As Mark Kleiman reports:

Brent Scowcroft, another solid Republican, says he can’t figure out what goal Kyl & Co. might be pursuing by their opposition to the treaty other than the goal of denying the President a foreign policy victory. (A secondary goal might be squeezing Obama for even more wasteful government spending on warheads we’ll never actually use.)

If the START treaty is not ratified the U.S. will have no means of verifying the nature of weapon systems in Russia and the Russians will have no incentive to work with us on our policy with Iran or Afghanistan.  There is no U.S. interest served by holding up this treaty.

Kleiman continues:

If patriotism means the willingness to put, in John McCain’s words, “country first,” then the party that just won the midterm elections may be the least patriotic party since … well, since the Republican isolationists almost let Hitler win World War II.

I perfectly understand why the few remaining moderate Republican politicians don’t switch parties. They’ve made their choice. What I don’t understand is the persistence of moderate Republican voters. Your party is irrevocably in the grip of a group of reckless, cynical, and largely ignorant extremists. Time to go. Noisily

Reading through the professions of outrage over the TSA’s new passenger screening procedures, I experienced a series of painful flashbacks. Listening to Mr. John Tyner (now viralized, lionized, and perhaps soon to receive a Congressional Medal of Honor) liken a pre-flight pat down to “a sexual assault” and expounding on the integrity of his “junk” evoked a flood of really bad grad-school memories.

Before I start reminiscing, let me get something off my chest: I too really hate those pesky security checks at airports. I hate the snaking lines. I hate taking off my cuff links. I absolutely hate it when the TSA dude confiscates my 14-ounce bottle of contact-lens fluid.

But you know what else I really hate? I hate when my plane blows up. God, I hate that!

I could have sworn that conservatives such as Charles Krauthammer and George Will and the editorial board of The Washington Times hated that as well. I always liked that about conservatives.

But what is revealed by their reactions to “Nutgate”—a Google search leads me to believe that I invented this term and I’m insisting upon paternity because it works on so many levels—is the degree to which anti-government ideology has replaced “national security” as the new coin of the conservative realm.

In this mindset, the TSA agent represents a government (with a Democrat at its head) bent on molesting law-abiding citizens. The guy prattling on about his genitals is depicted as a folk hero and a patriot (as guys who talk about such things often are).

But my question is this: Do we have any reason to believe that the TSA’s procedures overestimate the ruthlessness and resolve of our enemies?

Juan Cole explains why all of this is foolish:

The old scanners and procedures designed to discover metal (guns, knives, bombs with timers or detonators) are helpless before a relatively low-tech alternative kind of explosive that is favored by al-Qaeda and similar groups.

The inspectors are looking for forms of PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, which is from the same family of explosives as nitroglycerin and which is used to make plastic explosives such as Semtex.

Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, used PETN, as did Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the crotch bomber, last year this time over Detroit. PETN was in the HP cartridges sent by a Yemeni terrorist in cargo planes recently. And, a suicide bomber put some up his anus and used it in an attempt to assassinate the son of the Saudi minister of the interior (which does counter-terrorism). Yes, he was the first ass bomber, and he missed his target, though he no longer cares about that, what with being dead and all.

The problem with PETN is that it cannot be detected by sniffing dogs or by ordinary scanners. But if you had a pouch of it on your person, the new scanners could see the pouch, and likewise a thorough pat-down would lead to its discovery.

The TSA guys are trying to look more systematically for PETN. That is why they have adopted these more intrusive methods. And, there has been chatter among the terrorist groups abroad about launching attacks on American airliners with this relatively undetectable explosive.

None of us likes the result, which is a significant invasion of privacy.

But if al-Qaeda and its sympathizers could manage to blow up only a few airliners with PETN, they could have a significant negative effect on the economy and could very possibly drive some American airlines into bankruptcy. Al-Qaeda is about using small numbers of men and low-tech techniques to paralyze a whole civilization, which was the point of the September 11 attacks.

Since the Bush administration hyped the ‘war on terror’ trope half to death, many in the American public no longer want to hear about this danger. But it is part of my business in life to deliver the horrific news that the threat is real.

The question is really what level of risk Americans are willing to live with. On the one hand, studies suggest that the crotch bomber could not really have brought down the airliner over Detroit last year, even if he had been able to detonate his payload. And, 500 million Europeans decline to take off their shoes when they travel by air, but there haven’t been any successful shoe bombings over there, nevertheless.

On the other hand, it would only take a few small teams making a concerted effort at bombing airliners, to spook travelers and consumers. With the US at risk of a double dip recession, this moment might appeal to al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda wannabes to strike. Al-Qaeda in Yemen is openly talking of a low-tech, high-explosive war against US economic interests, a war of a thousand cuts. Its planned method? PETN-based mail bombs.

I doubt it is possible to outlaw or control PETN. The only alternative to looking for it systematically on air passengers and in cargo would be to just take a chance that no al-Qaeda operatives will be able successfully to detonate a PETN based explosive on an airliner.

Here is a short excerpt:

So the answer to the question: “Do the Rich Need the Rest of America?” is as stark as it is ominous: Many don’t. As they form their own financial culture increasingly separated from the fate of everyone else, it is “hardly surprising,” Frank and Lind concluded, “ that so many of them should be so hostile to paying taxes to support the infrastructure and the social programs that help the majority of the American people.”

You would think the rich might care, if not from empathy, then from reading history. Ultimately gross inequality can be fatal to civilization. In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, the Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist Jared Diamond writes about how governing elites throughout history isolate and delude themselves until it is too late. He reminds us that the change people inflict on their environment is one of the main factors in the decline of earlier societies. For example: the Mayan natives on the Yucatan peninsula who suffered as their forest disappeared, their soil eroded, and their water supply deteriorated. Chronic warfare further exhausted dwindling resources. Although Mayan kings could see their forests vanishing and their hills eroding, they were able to insulate themselves from the rest of society. By extracting wealth from commoners, they could remain well-fed while everyone else was slowly starving. Realizing too late that they could not reverse their deteriorating environment, they became casualties of their own privilege. Any society contains a built-in blueprint for failure, Diamond warns, if elites insulate themselves from the consequences of their decisions, separated from the common life of the country.

Yet the isolation continues – and is celebrated.

[…] Socrates said to understand a thing, you must first name it. The name for what’s happening to our political system is corruption – a deep, systemic corruption. I urge you to seek out the recent edition of Harper’s Magazine. The former editor Roger D. Hodge brilliantly dissects how democracy has gone on sale in America. Ideally, he writes, our ballots purport to be expressions of political will, which we hope and pray will be translated into legislative and executive action by our pretended representatives. But voting is the beginning of civil virtue, not its end, and the focus of real power is elsewhere. Voters still “matter” of course, but only as raw material to be shaped by the actual form of political influence – money.

The whole speech is worth reading as he dissects the inner workings of American plutocracy.

Frightened by joblessness, “the American people” rewarded the party that not only opposed the stimulus but also blocked the extension of unemployment benefits. Alarmed by a ballooning national debt, they rewarded the party that not only transformed budget surpluses into budget deficits but also proposes to inflate the debt by hundreds of billions with a permanent tax cut for the least needy two per cent. Frustrated by what they see as inaction, they rewarded the party that not only fought every effort to mitigate the crisis but also forced the watering down of whatever it couldn’t block.

In philosophy we call these contradictions. As assertions, contradictions are meaningless in that they express no coherent idea. But as signals of irrationality they could not be more clear.

Apparently a leading candidate for the job is John Shimkus Republican from Illinois who thinks:

(1) We don’t have to do anything about climate change because the Bible says God promised not to destroy the world again after Noah’s flood.

(2) We shouldn’t reduce carbon emissions because it would be “taking away plant food.”

(3) “Today we have 388 parts per million in the atmosphere. I believe in the days of the dinosaurs, where we had the most flora and fauna, we were probably at 4,000 parts per million. There is a theological debate that this a carbon-starved planet, not too much carbon.”

(4) “When we breath in, we breath oxygen. When we breath out, we breath out carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is not a toxic emittent.”

This is the sort of person we depend on to solve the variety of problems this country confronts.

That Shimkus is a candidate for this committee tells us a lot about the intellectual capabilities of congressional Republicans and the people who put them in office.

It also tells us something about our increasingly slim chances of surviving for another century.

And the Washington press corps had one question repeatedly on their minds—Was it worth it?

I doubt that “over-reach” explains the defeat. If the economy were humming along we wouldn’t be having this discussion. But besides that, the question “Was it worth it?” is a strange one to be asking a politician in a democracy.

William Saletan in Slate had the best take on this:

“[I]f health care did cost the party its majority, so what? The bill was more important than the election.”

Politicians have tried and failed for decades to enact universal health care. This time, they succeeded. In 2008, Democrats won the presidency and both houses of Congress, and by the thinnest of margins, they rammed a bill through. They weren’t going to get another opportunity for a very long time. It cost them their majority, and it was worth it.

And that’s not counting financial regulation, economic stimulus, college lending reform, and all the other bills that became law under Pelosi. So spare me the tears and gloating about her so-called failure. If John Boehner is speaker of the House for the next 20 years, he’ll be lucky to match her achievements. [...]

It’s funny, in a twisted way, to read all the post-election complaints that Democrats lost because they thought only of themselves. Even the chief operating officer of the party’s leading think tank, the Center for American Progress, says Obama failed to convince Americans “that he knows their jobs are as important as his.” That’s too bad, because Obama, Pelosi, and their congressional allies proved just the opposite. They risked their jobs — and in many cases lost them — to pass the health care bill. The elections were a painful defeat, and you can argue that the bill was misguided. But Democrats didn’t lose the most important battle of 2010. They won it.

When I vote for politicians, I expect them to do what is best for the country; not whatever will keep them in power. Democrats ran on a platform that included health care reform as a priority; to not pass it would have been a breach of trust.

As Steve Benen writes:

Call me old fashioned, but I thought the point of getting elected is to try to make a difference. Acquiring power just for the sake of having it is hollow exercise in vanity. Once in a great while, officials have an opportunity to use their power to improve the lives of their fellow citizens and make the country considerably better off.

I get the sense this week that some would have counseled Democrats to let the opportunity pass for the sake of their careers. “We didn’t do much,” Dems could say this week, “but at least we’re still in charge.”

What nonsense.

Democrats started 2009 with an abundance of political capital, which they proceeded to invest. The efforts didn’t pay off on Tuesday, but the dividends for the country will be felt for years.

The question “Was it worth it?’ just misses the point—which is about what one would expect from the institution formerly known as “journalism”.

The proposed menu for a banquet:

APPETIZERS

Jellyfish and eggs; sow’s udders stuffed with salted sea urchins; patina of brains cooked with milk and eggs; boiled tree fungi with peppered fish-fat sauce; sea urchins with spices, honey, oil and egg sauce

MAIN COURSES

Fallow deer roasted with onion sauce, rue, Jericho dates, raisins, oil and honey; boiled ostrich with sweet sauce; turtle dove boiled in its feathers; roast parrot; dormice stuffed with pork and pine kernels; ham boiled with figs and bay leaves, rubbed with honey, baked in pastry crust; flamingo bioled with dates.

DESSERTS

Fricassee of roses with pastry; stoned dates stuffed with nuts and pine kernels, fried in honey; hot African sweet-wine cakes, with honey. (h/t Brian Leiter)

Does anyone know where I can get sow’s udder in San Diego?

Meanwhile back in the contemporary world, empire just isn’t what it used to be.

From Talking Points Memo:

The Cheese Industrial Complex

Here’s an article in the Times that is both disturbing and oddly comic, if darkly so. The US government is now making a major push to combat obesity. It’s the First Lady’s big cause. But for years Americans have been moving away from full-fat to reduced fat or skim milks. And this has created a surplus of whole milk and milk fat.

So what to do? While trying to get Americans to reduce fat intake and eat better, the USDA has also created a marketing arm called ‘Dairy Management’ which has the job of teaming with companies to find ways to get more cheese into consumers’ diets.

The story in the lede is about how ‘Dairy Management’ helped Dominos overcome sagging pizza sales by introducing pizzas with 40% more cheese. It’s been a rousing success and sales have doubled.

Is this progress?

What this election suggests to me is that the United States may have finally lost its ability to adapt politically to the systemic crises that it has periodically faced. America emerged from the Civil War, the depression of the 1890s, World War I, and the Great Depression and World War II stronger than ever—with a more buoyant economy and greater international standing. A large part of the reason was the political system’s ability to provide the leadership the country needed. But what this election suggests to me is that this may no longer be the case.

[…] The Republicans may not have a mandate to repeal health care, but they do have one to cut spending. Many voters have concluded that Obama’s stimulus program actually contributed to the rise in unemployment and that cutting public spending will speed a recovery. It’s complete nonsense, as the experience of the United States in 1937 or of Japan in the 1990s demonstrated, but it will guide Republican thinking in Congress, and prevent Obama and the Democrats from passing a new stimulus program. Republicans will accede to tax cuts, especially if they are skewed toward the wealthy, but tax cuts can be saved rather than spent. They won’t halt the slowdown. Which leads me to expect that the slowdown will continue—with disastrous results for the country.

And that is not the whole of it. As Judis points out, new industries, the only exit strategy from economic stagnation, will require government seed money  that the Republicans will block. Legislation to mitigate global warming will not pass. Budget deficits will skyrocket because tax cuts will be the only legislation that will get through Congress.

The most telling story was the contrast between Obama’s speech yesterday and the remarks of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell today.

While a contrite Obama extended a cooperative hand to the GOP, and suggested a willingness to compromise on everything from tax cuts to energy policy to health care, McConnell simply asserted that the aim of the GOP over the next two years is to make Obama a one-term President. From Steve Benen:

At President Obama’s press conference yesterday, he used the word “compromise” three times. The phrase “common ground” came up an additional three times. The president referenced working “together” 11 times. When ABC’s Jake Tapper, in the context of the debate over tax policy, asked, “So you’re willing to negotiate?” the president replied, “Absolutely.”

All of this sounded quite reasonable. But what I can only hope is that Obama and his team realize that Republican leaders have plans for the next Congress, and “reasonable” isn’t on the menu.

There’s been some talk lately about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) conceding that the “single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Let’s not forget, though, he keeps saying it.

The only objective the GOP has is political, to regain the White House in 2012. They have no plans to help anyone but their financial supporters.

The U.S. is a very large and dynamic country with tremendous wealth and human resources. But no amount of wealth or resources will be sufficient if we ignore reality. Politics in a democracy is not a game of winners and losers but a mechanism for developing strategies to confront problems. A country that ignores facts, ignores history, and fails to grasp the scope and nature of its challenges will never meet them; decline is inevitable.

People who feel resentful are not inclined to coolly assimilate the fact that Democrats made things less worse or that Republican free market radicalism cost them their well-being in the first place. The attention span of American voters can be measured in minutes. If nothing else, the GOP has proven that if you are going to fail, fail so spectacularly that the other team can’t fix it in the short run.

Here are a few facts that the majority of the voting public apparently don’t know:

We now have a health care system that insures thirty million more Americans than were insured before Obama took office, substantial tax cuts for middle-class Americans, a bailout of Wall St. from which the public will make a profit, a massive economic stimulus that saved millions of jobs, and an economy that has grown for the past four quarters. The calamitous job losses that characterized the end of the Bush Administration have ended and corporate profits are again on the rise.

But a recent poll shows that by a margin of two-to-one, those most likely to vote believe taxes have increased, the economy has shrunk, and the billions of dollars of bailout money will never be recovered.

As usual, Democrats made the mistake of thinking that if they play fair and do a competent job of managing the bureaucracy and the policy apparatus of government, the public will reward them with approval. But the voting public looks at politics as a morality play, not a policy seminar. The optics of bailing out Wall St. and Detroit while ignoring homeowners, small business owners, and construction workers cannot be changed by earnest management. Especially when Democrats themselves have a reputation for being handmaidens of casino capitalism and corporate welfare. Passing much needed health care reform is laudable but its benefits are too long term to affect this burgeoning resentment in the short term.

The GOP are masters at manipulating resentful, myopic, low-information voters; the Democrats wouldn’t know resentment if it bit them in the ass. (Oh. It did. We will see what they have learned)

At the close of the Bush Administration I published a book, Reviving the Left, in which I argued four claims: (1) Voters respond to underlying value systems, not policy proposals; (2) conservatism despite its superficial moral appeal is a form of nihilism, (3) managerial, interest group liberalism, because it refuses to articulate a competing value system, is ineffective as a political ideology; and (4) liberalism can be revived only by adopting a grassroots-fueled ethic of care that emphasizes our moral obligations to each other.

This election season tends to confirm all four propositions. Obama had to bail out the banks to maintain some semblance of a financial system. Had he shown the same care for homeowners and workers I wouldn’t be writing this today.

Although his campaign was vague enough to raise doubts, I had some hope that Obama understood (1), would fight to make (2) clear to the public, recognized the limits of managerial liberalism, and would begin the process of transforming liberalism into a viable political force with a powerful moral appeal. None of this has come to pass. My biggest disappointment is the utter collapse of the grassroots, youth-fueled organization that played such a role in his election. Democratic indifference toward that movement was obvious this election season. According to Ed Kilgore, “As Voters under 30 dropped from 18% of the electorate to 11%; African-Americans from 13% to 10%, and Hispanics from 9% to 8%. Meanwhile, voters over 65, the one age category carried by John McCain, increased from 16% of the electorate to 23%.”

Can we turn this around? I suppose hope springs eternal. Hope is by nature resistant to evidence but susceptible to vanity.

But without hope one has nothing.

I haven’t had time to absorb exit polls and results, but now is a good time to remind readers of the kind of people who now have power and influence and can claim to speak for America.

First up is Republican “strategist” Jack Burkman on a recent talk show defending U.S. foreign policy under George Bush. I don’t think I have seen a better example of the thuggish, rank immorality that passed for leadership just a few years ago. The other guests on the talk show can’t seem to decide whether they should laugh or throw a tantrum.

h/t Three Quarks Daily.

Next up, Alex Pareene at Salon gives out awards for the best race-baiting ads of the happily concluded election season.

[…] California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman wins an honorary Baity for putting the border fence in her ads, then lying about it, then running a Spanish-language ad claiming that she’s against the Arizona immigration law.

Next up: Nevada’s Sharron Angle, who just may defeat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, despite the fact that basically everyone acknowledges that she’s crazy. Angle shot out to an early lead with her “Thanks, Pal” ad explaining how much Harry Reid loves Mexicans, who are scary. […]

You’ll note that happy, white college graduates are compared to young Latino men in backwards baseball caps. Reid wants to give the Mexican ones in-state college tuition, which is for some reason horrible, because we must never allow immigrants to go to college.

And it goes down hill from there. The article and accompanying 16 videos provide a litany of brutal anti-Muslim, anti-Mexican screed pandering to every imaginable racial fear lurking in the electorate this year.

And this article would not be complete without a quote from conservative activist and former rock “star” Ted Nugent speaking at a rally for West Virginia Republican John Raese:

God bless the attitude. I love your attitude. I got some spirit going wild out there today. You’re really turning me on. But here’s how you will win, and if you don’t do this, you’ll lose and Nancy Pelosi will keep her puppet. Here’s how you fumigate the rats . . . If each of you don’t get an army of voters to get John Raese to go to Washington and fix it, if each of you don’t get all your friends, all your co-workers, all your neighbors, everybody in your life, you cannot relax between now and Tuesday. You might not even want to sleep. You might want to realize that it’s not good over bad. It’s good over evil.‘

Here is the video via Juan Cole:

As Juan Cole notes:

Nugent’s rhetorical technique is to dehumanize his opponents. Pelosi does not have a political ally but a “puppet.” The Democratic representatives are not humans, but “rats.” He is talking about Al Franken, John Dingell, and Nancy Pelosi. They are rodents and ‘varmints.’ He even uses the language of mass murder against them. He calls for them to be ‘fumigated.’ That the Democratic Party is the party of urban ethnic minorities, of Italian and Polish Catholics, of Jews, of Latinos and African-Americans, and that Nugent was demonizing them before an all-white rally in West Virginia, underlines the ethnic tensions on which he was implicitly playing, and in that context his imagery of extermination is extremely smelly.

Nugent contrasts the vermin in Congress to an imagined organic community of hunters, church-goers, and bowlers, who must mobilize as an “army.” The use of fascist imagery, of solidarity-producing activities producing a martial commitment, is striking. Only about 4 percent of Americans hunt, and only ten percent fish. Less than a third regularly go to church. The organic army he is raising is clearly white, relatively well off, unusually religious, and able to afford rural estates. (Nugent was born and raised in old, white, industrial Detroit but now lives on a farm, from which he did a reality show for clueless city-slickers such as his teenaged self had been).

His flourish is to end on an ominous black and white note. The political battle, he says, is not a matter of choosing good over bad. It is good over evil.

Nugent is a horrible human being, perhaps not all there. He told a British journalist of Iraq in 2006, “Our failure has been not to Nagasaki them.”

American Democracy will not survive if we continue to put people who hold these views in office.

[…]Herbst reports from a survey of university students in Georgia that she and her colleagues conducted in 2008-9. Their findings suggest a pervasive dread of argument as such, at least in public settings.

She writes that “72 percent of students agreed that it was very important for them always to feel comfortable in class,” with “only 7 percent believing comfort not to be an issue.” She calls this “evidence for at least one factor underlying the student anxiety that we find: Feeling comfortable and unthreatened intellectually is a value many students share.”

McClamee comments:

To think or believe something is a strictly personal matter. Hence pursuing an argument is taken as very nearly an act of aggression. Herbst cites interview data suggesting that some students regard it is almost impossible to persuade other people of anything. (This is, of course, a self-fulfilling attitude.) “Contrary to the image of college being a place to ‘find oneself’ and learn from others,” she writes, “a number of students saw the campus as just the opposite – a place where already formed citizens clash, stay with like-minded others, or avoid politics altogether.”

Regarding the Stewart/Colbert rally, he concludes:

But the anti-ideological spirit of the event is a dead end. The attitude that it’s better to stay cool and amused than to risk making arguments or expressing too much ardor — this is not civility. It’s timidity.

“Here we are now, entertain us” was a great lyric for a song. As a political slogan, it is decidedly wanting. If someone onstage wants to make Saturday’s rally meaningful, perhaps it would be worth quoting the old Wobbly humorist T-Bone Slim: “Wherever you find injustice, the proper form of politeness is attack.”

Juan Cole’s post-mortem on the rally is entirely correct:

Stewart’s was a gentle ‘can’t we all get along’? plea. It at times seemed to echo Barack Obama’s increasingly naive-sounding 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention about the lack of difference between blue and red America.

I am sympathetic to Stewart’s amazement and disapproval of where political exaggerations in the hothouse petrie dish of 24/7 cable “news” may be taking us.

But with all due respect, I think Stewart’s statement mistook the problems as being solely ones of rhetorical imagery. The 80 percent in America have been royally screwed over for 40 years now. They’ve been deprived of a real share in our increasing national wealth, with wages and compensation having been kept down, in part by massive union-busting. They were robbed of whatever little progress they had made by corrupt or greedy unregulated bankers and financiers,who were mostly bailed out with the people’s money. The “tax cuts” of this century were actually a massive transfer of wealth to the ultra-wealthy. As a result of these transfers, the wealth of the 400 billionaires and the more hundreds of near-billionaires, has increased exponentially since the Reagan tax cuts. And, when the voting public finally seemed to have woken up to the scam, the Right wing deployed phony racial and cultural issues to rile up “whites” to make sure they are kept down and the great billionaire bank robbery can continue. At the same time, much of the wealth at the top derives from environmentally ruinous activities, such as exploitation of hydrocarbons or depleting the oceans of life, or mountain-top removal mining, or selling people cigarettes and other carcinogens, or mounting private security armies for deployment in the country’s ever-increasing war zones. The outcome, over the coming decades, of growing inequality and growing environmental degradation, could be catastrophic.

Me, I worry about whether the Republic can survive a situation in which 1 percent of the population has over 40% of the privately owned financial wealth, or in which they take home a sixth of the nation’s income every year. I worry about tens of millions of unemployed, thrown out of work by deregulation and high-level criminality, and millions more of the working poor barely making ends meet. I worry about the end of commercial fishing and the droughts and dust bowls of climate change. And I think those things are worth getting a little hot under the collar about, and that what politics is is a way of attributing positive and negative traits to political ideas and officials, and making these judgments accessible to the public through affect. I don’t think climate-change deniers, anti-science ignoramuses, or laissez-faire capitalists who screw up the economy and put millions out of work are “nice.” And while I do believe we have to convince them and their followers they are wrong with reasoned democratic discourse, I think some snark and outrage is entirely called for.

Conservative politician and media figure Pat Buchanan announced to the 1992 Republican convention that we are in a  “cultural war for the soul of America.”

18 years later, liberals are still not taking his words seriously. Until we recognize we are in a battle, not a seminar room, liberalism will continue to get kicked around by conservative bullies.

Very few of those who correctly believe that climate change is happening are pissed about it. More like “concerned,” the way people are concerned about homelessness or poverty in Africa, like, y’know, somebody (else) should really do something about that. Few write letters to legislators or hassle them about it in town halls. Almost no one will change their vote over it. No legislator stands to be primaried or driven from office over it.

In other words, all the intensity, and thus all the political risk, is on one side. For the political landscape to change in coming years, what’s needed is not a massive education campaign — though it certainly couldn’t hurt! — but a shift in the balance of intensity. The question is how to reduce the intensity of denialists and increase the intensity of climate hawks.

But, in the end, Roberts was optimistic because he thinks generational change will replace the denialists with armies of young, committed environmentalists that will gradually shift the debate in favor of mitigating climate change.

I am not as optimistic as Roberts because I think climate change, from the standpoint of ordinary moral agents (i.e. non-philosophers) is not easily conceptualized as a moral issue.

By “ethics” or “morality”, I am referring to the actions I ought to take as an individual.

With regard to the causes of the predicted harms of climate change, the contributions of individuals are tiny, the actions that lead to climate change are otherwise innocent—they don’t involve any sort of obvious wrongdoing—and the effects of each individual’s actions are displaced over vast amounts of space and time. It is not obvious then how an individual is responsible for the harm, so it isn’t obvious why individuals have a responsibility to do anything about it.

Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, even if we felt an obligation as individuals to do something about climate change, there is very little we can do about it. Because our contribution as individuals is so inconsequential, any reduction we initiate with regard to our personal discharge of CO2 will also be inconsequential as well.

So, in other words, we have a very big collective action problem on our hands. I can do nothing to solve climate change on my own. And in the absence of global consensus among governments to take action in consort to solve the problem, which in the current political environment seems implausible, I as an individual can do very little.

As a result, people don’t see climate change as an ethical problem. It may be an engineering problem or a technological challenge, or a political problem for governments to solve, but not an urgent ethical problem that demands individuals take action.

The question is can philosophy help to conceptualize climate change more clearly. Do any of our moral theories explain why climate change ought to be a moral issue?

I think the answer is no if we consider only traditional moral theories. I will have more to say about this next week.

So the choice is between getting rid of French and getting rid of philosophy? What a great alternative!

A choice between removing the liver or the lungs. Stomach or heart. Eyes or ears. How about that?

Someone needs to invent a kind of instruction that is, first, strictly monolingual — because everything can be translated into English, can’t it? — and also one from which all questioning (for example, of what “translation” means, both in general and in terms of this or that specific language) has been completely eliminated. A single language alone, cleansed of the bugs of reflection, would make the perfect university subject: smooth, harmonious, easily submitted to pedagogical control.

It’s time to propose getting rid of both French and philosophy, and, for that matter, all related subjects, like Latin, psychoanalysis, Italian, Spanish, literary theory, Russian, or history. Perhaps it would be wise to put in their place, as mandatory course offerings, some programming languages (e.g. Java), and also commercial Chinese and technical Hindi — at least until these languages have been completely transcribed into English. (Unless it is the opposite that comes to pass.)

Anyway, let us teach what is displayed on billboards and stock market monitors. Nothing else!

Courage, comrades: a new world is being born!

[tr. J. K. Cohen/H. Saussy]

The corporatization of the university and the commercialization of every aspect of life continues apace enabled by greed-as-a-virtue conservatives and a timorous, ineffectual liberalism powerless to arrest it’s advance.

A new world is being born indeed. But is it one that humans will inhabit?

The French are striking over what? Retiring at 62?

What’s French for “huh?” France is on strike, the population outraged by a proposed pension reform that would raise the retirement age. From — zut alors! — 60 to 62.

The attitude of the U.S. media has been to poke fun at those silly French who hate to work and want to retire when they’re 60 and sip Calvados on the public dime.

But, of course, as usual the mainstream press is very likely misleading the public (especially the odious right-wing UT).

Here is an alternative perspective from Bob Vallier:

Currently, a worker has to contribute to social security—which is not at all the same as American social security, in that it also includes universal health coverage, unemployment insurance, and a whole host of other social benefits that constitute the social safety net for all citizens—for 40.5 years; under Sarkozy’s reform, a year would be added on to the contribution (and again, several members of the left agree that this may be necessary, and in itself is not so bad).   If someone starts working in a public sector job, as for example a mechanic at the SNCF, at the age of 18, then even with the reforms, the absolute earliest they could retire would be 60.  Of course, almost no one starts working at the age of 18 at such jobs, because (a) the unemployment rate among 18-to-26 year olds is the highest at 38%, and (b) such jobs require qualifications that you can get only after at least two years of training and apprenticeship.  So a minimum retirement age at 62 is mathematically realistic and fiscally responsible, and everyone knows it.   That’s not really the problem.  The problem is that once you reach the minimum retirement age, you could retire only if you’ve been paying into social security for 41.5 years, an even then, you could retire only on a partial pension.   You are  currently not entitled to a full pension until you are 65, and under the proposed reforms, this would be raised to 67, which implies that you would not start working and contributing in full until you are 25.5, which, given unemployment rates, is by no means obvious.  Any time off for disability or due to a period unemployment between jobs—i.e., when you are not earning a salary and thus not contributing to social security—would actually count against you, forcing you to work longer.  If you do all the math, it soon becomes apparent that the real age at which you would be eligible to take your retirement would be approaching 65 or 66, while the age at which you could receive a full pension is approaching 70 or 71.  So, it’s not at all a matter of adding just two years on to the minimum retirement age; in real practice, these reforms would add between 8 and 10 years onto the time you’d have to wait before you’d be eligible for retirement at full pension. […]

After describing how France’s social safety net works and the costs it imposes on employers:

In the past few years, Sarko (and Chirac before him) has tried to reform social security (and again, everyone recognizes that it needs to be reformed), and the proposed reforms (which largely failed because of strikes similar to those we see today) were all about shifting the costs of social security away from employers and to employees, i.e., increasing the rate of employee contributions.   Sarko and company argue that such reforms would stimulate employment, but what such reforms would mean on a practical level is that each employee would be taking home even less in real net income.  So once again, the strikes today are not just about raising the minimum retirement age; they are about protecting a broad ranger of employee benefits, which are rightly viewed as under threat.  If these present reforms succeed, then Sarko  and his government will have a strong hand (even if his approval rating is a dismal 26%) to pursue other reforms in social security that will be deleterious to workers, and the various social agents (unions, etc.) will be viewed as weak, ineffectual, and unable to protect les acquis, the rights and entitlements they have all fought for.  And it wouldn’t be just the working-class that is affected; it would be everyone.  And that’s why there is such strong support for the present actions.

And it turns out, according to Vallier, that the unions have proposed their own pension and social security reforms that would finance the system but would be paid for by big business and hence cannot get a hearing.

I have no independent knowledge of the French situation and I am unfamiliar with the writer here so I don’t know if all of this is accurate. But it is nuanced unlike the drivel we get in the media.

I would not be a bit surprised if the U.S. press accounts are systematically misleading.

But sometimes a simple list will make the point just fine. Via Laurie Findrich:

Below is a list of ten good things we have because of our large federal government:

1. The Internet. This was invented not by entrepreneurs, everybody, but by the United States military.
2. The Apollo program, culminating in the most marvelous of modern moments, Neil Armstrong’s famous words, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” (Yes, I too had to learn after the event that the word “a” was in there.”)
3. Interstate highways. Thank you, Eisenhower. True, the invention of the automobile was the work of that vicious genius Henry Ford. And many think the interstate highway system led us in the wrong direction, so to speak, by making us more dependent on automobiles and trucks instead of rail transportation. But imagine driving from New York to Florida without the interstate, and you instantly see the benefits.
4. Social Security. A federal system of retirement payments for old people prevents those of us who are not yet old, or not poor, from having to step over old people while they lie dying in the streets.
5. Medicare. Ditto the above.
6. The National Weather Service. I leave it to your imagination if each state handled weather by itself, or worse, if weather reporting were in the hands of private entrepreneurs. You’d never know there were storms approaching if the paid advertisers included the tourist industry.
7. National Parks. Without the federal government, there’d be no Yellowstone, no Bryce Canyon, no Washington Monument or Lincoln Memorial.
8. Free museums in Washington, D.C., all paid for by the Feds. Washington is the only city in the country where you can take your family from one museum to another without paying any admission fees.
9. The FBI.  Lefties may not like this choice, because the FBI has done some very bad things, and presumably is still doing them (J. Edgar Hoover, for example, was a tyrant, over and out), but should you get kidnapped and taken across state lines this happens), they’re there for you.
10. Progressive Federal Income Tax. Without this, states would set up a race to the bottom in income tax, with the result that all the rich people and corporations would continuously be on the move. Meanwhile, everybody else would constantly be pulling up stakes to follow them. Normal citizens would be even more frazzled trying to chance jobs than they already are.

And here’s a list of ten things we don’t have because of our large federal government:

1. Lots and lots of plane crashes. (This one I’ll be thinking about on my way to the airport Wednesday.)
2. Thalidomide victims (thank you to the FDA, back in the 1960s, for this one).
3. Segregation (it doesn’t take a big imagination to figure out what some states would have done without the intervention of the federal government).
4. Runs on banks.
5. Endless Love Canals, without anyone or any company ever being held accountable.
6. Employees suffering work-related injuries and diseases without employers being held accountable.
7. Fire fighters unwilling to cross state lines during forest fires.
8. Easy transportation, without the need for passports, within the United States.
9. No disaster relief save for what a particular neighborhood, area or state can muster.
10. No food stamps to help out the one in five American families who live below the poverty line.

Tea partiers have no answer for this simple list. But it sure will make them angry.