A few days ago I posted on BYL’s Facebook page a link to a short Dissent piece on Ted Kennedy. (That piece can be found here.) That piece elicited response from a friend of mine. To get some conversation going here I’ll paraphrase his comments below.

• Dissent often quotes Richard Rorty who, in praise of the magazine, called it the most important publication for the American left. So when did they become “…fodder for limo liberals (snark intended)?”
• On Kennedy’s effectiveness, it turns out the “lion” was “willing to get into bed with the hunter after it was done roaring.” (Read this as meaning that compared to other liberals and progressives Kennedy was able to compromise and get things done.)
• Finally, on Kennedy being more liberal than his brothers, it’s perhaps the case of comparing people out of context. That is, “his brothers had a very different compromise environment.” (On this point, think of comparing athletes against other athletes in their own generation instead of comparing, say, Rod Laver against Pete Sampras against Roger Federer.)

So, food for thought. Things to mull over, etc.

Health care reform is on the forefront of political news these days. One aspect of Obama’s proposal has polarized the American right and left–the public option. (The polarizing effect of this piece is so great–as is Obama’s desire for bipartisan politics–that he’s thought of dropping it altogether. This move is perhaps having its own deleterious effects.) Town hall meetings have been marred by disruptions and Obama has routinely been called a socialist. (And, in other situations, he’s been compared to Hitler.) What’s striking from all this hubbub over the public option, however, isn’t rationing, euthanization of the elderly, or a government monopoly on health care. Rather, it’s a fundamental misunderstanding over what the public option actually is. Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight has a point-by-point proposal for getting a better hold on the public’s view on the public option. These include (1) Make clear that the ‘public option’ refers unambiguously to a type of health insurance, and not the actual provision of health care services by the government; (2) Make clear that by ‘public,’ you mean ‘government’; (3) Avoid using the term ‘Medicare’ when referring to the public option; (4) Make clear that the public option is, in fact, an option; and (5) Ask in clear and unambiguous terms whether the respondent supports the public option–not how important they think it is. Forcing people to think about the public option in this manner surely will help politicians gain a better understanding of what their constituents want. And, perhaps more importantly, it will force citizens to think more clearly about what they want for themselves and others.

Rachel Maddow is quickly becoming a firebrand for the left. This past weekend she was on NBC’s Meet the Press. Notably, she argued with former House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Here’s footage of them locking horns.

And, for kicks, here’s an earlier video of her on Hardball arguing with Pat Buchanan about SCHIP.

Human Rights Watch have just released a 124 page long report, “Broken System: Dysfunction, Abuse and Impunity in the Indian Police,” detailing abuses by India’s police. (There’s also a smaller, 12 page report for those of you who don’t have the time or the stomach to work through the longer version.) The report details, among other things, the deteriorating state of the Indian police, human rights violations, the lack of accountability, and, finally, HRW’s recommendations.

For a country that heralds itself as the world’s largest democracy, the picture painted by the HRW report isn’t pretty. In January 2009, “Officer Singh” told HRW: “This week, I was told to do an ‘encounter.’ I am looking for my target. I will eliminate him.” The “encounter” Officer Singh refers to is “the practice of taking into custody and extrajudicially executing an individual, then claiming that the victim died after initiating a shoot-out with police. Officer Singh says he wanted to be an honest cop. He says, “[n]o one is born corrupt. It’s a tailor-made system: if you’re not corrupt, you won’t survive.”

But the story doesn’t stop there. There’s also torture. One torture victim, an eighteen year old boy, says, “[a]fter they finished tea they pulled off my shirt and trousers. The constable kicked me, and then constables came and held my hands and legs. They drenched me with a bucket of cold water…For one and a half hours, I was beaten like this…. [On the third night] the SI [sub-inspector] and SO [station officer] pressed their feet against my thighs. I felt my veins, it felt like they would burst. They said, “We’ll make you impotent and you’ll be of no use.” The police, however, are unrepentant about their actions. A constable from Bangalore, for example, remarks, “We do use some extralegal methods. You might disagree, but we cannot do all work by the book. Then the police would be completely ineffective.”

These are only a few snippets from the report. India’s population, as most well know,  features one of the world’s largest underclasses, which includes a pronounced north-south gap. The rich, and middle-class, can, then, if it comes down to it, bribe the police. But this isn’t an option for the socially, politically, and economically marginalized lower classes and untouchables. There’s obviously a lot of noise about India as an emerging economic (super)power. But there’s been substantially less attention paid to issues like police abuse, class warfare (in the literal, not Palin, sense), and violence against females.

Since its publication in 1971, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice has shaped the conversation about justice. Rawls’s writings have attracted many followers and equally many critics. Rawls’s “difference principle” is one aspect of his theory of justice which has been especially critiqued. Since delivering his Tanner Lecture critiquing Rawls on this score (”Incentives, Inequality, and Community”), G.A. Cohen spent nearly the last twenty years further scrutinizing Rawls’s methodology. His arguments can be found in two books–If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? and Rescuing Justice and Equality. I’m very sad to have learned that Jerry Cohen passed away this morning after suffering a massive stroke sometime yesterday afternoon.

I was very fortunate to have heard Cohen while I was at Harvard. He first delivered a paper on conservatism. (As he wrote in his paper, “Things ain’t what they used to be.”) The next day he debated UCLA’s AJ Julius on the topic of justice. (Julius has a fantastic paper, “Basic Structure and the Value of Equality,” in which he engages Cohen’s critique. He also had a handout which looked somewhat similar to this. [I also think there's no greater respect you can pay your teacher or someone you've learned from then working on a large project engaging one of their ideas.]) I was intending to leave after the debate but some of my friends who had previously gone to Oxford told me to stick around. They told me that when Cohen was an undergrad at McGill he was so poor that he’d do standup comedy to get some money together. So, after dinner, Cohen went to the front of the auditorium where, a couple of hours earlier, he’d locked his intellectual horns with Julius’s, and did some of the funniest comedy I’ve ever heard. His books aren’t easy to to read, and you’ll need to be familiar with Rawls to understand the latter two, but his writing is first-rate philosophy.

I was on Netflix the other day looking for a movie to stream when I chanced upon Two Lovers. The film was well-received by the critics. But it’s perhaps most notable as Joaquin Phoenix’s last film before he retired to become a rapper. Some may think this a curious development. And perhaps it is. But actors, I suppose like any other sort of person, are prone to seemingly eccentric behavior. Anyone remember when, in the mid to late 90s, Bill Murray announced he was retiring from acting to devote himself to trying to make it to the NBA? In that case, one might argue, Murray hadn’t put out a great film in a while, and so a diversion, like trying to be a professional basketball player, might be warranted.

But Joaquin Phoenix is on the top of his game. He’s had a slew of very well received films, including Two Lovers and, before that, Walk the Line. He’s also involved with his work in animal rights. (The animal rights film Earthlings, mentioned in an earlier post, was narrated by Phoenix.) So, when I was reading about his recent film online, I was certainly surprised to find he was retiring from acting to become a rapper. And I was more surprised to see a recent interview of him on Letterman

and another video of him rapping in Miami and jumping into the crowd to attack a heckler

Make what you will of these two videos. Gwyneth Paltrow, his costar in Two Lovers, thinks it’s all a hoax.

(I know, it’s not political. But I just had to indulge myself.)

Last night on the Daily Show, John Oliver did a great segment about how United States Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner can’t sell his own house. The story goes that Geithner bought the home in 2004 for 1.6 million dollars. He then tried to list the house in early 2009 for 1.635 million. This would be fine and dandy if the US housing market had not fallen 30% over the course of the last year. Quote of the day: “Whoever owns this home obviously knows nothing about finance.”

This past weekend I watched Food Inc. But before I talk about the film specifically I want to consider a couple other things.

The Templeton Foundation is sponsoring a “Big Questions” series. Each question features responses from an assortment of academics and public intellectuals. One question in the series asks, “Does the free market corrode moral character?” One of the respondents, Michael Walzer, says, “Competition in the market puts people under great pressure to break the ordinary rules of decent conduct and then to produce good reasons for doing so. It is these rationalizations — the endless self-deception necessary to meet the bottom line and still feel okay about it — that corrode moral character.”

These rationalizations for doing egregious things, especially in relation to nonhuman animals, have obviously been long decried by animal rights/welfarists of various stripes. Peter Singer’s 1975 book, Animal Liberation, brought to the public eye most of these practices. (In 2006, Singer, along with Jim Mason, wrote another book, The Way We Eat, which focused specifically on the American diet. They highlighted, among other things, three diets: “standard American diet,” “ethical omnivores,” and vegans. The book also represented a refutation to some of the claims advanced by Michael Pollan and others. ) And, since their founding in 1980, PETA have continued highlighting everyday animal cruelty.

But, to the public eye, Peter Singer and PETA are “radical” forces. The things they want us to do, like giving up meat and dairy, which, even  in the face  of the facts they present about factory farming, environment damage, and health effects, aren’t accepted by most as live options. So, how do we tie together evidence about American obesity, factory farming, the environment, etc.? Food Inc., in a way, makes such an attempt.

The film features Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan. The film looks at, among other things, the new face of American farming, and factory farming specifically, an American family’s diet and its effects on their health, and some possible solutions to the problem. If you’ve read Schlosser’s and/or Pollan’s books then what the film visits isn’t new material. The same can be said about the factory farm footage (Earthlings, another documentary film which came out a few years ago, depicts them much more graphically), and the family of four eating their meals from a fast food joint. But there’s something to be said about tying all these things together in one place with public figures and in the manner in which the filmmakers did. The movie didn’t reinvent the wheel or, for that matter, tread new ground. But it’s another (successful) attempt at showing how commodifying life affects everyone. If Food Inc. isn’t a wake-up call then I don’t know what is.

Animals are, unfortunately, used in “entertainment.” There are some instances, e.g., dogfighting, cockfighting, that are indisputably morally ghastly. Then there are instances where animal use is supposed to be of cultural import, namely, bullfighting. (In Pamplona, Spain this year, however, one of bulls got even in the annual running of the bulls.) But circuses are in a class of their own for a couple of reasons. First, people generally don’t associate them with animal cruelty. Perhaps many people think of circus folk, animals included, as one big family. And, second, circuses are so ubiquitous that people perhaps think that if some grossly negligent acts against animals were going on then someone would act against it. But circuses continue to operate in the US and elsewhere. And their treatment of animals is pretty much deplorable. PETA–you know, those assholes who just like stirring up controversy because they’re too bored and/or stupid to do anything else–have released footage from Ringling Bros. 2009 shows. Take a look at the video yourself.

Visit RinglingBeatsAnimals.com

Ceremony don’t mince words. They also don’t waste time. Their latest album, Still Nothing Moves You, is no exception. This effort finds the Bay Area quintet belting through fifteen hardcore punk songs in twenty-one minutes. Lyrically, their subject covers well worn terrain, including, e.g., loneliness (”I can’t seem to make things right/I can’t seem to erase my mind/more nothing than negative space”) and religion (”I won’t be skullfucked by faith/ I am the upside down cross”). So, what’s the catch? Sonically, Ceremony are surely stretching the boundaries of the hardcore punk genres. First there’s Ross Farrar’s vocals which, shouted, in the Ian Mackaye sort of way, create a definite sense of urgency. And then there’s the instruments. In a way they’re typical of other bands in the genre, e.g., F-Minus. But in other instances they’re more akin to something from a Khanate album. But in the end you really can’t go with the brutality of a good hardcore punk album. Here’s a video of them playing at Berkeley’s 924 Gilman St. venue. (Davey Havok of AFI even joins them on stage for a cover of Project X’s “Straight edge revenge.”)