Upward Mobility

By now, I suppose, the cat’s out of the bag. As of next week, I’ll be blogging regularly at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen. Dispatches will remain in place, though I’m afraid I don’t have the time or inclination to write for two blogs simultaneously. My heartfelt thanks go out to everyone who has stopped by, commented, or linked to this website. Blogging over the past few months has been incredibly rewarding, and I look forward to continuing the conversation with my fantastic new co-bloggers.

See you at the League.

Due Deference

Over at the League, Mark Thompson (an actual lawyer!) and I published a pretty interesting dialogue on judicial legitimacy, cultural change, and originalism in the wake of the Iowa gay marriage ruling:

The courts have a certain amount of judicial capital – i.e. public trust in the courts as an institution. This gives them the credibility to enforce unpopular laws (releasing guilty criminals on technicalities, for example). Court capital, however, is extremely sensitive to public perception, and if it is completely depleted, popularly elected branches of government will take advantage of this erosion of public trust by compromising judicial independence – through court-stripping, enacting judicial term limits, slashing the courts’ budget etc. etc.- thereby undermining the judiciary’s ability to enforce constitutional law.

As a pragmatic issue, I think the courts need to be cognizant of their public legitimacy precisely because a loss of credibility could undermine judicial independence. The law isn’t solely enforced or implemented by the courts – they require the implicit consent of the public, the legislature, law enforcement, as well as any number of other bodies. In other words, it makes a whole lot of sense for the courts to not only pay attention to public opinion, but to carefully pick their battles in order to preserve judicial independence.

Check out the whole thing here.

Mary Washington Debate Has a Twitter Feed!

Exciting stuff. Follow us as we crush the hopes and dreams of debaters from more presitigious schools at the year-end National Debate Tournament.

Gene Wolfe is a conservative

I suppose there were elements of The Book of the New Sun that could plausibly be described as conservative, but I never really considered the man’s politics. Here’s an interesting podcast interview with Wolfe from National Review.

Highbrow vs. Lowbrow

Sonny Bunch had a smart comment on the latest Culture11 postmortem:

Yeah, but this is a problem with the culture writ large, not just in conservative spheres. Example: In my day job, I’m a film critic at the Washington Times, and my boss just came over and talked about the DVD reviews that generate web traffic (workout DVDs) and the ones that don’t (Criterion DVDs). I bet if you look at sales numbers you’d see a similar trend (and you certainly see a similar trend at, say, Amazon when comparing run of the mill tripe to quality DVDs, like those produced by the Criterion Co). It’s tough to discuss highbrow (or even middlebrow) stuff and be popular.

A fair point. But if you’re a magazine of ideas like National Review or a national newspaper like the Washington Times, there’s something to be said for acquiring a certain highbrow cultural cachet. In much the same way that capturing the 20-35 year old male demographic is more important to ad execs than American Idol-type mass appeal, becoming an important cultural barometer can be more lucrative (and certainly more influential) than churning out tons of workout DVD reviews. The importance of a publication like the New Yorker, for example, can’t be explained by sales figures alone.

I’m sure it’s pretty tough to hit that cultural sweet spot, but appealing to a mass audience has its own limitations. I can’t really take Big Hollywood seriously after reading Dirk Benedict analogize the new BSG series to castration. Is a site that features posts like “Jack Bauer and the Pope” ever in danger of become a real hub for engaging cultural criticism? Or is it simply a culturally-tinged version of RedState or Little Green Footballs? Culture11, at least, had the potential to become an important, right-of-center intellectual publication. The significance of that type of outlet can’t always be measured by comparing traffic statistics.

Liberals seem to be better at appealing to a highbrow cultural audience, probably because their subscribers are already thinking along the same cultural and political wavelengths. But I think there is an audience out there for serious cultural criticism from a right-of-center perspective. Take it away, Mr. Poulos:

“The right has a lot to learn from people who are completely outside of it,” he explained later. If they did that, they “might actually win some latecomers, people who have lived unhappy or unsatisfying lives. And if they show up at the door of the right and say, ‘Gosh, my super-transgressive life is sort of unrewarding, maybe I’ve exhausted this mine of self-indulgence and personal freedom and saying ‘fuck the man,’ and the right is completely disinterested in engaging those people, I think they’re missing out.”

Notre Dame For The Win

I’m not a Catholic, so I’m loath to comment on the Obama-Notre Dame controversy. That said, I’m dully impressed by the names of the student groups assembled to oppose Obama’s commencement address:

The Irish Rover Student Newspaper
The University of Notre Dame Anscombe Society
Militia of the Immaculata
Children of Mary
Orestes Brownson Council
Notre Dame Law School Right to Life
Notre Dame Law St Thomas More Society

Definitely a lot cooler-sounding than your average college clubs.

Larison Brings the Funny

Here:

The contrast Homans makes between C11 and Big Hollywood is instructive, and tends to confirm my rather jaundiced view of the inverse relationship between success and quality. Essentially, on one site you would find intelligent cultural criticism, and on the other you would find a lot of the cultural whining that seems especially concentrated among actors who have a political grudge with the rest of their own industry. In the former, there would be smart takes on new films by Suderman, for example, and in the latter you get Dirk Benedict complaining about how feminism corrupted the new BSG or Breitbart going off on another one of his insane rants. One site was challenging, the other flatters its audience’s prejudices. Naturally, the second one survives and thrives.*

And as if on cue, National Review’s John Miller chimes in, pointing to NRO’s laughably bad lists of conservative rock songs (Blink 182’s “Stay Together for the Kids” is number 17) and conservative films (300? Really?) as examples of serious right-of-center cultural criticism.

But shoving round cinematic pegs into square conservative holes is not serious cultural engagement – it’s wishful thinking. This, of course, is precisely the approach that Culture11 sought to correct by dealing with the culture as it is, not as NRO thinks it should be.

Posted Without Comment

From The Nation’s “Liberal Liaisons” section:

PRISON PICASSO. 48, nonviolent marijuana farmer. Seeks progressive Frida/O’Keeffe for correspondence . . .

Worthy Adversaries

So Katha Politt unleashed a broadside last week, taking the New York Times to task for daring to replace Kristol with another conservative columnist. She also criticized Ross Douthat’s liberal admirers, many of whom had the temerity to publicly applaud his selection. A few quick thoughts:

1. It’s a bit dishonest of Politt to not only not provide links to the articles/blog posts she’s criticizing, but to include one excerpt from an old college op-ed.
2. Several of the blog posts Politt criticizes – on female orgasms, masturbation, gay sheep etc. – strike me as examples of the sort of unformed meandering that makes the blogosphere so interesting. Some of this stuff is stupid; some provocative; some completely pointless, but I don’t think the same rigorous standards of appraisal one might apply to, say, widely-published op-eds should be used to assess old blog entries.
3. I was a bit disappointed by the reaction of two liberal commentators I respect and admire – Matt Yglesias and Ta-Nehisi Coates – to Politt’s criticism. Aside from the value of sparring with a sharp adversary or filling the Times’ mandatory “conservative columnist” slot with a halfway decent writer, isn’t there something to be said for elevating a thoughtful, persuasive advocate of the other side because he might be right? One of the things that really irked me about the Politt column – and, to a lesser extent, other liberal responses – was her absolute certainty that she has nothing to learn from intelligent conservatism. Maybe this is a product of my own intellectual insecurities, but one of the reasons I enjoy reading intelligent liberal outlets is because they may be right, and moreover I’m willing to be persuaded. I wish Politt was similarly inclined.

Note: I’d comment on more weighty matters (the bank stabilization plan), but right now I’m a bit overwhelmed by the scale of the economic crisis. Arguing over the merits of the New York Times’ latest columnist seems trivial in comparison, but at least it’s something I can discuss competently.

Exercising Civic Virtue: or, Why Dive Bars Are Best

Obviously, I’m in favor of anyone who defends drinking after work, but the latest from Front Porch Republic goes above and beyond the call of duty:

The news is dreadful: According to the Census, since 2006 we have been living in a republic where, for the first time in the history of the republic, Americans drink more bottled water than we drank beer.Why is this important?  It’s important because beer is a socially oriented beverage, and bottled water is a privately oriented one.

There’s a reason that beer commercials tend to include lots of people hanging out in a room together, and bottled water commercials tend to include lone individuals climbing things and running around by themselves, usually on a beach at sunrise – even though they are not being chased.

Drinking beer emanates, albeit clumsily and with all the familiar risks, from essentially social impulses.  Most people drink beer to lower social inhibitions, to make it easier to have conversations with other people, to assuage loneliness, to grease the wheels for engaging in what my students euphemistically call “relationships” – in other words, to give a form and excuse for social life.  You don’t drink beer to improve your private, individual health.

This is all true, and perhaps the best justification for finding a nice hole in the wall to go relax at is the social aspect. Of course, you want to avoid the cliquish, high school-like atmosphere of most meat markets, so your best bet is to identify a local dive to call home. If you’re in DC, the best option is definitely the Galaxy Hut, a place with the ambiance of ” . . . a grunt’s hooch in Khe Sanh circa 1968.”

Cheers.

Reasonable People

Over at Shadow Government, Peter Feaver defends the cost of the Iraq War. His “sanctions were falling apart; we had to do something” argument has always struck me as a bit odd – had we invested a tenth of the diplomatic capital we spent on badgering the U.N. and assembling a coalition of the willing on containing Saddam, I imagine we could have done something to shore up the sanctions regime -  but I’m more interested in discussing his broader decision-making calculus:

I believe reasonable people can look at that ledger (or a more complete version of it) and conclude that the Iraq war was not worth it. I also believe reasonable people can look at that ledger and conclude that the Iraq war was a defensible gamble or even the right decision. However, I do not think that reasonable people can seriously look at that ledger and conclude, as so much of the angry-shout part of the commentariat does, that all of the evidence stacks up on only one side of the balance sheet.

Even if you accept Feaver’s (highly-skewed) framework, it’s worth remembering that many war-making decisions involving the weighing of complicated costs and benefits – Iraq included – are discretionary. I admit I have a hard time comparing the abstract risks of regional instability and proliferation to the very real human cost of the invasion, but I suppose Feaver has a point insofar as the Middle East may have been more conflict-prone had Saddam remained in power. At the end of the day, however, this analysis includes untold numbers of independent variables, which makes it difficult for anyone other than an omniscient deity to accurately assess the war’s costs and benefits, which is precisely why “reasonable people” disagree vehemently over these issues.

So, given what should be an overwhelming presumption against war, death, violence and destruction and the difficulty inherent in any comparison that involves tenuous hypothetical scenarios and abstract considerations like stability and proliferation, shouldn’t our first instinct be to stear clear of these arguments altogether? Threats against the United States demand a response, obviously, but Feaver’s argument rests on assessing other, less tangible concepts like “regional stability.” If reasonable people can disagree over the merits of a proposed military expedition that bears no direct relationship to national security, I think it’s best to avoid that debate altogether and mind our own business.

Amateur Hour

The Times is hosting a fun debate on college athletes’ amateur status. Check it out.

Really, Mr. President?

The Jay Leno appearance didn’t bother me. Filling out a NCAA bracket for ESPN was kind of cool. But a $500,000 advance for a book deal? Had Bush done something similar, we’d all be braying about gross dereliction of duty. Granted, context matters, and so far the Obama Administration is nowhere near Bushian levels of incompetence. And yet we still don’t have a coherent bank plan. The economy continues to tank. And I’m left wondering why Obama is so consumed with antics more suited to the campaign trail or a post-presidential goodwill tour than a harrowing first-term presidency.

Moving/Car Towed/Other Stuff

Blogging, as they say, will be light.

Cheaters

Via John Schwenkler, it seems plagiarism has finally caught up with our globalized economy:

Screen after screen, assignment after assignment — hundreds at a time, thousands each semester. The students come from all disciplines and all parts of the country. They go to community colleges and Ivy League universities. Some want a 10-page paper; others request an entire dissertation.

This is what an essay mill looks like from the inside. Over the past six months, with the help of current and former essay-mill writers, The Chronicle looked closely at one company, tracking its orders, examining its records, contacting its customers. The company, known as Essay Writers, sells so-called custom essays, meaning that its employees will write a paper to a student’s specifications for a per-page fee. These papers, unlike those plucked from online databases, are invisible to plagiarism-detection software.

Everyone knows essay mills exist. What’s surprising is how sophisticated and international they’ve become, not to mention profitable.

In a previous era, you might have found an essay mill near a college bookstore, staffed by former students. Now you’ll find them online, and the actual writing is likely to be done by someone in Manila or Mumbai. Just as many American companies are outsourcing their administrative tasks, many American students are perfectly willing to outsource their academic work.

The entire article is a fascinating (and depressing) read. I’ll have more to say on this later, but for now I’ll leave you with a classic Will Ferrell cameo from the late, lamented Undeclared:

One of them

I was a bit perplexed by this Brad DeLong entry, which purports to criticize Ross Douthat for expressing reservations about hooking up with a girl in college:

From Ross Douthat, Privilege, bottom of p. 184:

One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend’s parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks. It had taken some time to reach this point–”Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want?” she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I wasn’t sure what to say, but then I wasn’t sure this was what I wanted. My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to. I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business… and then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered–”You know, I’m on the pill…”

What squicks me out is (a) that the real turnoff for Ross Douthat is that she has taken responsibility for her own fertility and gone on the pill, and (b) that Ross Douthat does not take this to be a learning moment–is not self-reflective enough to say “Hmmm… If there are other men like me who are turned off by women who take responsibility for fertility control, isn’t that likely to be a cause of more abortions?”

Combine that with what Ross Douthat’s dismissal of Belle Sawhill’s point that free-as-in-beer (but not free-as-in-no-hassle) birth control appears to prevent 1/5 of abortions–and there is an awful lot here not to like, and an awfully good reason to think that Tyler Cowen or Kerry Howley or Virginia Postrel or any of a large number of other candidates would be an infinitely better choice for the job.

And, of course, there is the other point: here is a Reese Witherspoon look-alike who has offered Ross Douthat the extremely precious gift of wanting to make love to him, and he writes her into his book in this way with what look to be sufficient identifying details.

Perhaps I’m misreading the excerpt DeLong highlights (I haven’t read Privilege), but it seems to me that Douthat is giving voice to a fairly common sentiment on college campuses across the country – that is, the regret and disillusionment that inevitably follow any ill-conceived hook-up. Given the context, I don’t think this is an attack on female contraception as much as it is an attempt to grapple with the problems of devaluing sexual relationships. It’s particularly ironic that DeLong refers to the encounter as a “precious gift” – I’m quite sure there’s nothing special about drunkenly fooling around in an absent parent’s bedroom.

Now, I’m not sure how I feel about all this, but I’m glad that someone out there is at least trying to grapple with these issues in an intelligent and sensitive manner. I should also mention that discussions like this one were noticeably absent from my (recent) college experience, and I don’t think any of DeLong’s proposed replacements at the Times – all writers I admire, by the way – offer a comparable cultural perspective.  A lot of people have suggested that Douthat’s brand of reformist conservatism is a bit too close to Brooks’ big government tendencies, but one of the reasons I look forward to reading his column is that it provides a platform for a brand of cultural conservatism that rarely gets mentioned in the major metropolitan dailies (much less discussed respectfully).

Over the past few years, many of the most interesting and challenging writers I’ve encountered have all shared certain socially conservative tendencies (or at least attempt to engage cultural traditionalists with some regularity). I’m not particularly religious and I don’t share a lot of their core assumptions, but I’m consistently challenged by their writing and now regret that it’s taken me so long to discover such a rich vein of argumentation. Many people, I think, would benefit from at least being exposed to this intellectual tradition, and giving a New York Times column to a smart young social conservative is a strong first step in that direction.

(Hat Tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Basketball Interlude

Cringe-inducing words from TrueHoop’s Henry Abbott:

Every time I hear about the government needing “shovel ready” projects to invest in as economic stimulus, I can’t help but think: Governments pay for stadiums anyway. Surely somebody is going to get some stadium stimulus dollars. Tim Romani from Icon Venue Group addressed that. He said he thought there would be stimulus money for “horizontal” costs associated with new arenas (parking, rail, infrastructure) but not “vertical” (the arena itself).

The thought of showering incompetent franchise owners (I’m looking at you, Abe Pollin) with stimulus money is enough to make any fan retch.

Best Gift Ever

I received a pretty awesome pirated copy of “The Wire” for my birthday. Among other hilarious miscues, the cover features Bunk, Sydnor, Freemon, and Bubbles arrayed against the Sydney skyline. The artist presumably thought that Sydney’s waterfront was a decent stand-in for Baltimore, but then forgot to remove the painfully-apparent Sydney Opera House from the picture.

Racism in Sport

Brian Phillips compares soccer hooliganism to American fans’ troubled relationship with black NBA players. A taste:

Unlike American racism, which can be seen as an internal social problem transformed by changing attitudes within one overarching culture, the history of European nationalism was decided by relatively recent battles between armies whose sources of legitimacy were external to one another. Thus, to forestall the unanswerable shame that attaches itself to overt expressions of prejudice in American sports (Rush Limbaugh on Donovan McNabb, even Shaq when Yao first came into the league), prejudice in soccer can fall back on the dim memory of concrete populist ideologies. That’s not to say that the shirtless gentleman holding the corner of the “Filthy Gypsy” banner is a learned proponent of any identifiable right-wing philosophy, but there’s at least a vaporous sense that attitudes like his loathing for Ibrahimović were not long ago articulated by governments and embraced by respectable people. Which is enough to give them a perverse air of community justification, even when all the institutional forces in the sport are consciously trying (again, much more emphatically than the NBA) to eradicate racism and sectarianism from the game.

Read the whole thing. The standard response to this sort of unpleasantness is something along the lines of “nationalist hooligans, Nazi skinheads, signs that read “Filthy Gypsy” – these are the last gasps of Europe’s ancient history.” But I’ve always sensed that something beyond aging racists is at work here, and it’s striking that many of Europe’s youngest, most dynamic politicians – Jorg Haider, Geert Wilders, the late Pim Fortyun – all hail from the reactionary fringe.

Is Europe’s liberal gentility a carefully-constructed facade that cracks as soon as foreign footballers take the pitch? Or are sports hooligans a relic of the past, refugees from Europe’s impending “End of History?” A few weeks ago, Will Wilkinson suggested that liberal habits are mutually-reinforcing, pointing to Europe’s ability to sustain a liberal democratic order despite rapidly expending its reserves of cultural capital. I worry that liberal habits are too shallow to keep the peace, and that football riots and race-baiting banners tell us more about the fundamentals of Europe’s political culture than placid economic conferences in Brussels.

The Old College Try

I’m not sure if Campus Progress dredged up Ross Douthat’s old Harvard articles as part of some misguided attempt to derail his move to the Times, but they’re fascinating reading nonetheless (via). Three quick thoughts:

1.) I shudder to think what I would have done with a newspaper column in college. My only contribution to Mary Washington’s abysmal Bullet was “Three Years of Living Dangerously,” an embarrassingly crude (if   occasionally funny) satire of sharing a room with a lacrosse jock for several semesters.

2.) Douthat matured as a writer before he matured as a thinker. That said, many of his worst rhetorical excesses – “It goes without saying that [Saddam Hussein], too, is busy trying to acquire a nuclear bomb” – wouldn’t have felt out of place in any number of mainstream conservative publications circa 2002.

3.) I liked this passage:

“[A]bsent a remarkable change in human nature, it seems unlikely the American multitudes, more concerned with ‘Survivor’ and stock options than with the details of Al Gore’s prescription drug plan, will suddenly bestir themselves, flip on CNN, and catch up on all the politics they have missed during our comfortable, decade-long Gilded Age. More likely, a sudden and artificially induced increase in voter turnout would only mean an increase in the number of ill-informed, poorly thought out and just plain stupid votes. To be blunt, most of the people who don’t vote, shouldn’t vote.”