a man willing to give pleasure its due, is able to critique Gibson's film not by means of cheap moralism -and at this point in time, is there any other sort?- but on the grounds of formal logic, and of the meaning of that logic. Any political critique, if it is to carry weight, has to be made in such a way.

And how those moments kept me going for weeks afterward, like pearls dotting the cord of our moribund relationship. Belle
My God how the woman can write.

I'm so fucking lazy. Take it away Kiddo:

Angry Arabs and American Media...
We were all watching Al-Itijah Al-Mu'akis or "The Opposite Direction" on Al-Jazeera. It was pretty good today. We had just cleared the dinner table and were settling down to watch some film when E. turned the channel to Al-Jazeera expecting a news brief. I instantly recognized the man in the lemon yellow shirt with his longish curly hair pulled back in a ponytail- Asa'ad Abu Khalil. I remembered him from an interview he did on Al-Arabiya or Al-Jazeera- I can't remember which- immediately after the war, slamming Radio Sawa. Tonight, "The Opposite Direction" was hosting Asa'ad Abu Khalil, better known as The Angry Arab, and Ibraheim Al-Ariss, a writer for Al-Hayat newspaper which is based in Lebanon but is funded by some rich Saudi.

The subject was American propaganda in Arab media. Asa'ad Abu Khalil was brilliant. He discussed the effects of American propaganda on current Arab media and the way the current American government was pressuring certain Arab publications and networks into a pro-America stance. Unfortunately, his argument was way above Al-Ariss's head. Al-Ariss apparently thinks that pro-American propaganda is nothing less than a front-page headline saying, "WE LOVE AMERICA!!!"

Asa'ad Abu Khalil was discussing the more subtle changes taking place in some newspapers- the change in terminology, the fact that some newspapers have stopped covering the news and taken to translating articles directly from New York Times or some other American news outlet. He almost gave Ibraheim Al-Iriss, a reddish, portly man, an apoplectic fit. Poor Ibraheim fell short of pounding the table with his fists and throwing crumpled papers at Abu Khalil, who kept admirably cool. In other words, Asa'ad Abu Khalil ibarid il gallub.

(Iraqi phrase alert: ibarid il gallub, translated to 'cools the heart' is basically used to refer to something or someone who eases the mind- and heart- by saying or doing something satisfactory)

I get really tired of the emails deriding Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya for their news coverage, telling me they're too biased towards Arabs, etc. Why is it ok for CNN to be completely biased towards Americans and BBC to be biased towards the British but Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya have to objective and unprejudiced and, preferably, pander to American public opinion? They are Arab news networks- they SHOULD be biased towards Arabs. I agree that there is quite a bit of anti-America propaganda in some Arabic media, but there is an equal, if not more potent, amount of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim propaganda in American media. The annoying thing is that your average Arab knows much more about American culture and history than the average American knows about Arabs and Islam.

I wish everyone could see Al-Hurra- the new 'unbiased' news network started by the Pentagon and currently being broadcast all over the Arab world. It is the visual equivalent of Sawa- the American radio station which was previously the Voice of America. The news and reports are so completely biased, they only lack George Bush and Condi Rice as anchors. We watch the reports and news briefs and snicker? it is far from subtle. Interestingly enough, Asa'ad Abu Khalil said that Sawa and Al-Hurra are banned inside of America due to some sort of law that doesn't allow the broadcast of blatant political propaganda or something to that effect. I'd love to know more about that.

A channel like Al-Hurra may be able to convince Egyptians, for example, that everything is going great inside of Iraq, but how are you supposed to convince Iraqis of that? Just because they broadcast it hourly, it doesn't make it true. I sometimes wonder how Americans would feel if the Saudi government, for example, suddenly decided to start broadcasting an English channel with Islamic propaganda to Americans.

Important note to those of you who are going to email me: The last few days, I have received at least 3 emails saying, "I read your blog and don't agree with what you say but we have a famous saying in America- I don't agree with what you say but I'll die for your right to say it." Just a note- it's not your famous American saying, it is French and it is Voltaire's famous saying:"I do not agree with a word you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."

A brief comment on outsourcing:
A service economy is based on just what the words describe: servitude.
Are we to have an economy in which the working class is defined entirely by it's direct dependence on it's masters?
I know economists are not particularly interested in non economic factors, or I suppose on any sort of meaning that can not be quantified, but most people -even economists- try their best in to resist the quantification of their lives, and the determining factors of social life do not end when we step outside the door.

The social value of my neighborhood for it's inhabitants over the past hundred years was that it gave them a place of their own, a place the masters would not bother to visit, and where they could enjoy their vulgar and uneducated tastes without fear of embarrassment. Those days are gone now of course, and my neighbors are condescended to in their own home. What's the logic of outsourcing if not to continue and extend this process?

Economic logic knows and recognizes only itself. Social logic, on the other hand, knows and recognizes economic, non economic and even anti economic logic.
How can social logic be seen justly to constrain economic logic? Good question. But then you have to begin with a discussion of social logic, and economists, even those with social lives, begin somewhere else. Why? Because even at their most liberal, they start from an assumption that economic relations are the lowest objectively recognizable common denominator of human interaction. By that logic we're the moral equivalent of ants.

My neighbors are not ants, they're peasants.

"There is no salvation for those outside the Church," Gibson replied. "I believe it."
"...Put it this way. My wife is a saint. She's a much better person than I am. Honestly. She's, like, Episcopalian, Church of England. She prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus, she believes in that stuff. And it's just not fair if she doesn't make it, she's better than I am. But that is a pronouncement from the chair. I go with it.

I laughed when I read that. Balls to the wall, son. Balls to the wall.

Ophelia Benson has a mind of no distinction, and frets over the meaninglessness of life. I don't care. But it saddens me no end that although she can recreate the world, and more, that ability is not enough for Belle. It's not enough for Gibson either, though his martyrdom is metaphorical and hers may well be literal.

The only goal in life is to keep your mind flexible. Mechanical systems are closed; linguistic systems, except those made by hypocrites, are contradictory and open.

Still in a bad mood?
You betcha.

Maybe later: Durer vs Rembrandt at The ADAA art fair last week in NY.

In a lousy mood, but I have one observation for the day before I give out and hit the sack:
Every half assed J. School dumbfuck who makes his or her living being objective has one or more friends who are gay. These idiots may be useless as analysts of anything, but they have a definition of normalcy that has little in common with that of fundamentalist Christianity. This isn't talked about much, but it's about to become impossible to ignore. The modern press corps is biased; and Bush fucked up.

---
I can't get this out of my head:
Ophelia Benson in the comments to the same post I linked to earlier.

Yes, it's very disconcerting. At least it disconcerted me, realizing and being forced to admit that moral judgments can't be grounded.

Sophistication is a wonderfully ambiguous word, meaning both, "the quality or character trait resulting from cultivation, experience or disillusionment" and, "falsification by way of sophistry; misleading by means of specious fallacies." I have to assume O. Benson thinks only in terms of the second definition.

A final comment, for the moment, on Belle. She's the only blogger I've read who understands that a word may mean one thing, while the choice to use it means another.

I still don't link to her on the sidebar, because I don't I approve of her decisions, and most of the people who do link to her, either approve or don't care. It's not a question of morals: she hurts herself for a living, and I think she shouldn't. But at her best, the sheer number of emotions, of gradations of emotion and of sense that she can feel, and then describe, and then pull from a reader...
these abilities are things to envy in another human being.

She describes being alive in a way I understand but can't describe. I can't describe the sensations, nor the way she mirrors them in writing, but I feel them, and always have.
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The fact that I've been using the wrong word only proves the point: her writing doesn't describe so much as evoke. The language produces a response but then seems to fall away leaving only sensation.

A drop of sweat ran down the inside of my thigh, perhaps the only part of me that felt truly warm. When it reached the top of my stocking I felt it soak in, dissipate.

Eroticism is in the details.

It was only a matter of time
...from the winner of the Guardian's Best-Written Web-Site of the Year Award 2003 to Helen Garnons-Williams at Weidenfeld & Nicholson/Orion, in a good deal, in a pre-empt, for manuscript delivery in August 2004, by Patrick Walsh at Conville and Walsh. Italian rights to Rizzoli and Dutch rights to House of Books, both in pre-empts, with a Spanish auction underway.
Christy Fletcher at Fletcher and Parry is selling US rights this week, and there has already been considerable film interest.

Jack Balkin nails it in two posts [beating me by an hour] and in the process explains why both Josh Marshall and Atrios have less to worry about than they think: I'll quote the second (my italics):
"What's important is not how many cities actually go ahead and do this, but the fact that the idea has moved from the positively unthinkable to the positively thinkable. And what is more important is that elected officials and not courts are taking the lead. As I argue in the previous post, that is how constitutional change occurs." Yes.

I'm critical of Balkin on occasion, but his philosophy is the closest to my own of any legal blogger I've read. He's the only one who understands the full importance, the full moral weight of process. Structured argument, as a mediating force, as a buffer, is the only foundation for law in a democracy.

Josh Marshall makes a fool of himself in 9 paragraphs. If he thinks it's too soon he should just say so; everyone understands practical politics, but hemming and hawing just makes people suspicious.

A cold night

"There is a client, I've seen him twice now. Hard face, high cheekbones, water-clear eyes and eyelashes to envy. A cool person, handsome in a harsh way, gentle. Smart. We talk about books, he's an engineer of some sort and hates his job, and we talk about plays and films. I enthuse about Ben Kingsley in this or that role, about Anthony Sher. He half-smiles. No idea why he's single. Perhaps he just vants to be alone?

I walked out of a block of flats toward the river to find a taxi. On the way to the rank I passed the entrance of a tube station, where a legless man was soliciting donations. "Help the disabled, please help the disabled," he chanted.

A drop of sweat ran down the inside of my thigh, perhaps the only part of me that felt truly warm. When it reached the top of my stocking I felt it soak in, dissipate. A moment later, the legless man's voice again. "Help the disabled, please help the disabled." His cadence was flat but sing-songy, in time with the beat of footsteps from people streaming around him. "Help the disabled, please help the disabled."

I stood in queue but there were no taxis for a few minutes. A short, round man with overflowing plastic bags came up to me. "Have you accepted Jesus as your Lord?" he asked. It sounded like reflex, devoid of meaning, as automatic as a 'hello.'

"Afraid not, Jewish," I said. Stock answer. More a cultural than a religious thing for me, but usually sufficient to drive the crazies off.

He nodded in sympathy, his eyes never rising above the level of my shoulder. "The Jews wanted a king, and God gave them a king, but he was manic depressive you see and would go out and hide in bushes screaming at people."

"Not a very effective king, you might say," I said.

"I'm going to freeze standing on the bridge," he said, and gathered his shopping bags, and walked away.

Jean Rouch, documentary filmmaker, born May 31 1917; died February 18 2004.

I've said this before, but it has a specific resonance today.
In the past, the intellectual elite and the courts were ahead of the people. I think these days at least on issues of basic decency it's not true, and in some cases it's the other way around. Atrios is more right than he knows. The Mayors of San Francisco and Chicago are both Catholic, and neither consider themselves to be out on a limb as far as their constituents, and consciences, are concerned. I was worried that the Massachusetts decision was pushing it beyond where the public wanted to go, but I think I was wrong.
This will be something for historians to discuss, but somewhere between Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and the current political crisis, the dam broke. It's over.

The movie on ABC tonight was centered on a love triangle between a man a woman and a chimpanzee.

Our beloved president is busy shooting himself in every possible bit of his anatomy and I'm busy arguing esthetics with students of analytic philosophy. I'm having fun I guess. But O. Benson did come out and admit, albeit indirectly, to her closeted Platonism. And Platonism is all about Daddy. And George Will is all about Daddy; and David Brooks is all about Daddy; and Donald Rumsfeld thinks he is Daddy; and there ain't no fuckin' Daddy. So I guess I'm doing my bit for the revolution after all.
My last response at B&W. You should read all the comments to see how we've come this far. I fixed one typo. Otherwise as written (in a hurry):

"I just came home and I'm covered in dust.

You're right of course. Baseball is quantifiable to a point. but there are still plenty of arguments. Rule based activities are not grounded in any absolute sense, sports any more than literature, theater, or law.

Off the top of my unwashed head:

If someone creates an enclosed -self referential- system that is complex and formally subtle, that has within it a wide range of categories - gradations of meaning, and of sense- and which exhibits these categories in such a way so as to invite the same sort of mental activity in the 'audience' as in the 'maker'; the system is a work of art. Someone may be called a 'good' conversationalist, or a 'good' dancing partner. Both talking and dancing are formal activities, based on a technical facility; but as social activities both are also based on an ability to involve others, to cater to them without condescending, and engage without flattery.

Art "is that which convinces." It's a kind of complex seduction. The best way to describe the limitations of M.C. Escher is to say that his art dances with itself and allows us to watch. The best criticism of Norman Rockwell is to say that his work is neither 'formally' complex in the modern sense, nor formally complex in terms of distinction of meaning and character. What does Rockwell make out of the aporias of modern American life? How does his work stack up to the complexities- the complexities of meaning (of any sort of meaning) - in Faulkner or John Ford? Not 'What' does it mean? but 'How much' does it mean? How much can a viewer bring to the work without drowning it in the viewer's own response. If Escher's work is dancing with itself, how long until the appreciative viewer is dancing with him/herself in a dream that has little to do with the object/book/film under his/her gaze?

What causes complexity? Is art the creation of individuals? The Bible is not. The Odyssey is not. These stories both became complex through all the hands that touched them over time. With both we are unable to tell the art from the history of its telling. It does not matter how complexity is formed. The point is that on occasion it is focused on a specific point, object or story. But there are within this men and women of 'genius' just as there are people of genius in any other field.

As with justice, which is taught in law schools as 'Imperfect Justice,' all judgment in the arts is 'imperfect' judgment. That does not mean there is no objective ideal of justice, nor any objective ideal of art. What it means is that any given act of judgment may in itself be wrong, but that by our series of approximations we keep these ideals within sight, if not within reach,

At this point I think it's safe to say, however, that Bach is objectively pretty good. If you think the mathematical patterning proves that, then I'll just switch my choice to Titian.

Obviously this I have not tried to ground esthetics in any absolute sense, any more than I've tried to ground law. What I've tried to do is explain how we can ground it to the point of acknowledging mastery, even if at any given point we can not point to one example with absolute certainty.
---
About Pollock. Interesting problem. He was a very intelligent man at a party full of very interesting people,at a very complex time in our history.
Is it a case of "You had to be there"?  Possibly. In 200 years people may read about the times and the party without needing to look at the pictures; in 200 years, but not yet.

I've been rewriting this post, since I've gotten into a bit of an argument.
Ophelia Benson responds.
--------

"When the Bourgeoisie rises, dynamic reason is its description and defense [see China, India, and Iran.] When it declines, brittle reason is its crutch."

I wrote that in the post below. Reading this at DeLong reminded me how true it is. Examine the range of reference in the responses. I probably would not agree with Aparna Jairam on a lot of things, but at least we could talk. And of course River is a programmer.

Perhaps it's up to the next generation, of economies not people, to bring about the humanization of computer technology. If so, I'd wonder if the coexistence in close proximity of high tech and agrarian communities, of conservative and modern, is the reason. The industrial revolution and the bourgeois revolution are repeating themselves, with computers replacing steam engines. And the cultures that invented the steam engine are tired. But of course the followers of a brittle logic- of a logic that does not take into consideration the effects of time- would not understand that thought.

--- And yes I'm aware of immigration. I comment enough on my preference for immigrants over Americans, at least as far as my social life is concerned. But at the same time, to critique capitalism one has to have an appreciation for stability. In the past that appreciation was foreign, as it were, to the left -to the left without power of course- but it has always been where they and grass roots conservatives have had common ground. Permanent revolution is the capitalist ideal. Someone has to defend those who want to live simply and in peace, or at the very least to force those in search of glory -intellectual or financial- to acknowledge not only the presence of the majority but their full moral weight.

One of the things I envy about Catholic as opposed to Protestant societies is the common language that seems to exist across educational, and even to some degree economic lines. There is no commonality between American intellectuals and the rest of this county. Brian Leiter was even proud to say in one post that he did not link to Atrios because Atrios did not have enough of a specialist's knowledge to warrant the attention. This shocked me. As a child I remember seeing Gore Vidal on the Merv Griffen Show, and my favorite writer on politics in this country is still Joan Didion. Someone I met years ago, who was at the time an assistant editor at the N.Y. Review, said with some distaste that Didion and her husband "want to have it both ways."
Well... Of course.

Voting chaos looms for American election. The Independent:

The electronic voting system designed for the forthcoming American election is fundamentally flawed and could undermine the trustworthines of the entire US democratic process, a scientist has told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Paper ballots can be scrutinised to ensure they have not been misread or tampered with but electronic votes recorded only as computer code cannot be checked to see the true intention of the voter, said David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford University in California.
...
"The system is in crisis. A quarter of the American public are voting on machines where there's very little protection of their votes. I don't think there's any reason to trust these machines," he said.

More reasons to read Juan Cole.

"Speaking of Sistani, I received by email a fascinating account by a participant of a recent joint visit to Sistani of Kurdish and Sunni Arab clan leaders. I was given permission to quote from it by the person who sent it to me, on condition that I guard the confidentiality of the persons involved. I thought that as an educated Sunni Arab impression of Sistani, the account has historical significance."
Impressions of Sistani:

"He had a heavy (and I mean really heavy) Persian accent which he didn't (and couldn't) hide. He used classical Arabic, but the structure of his sentences was not perfect . . .

. . . he went on and on about Sunnis and Shia saying that these were doctrines differing on how to interpret Islam and they were all decent and good-intentioned. They were definitely no reason for bloody strife. He talked about the ancient pillars of the sunni doctrine and praised them all in detail and said how he respected them as men of faith and as scholars. The difference between the Shia and Sunna, he believed, was far less significant than the danger facing the Iraqi nation at present. Well, personally that put him on my right side!"
More here

I'm watching Bremer on ABC. He really is the perfect definition of a nonentity: the naive servant of corruption. I wonder how he plays in the aphasia ward?