Babysitting for my niece today in California, I ran into what must be a very common problem. Trailing her around the house -- she's tearing around the place on foot at 12 months, that's my girl -- I suddenly got nature's call. But what do you do when you're supposed to be watching the child like a hawk? My sister would kill me if she got home and saw Chloe chilling alone.
So I guess you take the little tyke to the bathroom. After all, she's too young to understand what's happening in there and be grossed out. Not so, thinks one poster over at boing boing. He notices, via a link, that they're now making a harness for toddlers that you can hang up on the bathroom door to keep her occupied those critical minutes.
He thinks it sounds kind of abusive (gotta agree) and posts a spoof image: at least give the kid a gasmask!
As noted in a recent Esquire article not available online, YouTube has presented an opportunity for the nation's youth -- as with MySpace, it is mainly the young who use it -- to publish a huge, democratic talent show, and let the cream rise to the frequently viewed list. Some of this stuff is truly amazing. Don't you think? No, really, though, don't you think? If you like that last one, though, here's my all-time favorite young self-published performer at work. Nice editing!
Finally we have the necessaryitems following each election that everybody once looked forward to but now ignores. These are the report cards on the nation's top pollsters, this one focused on the Senate. If you're heavily interested, The Wall Street Journal does it more exhaustively, with an impressive graph database available free online. But most people just want to know who to listen to next time around.
At Ezra Klein's blog, a guest poster breaks it down simply, noting that each pollster overestimated GOP performance, not such a surprise given the overall mauling:
Rasmussen: 2.15% GOP overestimation, 3.23% average error
Mason-Dixon: 3.73% GOP overestimation, 3.73% average error
Reuters/Zogby: 1.67% GOP overestimation, 4.56% average error
Zogby Battlegrounds: 5.36% GOP overestimation, 6.45% average error
SurveyUSA: 2.55% GOP overestimation, 5.22% average error
Quinnipiac: 3.67% GOP overestimation, 3.67% average error (only 3 polls)
So it appears that Rasmussen is the winner by quite a margin this time, though Reuters/Zogby comes closest to capturing the balance of power. Relying on these guys in '08, however, is a bit like buying stocks that are already hot, though. "Past results are no guarantee..."
At 411mania.com, which is new to me, Ray Robison, a military analyst and FoxNews.com contributor, draws a parallel between Richard Nixon's philosophy in Iraq and today's Democrats' position on Iraq. Nixon wanted South Vietnamese to do the fighting themselves, calling the policy Vietnamization. The Democrats, says Robison, want to leave when possible and allow the Iraqis to police themselves. But isn't that what both parties are saying? Remember "We will stand down as Iraqis stand up"?
In any case, Robison cleverly quotes from John Kerry's own remarks in 1971, in which he predicted that contra others, there would be "no bloodbath" following American withdrawal -- that, in Robison's words, "we are the problem." Democrats do wonder if that's the case now, probably more so than Republicans.
Robison insists that American withdrawal in Vietnam spelled disaster for the region and for US military morale, and draws his conclusions from there. It's a slightly clumsy column logically, but it points to what might be a valid comparison.
Over at Open University, Eric Rauchway wonders whether Microsoft PowerPoint is "like a handgun -- has its place, but should be kept out of the hands of children and the intemperate? Or is it inherently bad?" Apparently those are, to him, the only alternatives.
I hadn't been aware that there was a committed anti-PPT contingent out there, but I guess I'm not surprised. (Is there an anti-Word contingent? Count me in. Great Louis Menand line: "It's time to speak a little truth to power: Microsoft Word is a terrible program.")
Rauchway poses different theories of The Problem with PowerPoint, but seems to suggest the rub is "presentation software creeping into areas of discourse where it doesn't belong (like, e.g., war planning)." As a PowerPoint spoof Matt Yglesias links to illustrates, PowerPoint has a way of flattening and misrepresenting an issue by boiling it down to nothing.
Today's Globe offers the story of a woman who was kicked off a Delta flight from Vermont to New York for breastfeeding her child while she waited for takeoff. According to the article, "dozens of self-proclaimed 'lactivists' plan to suckle their infants in front of Delta ticketing counters around the nation" today, including at Logan.
Delta has apparently reprimanded the flight attendant responsible for removing the woman from the flight, and a spokesperson told the Globe that breastfeeding is allowed on all Delta flights.
Perhaps the whole thing could have been avoided if the world had a universal travel icon for breastfeeding area. It soon will. Via spurgeonblog, Mothering magazine recently sponsored a contest to design such a symbol, and just last week it narrowed down its 12 semi-finalists to three finalists. My favorite submission, however, didn't make either cut:
The stories last week about Milton Friedman were (appropriately) eulogistic, extolling his journey out of the economic wilderness and into the mainstream.
But Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard economist, says that Friedman, who loved to argue, might have most appreciated this reflection by the appeals-court judge and scholar Richard Posner -- because Posner barely pauses to praise before leaping right back into disputation. After mentioning a couple of Friedman papers that influenced him greatly, Posner says he finds "slightly off-putting what I sensed to be a dogmatic streak" in the late scholar.
Correct in so many arenas, Posner says, Friedman refused to accept that there were cases when his free-market absolutism might -- just might -- require some rethinking and amendment. Posner says Friedman "took it almost as a personal affront" that the Scandinavian countries remained impressively affluent, despite their statist approaches.
"I also think that Friedman, again more as a matter of faith than of science, exaggerated the correlation between economic and political freedom," Posner writes -- a correlation that seems to be breaking down in China, for example.
(Posner's co-blogger, Nobel laureate Gary Becker, pays tribute to Friedman here.)
On the new blog of The Economist, called Free Exchange, an item that wonders why American unemployment is so low; at 4.4 percent, it's at its lowest point since before the 9/11 attacks.
What about all this talk about globalization, outsourcing, and the death of domestic manufacturing causing job losses here? It's a good question. Anti-globalists, says the Economist blogger, think that the labor force is shrinking, making the unemployment percentage misleading, and that many more people are now in part-time jobs with less security and fewer benefits, or none at all.
But the numbers don't necessarily bear that out. Economists see "little evidence that job security has declined in the last twenty-five years." And it's difficult to measure what part-time jobs actually mean, since many people (especially mothers) elect them over full-time employment.
Are jobs actually disappearing to Bangalore, never to reappear? Perhaps someone can point to data that confirm that common view.
An interesting new finding from James Lindgren, a law professor-social scientist hybrid at Northwestern who is "a leading scholar in the growing movement of New Legal Empiricists." On The Volokh Conspiracy, where he is on the roster of contributors, he reports, summarizing a new paper of his, that those in favor of more income redistribution are less generous in charitable giving than those who favor limited government and unfettered markets. Those government interventionists are also less likely to engage in altruistic behaviors like looking after pets and houses for neighbors or friends.
This will please adherents and advocates of "compassionate conservatism," a phrase George W. Bush trotted out often during his first Presidential campaign, and displease those who believe that people opposed to higher taxation just want to hold on to their loot.
Lindgren also found, in the same paper, that "redistributionists" were generally more unhappy than anti-redistributionists, measured in various ways: "The data are consistent with redistributionists in the general public being more angry, sad, lonely, worried, and restless, and less happy, at ease, and interested in life." Perhaps that's simply a confirmation that blue-staters are more neurotic.
It appears that at least one other writer for the MSM out there agrees with me that it's lame to mention philosophers' names just for a giggle. Writing about the new CBS show "3 Lbs." on Tuesday, New York Post television critic Linda Stasi had this to say:
Annoyingly, in the first two episodes, we're also offered a variation on the same joke.
"Who said that? Descartes?"
"No, Popeye!"
Week Two: "Who said that?"
"Schaupenhauer -- also Wilt Chamberlain."
Schaupenhauer? (Oh well, you can't choose your allies.)
Stanley Tucci in "3 Lbs."
On Wednesday, there was a humdinger of a Philosopher-Name-Drop (PND) in the Riverfront Times (St. Louis, Missouri). In a story about St. Louie Chop Suey, Malcolm Gay cooked up a conceit about Socrates and forced it down readers' throats till they gagged:
In a life beset by uncertainty we can be sure of this: Socrates never ate a St. Paul Sandwich. How do we know? Why, simple logic. Premise A): Socrates the Greek philosopher who died in 399 B.C. never visited St. Louis, Missouri. Premise B): The St. Paul Sandwich - comprising an egg foo young patty slice of tomato, pickle and iceberg lettuce sandwiched between two slices of mayonnaise-laden white bread - is cultivated exclusively in the culinary soil of the city's chop suey houses. Ergo Conclusion C): Socrates never ate a St. Paul Sandwich.
It goes on and on like that. Here's one more taste of Gay's prose:
Be it a meal, a man, or a concept, Socrates believed all earthly things were but imperfect replicas of their idealized forms.... Can there be any doubt but that egg foo young, chop suey, crab Rangoon and, of course, the St. Paul Sandwich are but imperfect descendants of their unimpeachable Chinese archetypes?
This kind of thing almost makes a run-of-the-mill misappropriation of a philosopher's sayings seem harmless. There was a good example of that in today's issue of Business First of Louisville (Kentucky). Phil Scherer, president of Commercial Kentucky Inc., was asked, "What is the best job advice anyone has ever given you?" Scherer replied:
I like to go back to Socrates, who said, "Know thyself. The unexamined life is not worth living." Understanding what you do and understanding the business you are pursuing is important from the standpoint that your clients look to you for advice, and that advice is strengthened by the knowledge you have of the market and the product.
Phil Scherer
I don't think that's what Socrates meant. On the other hand, when John G. Brokopp wrote the following, in a Chicago Sun Times story about slot machines (on Friday), his analogy wasn't too bad:
Much like Diogenes, the ancient philosopher, who is said to have wandered the streets of Greece carrying a lantern in search of an honest man his cynical nature told him didn't even exist, slot players more than 2,000 years later find themselves in a similar quest for the truth about their favorite games.
Still, quoting a philosopher in a story's opening sentence is cheesy stuff. A high-school newspaper editor would never let that line stand!
OK, that's it for this week. As noted in an earlier post today, this will be the last installment of "Philosophywatch," for at least a couple of months. Though I will continue to contribute to Brainiac every week, I'm going to take a break from this particular feature. If you have strong feelings about this matter, please drop me a line!
For some years I have been following with giggles and enthusiasm the introduction of new products from a company called Despair, Inc. Despair offers the logical and extremely funny answer to those motivational management posters advertised in in-flight catalogs, the ones that say something like: "ACHIEVEMENT: Decide carefully, [comma is sic] exactly what you want in life, then work like mad to make sure you get it!"
Posters and mugs and calendars from Despair offer the same glossy photographs but the message are of a different kind. "Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all the unhappy people." "A company that will go to the ends of the Earth for its people will find it can hire them for about 10% of the cost of Americans." "The only consistent feature of all of your dissatisfying relationships is you."
Now Despair is advancing on the Internet and showing itself a worthy competitor to the cubicle humor, of, say, The Office (BBC or NBC). Despair is now offering monthly video podcasts for management training. The message of a training spot about handling employee complaints: Implement the "It Could Be Worse" Program, in which you remind the call center worker that while she may not be happy with her headset, she might like to know that the boss is considering outsourcing her entire division.
The podcasts are funny enough that you might want to subscribe. Because "Sooner or later, everyone comes to Despair."
An overt admirer of the health care plan and legislation Gov. Mitt Romney was able to hammer out with the Democratic legislature in Massachusetts, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is making a priority -- perhaps his number one priority -- of creating a plan to increase the reach and decrease the cost of health insurance in the nation's largest state. California, no surprise, won't be offering a single-payer program; it will be looking to expand coverage through "shared responsibility"; in other words, employers, patients, and the state will all be required to pay more, as in Mass.
As noted in this article in the Los Angeles Times, Schwarzenegger is running into some troubles and is bound to run into more:
Hospitals, doctors, insurers and consumer groups are already scrambling to present their own proposals and to blunt alternatives, such as efforts to regulate insurance rates -- anathema to insurers -- or redirect hospital subsidies.
"There are a lot of people in Sacramento who will line up to defeat any proposal that's not their own," said Dustin Corcoran, vice president for government relations of the California Medical Assn., which represents doctors.
But the bigger problem may be that "adopting a Massachusetts-style plan could cost as much as $9.4 billion more than California now spends on healthcare." In a state running about a $5 billion deficit. Massachusetts was lucky in this sense. They had funds already earmarked for insuring the poor; they had fewer uninsured; and they had a legendary system of hospitals and clinics. It will be interesting to see how far Arnold is able to go in emulating the Mass. model, which the whole nation is watching along with him.
A reader named Dan Parker accuses me of hypocrisy, because I write this "Philosophywatch" feature for Brainiac, but *gasp* sometimes mention intellectuals and philosophers in my own writing.
Here's what Parker wrote in an email yesterday:
[Here's you Sept. 11, 2006:] Once upon a time, I dreamed up and co-edited a column called Philosophywatch, which kept a sharp eye on the MSM for gratuitous references to philosophers, theorists, critics, and artists. Dragging Sartre and Martin Amis into a CD review is the definition of bathos, if you ask me, and it still cracks me up when magazine and newspaper writers do stuff like that.
[Here's you June 27, 2006, at snotty Slate:] Thinkers like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari offered up theories of how social control was now exercised not through class domination but increasingly subtle mechanisms. In 1972, for example, Deleuze and Guattari claimed in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia that Westerners have been "oedipalized" (normalized, trained to desire their own repression) at home, at school, and at work. [etc.]
A common misconception about "Philosophywatch," I've found, is that its author must be opposed to any and every use of an important thinker or writer's name in print. Not so! I'm ticked off (or amused) when magazine and newspaper writers drag such names into their prose without offering any meaningful context, just to show off -- or for comical effect. But as readers of "Philosophywatch" know, I will sometimes defend a writer's decision to mention a philosopher... if it strikes me as an un-gratuitous mention.
That said, today's (forthcoming) installment of "Philosophywatch," the 10th since I started penning it for Brainiac, will be the last for a while. The holiday season is upon us, and this feature requires a lot of work. Also, I have some other ideas for weekly Brainiac features that I may want to explore. So... stay tuned!
The History Channel's three-hour treatment of the Mayflower voyage, "Desperate Crossing" (which airs tonight and repeats all week) may turn out to be terrific. But the tagline for the print ads is a headscratcher:
It was a True Test of Manhood
Even for the Women and Children
Since the traits most in demand for Pilgrims seem to have been disease resistance, endurance, and luck – virtues not especially "manly" in anyone's dictionary -- "manhood" seems like an odd word to choose. And the verbal paradox -- manhood for women! -- adds an incongruously joky note to the otherwise solemn ad. What were they thinking? (Seriously: What were they thinking?)
The jokiness is entirely intentional, on the other hand, in the current Dunkin' Donuts ad mocking Starbucks' menu language. "Is it French? Or is it Italian?" sings the chorus of customers. "Maybe Fritalian?"
The punchline: "Delicious lattes from Dunkin' Donuts. You order them in English, not Fritalian."
Wait -- you order "lattes" in English?
OK, "latte" is English, in a sense; it's in our dictionaries, defined as the short form of Italian caffe latte. But it's not fully assimilated English, like "ghetto" and "casino." We cook fettuccine al dente, but we don't brush our "dente" with Colgate. And we order lattes, but we don't call the milk in the fridge "latte." So DD gets points for humor -- but it loses a few for its fuzzy linguistic logic.
