Civility.

Brandon Watson expresses it well:

Civility is the practice of maintaining civic good relations, where civic good relations are those relations that make society 'work' in some sense. (The old Aristotelian name for them would be civic friendships.) Society is a way in which we live together, and civic good relations are those relations among the people in society which make living together possible and viable, either because they are pleasant, or because they are useful, or because they are good for us. In this sense you can have civic good relations with people you don't really like at all; in such cases you simply recognize that, whatever problems you have with them, you have to live with them to achieve certain good things, and you act accordingly. 

[...] 

All the mechanisms of democratic politics depend for their success on reliable venues for rhetorical communication; good rhetorical communication will often require argument. But you can have a pretty successful democratic politics based less on argument than on human sympathy, and one finds in fact in democratic politics that resolution of serious disputes is very often resolved not by argument but by compromise or by mutual sympathy or by a live-and-let-live approach. We should certainly be thankful for that; otherwise our societies would have failed long ago.

Of course it's election season again, and there have been a few uncomfortable culture-war flare-ups already. I'd lament the intensity of the polarization, but I'm actually not convinced that we're anywhere near a high-tide of civic division. On the other hand, social networks do give us new modes of engagement, and it's not clear that the old practices that sustain a civil society transfer easily to the highly performative world of social media.

UPDATE: Read the good comment.

Vibrant.

Thomas Frank tackles vibrancy:

Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn’t successful— isn’t even a city, really—unless it can lay claim to being “vibrant.” Vibrancy is so universally desirable, so totemic in its powers, that even though we aren’t sure what the word means, we know the quality it designates must be cultivated. The vibrant, we believe, is what makes certain cities flourish. The absence of vibrancy, by contrast, is what allows the diseases of depopulation and blight to set in.

This formulation sounded ridiculous to me when I first encountered it. Whatever the word meant, “vibrancy” was surely an outcome of civic prosperity, not its cause. Putting it the other way round was like reasoning that, since sidewalks get wet when it rains, we can encourage rainfall by wetting the sidewalks. But to others, the vibrancy mantra is profoundly persuasive. [...] Specifically, vibrancy transforms communities by making them more prosperous.

-Thomas Frank, "Dead End on Shakin' Street"

Some thoughts:

1. Well, now that I've read this, "vibrant" has gone into the category with "quirky" as words I can only use with implicit reference to marketing campaigns.
2. This is of course an attack on city- and corporation-subsidized vibrancy, not actual urban life. Baltimore has a big foundation-funded street fair called Artscape ("America's largest free arts festival," whatever that means). For five years or so, a local artists' collective ran an independent DIY festival called Whartscape as explicit counterprogramming. It's the nation's Artscapes that are under consideration, not our Whartscapes.
3. How much money is actually going towards vibrancy efforts? Frank talks about "blowing millions setting up gallery districts and street fairs": at a representative event, where does the money come from? How much does the Station North Arts District in Baltimore actually cost the city? Probably the answer varies a bit from city to city.
4. Even if vibrancy as a whole can't be measured, particular events are perfect fodder for pie charts and presentations. It's way easier to report "we got two new galleries" or "festival attendence was up 11%" than it is to tackle the problem of public schools or build consensus for a bigger policy change. Which doesn't excuse going for the easy path.
5. If foundations are trying to solicit donations from corporations and rich businesspeople, wouldn't you expect them to lean pretty hard on the idea of attracting a big base of yuppies for corporations to hire? Whereas if in practice a lot of money gets put toward smaller-scale community efforts, they wouldn't make that the main part of the pitch, would they? It'd help to see some numbers on where arts funding goes.
6. Throughout the article there's an assumption that cities are using vibrancy efforts to compete with each other. What if they're actually trying to compete with their own suburbs?

Churches and tax exemptions.

Yglesias argues that non-profits shouldn't get property tax exemptions. He says that you'd think conservatives would love the pro-business implications of this argument, except for one thing:

Unfortunately, the main beneficiary of nonprofit tax bias is churches, and conservatives love churches. The church case is, however, a particularly pernicious one since one-day-a-week religious services are an exceptionally poor use of scarce land and it’s simply not the case that building more lavish church structures attracts God’s favor.

So, yes, the main sanctuaries of large churches generally don't get used throughout the week (though many chapels have daily services). But off the top of my head, I know of many churches that run day-care centers or schools during the week. They're often willing to make space available in the evenings for AA or NA meetings. Now I'm curious about what proportion of churches do this, and marking it down under TO RESEARCH.

Also, I know he's kidding around, but just in case any of you are thinking about doing this: trying to "attract God's favor" is a bad reason for building a Christian church.

The Influence of American Sea Power.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry argues against Ron Paul's foreign policy at The American Scene and Business Insider. In short (from BI):

From bases in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the US military protects the world's shipping lanes, making sure the clockwork of the global economy runs smoothly and goods and oil can be shipped to and back. This is the part of the global American military footprint that actually matters, not the wars. These wars may be very bad ideas, but Ron Paul and his ilk don't just want to end those wars. They want to end America's global military hegemony.

So here are some questions for Gobry: is the structure of the United States military really suited to this end? What's the relationship between shipping-lane protection and the Global War on Terror? And, most importantly, why don't Paul's opponents make this response in debates? (Forgive me if they do. I am not keeping track of the GOP primaries.)

This position isn't the usual one for the defenders of the status quo, because mere protection of global trade doesn't justify the US Military's current goal of "full spectrum dominance," that is, the ability to defeat any conceivable threat from any other power. If the United States only needs to be hegemonic enough to protect the global economy, there's still a lot of room to slash military spending.

And then there's this:

We're all for blasting illegal, unwinnable, endless foreign wars of choice. We're all for smashing the national security state that treats grandma like a terrorist if she wants to board a flight. We're all for howling at the insidious and wasteful military-industrial complex, and cutting the unsustainable Pentagon budget.

At the risk of being flippant, no we're not. What Gobry describes here is a minority position in US politics. I know of pundits who take this line: Ross Douthat comes to mind. But can anyone show me a politician who votes against wars of choice, the security state, and the military-industrial complex, but publicly articulates the importance of a pax Americana for world trade? I have a hunch that such a figure won't appear unless Ron Paul's brand of anti-imperialism gains enough momentum to frighten Washington.

Abbottabad.

I was pleased to see that the August 8th New Yorker had a long feature on the Bin Laden raid. I wasn't disappointed on first read. It was detailed and riveting, and I recommended it to friends.

Weird to find out that the author didn't speak to any of the SEALs who went on the raid. I thought that was the whole hook of the piece, especially since there's a sentence about the account being based on the SEALs' recollection of the raid. Turns out he means an account based on accounts of the recollections.

I've got a lot of goodwill for the New Yorker, but I wish this had been more straightforward.

Hipsters and the tea party: close, but not quite.

Hipster Tea Party with Ryan Hansen from Ryan Hansen

I think that if I say the "hipsters always get into everything ironically, and were into it before you were" angle is played out, I'm falling into some kind of trap. So... the "BASSIST NEEDED!!" poster is funny.

"Founding Gardeners."

There's probably a way to relate this brief review of Andrea Wulf's Founding Gardeners to Michelle Obama's anti-obesity initiatives and then blast the Tea Party, but I don't have it in me. Instead I'll just quote my favorite sentence:

As seen with Washington in New York, the Founders' near obsession with horticulture seemed at times to obscure their judgment—almost no pressing issue could dissuade them from visiting another garden—but it also spoke to their commitment to the agrarian ideal.

Seriously? BHL?

Say what you will about France, but their public intellectuals can get things done. This is so weird: philosopher/celebrity Bernard-Henri Lévy claims that he's the one responsible for convincing the French government to intervene in Libya, and that he did this by wandering into Libya to meet with rebel leaders to help them call up Sarkozy. I don't know how I missed this story, but I'm glad Ross Douthat referenced it in his latest blog post:

It is an extraordinary tale, about which neither the Élysée Palace nor the Foreign Ministry wished to comment, other than quietly urging a grain of salt. Mr. Lévy was in Egypt at the tail end of the Tahrir Square uprising, went to the Libyan border but had pressing business in Paris. But on Feb. 27, before returning to North Africa, he called Mr. Sarkozy, asking if he was interested in making contact with the rebels. He was, so Mr. Lévy rented a plane and flew to Marsa Matrouh, the Egyptian airport closest to Libya.

Accompanied by his oldest friend and longtime collaborator, Gilles Hertzog, and, of course, a photographer, Marc Roussel, Mr. Lévy walked across the border past hundreds of yards of refugees and foreign workers and flagged down a car, which was delivering vegetables every 20 miles on the way to Tobruk, the first Libyan city inside the border. He then went to Bayda, where he found Mustafa Mohammed Abdul Jalil, the former Libyan minister of justice and leader of the Interim Transitional National Council.

Woodward on the raid.

Hopefully everyone's already read Bob Woodward's article about the raid on the Bin Laden compound, but if not, here it is. As good as this one is, I'm still eager to read a longer telling of the story. Finding bin Laden has been a massive (and massively expensive) national project, and I'm curious to see what lessons we draw from the operation.

Interstates before interstates.

From the Baltimore Sun's Getting There blog:

“U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is pointing out that this weekend marks the 200th anniversary of what could be called the United States' first interstate highway: the National Road from Cumberland to what is now Wheeling, W.Va.

“Construction of the road was authorized by Congress in 1806 but didn't begin until May 8, 1811 -- setting a precedent of road project delays that persists to this day.”

The weekend in question, by the way, was last weekend. I'm always glad to hear that the people in Cumberland had something to do on a Saturday.

Monarchy, cont'd.

Josh has written more on monarchy, and the first thing to note is that he pulls off a footnote trick that, to my knowledge, not even David Foster Wallace ever tried. Well done!

Anyway, I think Josh is right to get away from the question of whether a "yearning for monarchy" is in some way natural to humans. Beyond that, I don't have much to say. Of course there's no way to introduce a powerless monarchy in the USA, and the political problem that makes monarchy attractive (unlike Colin Firth in The King's Speech, all of our leaders want the job) has do be addressed by more democracy — more activity on the local level.

Kings and the problem of the center.

Internet amigo Josh expressed revulsion ("ugh") at Ross Douthat's praise-of-monarchy post. If Douthat was really saying that we should have kings because, deep down, we like them so much, then "ugh" would be warranted.

But the assertion that "[i]n their hearts, most people want a king and queen" is not itself Douthat's defense of monarchy. It's the starting point for Douthat to explain (1) why we seem to want monarchs, and (2) why this is not a totally bad thing. The actual defense is Douthat's too-brief description of how a mostly powerless monarchy can be a helpful check on a modern democratic government.

Anyway, without committing myself to a position on the question of monarchs in the abstract, I'd like to post one of Robert Jenson's descriptions of "the problem of the center":

The problem is the problem of the center, of what joins you and me to be a unit other than either of us, within which each of us has a function for the other. If we are centered merely by a system or ideal, our society will be qualitatively old, and will reduce us to functions, for systems and ideals cannot love. Therefore, societies have regularly sought a person, a being who can love as the center: the King, the Führer, the theios aner of a state cult. But those who love and therefore die, and do not rise again, fail at love -- so that all societies so centered are at last distorted by the frenzied attempts of their centering persons to be immortal.

-Robert Jenson, “Eschatological Politics and Political Eschatology.” Essays in Theology of Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. (26)

We should know.

Amy Davidson writes in her New Yorker blog:

Here are some of the reasons we’ve held people at Guantánamo, according to files obtained by WikiLeaks and, then, by several news organizations: A sharecropper because he was familiar with mountain passes; an Afghan “because of his general knowledge of activities in the areas of Khost and Kabul based as a result of his frequent travels through the region as a taxi driver”; an Uzbek because he could talk about his country’s intelligence service, and a Bahraini about his country’s royal family (both of those nations are American allies); an eighty-nine year old man, who was suffering from dementia, to explain documents that he said were his son’s; an imam, to speculate on what worshippers at his mosque were up to; a cameraman for Al Jazeera, to detail its operations; a British man, who had been a captive of the Taliban, because “he was expected to have knowledge of Taliban treatment of prisoners and interrogation tactics”; Taliban conscripts, so they could explain Taliban conscription techniques; a fourteen-year-old named Naqib Ullah, described in his file as a “kidnap victim,” who might know about the Taliban men who kidnapped him. (Ullah spent a year in the prison.) Our reasons, in short, do not always really involve a belief that a prisoner is dangerous to us or has committed some crime; sometimes (and this is more debased) we mostly think we might find him useful.

From a New Statesman article on the corruption of the New Orleans city police:

On 17 March this year, the federal department of justice (DoJ) decided that enough was enough and it has made moves to have the New Orleans police department (NOPD) placed under the supervision of a federal judge. The New Orleans jail system will likely follow.

The department released a report covering only the past two years and ignoring several current federal investigations of police officers for murder. It says, more or less, that the NOPD is incapable on any level; that it is racist; that it systemically violates civil rights, routinely using "unnecessary and unreasonable force"; that it is "largely indifferent to widespread violations of law and policy by its police officers" and appears to have gone to great lengths to cover up its shootings of civilians. "NOPD's mishandling of officer-involved shooting investigations," the report says, "was so blatant and egregious that it appeared intentional in some respects."

The interventionist flip.

This section of a Ross Douthat column describes something that shaped the way I think:

In the 1990s, many Democrats embraced Bill Clinton’s wars of choice in the Balkans and accepted his encroachments on civil liberties following the Oklahoma City bombing, while many Republicans tilted noninterventionist and libertarian. If Al Gore had been president on 9/11, this pattern might have persisted, with conservatives resisting the Patriot Act the way they’ve rallied against the T.S.A.’s Rapiscan technology, and Vice President Joe Lieberman prodding his fellow Democrats in a more Cheney-esque direction on detainee policy.

But because a Republican was president instead, conservative partisans suppressed their libertarian impulses and accepted the logic of an open-ended war on terror, while Democratic partisans took turns accusing the Bush administration of shredding the Constitution.

I found this so confusing when it happened.

An argument and a typology.

(using this blog as an expanded memory)

I. The argument

Alexander Pruss has posted the nine-step "consequence" argument against Calvinism. The consensus in the comments is that the fourth premise (sixth step) is the one to argue about.

II. The typology

From Adam Kotsko at AUFS:

In the center, you have liberalism, for which capitalism is here to stay and must simply be managed (and sometimes that “management” is held to consist in leaving it to its own devices). The attempts to get rid of capitalism can be classified as either trying to replace it with a system of similar universality and universalizability (left-wing) or retreating into a particularity that will shield us from its effects (right-wing). That really is how the situation is laid out: you have socialism (left-wing) or capitalism (liberalism), and the only place for a “third way” to land is on the right wing (whose exemplary form is fascism).

In the comments, where there's a lot of noise but also some helpful clarifications, Kotsko explains a little further.

What I reject is local-ism, which makes the irreducibility of the local a starting place and rejects universalizability in principle — i.e., people who will say “the whole problem with capitalism is that it’s universal; universalism is oppressive in itself; we need local/particular strategies that can never become universal and hence oppressive, etc.” I think we need models that are universalizable, that can be applied (while making adjustments for local circumstances) everywhere, that think through what it would look like for something to be applied universally...

It goes without saying that if you don't think capitalism is the problem, you'll be in the "liberal" category here. Anyways, "universalizability" is a useful concept.

One more thing: I have to admit it was a little bit disturbing when Kotsko broke the fourth wall in the comments and started talking about the disagreement being a performance for the lurkers, of which I am one.

English needs a distinct second person plural.

From a Maryland Democratic Party mailing apparently addressed either to the state of Maryland as a whole or to someone really, really rich:

It's not a question of whether you agree with Bob Ehrlich or not…

It's a question of which Bob Ehrlich you agree with.

Is it the Bob Ehrlich who keeps talking about all the tax cuts he'll give you?

Or the Bob Ehrlich who raised your taxes by $3 billion?

I just don't know what I would do if someone raised my taxes by $3 billion.

Politics and LOST.

I've been wondering if there's a good way to tie LOST to politics. I'd wanted to chase the leadership angle that Noel Murray at the AV Club often writes about, but Brett McCracken at The Search has beaten me to it by a mile. I really like his explication of the show's geopolitical themes:

“As I reflect on the show having seen all six seasons, I think the central thematic tension of Lost has always been that of the global vs. the local, the big view vs. the narrow view, “for the greater good” vs. ‘my own private island.’

[…]

“The show presents a way forward for our chaotic, treacherous, ‘WTF?! Where are we??’ world. And the way forward is sacrificial love for our neighbor– ‘neighbor’ meaning our children and love interests, but also our broader global family… those who are very different from us and yet nevertheless struggling to make sense of ‘the island’ we all inhabit.”

The whole post is much longer, and all of it is worth reading. My attempts to come up with something similar kept foundering on the difficulty of pinning characters to the leadership styles of actual leaders — I thought I might have had something with a comparison between George W. Bush and Locke at the height of his man-of-faith phase, but I couldn't really make it fit. But where my allegorical readings stumbled, McCracken's analysis of themes really succeeds.

Big money and local politics.

When Citizens United came down, the national media quite naturally focused on how the ruling would affect national politics, which is where big money dukes it out with big money. But who was thinking about the little races? Certainly not me.

Thank goodness for Carter Wrenn. He's watching the battle between Alcoa Corporation and the Stanly County Commissioners over chemical dumping in Badin Lake. Here's the key final paragraph:

Alcoa’s an international behemoth conglomerate. Its Chairman is from Brazil, its President is from Germany, it’s partnered with the Chinese and its world headquarters is in Pittsburgh, old Andrew Mellon’s hometown. It smelts aluminum everywhere from Iceland to the Amazon Rainforest and its annual budget is bigger than the State of North Carolina’s – so what hope on earth do three local County Commissioners (who may raise $5000 in their entire campaigns) have of winning re-election if Alcoa with its $20 billion annual budget is dead-set on retiring them?

You ought to know that Wrenn played a major part behind the scenes of some of the roughest campaigns in recent NC history, so he knows a little something about the power of TV advertising.

How conservative is this?

A germ of a thought: Insofar as I have one, my basic political principle is something along the lines of “The government’s level of access to resources should significantly, though not directly, constrain government action.” More colloquially: “If you can’t afford to do something, you generally shouldn’t do it, no matter how badly you want to.”

This sets me at odds with both parties in practice, though I could reconcile myself with segments of either in theory.

In a utilitarian scheme, what’s the proper way to compare not doing something about present suffering against putting those who come after you in an impossible position?

I should be less vague and centrist-cowardly before trying to adapt this for the big blog.

Acorns, etc.

I wrote up something at the League on the ACORN tempest. I can't help thinking two things: first, the videos imply something's wrong, but the makers are content to just imply widespread corruption without attempting to pin down the extent. With some amount of taxpayer money at stake, a low-level congressional hearing and further investigation by professional reporters is appropriate. Second, ACORN's a big organization, and yet the conservative media is interested in the story because (only because?) of ties to Obama and other Democrats. What I'm curious about is whether and to what degree ACORN's internal problems hurt the people that they're trying to help, because it's not yet clear that they do.

The new media vs. old media angle on this story-of-the-week is the main reason I'm writing about it rather than just reading. I don't want James O'Keefe to be the standard for citizen journalism. That is, he got the scoop but I'm still waiting for real journalists to tell the story.

(Also, my friend Hope told me to check out the videos well before they got to the point in the news cycle where I would have seen them otherwise. Not being a watcher of cable news or a reader of Breitbart's blogs, I normally wouldn't have caught something like this until it crossed over. It was interesting to watch the whole process.)