General Stuff: General Wisdom

Saving the Game of Hockey

Sun, 28 Mar 2004 19:31:51 GMT

In the Globe & Mail on Saturday, Montreal Canadiens great Ken Dryden, now vice-chairman of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, offered a manifesto for Saving The Game of hockey. Dryden's essay comes in the wake of continuing complaints from fans and players that detrimental changes have plagued the NHL for the past ten or fifteen years at least; such changes include the issues of expansion, vigilante violence, and an increasingly congested game.

Dryden has for a long time been one of the most respected archivists and critics of hockey, especially as it is instituted in Canada. Despite a relatively short playing career of only 8 seasons as goalie for the Montreal Canadiens, Dryden earned 258 wins and 46 shutouts, and won the Vezina trophy as the league's best goalie five times. A lawyer with degrees from Cornell and McGill, Dryden has published some of the best books on hockey, including the classic The Game.

Dryden's editorial in The Globe accomplishes at least two things: first, he contextualizes change in the sport of hockey, noting how it began as a game of seven-on-seven with no forward passes for its first 50 years; and second, he makes the case that the change that is necessary now must be a holistic change, not simply a tinkering with one or two isolated rules.

Dryden challenges some of the standard arguments about "the problem" with hockey, such as the suggestion that modern players simply don't respect each other:

To me, the change isn't a loss of respect, it's the presence of opportunity. As a checker, if you are 10 feet away from a puck carrier, you can't hook or slash him. You can't high stick him, either. And you can't do much damage to him if you are moving at him at cruising pace and not at a sprint. But with today's shorter shifts that allow you to move faster, to get closer, it's different. Now you have opportunity. Now you can hook and slash and high-stick your and smash him into the boards. So now you do.

Dryden notes a change in the fundamental physics of the game by the presence of bigger players playing shorter shifts:

In 1952, the average NHL player was 5 foot 10 3/4 inches and 175 pounds. In 2003, that same player was 6-foot-1 and 204 pounds. The extra 2 3/4 inches doesn't mean much. The extra 29 pounds does. And it really makes a difference when you add another change. In 1952, the average player each time he went on the ice played shifts lasting about two minutes. Today, an average shift lasts 40 seconds. Playing two minutes at a time, a player has to play a coasting/bursting style of game to save energy. You coast in the neighbourhood of the puck at most moments, then when there is an offensive chance or a defensive urgency, you burst. Playing 40 seconds at a time, you burst all the time. You play at a sprint. I remember little of high school physics, but I do remember: F = ma. Force equals mass times acceleration. So when a body that weighs 29 pounds more, moves at a sprinting speed, the force of collision is significantly, dangerously greater.

His argument might be summarized as: The problem isn't an increased intent to injure; the problem is the increased opportunity to injure. So, what's to be done about this? And something must be done, because, while hockey has not degenerated to Slapshot-like excesses, it has become a game dominated less by flashes of brilliance from superstar players, and more by the defensive efforts of the lowest common denominator. The offensive stars of the NHL are being cloaked by defensive systems and the unwillingness of the league to enforce obstruction rules.

One of Dryden's suggestions is to declare "finishing a check" interference. As it stands, players are allowed to hit someone who held the puck one or two seconds prior. Interference is only called when one player hits another player who has yet to receive the puck.

We need to see hits from behind and hits to the head for what they really are. We need to see finishing a check for what it really is. These and other plays are not traditions of the game worthy of protection. They have brought danger to the game. They have hurt the game.

It is unlikely the NHL will adopt Dryden's suggestion for "finishing a check," but in his typically astute understanding of the game he has zeroed in on a single action -- hitting someone one or two seconds after he releases the puck -- that embodies a number of wrong attitudes in the game. Of course, Dryden's complete answer involves revisiting the rules of the game in their entirety. He's not advocating a radical transformation; instead, he is asking that we see the cumulative effect of incremental changes.

Dryden's focus on the relational properties of rules seems to be more in touch with the flow of hockey. Perhaps more than any other sport (save soccer), hockey is about flow, movement, continuity. Americans prefer sports suited for television, sports that emphasize stoppages more than flow: football, basketball, baseball, in particular. Hockey is faster than these games and relies on changes on-the-fly. Most Americans don't have the grass roots exposure to hockey to be able to track its movement. To most Americans, the game must appear to be a blur of uncoordinated movement and violence, just a scramble for a puck the American televisions can't seem to transmit (witness Fox Sports' disastrous creation of a digitized "streak" that trailed the puck in their brief stint as the marginal American carrier of NHL hockey on TV).

American sports are ideal televisual spectacles. The stop-and-start quality of baseball and football, for example, does not change a bit with the introduction of TV. But anyone who has been to an NHL game recently knows how obtrusive the "TV timeouts" are to the flow of the game. The use of hurry-up faceoffs in the World Junior Championship every year shave at least 30 minutes off the length of the broadcast, and eliminates all the unnecessary jostling between stoppages.

In baseball, you can lower the pitcher's mound and it changes the game in a very concrete and observable way. The pitcher has less dominance over the batter. In hockey, you can change the size of the goalie's equipment, but this does not account for lighter hockey sticks, more obstruction, or shorter shifts. Hockey is a game that is played, and therefore must be thought of, holistically. Even though there are one-on-one matchups in hockey, as there are in all team sports, the speed of transitions in hockey reduce the singularity and impact of these matchups.

In baseball, the pitcher-batter matchup dominates; it is primarily a game of individuals, especially pitchers. In football, the one-on-one matchups, such as defensive backs and receivers, are largely pre-ordained in the called play, and do not evolve as organically as, for example, when a defenceman "pinches" in hockey and a forward must cover his deserted spot on the blueline.

It is the fluidity of hockey that makes it such a beautiful game, and the solutions to its current problems must be considered with the same sense of relationality, transition, fluidity, wholeness.

Bush is "weak on terror"

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 21:26:40 GMT

I don't how Paul Krugman is right as often as he is, but damn the guy is good:

The Bush administration, which baffled the world when it used an attack by Islamic fundamentalists to justify the overthrow of a brutal but secular regime, and which has been utterly ruthless in its political exploitation of 9/11, must be very, very afraid.

Polls suggest that a reputation for being tough on terror is just about the only remaining political strength George Bush has. Yet this reputation is based on image, not reality. The truth is that Mr. Bush, while eager to invoke 9/11 on behalf of an unrelated war, has shown consistent reluctance to focus on the terrorists who actually attacked America, or their backers in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

This reluctance dates back to Mr. Bush's first months in office. Why, after all, has his inner circle tried so hard to prevent a serious investigation of what happened on 9/11? There has been much speculation about whether officials ignored specific intelligence warnings, but what we know for sure is that the administration disregarded urgent pleas by departing Clinton officials to focus on the threat from Al Qaeda.

....

It's now clear that by shifting his focus to Iraq, Mr. Bush did Al Qaeda a huge favor. The terrorists and their Taliban allies were given time to regroup; the resurgent Taliban once again control almost a third of Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda has regained the ability to carry out large-scale atrocities.

But Mr. Bush's lapses in the struggle against terrorism extend beyond his decision to give Al Qaeda a breather. His administration has also run interference for Saudi Arabia — the home of most of the 9/11 hijackers, and the main financier of Islamic extremism — and Pakistan, which created the Taliban and has actively engaged in nuclear proliferation.

Some of the administration's actions have been so strange that those who reported them were initially accused of being nutty conspiracy theorists. For example, what are we to make of the post-9/11 Saudi airlift? Just days after the attack, at a time when private air travel was banned, the administration gave special clearance to flights that gathered up Saudi nationals, including a number of members of the bin Laden family, who were in the U.S. at the time. These Saudis were then allowed to leave the country, after at best cursory interviews with the F.B.I.

Hockey Only Sport That Assumes The Rules Aren't Enough

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 05:35:06 GMT

Today, all three national newspapers in Canada ran photos of the Todd Bertuzzi incident from Monday night. Bertuzzi, a forward for the Vancouver Canucks, sucker-punched Steve Moore of the Colorado Avalanche at the end of Monday night's contest, as retaliation for a hit Moore delivered on Canucks forward Markus Naslund earlier in the season. Naslund missed several games with a concussion, as a result of the hit. After punching Moore in the head, Bertuzzi drove his face into the ice. Moore's neck was fractured and he received a concussion. The Vancouver police are investigating the incident.

Moore's father called the incident "a dark moment for hockey." This evening Bertuzzi issued a tearful apology.

Undoubtedly, the Bertuzzi incident was the topic of discussion across Canada today. It's difficult to find an American analogy to explain the prominence of an event like this in the sport of hockey, because America is so much larger than Canada, and as a result it supports several sports fanatically. In Canada, there is hockey, and there is everything else.

In my mind, the Bertuzzi incident raises at least the following questions: How long should Bertuzzi's suspension be? Is the incident indicative of broader trends in the game? Is the incident justification for a ban on fighting in hockey (keeping in mind that this was not a "fight" but a surprise assault)?

First, if the NHL does not ban Bertuzzi for at least the rest of the season and the playoffs, it will be an insult to Steve Moore, an insult to the professionals who play hockey, and an insult to the fans. Personally, I think he should be banned for at least 1 year. In a more perfect world, he would be banned for as long as Moore is injured. It is possible that Moore will never play hockey again.

Second, the incident is not indicative of broader trends in hockey. This is an anomalous incident. Yes, similar acts of goonery have happened before. But I don't believe the NHL is in any way approaching a state of Slapshot-like parody. That said, I do think the NHL is the most barbaric professional sports league on the planet. Incidents like this just don't happen in other sports. Damien Cox of the Toronto Star sums up the unfortunate mentality that rules hockey:

That line heard over and over yesterday was that Bertuzzi's unprovoked, unwarranted and cowardly attack on Colorado's Steve Moore two nights ago that left Moore with a fractured neck was an "unfortunate" incident.

Unfortunate? Try sickening, despicable and an affront to the sport.

But you won't hear that from this league, an environment in which goalies were once labelled as sissies for wearing masks and players thought of as less-than-manly for wearing helmets.

You won't hear a player or coach or GM or union rep stand up and call for justice on behalf of Moore. You likely won't hear any significant figures in the sport demand the NHL put an end to these vicious incidents that every two or three years lands one of the league's players in a criminal court.

You will only hear excuses and clichés and silence and empty apologies.

It's all part of a sick, age-old hockey mentality. A running back in football can cut through a hole and get drilled by a middle linebacker, and then shake off the blow and retreat to his huddle.

He doesn't demand that a player on his own team cross to the other huddle and challenge that linebacker to a fight.

In hockey, however, every clean hit is an insult to be avenged.

Every issue, to those who believe in this culture, is best resolved with fists.

You hit our guy, we high-stick you.

You knock our guy out, we put your guy in the hospital.

As long as that remains the dominant mentality, people like Steve Moore will have to suffer now and then.

Canadians have to take responsibility for this mentality. This is not America's fault (a popular choice for Canadians, on all manner of subjects). For some reason, hockey culture retains the kind of violent populist barbarism that usually gets filtered from other sports for the sake of selling it to the kids, or simply because society's standards in these matters have improved.

Third, the Bertuzzi incident should not be the reason to ban fighting in hockey. Fighting in hockey should be banned regardless. No other sport allows its participants to beat the hell out of each other while the officials stand around and watch (unless beating the hell out of people is the point of the sport, of course). Hockey is the only professional sport that retains such a stupid allowance.

Proponents of fighting, and apologists for Bertuzzi, will say there has to be some form of violent retribution allowed to act as a deterrent for violent retribution. It's a Cold War mentality in hockey that says, If fighting is allowed, players will avoid stepping out of line because they know they will be taken to task by the other players. You don't hit the goalie because you know you will be mobbed by the other players.

In hockey's antiquated culture, the rules are so ineffectual that built into them is an allowance for self-policing.

As soccer fans, I'm sure, would say, If you just make the infractions that lead to fighting, and fighting itself, illegal and punishable by suspension, you eliminate the need for fighting. Instead of five minutes for fighting, just suspend the players for a game. Soon, none will fight because it won't make any sense.

But this leads to more stick infractions, say people like Don Cherry. Well, then, penalize high sticking with more severe penalties. And on it goes. The apologists who suggest incidents like the Bertuzzi assault on Steve Moore will happen no matter what rules are created and enforced are assuming a kind of fatalism that rules are created to counter in the first place.

Why doesn't hockey change? I think it's because the people who could change it are so entrenched in its attitudes that they find such changes inconceivable. It's like when the police are asked to investigate themselves, and the internal culture of the institution overrides the considerations of outsiders. They take care of their own. Hockey's a similarly hyper-masculine institution in Canada, with grass roots support perhaps unimaginable for other sports in other countries. To these people, to many of the hockey dads out there, if you remove fighting from hockey, you remove a little piece of what makes a Canadian man a man.

Perhaps the analogy I'm looking for is this: Banning fighting in hockey is like asking NRA members to surrender their guns.

Unfortunately for Steve Moore, the barbaric mentality that rules hockey, the right to fight, may cost him his career, and it almost cost him his life.

"On a Mission From God": The Religious Right and the Emerging American Theocracy

Wed, 10 Mar 2004 04:01:25 GMT

http://www.buzzflash.com/farrell/04/03/far04007.html

Why We Love

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 23:56:39 GMT

From a review of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love:

If, as Fisher states, 90 percent of prairie voles stick with one mate for life because they're good dopamine producers and have a sprig of DNA that enhances loyalty, and if norepinephrine automatically floods the brain of a ewe who's on the prowl every time she sees a slide of a ram's face, and those same chemicals burble through the human brain in love, will people one day be able to modify and medicate passions we once regarded as ungovernable? Will not only lust but love be buttressed, cured or even created with a prescription?

The question is not: Can passions be modified by pharamceuticals? The question is: Will we need a prescription for these pharmaceuticals when they become available, and why?

Time to get over our humanist hangover, people. You are the sum of your chemical impulses.

Getting Married, Biblical Style

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 22:10:49 GMT

This is from CJ's Bullhorn. Fantastic stuff. I have to reproduce it here.

Isn't this what we're talking about here? Isn't BushCo trying to make US marriages adhere to biblical definitions? I acquired the following from a friend, the editor/writer is unknown to me. Seems like our president is fudging a bit here, but that's nothing new. The following is, as far as I know, accurate: I don't own a bible to verify this. One wonders if the first legalized divorce was that of an elected official. My guess would be "yes".

The Scriptures are verified with King James version - not a good one, but the fundies always use it.

In defense of Biblical Marriage

The Presidential Prayer Team is currently urging us to: "Pray for the President as he seeks wisdom on how to legally codify the definition of marriage. Pray that it will be according to Biblical principles. With any forces insisting on variant definitions of marriage, pray that God's Word and His standards will be honored by our government." This is true.

Any good religious person believes prayer should be balanced by action. So here, in support of the Prayer Team's admirable goals, is a proposed Constitutional Amendment codifying marriage entirely on biblical principles:

A. Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen 29:17-28; II Sam 3:2-5)

B. Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives. (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21)

C. A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deut 22:13-21)

D. Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden. (Gen24:3; Num 25:1-9; Ezra 9:12; Neh 10:30)

E. Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor any state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce. (Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9)

F. If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother's widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by law. (Gen.38:6-10; Deut 25:5-10)

G. In lieu of marriage, if there are no acceptable men in your town, it is required that you get your father drunk and have sex with him (even if he had previously offered you up as a toy to men young and old), tag-teaming with any sisters you may have. Of course, this rule applies only if you are female. (Gen 19:31-36)

A Belated Rebuttal to Dennis Miller, That Fucking Hack

Thu, 26 Feb 2004 21:41:53 GMT

This is an old item, but since some ignorant moron recently responded to my "Dennis Miller is a Fucking Hack" piece, I thought I would link to it now because (a) I just found it and (b) it quite comprehensively refutes Dennis Miller, that fucking hack.

See "Rebuttal to Dennis Miller's Cute Simplifications."

You Can Find Me in The Woods

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 02:56:00 GMT

I've been thinking about studying up on survival skills. There are always tales of armageddon in the news, but lately the tales have begun to sound more probable. Something about the combination of oil shortages and global warming that gives me the creeps. Think I'll look into a nice wooded plot.

A few weeks ago there was a column in the Toronto Star about the impending oil shortage. Estimates are anywhere from 5 years to 30 years, but given the numbers I'd say it's going to happen eventually. Richard Gwynn writes:

The U.S. Energy Department reckons that this ``tilting point" won't happen until 2037. Its calculation is widely criticized, with its forecasts for increases in demand dismissed as far too conservative.

One well-known petroleum geologist, Colin Campbell, has put the tilting point at 2010, or little more than a half-decade away. Another, Kenneth Deffeys, forecasts that it will occur this year.

The basis facts are these: The entire world now both produces and consumes some 75 million barrels of oil a day. By 2015, or a decade away, demand is expected to increase by more than two-thirds, or by another 60 million barrels a day.

This extra demand simply cannot be met. We would have to find and develop the equivalent of 10 new North Sea oilfields in just a decade. Even if Iraq's oilfields are fully developed, with almost unlimited new investment and new technology, it could only produce an extra 6 million barrels, or a mere one-tenth of the amount needed.

Even Dubya has acknowledged the trend:

A bit surprisingly, President George W. Bush, himself an oil man, has actually expressed some concern about the issue. He's said, "It's becoming very clear that demand is outstripping supply."

Environmentally, an oil shortage would be a great thing. There are some 900 million cars in the world, and I'm sure taking a few of them off the road wouldn't hurt the air and water and everything else. But socially an oil shortage would mean absolute chaos. Of course the shortage will happen in stages, with gas prices skyrocketing (some say this could happen this year). So the chaos will be a sort of slow burn, not an instantaneous meltdown.

The Americans will blame the Chinese for the shortage, since China is the world's second-largest guzzler and has yet to exploit its industrial potential. Everyone else will blame America, because it is the world's number one guzzler, and unabashedly so. But the real problem is homo sapiens, not one country. Our collective stupidity and selfishness will make political expediency in solving the problem a difficult, if not impossible, task.

I figure the worst will happen during my lifetime, which gives me good reason to start learning about how to prepare a beetle for dinner with some rocks and twigs, and how to hone my defiant hillbilly voice for when the coppers try to storm my mountain cabin.

According to a recent story in The Guardian, climate change could produce far more chaos worldwide than the so-called threat of terrorism ever could.

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.
'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

It's really convenient for the Pentagon that warfare is going to define our toasty future (I don't live in Britain, so instead of a coming ice age -- sorry about your luck, GB -- I'll be basting in a Pentagon-controlled world of drought and famine). I guess we should give all our money to the people who make war, since war is what we'll be making. I mean, they know what to do in case of emergency (break glass, then break country who made the glass). How is permanent war in the future any different from the permanent war now enjoyed by most human populations?

Anyway, the point is I have some learning to do. I also need a gun. Turns out, those guys in Michigan were right. Boy, do I feel stupid.

I figure I still have at least 5 to 10 years to become a proficient marksman, and a capable hunter and fisher. I'll have to find a wooded area with food but no snakes. I don't like snakes. I'm not sure what I'll do when the bug spray wears off; I'll be totally exposed.

Can you believe The SAS Survival Handbook: How to Survive in the Wild, in Any Climate, on Land or at Sea is only $17 at Amazon? Why the fuck did I get an education? I could have survived on $17 for the rest of my life.

In the meantime, I should probably keep track of the emerging New World Order.

New Documents Illuminate Calamities of "Old" Europe and Its Neighbours

Sat, 21 Feb 2004 18:01:45 GMT

Whenever I read about WWII, I am reminded of how insulting the Bush administration's characterization of "Old" Europe is. It's a characterization that usually envelopes the United Nations and other agencies, economies, and governments that have been dwarfed by the military superiority of the United States.

America has never known suffering on the same scale as the war that was fought most viciously in and around Europe from 1939 to 1945, and yet Bush and his supporters dismiss Europe as some kind of antiquated civilization because it doesn't eagerly jump at every opportunity to ignite a conflagration. Europe's reluctance to wage cynical wars for imperialistic ends couldn't possibly have something to do with their relatively recent proximity to devastation like America has never known, could it?

Europe is by no means perfect. But the American characterization of Europe as "yesterday's empire," as the place where people just don't have the gonads to wage war, completely avoids some of the real reasons European countries may not gleefully follow Bush's marauding ways (aside from the widespread disdain for American culture). A NY Times piece on the war in Russia in WWII is the kind of "real reasons" I am referring to:

The four-year conflict between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army remains the largest and possibly the most ferocious ever fought. The armies struggled over vast territory. The front extended 1,900 miles (greater than the distance from the northern border of Maine to the southern tip of Florida), and German troops advanced over 1,000 miles into Soviet territory (equivalent to the distance from the East Coast to Topeka, Kan.). And they clashed in a seemingly unrelenting series of military operations of unparalleled scale; the battle of Kursk alone, for instance, involved 3.5 million men.

In short, the war fought on the Eastern Front is arguably the single most important chapter in modern military history — but it is a chapter that in many essential ways is only now being written. From evidence released from Soviet archives since the mid-1980's, scholars have learned, for example, that Soviet deaths numbered nearly 50 million, two and half times the original estimate; that the Red Army raped two million German women during their occupation to wreak revenge; and that an astonishing 40 percent of Soviet wartime battles were for deacdes lost to history.

Bush and many Americans treated 9/11 as if it had changed the course of history, as if life for the whole planet would never be the same, as if no horrors in history could compare with the loss of 3,000 American lives.

But can anyone honestly say, after looking at a figure like "50 million" Soviet deaths, that 9/11 should be anything more than a footnote in the history books? Naturally, it won't, since the people who shape our perception of history and create the climate in which history is disseminated have too much invested in promoting 9/11 as a great calamity in the history of the world, much like they can refer to a reception in football or a home run in baseball as a "miracle." The same people and the climate in which they operate has generated thousands of lines of newspaper copy over an exposed breast.

I'm not referring to the Bush administration or Republicans alone. The kind of self-serving hyperbole that surrounds 9/11 emanates from many places within American culture and abroad, and other cultures have their own 9/11-type events to mythologize. Occasionally, an article like the one mentioned above recalls the scope and horror of nationalistic atrocities. One can only hope that the propaganda of 9/11 will give way to a more sober analysis of its place in history, for the American example as it stands is playing out much like the historical whitewash of Stalinist Russia:

The Soviets also buried the history of the Eastern Front. Soviet military historians turned out accurate and detailed work, but since they could analyze only what Soviet officials permitted them to write about, they skirted, or, more significantly, ignored those facts and events the government considered embarrassing. Soviet propaganda, meanwhile, lionized the heroes of the "Great Patriotic War."

Privatized American health care far less efficient than Canadian model

Tue, 17 Feb 2004 21:34:08 GMT

As always, Paul Krugman is addressing the issues that matter, and exactly how they matter. In today's column, he goes after the Bush administration for their lack of a policy for improving American health care.

It's true that the U.S. spends far more on health care than any other country, but this wouldn't be a bad thing if the spending got results. The real question is why, despite all that spending, many Americans aren't assured of the health care they need, and American life expectancy is near the bottom for advanced countries.

Where is the money going? A lot of it goes to overhead. A recent study found that private insurance companies spend 11.7 cents of every health care dollar on administrative costs, mainly advertising and underwriting, compared with 3.6 cents for Medicare and 1.3 cents for Canada's government-run system. Also, our system is very generous to drug companies and other medical suppliers, because — unlike other countries' systems — it doesn't bargain for lower prices.

The result is that American health care, which at its best is the best in the world, offers much of the population a worst-of-all-worlds combination of insecurity and high costs. And that combination is getting worse: insurance premiums are rising, and companies are becoming increasingly unwilling to offer insurance to their employees.

I have bolded one sentence above because it's a fact I wish I could share with every free market evangelist who preaches that putting every facet of civic life into the hands of capitalists will make them more efficient and less expensive. That's bullshit, especially when it comes to essential services such as health care. As the study noted proves, private insurance companies in the United States spend ten times as much on administrative overhead per dollar spent on health care as the Canadian government spends on its administrative costs.

That's right. The evil socialist apparatus of the Canadian government that ensures all Canadians have free health care spends one tenth what the lean, mean, privatized machine in the United States spends on administrative costs.

I'm not suggesting anyone get rid of the markets. But privatization of essential services during the reign of neoliberal economics for the past twenty to thirty years has only eroded the social infrastructure of developed countries such as the United States and left people everywhere wondering, where did all the money go? Believe it or not, America, sometimes the government is more efficient. Sometimes government should intervene in the marketplace. Sometimes liberal government is more valuable than the ethic of the marketplace.

If America had "let the markets decide" everything, slavery would still be legal. Don't let insurance and pharmaceutical companies enslave you.

The Science of Love: Like Snorting Cocaine

Mon, 16 Feb 2004 04:26:46 GMT

Check out this item from The Economist:

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=2424049

"Parts of the brain that are love-bitten include the one responsible for gut feelings, and the ones which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine. So the brains of people deeply in love do not look like those of people experiencing strong emotions, but instead like those of people snorting coke. Love, in other words, uses the neural mechanisms that are activated during the process of addiction."

There Is No Added Threat of Terrorism After 9/11

Sat, 14 Feb 2004 04:25:30 GMT

I've been debating with an "Order of the Day" reader for a few days now over one of the items I posted recently. The reader mentioned the "added threat of terrorism" in a post, as a response to one of my arguments, and I challenged this idea. I wish I could speak to the American people and have them understand (my intention not being to villify America) that America has contributed to far more "terrorism" in the last century than any of the countries now aligned with the term by the current administration (Iran, Iraq, North Korea, etc.). If by "terrorism" one means the unwarranted use of force or threat of violence to achieve political ends or to instill fear in another, then the United States has sponsored more terrorism than the aforementioned countries. Anyone who has read Noam Chomsky over the past three decades knows as much.

My bigger concern is the presumption that many Americans share that says there is an "added threat of terrorism" since 9/11. I have maintained for some time that, relative to the victims of American terrorism over the years (Chile, Panama, etc.), America's own threat of being the victim of terror is virtually non-existent. Outside of 9/11, the threat has not claimed many lives at all. And even 9/11, as terrible as it was, must be put into context to reign in the hysteria that has controlled the American public. Consider this passage from a story in the March 2004 edition of Harper's magazine:

In 2001, terrorists killed 2,978 people in the United States, including the five killed by anthrax. In that same year, according to the Centers for Disease Control, heart disease killed 700,142 Americans and cancer 553,768; various accidents claimed 101,537 lives, suicide 30,622, and homicide, not including the attacks, another 17,330. As President Bush pointed out in January, no one has been killed by terrorists on American soil since then. Neither, according to the FBI, was anyone killed by terrorists in 2000. In 1999, the number was one. In 1998, it was three. In 1997, zero. Even using 2001 as a baseline, the actuarial tables would suggest that our concern about terror mortality ought to be on the order of our concern about fatal workplace injuries (5,431 deaths) or drowning (3,247). To recognize this is not to dishonor the loss to the families of those people killed by terrorists, but neither should their anguish eclipse that of the families of children who died in their infancy that year (27,801). Every death has its horrors. (page 79)

I realize that when I make an overstatement like "there is no added threat of terrorism," I am inviting the failure of that argument at the first sign of a terrorist attack on US soil. Eventually, someday, maybe next week, maybe next year, maybe not in my lifetime: Somebody will try to attack the United States through the use of terror. That does not mean any efforts to prevent such an attack are justified. Crimes against civil liberties and crimes against foreign nations are not justified by the potential for terrorism.

A smarter response to the perception of an added threat of terrorism (one that has never existed, and one that shows no sign of materializing) would be to seek conciliation with the nations America feels are threatening. Make concessions. Remove military installations from some foreign countries. Breach the cultural divide that exists between the West and the Muslim world. Such concessions will make the difference between those who dislike America and those who dislike America enough to attack it. Some people will always have differences with American ideology; but not all of these people represent threats of violence against America.

Continuing to "fight fire with fire" will only stoke the flames of hate. This will only force some opponents of America from private forms of disagreement to public acts of terrorism. Cooler heads must prevail, and the beginning of this kind of conciliation is the recognition that 9/11 does not prove there is an added threat of terror. It's the same threat it always was.

Canadians Hate George Bush but Love Conan O'Brien

Sat, 07 Feb 2004 17:53:00 GMT

Two recent items in the Canadian press tell the story of Canadian-American relations these days. The first is a February 9 Maclean’s magazine cover story (“Hope you lose, eh”) that reports only 15% of Canadians polled would vote for George W. Bush in the upcoming election. The second item is the news of comedian Conan O’Brien visiting Toronto for a set of shows next week.

They may not seem like comparable stories, but I think they speak to a distinction in Canadian culture that should be made more often in the public forum: Canadians don’t hate Americans, Canadians hate George W. Bush. And “hate” is a strong word in Canada.

By now it is obvious that Canadians, much like Europeans, use anti-Americanism as the constitutive “other” of their national identity. “America” has become a signifier of all that is arrogant, caustic, and low-brow in society, whatever society that may be. Of course not all Americans are arrogant, caustic, and stupid; in fact, just based on sheer numbers, there should be more kind and articulate Americans than Canadians (considering America has ten times the population). For most Canadians and Americans, the real numbers don’t matter: Canadians will always have a somewhat smug sense of superiority when talking about Americans, and Americans will always ignore Canada. There, how’s that for superficial generalizations?

But as the Maclean’s article notes, there is something different about the Canadian dislike of George W. Bush. Canadians have always felt somewhat more uncomfortable with Republican presidents than with Democrats, for the obvious reason that Republicans tend to skew a little more to the right on social matters, but the distrust and dislike of Dubya is a much more extreme reaction. And in this Canadians are not alone. Dubya has polarized moderates around the globe.

“The intense sympathy Canadians felt following the attacks of 9/11 – something that manifested itself not just in acts of mourning and charity, but in a willingness to support whatever actions the U.S. deemed necessary – has dissipated,” writes Jonathon Gatehouse. “In its place is a deep dislike of the bellicose new global reality, and a lingering distrust of Bush’s motives.”

It’s too bad the article tries desperately to represent a spectrum of reasons why Canadians hate Dubya, because some of the reasons provided (and the people who provide them) represent the lunatic fringe:

“In Canada, a country that has always fretted about being swallowed up, either territorially or culturally, by the behemoth to the south, the spectre of an expanding American Empire feeds a deep-seated paranoia. At least for some.” Yeah, well, that “some” is quite small. Most Canadians don’t give a second thought day-to-day about an American invasion. And even if we did, we’d be justified: a 2002 poll showed that 32% of Americans thought Canada should be “annexed.” So, this point is either insignificant or entirely attributable to real American attitudes.
The article then cites David Frum, which is like asking Joseph Goebbels about life in Germany in the early 1940s. Frum coined the phrase “axis of evil” writing propaganda for Bush, and has since co-authored a blueprint for insanity with the Prince of Darkness himself, Richard Perle. Frum tells Maclean’s, “My contention is that the differences are much less dramatic than they are usually made out to be…. The Canadian media have generally taken a very belittling approach to [Bush].” Of course! The Canadian media made Bush look like a stupid ass. Frum then says something like, “Terror, terror, terror. Security, security, security.” Look, couldn’t Maclean’s find a more credible source than some power-hungry lackey like David Frum? If anything, the Canadian media has been much more balanced than the American media, which until very recently has refused to publish anything critical of Bush, and this despite a mountain of evidence depicting his post-9/11 deceptions.
Then the article cites Reginald Stuart, a Mount Saint Vincent University expert on U.S.-Canada relations, now at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson International Center. Stuart thinks the Canadian distaste for Bush “is smug and more than a bit juvenile.” This is remarkable, because it is an opinion that completely devalues the analytic capabilities of people who disagree with Bush. Maybe Bush deserves contempt? Maybe his policies do threaten the progressive social politics of Canada? Hasn’t Bush made overtures about new drug laws in Canada, and about same-sex marriage issues? America has never hesitated to interfere with other countries’ political landscapes in the past: Just ask Chile, Panama, Iraq, Iran, etc.
Finally, the article concludes: “Bush’s repeated ‘with us or against us’ declarations have made it clear that there are new, tougher requirements for being America’s ally. And as long as he remains well-positioned for another four years in the White House, we may have to do our share of puckering up. Canadians know that. We just don’t have to like it.” First, Bush is not necessarily “well-positioned” to win this next election; his approval ratings are at an all-time low. Second, and more important, why should Canadians have to accept (at least overtly) Bush’s arrogance and unilateralism? It’s that kind of fatalism that allows empires to be built and social injustices to be perpetrated. What you are seeing now, with the rising tide of anti-Americanism and the ebbing tide of America’s economy, is the quiet retribution of the rest of the world, our collective response to Bush’s arrogance. No man is an island. No country is either. This, too, shall pass.

The Star Week article on Conan O’Brien’s visit to Toronto next week represents the flipside of Canadian-American relations. See, we’re not always sniping at each other, ignoring the other, or making smug remarks about one country’s intellectually-challenged leader. Sometimes we share comedy.

O’Brien discusses his appreciation of Canadian comedians, especially SCTV.

“O’Brien is such a notoriously hardcore fan, he was asked to present the cast with a special award at the 1999 Aspen Comedy Festival, and also this year to write the introduction to the show’s new DVD package.” O’Brien calls SCTV the “least needy comedy show” he’d ever seen.

Late Night With Conan O’Brien will be taping shows in Toronto for the week of February 10-13. It seems appropriate that O’Brien would be the one to try this: His self-deprecating and occasionally absurdist humour seems closer to the Canadian brand of comedy than Leno’s crass populism, SNL’s abrasive frat boy hijinks, or Letterman’s cool cynicism. O’Brien is “nicer,” one might say, invoking a common perception of Canadians (and really, what’s so wrong with being nice? Some Americans find it problematic, I think, because they would rather be showy and occasionally abrasive than nice and occasionally dull).

The comedy exchange program next week will undoubtedly contain a host of American stereotypes about Canada (O’Brien is, after all, still making his show for an American audience), but it will also probably be accompanied by O’Brien’s general sense of charity; that is, his comedy occasionally has “victims,” but his overall demeanour isn’t malevolent.

And this is what George W. Bush could learn from Conan O’Brien and from Canada. Conflict happens in the world, yes, but isolationism and dogmatism will only exacerbate the conflict, they will not help resolve it. In fact, as many have noted, Bush’s response to the so-called threat of terrorism has only made things worse (much to his delight, I’m sure). Think about O’Brien’s characterization of SCTV as the “least needy” comedy show: That’s a selfish form of comedy he is describing, because it is being made for its creators, not for the audience. But the difference is, it wasn’t a malicious form of comedy, so the audience could enjoy it, too, without exclusion.

America needs to define itself, like all countries, with some measure of self-absorption and self-aggrandizement, but it also needs to define itself in less exclusive and dogmatic terms. Some Americans need to learn the social and economic benefits of charity and respect for others. A regime change at home would be the first step toward an America foreigners can laugh with, and not simply at.

A good summary of human rights abuses resulting from the Bush doctrine, and how things could have been handled differently

Sun, 01 Feb 2004 21:49:49 GMT

America's approach to human rights [Economist: Opinion]

Excerpt:

Around the globe, America's human-rights policy has visibly softened, subsumed under the all-encompassing banner of the “war against terrorism”. And at home, the Patriot Act, military commissions, Guantánamo and the indefinite detention of American citizens have placed America in the odd position of condoning deep intrusions by law, even while creating zones and persons outside the law.

At this point, you are surely asking: “Why did this happen?” and “What can we do about it?” People living outside America sometimes suggest that the reason is rooted in the American national culture of unilateralism, parochialism and an obsession with power. With respect, let me urge you to see it differently. The Bush doctrine, I believe, is less a broad manifestation of American national character than of short-sighted decisions made by a particularly extreme American administration.

Religion and Capitalism, Sitting in a Tree; or, What is the Lesson of the Prisoner's Dilemma?

Sat, 31 Jan 2004 19:43:52 GMT

Lots of talk about free markets in today's NY Times. What is the relationship between ethnicity and free-market democracy? What is the relationship between religion and capitalism? And what can the Prisoner's Dilemma teach us about all of this?

On the Dark Side of Democracy profiles Professor Amy Chua's belief that so-called "free" markets and democracy are not the cure-all Western conservatives promote them to be.

All too often, she says, bringing free markets and elections to developing nations leads not to stability or prosperity but to hate-mongering, discrimination and even genocidal violence.

The idea that political and economic liberty could trigger such atrocities is heretical to many Western liberals. That, Ms. Chua says, is because people here are blind to ethnicity.

....As she states the case in her recent book, "World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability"(Doubleday, 2003): "Markets concentrate wealth, often spectacular wealth, in the hands of the market-dominant minority, while democracy increases the political power of the impoverished majority. In these circumstances the pursuit of free market democracy becomes an engine of potentially catastrophic ethnonationalism." And this, she adds, is precisely what is happening today in Indonesia, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Russia and the Middle East."

On the stupid side of academia, you have two Harvard sociologists who contend that religion affects the economic prosperity of certain countries because "What really stimulates economic growth is whether you believe in an afterlife — especially hell." Religion is a significant factor in the running of a capitalist economy, no doubt, but not because of the contents of its belief system, as these sociologists believe:

"Our central perspective is that religion affects economic outcomes mainly by fostering religious beliefs that influence individual traits such as honesty, work ethic, thrift and openness to strangers," the researchers, Robert J. Barro and Rachel M. McCleary, wrote in a recent issue of American Sociological Review. (They also happen to be married.) "For example, beliefs in heaven and hell might affect those traits by creating perceived rewards and punishments that relate to `good' and `bad' lifetime behavior."

....As the couple began their study, Ms. McCleary said, it was clear that the widely discussed secularization thesis — the idea that a country becomes more secular as it becomes richer and more industrialized — did not apply to the United States, one of the most religious nations in the world.

And over the last 30 years, many East Asian countries, including Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea, have experienced both rapid economic growth and the spread of Christianity, Mr. Barro said.

It's only late in the article that the more salient feature of this research is noted:

But one of the major challenges to such research is that countries that vary in their religious beliefs and practices also vary in ways that have nothing to do with religion, said Paola Sapienza, a professor of finance at Northwestern University. "Are you really picking up religion or something that correlates with it, like certain laws or social and economic institutions?" she asked.

The truth about the spread of religious attitudes is in Sapienza's study:

Last year, in the Journal of Monetary Economics, Ms. Sapienza and her colleague Luigi Zingales, at the University of Chicago, and Luigi Guiso, at the University of Sassari in Rome, published a paper that did not compare countries but looked at the relationship between religious beliefs and the attitudes shown to foster economic growth. "On average," they wrote, "religious beliefs are associated with good economic attitudes, where good is defined as conducive to higher per capita income."

But that study found that more religious people were also less tolerant of other races and nationalities and had more negative attitudes toward women. The study based its findings on World Values Surveys data collected at the University of Michigan.

The Harvard sociologists were trying to spin their data to suggest that religion produces "positive" attitudes related to economic growth, but this presumes that there is some correlation between a person's "honesty" and "thrift" and a person's religious beliefs, and it presumes the definition of "good" is a consequence of "higher per capita income." They trumpet belief in "heaven" and "hell" as good things because these beliefs may modify a person's behaviour, convince a person to work hard and tell the truth.

The General thinks religious belief is conducive to capitalist growth because both enterprises require the mass of adherents to believe in the righteousness of suffering. Victory through suffering, is the Christian mantra. Christianity convinces the poor to work at Denny's 40 hours per week and to accept the malicious governance of their corporate overlords because, well, God wanted it this way. Dignity in suffering. Just keep going to church and everything will be alright. Your victory is in the next life, so don't worry about the shitty conditions of this one. Instead of revolting, forming unions, doing something, most people sit back and take the abuse, and I think this is because religion convinces them that there are more important things than, say, better working conditions or higher wages. Important things like heaven and hell and other such nonsense.

Notice how the Sapienza research shows that religious people are less tolerant of other races, nationalities, and have negative attitudes towards women. That kind of dogmatic intolerance is what makes for a good capitalist, someone who can reduce the world (though it resists such reduction) to a simple formula of supply and demand, or good and evil, and then justify every unethical outcome (sweatshops, pollution, degradation of the environment, war over oil) as just a necessary evil of man's dominion over the earth, or just a necessary evil in the fight against... evil. Capitalism is not based on "justice for all" but on an inherent inequality, a disparity that generates profit. It's the most fundamental concept in capitalism: Somebody (actually, many people) has to work for less than their work is worth. The intolerance of religious people seems well suited to the capitalist spawning of inequality.

Look to the "prisoner's dilemma," a classic dilemma in game theory, for the central reason that religion works so well for capitalism. The prisoner's dilemma illustrates the conflict between individualistic and collective behaviour. Two men are arrested for the same crime, and interrogated separately. What should they do? Rat each other out? If prisoner A blames prisoner B for the crime, and prisoner B blames prisoner A, then there is no net gain. If prisoner A says nothing and prisoner B says nothing, then there is a slight advantage to both that they will not be convicted of the crime. However, by not saying anything, one risks being blamed by the other (and saying nothing in one's defense): This is the worst outcome and the best outcome.

In other words, is the individual best advantaged by selfish or unselfish behaviour? The best outcome for either prisoner would see one guy act selfishly (blame the other) and the other guy act unselfishly (say nothing). The first guy gets away because the second guy didn't say anything, he acted altruistically, and the first guy did, he acted selfishly. The lesson here is: Act selfishly and convince the other(s) to act unselfishly. This is the best outcome for you. Naturally, both prisoners know this, and so they can sabotage each other by both acting selfishly.

What does this have to do with religion? Well, while the agnostic rich people who run the country act in their own self-interest, they also convince the majority of poor people to act unselfishly, primarily by getting poor people to embrace religion and nationalism. Go to Iraq and risk your life to protect the American way of life. What they really mean is, Go to Iraq to protect my precious oil and power. The lesson of the Prisoner's Dilemma is: Convince everyone else to act unselfishly. But be as selfish as you can be. That's good capitalism.

Documenting American Life in 2003: The Fog of War, Spellbound, and Capturing the Friedmans

Sun, 25 Jan 2004 18:07:19 GMT

In the NY Times today, Frank Rich discusses Robert McNamara, subject of the compelling documentary The Fog of War, as the precursor for the era of CEO politicians.

As a national role model at the dawn of Camelot, Robert McNamara was Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and, yes, Paul O'Neill before it was cool. He entered the cabinet as an exemplar of "American certitude and conviction" who could use "his rationality with facts" to intimidate bureaucratic dissenters, David Halberstam wrote in "The Best and the Brightest" in 1972, after Mr. McNamara had come to his bad end. Among Mr. McNamara's virtues, Mr. Halberstam wrote, was loyalty — but "perhaps too much loyalty, the corporate-mentality loyalty to the office instead of to himself."

McNamara may be the exemplar of the kind of bureaucratic functionalism that has hijacked our civic life in North America.

In the Kennedy administration, Mr. McNamara's background was something of a novelty. The Bush administration boasts more C.E.O.'s in top jobs than any administration in history — as well as the first president with his own Harvard M.B.A.

With the "business" of government ceded to cynical opportunists such as those who populate the Bush White House, the true character of governance and citizenship are to be found not in the model of government forwarded by people like Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, but in the nuances of documentaries such as The Fog of War, and two other successful American documentaries from 2003, Spellbound and Capturing the Friedmans.

The Fog of War has more to teach the general public about proper governance (via the mistakes of Vietnam-era bureaucrats like McNamara) than any State of the Union Address and its partisan jingoism. As Rich points out, the lessons of McNamara's follies in The Fog of War share many parallels with current American foreign policy:

The greater debate has been over the degree to which the follies of Vietnam are now being re-enacted in Iraq. Though Mr. Morris started interviewing Mr. McNamara before 9/11 and his film never mentions current events, the implicit parallels between then and now are there for the taking. In the Johnson administration's deceptive hyping of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a provocation to war, we see the Bush administration's deceptive hyping of the supposedly imminent threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction for the same purpose. In Mr. McNamara's stern warnings against waging war unilaterally and against trying to win the hearts and minds of a foreign land without understanding its culture first, we find historical lessons we didn't heed as we blundered into the escalating chaos of our "postwar" occupation of Iraq.

Similar lessons about the nature of democracy and some of its failings in contemporary America might be taken from Spellbound, a documentary about the national spelling bee competition. Whereas The Fog of War contains lessons about the absence of empathy in US foreign policy, Spellbound examines "otherness" on the domestic front. Why do kids from various geographical regions, races, and classes enter the seemingly mechanical intellectual exercise of a spelling bee? On one level, the film (almost unknowingly, it seems at times) lays bare the American drive to turn everything into a competition, even spelling, as if to offer an intellectual analog for athletic and militaristic agones. Even in the passive pursuit of learning, Americans want to see winners and losers. Does this type of activity produce future CEO politicians, as much as the other violent competitions that characterize being American and being young?

It's not clear if the filmmakers of Spellbound recognize the fine line they are walking between jingoism and satire. For Capturing the Friedmans, however, the ambiguity of the central subject matter is what creates the essential tension that drives the film. Capturing the Friedmans examines the life of a family as it unravels following the arrest of the father and one son on child molestation charges. By the end of the film the question of "did he do it?" is supplanted by issues of the process of American justice and the life of a community in a democracy. What kind of justice system does bureaucratic functionalism create? What kind of community does it create, and how do such communities deal with misplaced trust and abuse?

Documentaries such as these remind us that art still has more to offer the public sphere than business and the people who populate it. Art does not reduce human beings to their exchange value, but instead gives expression to the uncertainties and possibilities of public and private life. The General salutes these documentary filmmakers for showing the frailty, uncertainty, and often erroneous character of human perception in a year in which programmatic rationality and religious zealotry were celebrated by some as strengths of character instead of the bastions of fascism that they are.

Why Not Just Get RSS From My Ass?

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 03:24:09 GMT

see if you will a picture. My pal Sean brought this lovely photo to my attention. It should give the restless WWdN reader something to do for, oh, six or even eight seconds today! [WIL WHEATON DOT NET: Where is my mind?]

The General just thinks it is funny anyone would require an RSS feed from the blog of Wil Weaton. And that's exactly why The General subscribes. And you should too. Because you never know when Wil Weaton lay it on you, and you'll be all like, "What the fuck was that? Was that Truth, Wil Weaton style?" And Wil Weaton will be all like, "Fuck ya."

I don't know where that was going. Anyhoo, occasionally the General must step away from saving the world from its dumb-ass self. And when The General steps away, he steps into a world of Weaton, my friend.

"Know Thyself" Replaced By "Love Thyself"

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 01:39:04 GMT

What French girls know. Young girls in France learn early in life that happiness is not as important as passion. [Salon.com]

According to Christophe, a French journalist with a seriously lush history of romance on both sides of the Atlantic: "Everything in [American] culture is defined like a contract, even the business of love. That's precisely the opposite in France. I've dated French women for months before I ever really knew who they were or what they wanted from me. After the first or second date, the American woman wants everything spelled out: 'Are we dating? Are you my boyfriend or just a friend?' A French woman doesn't do that. She doesn't give much away. She's comfortable letting things evolve naturally, but the ball's almost always in her court."

Poor heterosexual French men. Poor heterosexual men, period, the General says. At some point, the healthy liberation of women from certain social stigma and economic chains turned into a very unhealthy celebration of pure, unadulterated narcissism. What the article above is describing as French women's desire for passion, potentially at the expense of love or security, is really the ascendence of narcissism in the definition of womanhood. The French may call it "passion" and say that it doesn't exist in the same way in the contractual relationships of North American women, but in reality North American women live the same way, and call it "ambition" or "self-fulfillment" or something like that.

Whether you call it "passion" or "self-fulfillment," you are describing the belief in the myth of the individual for the purpose of consummately narcissistic behavior.

The woman at the centre of this article continues:

"We learn that we have more power when we keep things to ourselves than when we give things away. We learn that the art of seduction is based on innuendo and silences."

No, what you're talking about, Natalie, is the art of neurosis. Of course women have more power when they "keep things" to themselves; business people just use the poker metaphor, and call it "playing it close to the vest." This isn't seduction; this is deception, and it has become the hallmark of interpersonal relationships now that middle class women have as much opportunity to make money as middle class men. (After all, let's not kid ourselves into believing that these rules of "seduction" apply to rich people, or matter as much to poor people; feminism and its cultural residue are middle class phenomena.)

Feminism didn't make women better people by creating a semblance of economic and social equality with men; feminism made women better consumers, just like men. Now we can both treat each other like objects in a self-absorbed game to satisfy our overdeveloped sense of entitlement. I'm not suggesting some nutty conservative idea about barefoot and pregnant is the answer. I'm simply describing a generation of narcissistic women.

Think about what is really being said by the French woman in the article above from Salon. Passion is more important than happiness. It is better to be wildly inconsistent, but to enjoy sporadic moments of "passion," than to know what you want in a mate and to look for it. In other words, the "belief" in passion, the dogma of passion espoused here, is really saying: It's not important that you declare your intentions to the other person, or even that you know your intentions; instead, what matters is satisfying yourself at the other person's expense. Always serve yourself. Passion is like the high one gets after purchasing a new stereo or a new dress. Forget about the human price of that object (landfills or sweatshops); just consider your own "passion" satisfied by it.

Men had their millennia of selfish indulgence. Even now, most narcissists, according to the clinical definition, are men. The difference in the last 20 or 30 years in North America has been the emergence of a larger portion of middle class women who now carry themselves like men have for so long. The new narcissism is based on the success of capitalism, which breeds in its patrons a sense that self-love is the remedy for self-loathing; however, the more one indulges the self-love (and finds it wanting), the more one feels the self-loathing. I'm reminded of an old dance song by The Tamperer featuring Maya Days called "If you buy this record your life will be better." We approach all commodities with this mentality. We approach people with this mentality. But of course The X-Files was wrong: The answer is not "out there."

And because there is no answer to your unhappiness, dear seductress, your passion-seeking neurosis never satisfies, and in your wake is a swath of distraught, or embittered, or simply confused men. But don't worry about other people: You don't need them except for the random pursuit of passion.

Postanarchist Hakim Bey summarizes the capitalist production of alienation:

Capitalism, which claims to produce Order by means of the reproduction of desire, in fact originates in the production of scarcity, and can only reproduce itself in unfulfillment, negation, and alienation. As the Spectacle disintegrates... it reveals the fleshless bones of the Commodity. Like those tranced travelers in Irish fairy tales who visit the Otherworld and seem to dine on supernatural delicacies, we wake in a bleary dawn with ashes in our mouths.

That is, capitalism only works if it breeds self-loathing (after all, isn't the message of every advertisement, "You're not good enough") with the promise of self-fulfillment. The passionate French woman of the Salon article reminds me of the prototypical consumer: aimless, self-indulgent, incapable of empathy because it would destroy the rush of narcissistic abandon.

The belief in passion -- the central mythology of celebrity culture -- is precisely the problem, not the cure. And I don't mean this in a prudish sense: pleasure is a good thing. I mean passion as it functions in a "delusory" sense, in the way it deludes, covers up, represses.

Passion fuels the culture industry. Passion breeds fascism of the body. The fat person is the new communist, the new drug cartel, the new terrorist: the person against whom hate is permitted, about whom no joke is too cruel. Why? Because body fascists employ the mathematics of narcissism, in which beauty is a zero-sum game: To gain weight is to lose everything. If other people do not desire you, you are nothing. No value is generated internally. Let the markets decide.

The article in Salon maligns North Americans for being too direct and businesslike in their relationships, but the problem is that the desire of the modern consumer of "love" is undirected, it has no goal but desire itself. The desire of the modern woman is directed at herself: she fetishes every inch of fat, she obsesses over the "success" of her girlfriends, she has no room for a mate because ultimately her true love is herself. The desire for passion simply creates a pathological being who is in love with love. This type of woman is no different than any other kind of addict, and the detriment to others is the same.

Bottom line: Know what you want, and communicate what you want. If you don't know what you want, then, to quote one of the great metal acts of all time, "Be yourself, by yourself/ Stay away from me."

Why is being a lying, obnoxious, idiotic extrovert a virtue?

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 22:58:27 GMT

A Reuters story on Arnold Schwarzenegger today caught my attention for two reasons: first, its absolute superfluity; and second, the way it valorizes being a "salesman" above every other significant and offensive flaw that Arnold Schwarzenegger flaunts.

Salesman Savvy Is Schwarzenegger's Ultimate Muscle

"I am a salesman by nature," the former Mr. Universe and film star said in his first State of the State address to the California legislature, an address that wound up being televised around the world.

"And now most of my energies will go to selling California," he said before mentioning two of his box office duds. "If I can sell tickets to my movies like 'Red Sonja' or 'The Last Action Hero', you know I can sell just about anything."

Hardy, har, har. I know we're far from having a philosopher king ever ruling any form of human civilization (and maybe that's a good thing), but why do we celebrate being gregarious (and in this case, not even a witty form of it) over all other forms of being (contemplation, judicious decision-making, practical experience, and so on)? People would rather have a weightlifting moron in office because he seems to be sociable, and certainly looks strong. The fact that he has no experience with holding office (let's remember this isn't city hall he's running), no credentials that suggest he is learned enough to understand the variety and complexity of issues facing a governor, and no credentials that even suggest he can think on his feet, means nothing?

Add to all of that the cynical truth about Schwarzenegger's rise to power amid accusations of sexism and racism: He probably gained more approval than he lost for his sexism and racism. People say stupid things like, "Well, at least he had the fortitude to admit to his past actions." Well, sure, but wouldn't it be better if he weren't a racist, misogynist asshole? Instead, people read his openness about being a misogynist asshole as some kind of virtue, because it shows that he's up-front about things, he's direct, he's a straight shooter. The valorization of extroverted behaviour for its own sake ("he's a salesman") is indicative of a culture that has stopped thinking and is voting on name recognition alone.

He's a salesman? What's he selling? That's the real issue, not his willingness to promote himself. In this case, Schwarzenegger is selling out the state of California by letting Enron off the hook for the tens of billions of dollars it cost the state.

Self-promotion is easy; just watch wrestling for some tips. The hard part is introspection and humility.

What I Learned in 2003

Wed, 31 Dec 2003 21:57:38 GMT

What was I hoping for in the first place? Well, I think I wanted to believe that microcosmic practices could add up to more than macrocosmic forces; that is, I wanted to believe that the life of a human being wasn’t so completely constrained by a hierarchical procession of power that at least some everyday actions mattered in the collective pattern of existing. It’s not that I think that some people’s lives matter, and others don’t; it’s that people must have the impression that their lives matter, in order to convince them it’s all worthwhile, and the current arrangement is convincing for only the smallest number of people. In other words, I just don’t think the story of our time is a very good one for most of the people of our time.

What did I learn?

Things are getting worse, not better. Aside from improvements in certain parts of medical science, most of the narratives that control our lives are telling increasingly cynical and despairing stories. Sports: Ruined by capitalism, with no end in sight; who needs another World Series with the Yankees versus whomever? Professional sports just isn’t an interesting story when the financial disparity between teams is so dramatic. Entertainment: Too much product, and the ubiquity of celebrity news has completely destroyed the illusion of the creative process. How can we take our stories seriously (and I think we have to, to keep believing that stuff matters) when the process of storymaking has been so completely deconstructed? Politics: It wasn’t long ago that ideologies mattered; but now there is no difference between the parties, wherever you live, just a question of how much they’re willing to do for the payola.
The oil barons will determine the fate of my world at least until I am dead. I’ve never questioned the rule of the rich; but it seems like only one kind of rich matters now: oil rich. Even though the supremacy of oil is a story at least a century in the making, the extent of its power has never been so pronounced as it is now (right at the moment its power and sustainability is being questioned). Obviously, the main reason for this is that the Bush administration is composed largely of, and works on behalf of, oil and energy company executives; and since America is by far the most powerful nation on earth, the de facto rule of the oil barons is the natural consequence. Consider this passage from the 1991 Pulitzer Prize winning book by Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power: "It is oil that makes possible where we live, how we live, how we commute to work, how we travel – even where we conduct our courtships. It is the lifeblood of suburban communities. Oil (and natural gas) are the essential components in the fertilizer on which world agriculture depends; oil makes it possible to transport food to the totally non-self-sufficient megacities of the world. Oil also provides the plastics and chemicals that are the bricks and mortar of contemporary civilization, a civilization that would collapse if the world’s oil wells suddenly went dry" (15).
John Travolta is the key to the entire entertainment industry, and maybe life itself. See my evolving "Travolta Hypothesis" here and here. Then consider this: "In the final analysis, stars are created by the need we have for them, and not by talent or absence of talent or even by the film industry or advertising. Miserable need, dismal, anonymous life that would like to expand itself to the dimensions of cinema life." -- Guy Debord
Digital piracy is a good thing. People reduce this issue to an economic and legalistic one, but I think if you look at the cultural benefit of digital piracy you will see that fewer movies and records being sold is a good thing. And don't give some sob story about "the end of music": Since when is the commodification of music the natural state of things? I don't think Justin Timberlake needs another obscenely ostentatious shopping spree courtesy of his impressionable fans.
Religion is a destructive force that promotes ignorance and superstition. This is not news at all, but I put it on this list because I think 2003 was a banner year for religion (and as a consequence, a not-so-banner year for the rest of us). When they're not shooting doctors for performing legal abortions, or denying school children to right to learn the theory of evolution (perhaps the most adequately demonstrated scientific theory around), religious extremists are voting for Republican administrations that militarize this message of hate for the Islamic world (which has done more than its share of spreading ignorance).
The aesthetic experience is the only site for true meaning in this life. Humans are animals who desire pleasure and try to avoid pain (occasionally the two coincide, when pain is pleasure). Humans cannot be trusted; but the aesthetic experience that gives pleasure can. Interpersonal relations are necessary but ultimately undermined. Watch movies. Read books. Listen to music. Find solace in the beautiful, but don't seek to control the beautiful. Beautiful people are almost always narcissistic assholes. Beautiful natural forms, films, words, images, sounds: find them and enjoy them, because the rest is bullshit.

The General salutes the artists of this world, the people who create instead of destroying, buying, or selling. May you continue to create, to enrich the aesthetic experiences for all of us in 2004.

A List of Canadian Inventions, Including The Telephone

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 06:52:00 GMT

It gets tiresome responding to critics. Here is a list of Canadian inventions, including basketball and the telephone:

http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa090100a.htm