Are prison stocks a secure pick? - Apr. 30, 2004: "Attracted by an expanding prison population and an overcrowded penal system, investors have sent shares of Corrections Corp. of America and Geo Group soaring over the last year. Both stocks now trade at or near multi-year highs.


'The prison population really never stops growing,' said Irving Lingo, chief financial officer with Corrections Corp. 'Even if the growth rate slows, the real issue is that inmates are coming into systems that are already overcrowded.'


Throughout the last decade, the U.S. prison population has grown by 3.6 percent annually to 2.2 million people -- or one in every 143 residents -- at the end of 2002, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.


That may be a scary statistic if you're a student of sociology, but it points to a nice 'customer base' if you're Corrections Corp. or Geo Group."

OK, shoot me...

Did American soldiers treat the Iraqi prisoners they "humiliated" any worse than the Iraqi prisoners routinely treated their wives?

Innocent people shouldn't be imprisoned and no one should be beaten or raped but the routine treatment of women in the Arab world, South Asia and other "traditional societies" doesn't occasion this level of outrage. To be fair, it's largely because it's routine, and the commonplace isn't news. But there's also the pervasive sense that, even if the more egregious acts of brutality--honor killing, dowery murder and stoning for adultry are deplorable, women can't be "humiliated" because they're accostomed to subservience. Young Arab males are another thing--humiliating a macho man constitutes a grievous harm. No one worries about women--they're used to it.

One of our part-timers, with an MA in philosophy and no prospects, got a job xeroxing. Within 3 months he was put on the management track, not because he showed great promise in collating and stapling reports but because management a manager passing by saw him and thought he would be bored at his job. No one ever worries that women who xerox, staple and collate get bored. Women are used to it--it's just routine.

The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > 'Acquainted With the Night': Troubled Children and Troubled Parents: "Could there be an incoherent rebellion under way against the relentless pressure to achieve, which kicks in now at the preschool stage? It may be a clue that the symptoms of many childhood psychiatric disorders seem to preclude schoolwork and attendance. Maybe the only problem with the kids is that they have been watching their own high-achieving parents, and they have seen where all that leads."

After Nickled and Dimed in America Barbara Erenreich should know better. If you don't get the credentials to make it into the talented tenth, you'll be kicking around between Walmart and the miscellaney of other jobs in the service sector that she describes in vivid detail.

Every year we have a session for academic advisors at which we are fed the usual pious sentiments about the value of a liberal education and eschewing narrowly vocational goals in favor of critical reasoning and self cultuvation. This would be fine if students were independently wealthy or sufficiently privileged to walk into sinecures on graduation. Realistically it is B.S.: students need to be trained in technical skills and credentialed. High achieving is a prerequsite for the good life--students are merely worried that they won't be able to make it in a viciously competitive environment where without the grades and credentials life will not be worth living.

Playing Tough

From Crooked Timber: Previous convictions: "I’ve just been over to Electrolite, where Patrick Nielsen Hayden has posted this stunning excerpt from the New York Times :


"… the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time. The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country’s criminal justice system"

Why should we be surprised? For the past quarter century or so most Americans have been convinced that tough will solve all out problems--if only in the long run when we're all dead. The hypothesis isn't falsifiable: if we get tough and things don't get fixed it shows that we haven't been tough enough; if things get worse it shows that have to stay the course to recoup sunk costs. Anyone who leaps off the tough train will get ground under the wheels because if things don't improve immediately--and they can't after years of destructive get-tough policies--he'll be blamed for derailing a get-tough policy that was just about to start working.

I don't think that Bush or his American supporters are really bothered by prison brutality as such--it's the kinky fun and games, prisoners on leashes, sodomized, made to simulate homosexual group sex that gets up their noses. I doubt that they would seriously object to a little sleep deprivation or good, clean flogging, in Iraq, Gitmo or in prisons stateside.

We got into this mess because liberals made no serious attempt to offer the America people a viable alternative. Home on the range there are only cowboys and wimps. The only alternative middle Americas see to get tough policies is the program of the "helping professions"--therapists, social workers, liberal ministers and the education profession.

The Clash of Civilizations

The year: 2043. The EU (since admitting Japan, the “Eurasian Union”) has become the world’s only HyperPower. The US, along with China, has been demoted to mere SuperPower status.

Within the EU there is growing concern about America's weapons of mass destruction as well as its ongoing human rights violations. In addition to stubbornly retaining the death penalty and allowing its citizens virtually unrestricted access to fire arms, the US remains one of the last nations on earth to resist the establishment of a socialist-democratic welfare state. While all nations in the EU have achieved 100% adult literacy and fund higher education, through the graduate level, for all citizens who qualify, the US continues to regard effective education as a luxury item for the elite--the majority of children are warehoused and, in the better public schools, entertained.

As a consequence, productivity has steadily declined in the US and the economy remains stagnant while the gap between rich and poor continues to grow. In short, the US has joined the "Third World": a small group of technocrats and families of the hereditary plutocracy enjoy lives of fabulous opulence in gated communities while the greater part of the population, without hereditary wealth or the education to participate in a labor market that requires a high level of technical skills, are locked out. Each year an increasing percentage of the GDP goes to fund security--police, private security guards, increasingly high tech surveillance equipment and prisons.

Sigrid Eriksdottir, Prime Manager of the EU, in consultation with her advisors, has finally made the decision to invade the US in order to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction and initiate regime change. "We're going to disable their nukes, take out that cowboy George Bush III, liberate the American people and make the world safe for Democratic Socialism," she says, in the perfect English which all citizens of EU nations speak as their second language. "Americans will welcome our forces as liberators."

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, George Bush III holds a war council with his advisors in a reinforced, lead-lined bunker a mile underground, fitted with shocks and McPherson struts to absorb the vibration of falling bombs. Bush's staff sociologists have assured him that, contrary to Eriksdottir's predictions, Americans will not welcome EU forces as liberators; indeed, they predict that the majority will fight to the death to preserve the American Way of Life. He has also been advised that the US may get military support from the UK, Canada, Australia and even a number of nations in Anglophone Africa if he plays his cards right.

Above ground, ordinary citizens prepare for war: most have no interest in being "liberated" by the EU and do not understand why Eriksdottir has decided to invade. Stubbornly monoglot, with little interest in the world outside the US, they get all their information about "Old Europe" from the American media, which portrays Europeans as decadent sissies who spend most of their time participating in bi-sexual orgies.

Inflamed by the preaching of fundamentalist Protestant televangelists and Muslim mullahs (Islam has become a major force in the US), the masses vow to resist. Most have little interest in issues or ideologies—they just want to defend their homeland. A sizeable minority however are concerned, with good reason, that an EU invasion and subsequent occupation will undermine their culture and take away what they hold dear: the right to buy guns, to have their kids taught Creationism in the public schools, to eat junk food and to drive SUVs.

By contrast, most members of the elite outside of the President's small coterie are eager for the invasion. They wish the US had joined the EU years ago and established a humane welfare state. They do not own guns or want their children taught Creationism and, privileged though they are, would prefer to live like citizens of other affluent nations, without gates, bars, security guards and beggars in the streets.

Eriksdottir is shocked when her sociological reconnaissance team reports that there will be resistance from the very Americans who would benefit most from liberation--the masses who get least from the conservative economic policies that are locked into place in the US and who are least able to isolate themselves from the violence, crime and public disorder that are pervasive. This isn't the way Marx said it was supposed to be.

Neo-liberals in the US, looking forward to the invasion and occupation, are not surprised. They have known for decades that the real "clash of civilizations" is not between the East and West, as it had been during the Cold war, between the North and South or between Christendom and Islam. It is between the Enlightenment and Traditional Societies, between the educated, cosmopolitan upper middle class around the world and the tribal masses in the US as well as elsewhere.

Sopranos: Carmella and Tony, Meadow and Finn

Tony and Carmella slept together, and enjoyed it but Tony left before Carmella woke up to "avoid sending the wrong message" as he told Dr. Malfi, and Carmella got on the phone to her lawyer to get divorce proceedings going in earnest.

Meadow and Finn were having problems too: Finn wanted to go back to his parents in San Diego for the summer. Meadow, afraid he'll bail, becomes demanding and difficult. So Finn proposes--at least he got it right. End of show: Meadow on the phone to Carmella to announce her engagement while Carmella looks out to the pool where Tony is floating like a bloated marine mammal.

Why do people behave this way? Why didn't Tony stay the night? Why doesn't Carmella just put a stop to the whole thing? Why did Meadow make more demands because she was afraid that Finn was cooling towards her? Why is it that when we want someone's favor, dread the loss of their friendship and feel insecure in the relationship, instead of extending ourselves to secure it, we undermine it?

Why aren't we rational self-interested choosers?

Of course one can read it as a Prisoner's Dilemma. Tony, Carmella and Meadow are betting that their partners will defect and playing the D strategy to counter. But it isn't a Prisoner's Dilemma strictly speaking because there are feedback effects: a player's countering a predicted defection makes the defection more likely. The rational play, I think is the leap of faith

Whether it's rational though depends on how heavily you weight avoiding rejection and failure, and that should be a matter of taste about which there is no disputing. But it still seems irrational to weight the avoidance of failure heavily if there are no opportunity costs.

Red and Blue America: Culture Wars Revisited

The Atlantic | December 2001 | One Nation, Slightly Divisible | Brooks:

"We in the coastal metro Blue areas read more books and attend more plays than the people in the Red heartland. We're more sophisticated and cosmopolitan—just ask us about our alumni trips to China or Provence, or our interest in Buddhism. But don't ask us, please, what life in Red America is like. We don't know. We don't know who Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins are, even though the novels they have co-written have sold about 40 million copies over the past few years. We don't know what James Dobson says on his radio program, which is listened to by millions. We don't know about Reba or Travis. We don't know what happens in mega-churches on Wednesday evenings, and some of us couldn't tell you the difference between a fundamentalist and an evangelical, let alone describe what it means to be a Pentecostal. Very few of us know what goes on in Branson, Missouri, even though it has seven million visitors a year, or could name even five NASCAR drivers, although stock-car races are the best-attended sporting events in the country. We don't know how to shoot or clean a rifle. We can't tell a military officer's rank by looking at his insignia. We don't know what soy beans look like when they're growing in a field.

"All we know, or all we think we know, about Red America is that millions and millions of its people live quietly underneath flight patterns, many of them are racist and homophobic, and when you see them at highway rest stops, they're often really fat and their clothes are too tight.

"And apparently we don't want to know any more than that"

Actually, I know quite a bit about Red America having lived in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and, more importantly, having grown up in Paterson, NJ--Sopranos Country. Unlike David Brooks, I never had the urge to explore the heart of darkness--I was only too happy to get out. Now I watch the Sopranos and reread Updike's Rabbit books regularly for sheer pleasure of reminding myself that I am not there.

Returning from safari in Flyover Country, PA, Brooks assures Blue Atlantic Monthly readers that underneath their crudity, ill-fitting clothing and fat, Red Americans are really decent people--not the homophobes and bigots Blues imagine them to be--as Blues, irritated by some of the excesses of the coastal elite, nod at their flatscreen displays and develop an urge to visit Des Moines.

I would council them to resist the urge. Reds are boring. Their intellectual landscape is impoverished, sparse and arid--and I for one have no taste for desert landscapes. They are emotionally flat, and do not tolerate passion, except in strictly circumscribed areas, or deviation from routine. They are unreflective, uncritical and conventional. Conversation with them is difficult and unrewarding. After the rigors of making appropriate small talk, avoiding vocabulary or topics that intimidate them, stretching to find safe general interest topics and make the ritually correct noises there is nothing left: all the conversational foreplay leads to nothing.

Why do we ignore or demonize them? (Brooks is right--we do) I think it's our entrenched moralism, our guilt for disliking good people. We have to rationalize our distaste by pinning moral failings on them--otherwise we should have to face the fact that we are snobs, that our likes and dislikes aren't tied to any moral qualities people possess but rather to how entertaining they are.

Could this be why we watch the Sopranos? There is, of course, the voyeristic impulse--getting inside the lives, and inside the heads, of people very different from us. That's what's fascinating about Rabbit: Updike pulls us inside the head of a character that we would not want to meet socially. But the Sopranos also provide the perfect moral excuse for our distaste: Tony, Chris, Pauly and the rest of them kill people and their wives, mistresses and whores live off the proceeds. So, we can persuade ourselves that we don't find them repugnant because they are dull, ignorant and conventional--we find them morally repugnant. That explains it: we not only get off scott free--we can congratulate ourselves on our moral sensitivity, as we do when we condemn the bigotry, homophobia and jingoism of the white working class.

Guarding the Guard Dogs? - Are you a dog "owner"—or a dog "guardian"? By Jon Katz: "Are you a dog 'owner'—or a dog 'guardian'?
By Jon Katz


Last month, In Defense of Animals, a California-based animal rights organization, sent me some materials about its 'Guardian Campaign.' A polite letter complimented me on my most recent book, then requested that I use the term 'guardian' rather than 'owner' in future writings about dogs.

The benefits of relating to animals as guardians rather than as owners would be 'far reaching,' wrote IDA president Dr. Elliot Katz (who's no relation). Changing how we speak would help change how we act. In a world where dogs are protected rather than owned, Katz argued, it would be easier to crack down on animal abuse, end the puppy-mill trade, and stop the killing of animals at shelters.

As a dog lover, owner of a rescue dog, and member of two rescue groups, I'm not convinced there will be concrete benefits from this metaphoric, even Orwellian revolution. "

I'm a cat owner. Cats don't benefit very much from being owned--they do fine being feral. When Katherine a.k.a. Kitty escaped from the St. Francis Day Animal Blessing at St. Johns (she bolted when the rector sprinkled her with holy water) she lived off the land for two weeks while finding her way home. Dr. Carillo, my dentist, and Nancy Painter who worked at the local supermarket reported on her progress as she wended her way east on Kearney and up Second Street.

Dogs are quite another thing and can't really make a decent living in the suburbs. I haven't owned a dog since Brownie, my childhood mutt, died at 16. In those days where I lived there were no leash laws: dogs roamed freely like cats, formed packs and cavorted around the neighborhood raiding trash cans and occasionally bringing down squirrels and rabbits. It was a good life for a dog: I won't have a dog if I have to keep him confined and walk him on a leash. Still, ownership benefits dogs and there's hardly a downside since, without any possibility of grasping the concept of property, they don't mind being owned.

It's hard to understand why people put such stock in word magic. Calling secretaries "administrative assistants" and addressing them as "Ms." doesn't make the job any tedious. Euphemisms and metaeuphemisms and euphemisms to the nth degree don't give sight to the blind, heal the lame or make "senior citizens" any younger. Whatever is the point? In England Old Age Pensioners get better treatment than Senior Citizens in the US and people happily chuck loose change into boxes for charities devoted to helping spastics. The halt, lame and blind, and the elderly and infirm, do not seem to do any worse than they do in the US.

It puts me in mind of one of the few good books Atheneum published while I was working there, Dr. Bowdlers Legacy by Noel Perrin, a history of expurgated literature. When I was there we couldn't imagine how the process could have gotten started--now we know.

It's an empirical question whether euphemism, bowdlerization and and political correctness do any good. I doubt it. If anything they are a cheap substitute for costly, inconvenient material improvements. So even while women with BAs in humanities disciplines have no options beside secretarial work we style them "administrative assistants" or as my university has it, upping the ante, "executive assistants." Talk is cheap.

According to Perrin, Addison, who saw the beginning of the Bowdlerization movement, objected that calling a kept women a "mistress" rather than a strumpet, trollop or whore only obscured the reality of the arrangement and made it seem respectable. By the same token, official loquitions concerning Walmart associates, undocumented workers and the differently abled put a kind face on a nasty situation and absolve us from doing anything to fix it.

Woodword Redux

Watching the interview with Bob Woodward on 60 Minutes last night it was delicious to realize (1) that lots of non-PBS-viewing, non-NYTimes-reading Middle Americans were also watching it and (2) that Bush and his staff were also watching it.

It sounds like a pulp novel with all the characters charactured: Colin Powell, prescient and schoolmasterly, counseling prudence"--Nestor amongst the Whitehouse staff of cavorting centaurs drunk with blood; Bush on orders from his "heavenly father" to save the world. What matters is not whether it's true but that it will be believed.

Now the younger generation, who missed out on the fun of Vietnam and Watergate can enjoy the new, improved version as the Iraq bodycount ticks up and the 9/11 hearings grind on. Admittedly, it may be a little early for the election. Bush afterall has Saddam in reserve. A show trial strategically timed could give him a boost and, if the 60 minutes piece can be believed, declining gas prices will delight the American public this summer. Still, the slow grinding mill diminishes him and will make it impossible for him to appeal to his performance as a war president.

Personally, I couldn't care less about the war except insofar as it erodes Bush's electability. Wars happen--though this one was a morally outrageous blunder.

BayouBuzz.com - Louisiana Politics and News

You are Paul Krugman! You're a brilliant economist
with a knack for both making sense of the
current economic situation and exposing the
Bush administration's lies about it. You
somehow came out as the best anti-war writer on
the Op-Ed staff. Other economists hate your
guts for selling out to the liberals. To hell
with 'em.


Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

The New York Times > Washington > News Analysis: President Makes a Case for
Freedom in the Middle East: " President Makes a Case for Freedom in the Middle East

"WASHINGTON, April 13 — Facing a moment of political peril unlike any in the more than one thousand days of his presidency, George W. Bush made the case on Tuesday night for staying the course in Iraq with the language and zeal of a missionary and combined it with a stark warning that failure would embolden America's enemies around the world.

"'We're changing the world,' Mr. Bush said halfway through a speech and news conference that was largely an hourlong justification for holding fast in Iraq, no matter how the casualties mount, no matter how chaotic the process of forming a new government.

"Drawing later on a line he often slips into his campaign speeches, he reminded a global audience that 'freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom."

Ruat coeli:"no matter how the casualties mount, no matter how chaotic...we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom." I wonder what sense, if any, he gives to "freedom" or what Americans who buy this think the goal is.

I'm an imperialist too. I'd like to see the whole world made over into the image of the latte-drinking, NY Times-reading, Volvo-driving Eastern Liberal Establishment--everyone educated, reflective and critical, well-read, politically liberal and reasonable. My aim is cultural genocide: to wipe out "traditional societies" and spread the Enlightenment--but that will take a lot of doing in the US as well as abroad. And Bush's policies aren't likely to achieve it.

A Decade After Massacres, Rwanda Outlaws Ethnicity

"This country, where ethnic tensions were whipped up into a frenzy of killing, is now trying to make ethnicity a thing of the past. There are no Hutu in the new Rwanda. There are no Tutsi either. The government, dominated by the minority Tutsi, has wiped out the distinctions by decree...

That new thinking has its critics — those who say that denying that ethnicity exists merely suppresses the painful ethnic dialogue that Rwanda requires.

But the government insists that if awareness of ethnic differences can be learned, so can the idea that ethnicity does not exist. Rwanda has an entrenched culture of obedience, and the populace has been quick to pick up on the government's no-ethnicity policy, at least in conversations with an outsider.

To hear Mr. Twahrwa put it: 'Ethnicity is bad. I want it to go away.'"

What a brilliant counter-cultural idea! You'd think that we Americans with our vast experience of ethnic diversity, or anyone following conflicts in the Balkans, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, India or anywhere else in the world where tribalism is a force could have figured that one out.

It isn't even clear that the Hutus and the Tutsis ever were ethnic groups in any robust sense: they speak the same language and intermarry, they're not readily distinguishible even by other Hutus and Tutsisi, they're all Catholics and the distinction between them was blurred until colonial powers decided to make it official, in some cases reclassifying individuals for its purposes. Yet even where ethnicity is conjured up it can still lead to genocide.

Ethnicity is bad. I want it go go away too.

Yes, It Is a War Against Islam

"The problem of modern terror--terror that combines an apocalyptic ideology and a yearning for destruction--demands honesty with ourselves about the nature of the threat and honesty in politics. Capturing the top leaders of Al Qaeda is a necessity, but terror is not a threat that will end with decapitation. Nor will it end with the ordinary politics of negotiation and concession... The radical Islamists are at war with modernity itself. Their sense of difference is encapsulated in the declaration of an alleged Al Qaeda spokesman: “You love life, and we love death.” Transnational terror cannot be combatted in an atmosphere of international distrust. At the very least, the terrorists have proved themselves to be as good as their word. Governments that hope to resist them must be, too."

The radical Islamists are at war with modernity itself. Meanwhile romantics and postmodernists in the West bash the Enlightenment imagining buccolic tribal villages of happy peasants in local costume producing traditional crafts.

Today is Good Friday, and I remember my own romantic fantasy: a Byzantine world saturated with religiousity, icons and chant, legends of the saints, processions in the streets, churches encrusted with mosaics, stinking of incense. Of course I wanted the sanitized Episcopalian version, without the superstition, squalor and violence.

There is no free ride. It is a pity that the only viable alternative to Jihad is MacWorld, incarnate in Southern California. The price for security, fairness and opportunity is high--the loss of aesthetic value, romance and charm--but it's worth it.

Remember Lucy Killea?

Kerry, Candidate and Catholic,
Creates Uneasiness for Church

"Senator John Kerry's support for abortion rights and stem cell research has prompted discussions among Roman Catholic bishops and Vatican officials over how to respond to a presidential candidate who professes Catholicism while taking stands contrary to church teaching...

"The Rev. John McCloskey, the director of the Catholic Information Center in Washington and a member of the conservative organization Opus Dei, said, "Senator Kerry considers himself a Catholic, but on issues that are fundamental in terms of Catholic morality, he appears to be off the reservation."

"However, Father McCloskey said, American bishops are "in a quandary" over just what to do about Catholic politicians who fail to uphold church doctrine on issues like abortion. Punitive measures like denying Mr. Kerry communion could backfire, he said."

It might be interesting if Kerry were excommunicated--when our late Bishop Maher excommunicated Lucy Killea it did such wonders for her political career (in a heavily Catholic constituency) that other local politicians clammored for excommunication.

How many members of Opus Dei are there? Of course no one knows because it's Opus Dei. How many cultural Catholics and just plain ordinary mainline Catholics are there? When I take informal surveys of my classes, probably 65% Catholic, on abortion virtually all are pro-choice (and pro-capital punishment).

The Catholic Church de facto is the last viable "mainline Protestant" denomination in the US, regardless its official position, mandates from HQ and manifestos by Opus Dei. Extra ecclesia there are only a few fulminating fundamentalists, who've appropriated the name "Christian," even fewer liberal Protestants from the old majority denominations hanging on by the fingernails and the Unchurched, the third largest "denomination" in the US and the fastest growing.

In the US, serious political candidates still have to maintain a religious affiliation. But, as Howard Dean's abortive efforts to present himself as a devout Congregationalist (oxymoron?) suggest, outside the Catholic Church these days, there are only fundamentalists and fakers.

Kudos to the Catholic Church--as it is rather than as it's supposed to be!

News Analysis: U.S. Optimism Is Tested Again After Ambush Kills 4 in Iraq

I'm ambivalent about the pure hatred that, apparently, these citizens of Falluja bear to us.

I can see their point: we had no business getting into Iraq in the first place. We could have "contained" Saddam and more importantly could have done a whole bunch of other things globally to isolate him and other tin-pot dictators, to undermine the motive for terrorism and to make life better for people.

But I have no sympathy for the resistance. Saddam was a high-tech tribal warlord who beat up other tribes to get booty for himself and cronies, his clan and his tribe. He and his supporters exploited the rhetoric of anti-colonialism and national-self-determination to promote his agenda. I wonder how many Iraqis care, or know, what country they live in. Here are primitive people, living in mud-brick hovels who have no loyalties extending beyond their clan or tribe. They want their tribal leaders in power so that they can get the goodies. The prospect of a civil society thwarts their agenda.

What vision, if any, do the thugs who blew up Americans in Falluja and dismembered their corpses have for the future of Iraq? Most have none: they were just a mob of young, lower-class males out for a good time. Those who do want to keep Iraq the primitive tribal society it's always been, where Big Men achieve power through violence and corruption and their tribe-mates depend on their largess.

It's easy to see why Big Men like Saddam and other local warlords like the arrangement. And, where there's an excuse for violence, there will always be hoards of young, lower-class males rushing in to have a good time. But why do the majority of people go along with it? I suppose because they can't imagine what civil society would be like, or because they don't seriously believe that any alternatives to tribalism are possible. They imagine that Bush is simply another warlord out to loot and pillage so that he can dispense the proceeds to his tribe, and that attempts to establish civil society will leave them without patronage.

Maybe they're right.

Wages of Wealth: All This Progress Is Killing Us, Bite by Bite

The litany:

When Americans have more than enough money to buy food, they buy more food.
When they have more than enough money to buy cars they buy SUVs.
When they earn enough to live comfortably they work longer hours.
And, one might add, even when they're healthy enough they obsess about their bodies, frequent chiropractors and acupuncturists, and dose themselves with herbal teas to get even healthier.

The problem isn't American affluence but American puritanism which obscures the obvious truism that when the necessities are taken care of you can stop thinking about them and enjoy yourself. When you have enough food to live, you can stop thinking about food; when you earn enough to live comfortably you can buy leisure.

The whole purpose of affluence is liberation from those miserable necessities: eating, working, getting from place to place, dealing with the dull business of life, so that you can engage in "liberal pursuits"--literature, the arts, travel, crafts, sports and learning for its own sake.

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Spain united in sorrow and anger

Who done it? Islamic revolutionaries? Basque nationalists? Or a bunch of working class youths out for a good time? At least the spontaneous mass demonstrations send the message that most of the world is thoroughly sick of terrorism: revolutionary chic is over.

For the past four decades cute little revolutionary groups could count sympathy and support from right-thinking left-wing Americans and others intent on registering a protest against colonialist imperialism, capitalism and white, western, male hegemony. Any nationalist movement could be squeezed into the Revolutionary Template as an oppressed racial-ethnic-religious minority fighting for independence against colonial-oppressive-privileged overlords. Jewish settlers in Palestine against the British mandate, Algerians against the French, Irish Catholics against Irish Protestants, Mau Mau against the colonial government and, more recently, everyone against the American Cowboy. Any street gang or band of thugs could gain support by making ideological noises, preferably Marxist, as the Black Panthers discovered.

Now it's wearing a little thin. Spain is a respectable EU country and the Basques are not an oppressed minority group struggling for independence against an oppressive racist, colonialist regime.

I have nothing against violence per se: if the benefits outweigh the costs so be it. But what have these revolutions accomplished and how do the states of affairs they're brought about compare with other possible worlds? Without Soviet subsidies, Cuba is an economic basket case. Israel is a land-hungry racist state, perpetually at war. Kenya is an impoverished, corrupt, crime-ridden hellhole. The US, with all its natural resources and other advantages, is a socially backward anomaly amongst affluent nations where 40% of the population is functionally illiterate and there are beggars in the streets. Canada, Australia and New Zealand are doing much better. As for the goals of the Islamic revolution , there is nothing to recommend them: the aim is to expunge Western influence and turn the Islamic world into a puritanical theocracy.

Anyway, I'm making a bet now, though not a big one: I don't think that Eta or Al-Qaida as such was responsible for the bombings in Spain. I think it was a group of young lower-class males, a street gang, with a few romantic middle class hangers-on, who picked up an eclectic assortment of ideologies and possibly some financial support from "revolutionary" groups.

The Atlantic | March 2004 | How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement | Flanagan

This is yet another wallow in liberal guilt about what is supposed to be the Original Sin of feminism: shifting the burden of domestic work to poor women, immigrant women and women of color. It rehearses the stock confession of the aging Yuppie (if that isn't an oxymoron): I hired a nanny, but I knew what I was doing, am ashamed of myself, and do all I can to be nice to my nanny to make up for it.

What is uniquely bad about domestic work is that, for the most part, it hasn't been captured by the capitalist net. Women who hire nannies, "housekeepers" and cleaning women don't regard what they're doing as an impersonal market transaction. They construe it as part of an archaic quasi-feudal arrangement of patronage and servility and, if they are right-thinking liberals, exascerbate the feudal character of the arrangement by striving to be good patrons.

We don't worry about hiring gardeners to mow the lawn or plumbers to unstop our toilets or dentists to fix our teeth. We don't feel that we have to make up for the arrangement by establishing personal, quasi-familial relationships with them. We don't take an interest in our plumbers personal lives or give our dentists cast off clothing or assume that we're doing gardeners a favor by chatting with them.

But domestic servants are another matter. Women assume that domestic work is inherently degrading, that it essentially involves a personal relationship of patronage and servility in a way that gardening, plumbing and dentistry don't, and that it has to be sweetened with compensation beyond monetary payment. Yet ironically what makes domestic work humiliating is precisely the fact that senoras and servants don't construe their arrangement as an impersonal market transaction.

Child care and cleaning are bad jobs, though not nearly so bad as most jobs women can get--data entry, waitressing or cashiering. But they aren't degrading unless we make them so--as we do when we attempt make up for the arrangement by being nice and taking an interest. We know that we're not doing the dentists, stockbrokers or lawyers whose services we buy a favor by taking a personal interest in their lives or making conversation with them: we know that if we do we're prying and wasting their time. It is the assumption of privilege that blinds us to the fact that when we do the same with nannies and maids we're not doing them a favor either, and that by treating them differently from other workers whose services we buy we perpetuate the system of patronage and servility.

There is no practical way of eliminating shit work. The best we can do is see to it everyone has a fair opportunity to avoid it and that those who can't avoid it are fairly treated and decently paid. As for us good liberal feminists, the best we can do is recognize that nannies are on a par with gardeners, plumbers and dentists, providing services for a fee, and that well-meaning attempts to sweeten the bitter pill are insulting, patronizing and burdensome to the women who do these jobs.

Ethical Universalism and Particularism

I've just been reading some rubbish about "ethical particularism" in David Miller's book On Nationalisty. Rather I should have said that I've been reading some good stuff about this "ethical particularism" rubbish--the book is quite good: it's the doctrine that sucks.

There are two reasons that we should reject ethical particularism in favor of ethical universalism:

(1) Ethical universalism (like physicalism) is an aggressor hypothesis. Historically, the further we go in ethical reflection, the smarter, more educated, more experienced and more sophisticated we become as individuals the more we move int he direction of ethical universalism. Like Newtonian mechanics as an explanation of celestial motion where there was formerly a grossly disjunctive one, ethical universalism provides a unifying hypothesis.

(2) We don't just go increasingly toward ethical universalism, both as individuals and as a species: at every stage, we regard our progress along the way as a good thing. We have meta-intuitions, so to speak.