Rolling Stone ventures to MENA (!)

Rolling Stone is launching Rolling Stone: Middle East.

Needless to say, I subscribed immediately. I hope it's obvious why this is a huge deal; for one thing, this is a major American pop-culture publication showing major interest in the cultural products and pop life of a region that is almost uniformly understood as backward, primitive, and totally lacking in anything Rolling Stone could ever be interested in. That in itself is a huge deal.

If people in the region read it, that could be even better. It would be complicated, as validation by Western observers always is for almost any Arab group, individual, movement, or trend; but it could also be very valuable. It depends on how they play it at RS, and on how many people in the region actually read it and take it seriously. (Those variables are, of course, related--it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing). As much as it can be fun to make fun of RS these days, when I was in high school that magazine was incredibly important to me. I was the proverbial sad indie kid, and it was kind of a lifeline at times. There are some kids in the Middle East who are probably already consuming this kind of Western media, whether they can actually get their hands on the glossy or whether it's via an Internet cafe; how great is it that they could get their own deal? Something actually meant for them?

The major caveat is that as far as I can see, it's all in English. That worries me a little, and it throws the emphasis back toward the remedial-Orientalist perspective. Maybe there is or will be an Arabic-language version or website; I really, really hope so. Even if that doesn't happen, I still very much applaud this step.

And finally, it'll just be fun for me.

rollingstone.me.com, people: go. Read. Be pleased.

Two and two together

Marc Ambinder, who seems to have gotten some kind of fire lit under him in the past month or so--all of a sudden his stories are about forty times more interesting--has a brilliant piece about some of the interagency jockeying going on around the war in Afghanistan. It's a lesson in how to read for subtext and hidden information, and how much you need to know to be able to do so at all:

Greg Miller, the Washington Post's ace intelligence and national security reporter, poured a bucket of ice down the backs of American officials with his publication last night of a story about how U.S. special operations forces are hamstrung from pursuing high value targets in Afghanistan, even as they're quietly drawing up plans for direct military retaliation against entities who plan terrorist attacks in the United States. The Post chose to headline the story with what I thought to be of secondary importance -- the drawing of contingency plans for retaliatory attacks: "Options studied for a possible Pakistan strike." [...]

But the real interesting part of this story is subtextual. Miller is a fantastic journalist, and he has sources almost no one else has. But even the most voluble of sources chose to speak at moments when disclosing information would best advance their equities in a particular debate. So why are Miller's sources talking right now, and what message are they trying to communicate?

He proceeds to tell you his thoughts--which seem pretty plausible, but I'm hardly in a position to evaluate when it comes to the subtle discontents of CENTCOM vs. SOCOM in targeting procedures--and then wallops you at the end with a protip that, if you're me, leaves you gaping at the obvious genius of it while he vanishes cackling into the interweb.

By the way, note how two of the quotations in the piece use the word "punitive." If you've got some time today, run the word "punitive" and the names of the senior officers associated with the special operations command and see if you can figure out who likes to use that phrase a lot. (Do the same thing, incidentally, for the words "pulse" and "kinetic" and "senior administration official." That has nothing to do with this article, but it's going to be revealing, nonetheless.)

Trust, if I had any idea what the relevant names were, I would be happily digging around LexisNexis and not sitting here typing this.

So I've been watching the West Wing over again

And I love it as much as I always did. And I couldn't help but be reminded of Aaron Sorkin's distinctive cadence--and I know this is maybe going out on a limb a little--by this clip of NJ Gov. Chris Christie (R) calling out a reporter on, you know, caring about knucklehead stuff:

Gov Christie calls S-L columnist thin-skinned for inquiring about his 'confrontational tone'

So I got curious and I went and looked up his record--and by looked up I mean I went to his Wikipedia page--and it's kind of mixed for me. Not sure quite what I think of the man, not that it matters at all yet. (I'll be marginally surprised if he never runs for President.) Anyway, one to keep an eye on.

P.S. I don't know enough HTML to really know why there's that huge gap there or what to do about it; I also decided screw making the video fit entirely in the margins, since you can see all of him and if I did it it would be either tiny or very distorted. I hope everyone will manage to get through their day regardless.

Journalism in action

Roger Cohen has an amazing piece up at the NYT. Even if, as is likely, the revolutionary sentiment isn't as widespread as some of us would like to believe, this is amazing stuff:

I also know that Iran’s women stand in the vanguard. For days now, I’ve seen them urging less courageous men on. I’ve seen them get beaten and return to the fray. “Why are you sitting there?” one shouted at a couple of men perched on the sidewalk on Saturday. “Get up! Get up!”

Another green-eyed woman, Mahin, aged 52, staggered into an alley clutching her face and in tears. Then, against the urging of those around her, she limped back into the crowd moving west toward Freedom Square. Cries of “Death to the dictator!” and “We want liberty!” accompanied her.

That part made me tear up. This part was something else:

Just off Revolution Street, I walked into a pall of tear gas. I’d lit a cigarette minutes before — not a habit but a need — and a young man collapsed into me shouting, “Blow smoke in my face.” Smoke dispels the effects of the gas to some degree.

I did what I could and he said, “We are with you” in English and with my colleague we tumbled into a dead end — Tehran is full of them — running from the searing gas and police. I gasped and fell through a door into an apartment building where somebody had lit a small fire in a dish to relieve the stinging. [...]

I looked up through the smoke and saw a poster of the stern visage of Khomeini above the words, “Islam is the religion of freedom.”

To quote the man,

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Dick (Uncut)
Hoooolyyyyyy shiiiiiiiit. href='http://www.thedailyshow.com/'>thedailyshow.com
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Bah humbug

All I can say is that the American media can really be a bunch of downers when it comes to peace and reconciliation efforts. It's just not as fun for them as war cheerleading, I guess.



It should not be possible to put together a video montage where the two least crazy and least stupid people involved are Valerie Jarrett and...Pat Buchanan.

Also, why is Liz Cheney on TV so much lately?

Sotomayor

I must say, watching the reactions to the Sotomayor pick has been an almost beautifully predictable exercise in Kabuki politics. Observe:

SCOTUSblog:

Opponents’ first claim – likely stated obliquely and only on background – will be that Judge Sotomayor is not smart enough for the job. ... By contrast, John Roberts was described as brilliant and Sam Alito as exceptionally smart. The objective evidence is that Sotomayor is in fact extremely intelligent. Graduating at the top of the class at Princeton is a signal accomplishment. Her opinions are thorough, well-reasoned, and clearly written. Nothing suggests she isn’t the match of the other Justices.

Rod Dreher:

Given that we were certain to get a liberal justice out of Obama, I suppose one has to take comfort in knowing that Obama made a quota pick too, and did not choose a liberal justice who can match intellects with Roberts and Scalia.

Done and done.

What is incredible is that Dreher's sole basis for insulting Justice Sotomayor's intellect is the infamous Rosen hit piece that went up at The New Republic. I find it impossible to believe that Dreher missed the entirely warranted firestorm that followed the story, which was largely composed of anonymous gossip and amorphous "doubts" and concerns as well as flat-out falsehoods. That Dreher relied on a piece that even Powerline called gossipy suggests that he has given little if any thought to his opinion. He seems quite ready to buy into what Greenwald described as "the Jeffrey-Rosen/Ben-Wittes/Stuart-Taylor grievance on behalf of white males that, as Dahlia Lithwick put it, 'a diverse bench must inevitably be a second-rate bench.'"

Truly, deconstruct Dreher's statement for a minute. He said that Obama was bound to choose a liberal, and of his options he chose a "quota pick" who, for reasons passing understanding, therefore is necessarily intellectually subpar for the Supreme Court. I'm sure Dreher did not actually intend to say that any non-white non-male nominee would be likely to be below the level of Samuel Alito or John Roberts; what he intended to say, no doubt, was that this particular brown woman is seems to be below their level, and therefore must be seen as a quota pick.

But he's stuck in a circle here: he has no decent evidence to rely on when it comes to assessing her as indeed a less brilliant mind. The only evidence he bothered to cite is flimsy at best. So what I want to know is, how does he know she is a quota pick?

I won't attempt to answer the question. I don't know Dreher's mind. But I will say I do think he has what my roommate would call his judgment pants on.

Oh for the love of

Look, I am not a big Maureen Dowd fan. She snarks well, but that's really not enough for me, and her retrograde gender assumptions and the way she applies them to, oh, national security rhetoric makes me want to break lots of things.

So when I heard she had apparently plagiarized Josh Marshall, I shook my head but I wasn't exactly devastated or shocked. It's always been a mystery to me how the woman ended up with a Pulitzer. She's just not that good a writer.

ANYWAY, I was interested to see what excuse they would come up with. I did not expect it to be this pathetic:

I didn't read his blog last week, and didn't have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now.


i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent -- and I assumed spontaneous -- way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column.

but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.

Really? Your friend remembered JMM's point word for word, and then you remembered his or her wording perfectly while you were weaving your shimmeringly sarcastic tapestry column?

Weak, weak sauce.

I should note that in this column, MoDo did come out in favor of a Truth Commission re: torture and that I consider this a good thing. She should be congratulated. And it seems that Josh's point was actually integral to the shift in her opinion, for which he should be congratulated. This all could have been a wonderful episode in political discussion and multimedia journalism if somebody had been just a little more careful, wherever the breakdown was.

I am almost inclined to believe it was accidental just because it seems impossible to me that anybody could know what TPM is and not know that it is a huge deal, with tons of readers who also read the NYT. There's no way you would get away with it. I can't imagine how exactly this could happen, though. Any way you look at it this whole incident is just a big dollop of unnecessary stupidity marring what was in fact an important statement by a major opinionator, whatever I think of her.

Break down the walls

If there's one thing the death throes of the Republican Party is teaching me, it's that clearly there are a lot of conservatives out there that I would actually love to be friends with [emphasis added]:

"Hi gentlemen," [Poulos] began. "Um … in the interest of fun I’m going to taunt the panel first, and then try to justify running the gauntlet by phrasing it as a serious question." Poulos was wearing a charcoal suit and a brightly colored tie, which stood out in the ballroom’s sea of navy blue and khaki but was subdued by his standards, which tend to run toward things like monochromatic three-piece suits and velvet jackets. (He also has sideburns that are shaped like New Hampshire and almost as big; the combination of muttonchops and fine tailoring suggests a character in a Victorian political cartoon, or one of the white guys in Superfly.) [...]

"In the interest of being more than provocative," he said, getting to his serious question, "are we ever going to be able to address the question of cultural necessitarianism without being confident that we’re getting our cultural criticism right?"

Stripped of its woolly academese, what Poulos was asking was, can conservatism properly push back against a popular culture that it doesn’t really understand? How does a movement that yearns for the values of the past confront a culture that prizes novelty? This was a problem that had bedeviled modern American conservatism since Buckley first inveighed against the Beatles in his syndicated column. It was something that Poulos, who had dabbled in screenwriting and indie rock (his band was called the End of History) in Los Angeles before moving to Washington, had kicked around in his own writing.

This individual sounds, as Posh would say, MAJOR.

The piece, by the way, is about the demise of Culture11, one of the more interesting experiments in conservative journalism to have popped up recently. I was initially sad to see it go--well, I still am, somewhat--but Homans makes a good point about the potential value in its demise. Let's end the echo chambers and set everybody writing in the same publications together, with the standard being the quality of their journalism and their thinking rather than the purity of their beliefs.

Good one

As you may know, Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer (of CNBC) have been engaged in a bit of a spat lately. A summary:

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Well, last night the other night [ed.: this post took a few days] Cramer went on Stewart's show, the poor fool. All I can really say is oof. Tim F. at Balloon Juice said, "My immediate reaction is that the whole experience is painful to watch. It would be great if someone could explain to me why Jim Cramer did not stay home."

He received numerous responses, as is the norm at BJ, but I somehow was struck by these two:

Just Some Fuckhead

We are in freefall as a society when a fucking comedy channel is the only place we can get hard news.

Indylib

@r€nato:

Why is it that two comedians on basic cable are pulling so much of the weight for our so-called journalists?

The comedians do good journalism and the journalists do really, really, really bad comedy.

What really did it, honestly, was one commenter's link to "his take on the exchange, in comic book pictures." The first picture is from Watchmen, and the post is called "Don't Fuck with the Comedian."

Also relevant here is the honestly incredible comment thread over on Roger Ebert's blog post on Watchmen. (If you want to get some really nice basic education in quantum physics, scroll until you see some long comments and hunker down.) There I read, among other things, the following:

Ross Durham: ...between your review and this blog entry there is little mention of my favorite aspects of the novel. What about the Comedian? What about the joke? It's a very postmodern look at the human condition in addition to being a look at humanity, or life's, place in the universe.

alex: ...you do have to realize that the Comedian is living his life as being one great big parody of Humanity and his actions just really go to show what he thinks of humanity.

Ike: the Comedian, the nihilistic everyman, who wonders why god will not save him from his own immorality, and finds the entire situation to be one giant joke.

Emphasis added to this one:

Ray R.: While Manhattan is interesting, the real depth in the story is The Comedian. "The Big Joke" is what this is really all about. While nuclear war and the atomic clock are significant symbols, the most prominent and repeated motif is The Comedian's smilely face marred with blood. It's present at the beginning of the story and at the end of the story. Even as Dr. Manhattan stands on Mars giving his huge and empty speach about the uniqueness of each individual (come on dudes - anyone who knows the first thing about science knows what a load of junk this speech is), the camera backs up and reveals that his beautiful construct is actually a small portion of that big smiley face. Manhattan is interesting, but The Comedian is the real key to understanding Alan Moore's masterpiece.

All of this initially had the effect of making me go looking for my copy of Watchmen to reread it so I could get a handle on the various inklings stirring around my head. Unfortunately, I can't find it (though the search has led me to a desire to reread A Canticle For Liebowitz also, as it shares a certain nihilist cackle).

So instead of that, head back over to the Balloon Juice comments for a minute (bear with me):

jwb:
@William

The irony of Stewart and other Hollywood celebrity commentators like Maher is that they are really the only people in the country who have both regular, guaranteed access to the media and the willingness to point out the bullshit. They’re famous and wealthy enough not to be overawed or intimidated by politicians and executives and too prominent to be suddenly "disappeared" from the TV screen by the media for being too honest.

Actually, it’s their humor that gives them the power—not their celebrity or wealth (in the league they are playing in, that’s miniscule). That’s their difference from someone like Cramer—who has to depend on shilling for da boss guys because he can’t bring in the eyeballs any other way.

And now back to Ebertville:

Daniel: The tragedy of this movie is that it could translate only in severely truncated form what I think is the most interesting part of it and what you rightfully put in the title of this blog entry: the bit about being a puppet that can see the strings.

...We are, as a species, only starting to see the strings. Our growing knowledge of the universe creates entirely new intellectual challenges to deal with. H.P. Lovecraft wrote: "The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

ABVC: If there is someone else controlling your deeds and your thoughts, he could choose in an arbitrary way what you were going to do. You would only see the strings if he wanted [you] to. But then, you wouldn't need a crazy experiment gone wrong to see them. Maybe if he wanted you to need it.

If there is no puppeteer, or the pupeteer [sic] is not someone with a will, but the universe, then the possibility arbitrariness (is quantum randomness arbitrary?) would be eliminated and we would be puppets of the laws of cause and effect. You have a will, but it is not free, it is the effect of lots of causes.

All of this pasticherie on my part is intended to be pointing at the way we think we understand The Economy and a little bit at journalism. I'm now going to back up, sort of, and go through my own thoughts, tying back to all this source material when appropriate. Again, bear with me.

Current discussions of economics and the economy contain a bizarre contradiction: On the one hand, the Free Market Rulz OK because the economy is too complex, diverse, and fast-moving to be comprehended sufficiently by any planner or regulator. It is, to a certain degree, unknowable and all-powerful, if benevolent. This idea is roughly analogous to ABVC's description of a puppeteer with no will--"the laws of cause and effect. You have a will, but it is not free, it is the effect of lots of causes." (Free-marketeers might object to the statement that the will is "not free," but I think that the distinction that might be made here is not actually very significant, at least for what I'm trying to do. The "effect of lots of causes" bit I think is unimpeachable.)

On the other hand, we flatter ourselves that with enough math, studies, models, and theorizations we can understand how these things work. Even with the whole question of government interference set aside, there is more than one industry entirely devoted to studying and understanding the workings of The Economy, whether that means finance, Depression economics, international development, day trading, or financial journalism. This effort is roughly analogous to the notion of "seeing the strings", or trying to.

We understand the economy as both a reflection and the driver of our entire world. "Stocks rallied today in response to _______"; "In response to the recession, people are rediscovering the value of ______ by _______"; "We may see a cultural shift through learning to deal with austerity"; and "culture of commodification" are only a very few of the thousands of phrases we use to describe what the economy does to us or how it reacts to things that we do. The story is, In the endlessly circular dance of incentives, choices, and effects, easy credit and a housing bubble caused "reckless" spending and lending, which sent the economy to recklessly dizzying heights, leading to a crash which, apparently, will now reshape our entire culture and bring us a new Greatest Generation (unless it simply ends the world as we know it). This is a bizarre combination of The Economy's being by and of us while simultaneously being completely alien to us. We do things to it, we figure it out and profit off it, we game it, we live in it, but occasionally it completely swamps us. It's a force of nature--it is to us as the sea is to fishermen, or the Euphrates was to Mesopotamian farmers (floods are a central mythic trope in ancient Mesopotamian religion).

It follows from this that we seek to understand how this incredibly powerful force works and what our place in it is--to "see the strings". Just as we try to understand and harness physics, we try to understand and harness economic forces (maybe this explains all those Wall Street physicists).

But the great irony is that all of our efforts to see the strings--our glass edifices on Mars--are ultimately recursive and meaningless. They fit together, they explain each other, and most of the time they fit reality well enough that they seem to explain and describe it. But every so often things happen that they did not predict and don't explain, or at least don't explain conclusively. Even the Great Depression is not understood, in that lots of people understand it in completely incompatible and mutually exclusive ways, and we've had a good 80 years to try to figure it out. (The "was it Keynesian stimulus/WWII, or just the natural end of the downturn?" debate reminds me of the quantum debate about nonlocality--there are strong arguments for both, and no proof of either, and no clear way to figure it out.) Ultimately, we don't see the strings at all; we argue endlessly about the workings of our little glass automaton and fail to understand that it's sitting in the middle of a massive smiley face.

Lately, I've been having a very difficult time caring at all about the news when it comes to the recession, banking system reform, bailouts, any of it. I'm sure part of it is just fatigue with the whole thing. But I keep finding myself retreating into what I've dubbed my anthropologist's cynicism, which is the belief that none of this actually matters at all and most of it isn't real. NOTE: this is not to say that the hardship involved isn't happening. Of course it is, and it matters. But sometimes it's hard to believe that what's happening isn't just some sort of spontaneous, natural sea change or cycle, like a tidal wave--that something very like it would have happened nowish almost no matter what we did, and that AIG and CDOs matter about as much as algae. This entire disaster is built on a near-incredible series of abstractions (going all the way back to currency--I won't go so far back as the notion of property), to the point where one can almost think of it as a mass hallucination. Furthermore, even when I come out of my academic funk enough to take the crisis at face value, the degree to which nobody has any idea what is going on or what is to be done about it, and the degree to which any one opinion can be convincingly argued against, certainly suggests that while the phenomena at hand are real, our understanding of them is merely a comforting fiction.

This idea is not at all surprising to the anthropological cynic. As I learned over and over in The Anthropology of Policymaking, policy frequently has myriad effects in addition to--or in place of--its intended result. The process by which problems are identified, solutions conceived, and policies implemented generally involves multiple heroic assumptions, sometimes retrospectively insane logic, willful ignorance and oversimplification. What policy or methods represent the best solutions is determined less by an empirical advance of knowledge than by personal politics and ideological fads--much as in economics (supply-side! No, demand-side!) and quantum physics (nonlocality is real! No, it's not! It secretly doesn't violate relativity, I swear! Except when it does!) But we persist in believing, very firmly, that policymaking and many other arguably more quantitative fields are rational processes of improvement, whose wildly unpredictable results are owed more to the complexity and difficulty of the problems or questions these disciplines engage than they are to the complete disconnect between what we think we are doing and what is actually going on.

This, of course, is the joke. We think we see the strings, but they are far too long for us to comprehend them as such. They may not actually be strings at all, but rather Slinkies--hell if I know. This is why (in colossally superior and self-satisfied terms) I'm so bored with the financial crisis stories: a joke isn't funny when you already know the punchline. The punchline is that we don't actually understand the economic forces around us, nor do we understand our interactions with them. It's all fooled by randomness with a healthy dose of storytelling and myth. A form of paganism, if you like--believing that human actions affect natural phenomena. (Thank god we burned a Yule log this year, or the sun might not have come up in January either.)

Much the same can be said about political journalism and even journalism as a whole. There were many astute comments about this in the BJ thread as well as in the original post; there was also a Marc Ambinder piece that I cannot for the life of me find that I thought said something very true about the election coverage. Ambinder said that he truly thought, and had for most of the election, that the whole thing would swing on voters really hating Republicans right now plus a couple of big, sort of constant issues (I think the war and maybe the economy). That was it. None of the daily stories mattered. But he, and the press in general, can't just write that one story and be done with it. Nor can they write the same damn story word for word over and over (much as it may seem like it sometimes). So they cover all the little stuff that doesn't matter as if it did, because it's a story. And people who follow politics, who follow campaigns--and people who are in campaigns--all come to believe that it matters too, because again, what are they going to do? Sit around, whistle, and wait for November?

I'm sure this same basic myth applies to many more human endeavors, especially as everything that humans do becomes more and more data-driven on a more and more granular level. We have to do something with all that data, and so we come to believe that it's important. We build whole occupations around collecting, analyzing, and storytelling that information (in a sense, that's part of what finance is, and it's certainly what financial infotainment like Cramer's show does). Only very rarely does something big enough and inescapable enough come along and show us that it's all one big joke.

In the margins, though, we have court jesters to point out how silly it all is. Humor rests, often, on uncomfortable truths--on saying things that are just true enough to laugh about but not so true as to kill the party that is our collective hallucination that we can see and even pull some of the strings. The reason journalists keep finding themselves in service to the big guys, as Glenn Greenwald points out in searing terms, is that the daily practice (as opposed to the occasional monumental achievement) of journalism involves maintaining those fictions, structures, assumptions, and logics. This isn't, particularly, an insult to journalism--it just means that journalists, like everyone else, live in a kind of social fiction. If they stepped outside it, not only would power structures make their lives difficult, but no one would actually understand what they were saying. They would look like crackpots. Humor is, most often, only language we have for such things.

In that sense, then, it's not so surprising that the key to Watchmen, or, on occasion, the real truth-teller in the room, is the comedian.

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Jim Cramer Interview Outtake Pt. 3

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Essential reading (no, really)

I know I've been linking and doing not much else, but these two pieces are true tours de force. (I've been swamped with work and trying to get back into the rhythm of school after ICCAs, okay, I have obligations and whatnot.)

The first is "An Oral History of the Bush White House" from Vanity Fair. I'm only on page 2 myself, but it's already been amazing hearing people from Richard Clarke to Germany's foreign minister give their uncensored, undiplomatic takes in colloquial language on various moments of the administration. The piece has also illuminated a number of moments or occurrences that I never knew had taken place.

I found the piece through Ta-Nehisi, who gave it a stirring endorsement:

...folks should read the piece just because it really is stunning to see it all laid out before you. Rarely does one see cravenness, arrogance and incompetence married in such expert fashion. I was 25 when Bush came to office, and I never thought it would get this bad. But Purdum and Murphy show how things almost necessarily--from day one--had to go this way.

I read this piece on the plane ride out West, yesterday. I got halfway through and couldn't take it, I had to take a break. Finished it just we were coming over Utah, and I was just stunned. Journalism takes a lot of heat on this blog, perhaps some of it undeserved. So it's only right that I call out something when it's well done. Read this piece. Read it. Read it. Read it.

Second, Radley Balko explains with inimitable and wide-ranging logic why the War on Drugs is both a failure and a costly, harmful, and and misguided effort to begin with in "War on Drugs: The Collateral Damage" over at Culture 11. I particularly found his points about the militarizaton of police to be fascinating, though I suppose that's not surprising given all the studying of political power and state formation/state institutions I do. The piece is a comprehensive indictment of the drug war and its attendant policies and it's very much worth reading for the higher-level perspective that is generally so lacking in discussions of drug policy.

A note on Culture 11--it's a website (webzine?) dealing with culture as well as politics, geared to the American cultural conservative. It's been cited by many conservatives who have been revolted by the contemporary Republican party. I moseyed over there once before and was unimpressed, but this article has caused me to revise my estimation--clearly the piece I read that time was not fully representative of Culture 11's offerings. I'll be interested to see what comes out of the site as part of my continuing effort to understand what the hell this "conservatism" business is actually all about.