Sympathy through war

Oy, it's been a long time. Gurp.

A couple weeks ago I saw The Fog of War, Errol Morris' amazing documentary about Robert McNamara. One thing in particular struck me. Over the past few weeks and months I have been thinking a lot about how powerful and important sympathy is for so many aspects of human existence: compassion, an individual's social well-being, society's well-being, spirituality, etc. (As in this post from a month ago about the Humble Approach Initiative -- it's about humility through sympathy with others.) One of McNamara's lessons is to empathize with your enemy during war. Here's a guy who had a hand in firebombing Japanese cities and getting us into the Vietnam war, in a documentary made by a liberal former campus radical, and he came off looking fairly sympathetic, not least because of his sympathy with the enemy. I remember thinking at times that I had seen soldiers express that kind of sympathy for people they have shot at. In some ways they have no animosity, although they're trying to kill each other.

This Slate article mentions a similar phenomenon in a video game in which you fight against the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Japanese gamers, Clive Thompson says, love the game. They don't care that they're killing their fathers and grandfathers. And it's not a Japanese thing -- he mentions plenty of other games in which people happily blew up their countrymen, even including us superpowerful Americans. It seems that gamers go past the cultural implications of their games, thinking only about the art of war. I suspect at least some soldiers are the same way.

The source of 'chick power'

In the previous post, I said that Slate's piece on The Apprentice got me started on this kick of thinking about women drawing power from their sexual attractiveness. I had forgotten that last week I saw "Live Nude Girls Unite!", a movie about a strip club here in SF where all the workers unionized, made by one of the girls herself. She saw it as a very empowering step, but her mother was not convinced.

Chick power?

Over the past few days I have been thinking a lot about modern women, feminism and where they're going. It first popped up in my mind when I read Slate's take on The Apprentice, the reality show with Donald Trump which started out with a team of men facing a team of women in a weird capitalism game -- each week they have some kind of money-based competition, and each week the team that loses the competition also loses a teammate, sorta like Survivor. Turns out that the women cleaned up, winning every week. A few weeks into the show they had to shuffle the teams because the poor menfolk didn't have a chance. The thing is that the women did so well by dressing skimpy and exploiting their physical attractiveness. Essentially, they are using the old dynamic of prostitution, although not going through with any actual sex acts.

I have been torn about this sort of topic for a while. Lots of females I know seem to think this is totally fine, that women are smart to use their wiles to acquire stuff and power from men, who are starting out with most of the resources. This clashes sharply with the traditional feminist view of women needing to be respected for their minds and needing to stop men from seeing them as sex objects. I don't really know where I shake out on this issue, but I think it's sort of between the two sides. Politically, I tend to think more like the traditional feminists -- women using their sexual desirability to get things from men are trapping themselves in counterproductive roles.

At the same time, I am all in favor of women feeling free to live their sexual lives and dressing however the hell they want. I don't think it's necessarily bad for women to wear skimpy clothes or sleep with many partners, and straight sex is not necessarily a submissive role for women. I guess what I would hope for is that women could wear want they want, and sleep with whom they want, and not really have that have too much of a bearing on the other parts of their lives, like their profession. I don't really like it that the women on The Apprentice consciously wear belly T's to make money. If they wear them all the time because they like them, that's fine with me. I don't like feeling like the people around me are so exploitative.

I got in a debate with a few female friends over the movie Charlie's Angels. They thought it was fun and liked watching women kick ass. I couldn't help but think that some push for deeper empowerment of women was getting shrunk down into this little trifle. There's nothing wrong with the movie itself, but if that is what popular feminism is left with it's just damn sad.


These questions also arose when I came across this ESPN article about hot female athletes. There's an interesting mix of stuff going on here. First of all, the male author is saying that it's hot for women to play sports, and to be good at them. So we've made some progress. But in the end, one does get the feeling that the ultimate use of a female athlete for a male sports fan is as a sexual object -- it's just that what's sexy has changed from being demure, pretty, and passive; to assertive, toned, and athletic. It's definitely better, leaves a not-the-best feeling in my mouth.

In the works

Okay, they're making the bluetooth music transmitter. Give it to me for very little money.

My umpteenth get-rich-quick scheme

Here it is: you make a plug-in attachment for a portable music player that sends out the audio signal to 6 nearby headsets. That's it. I guess I would use bluetooth for the transmission.

What this does is allows a bunch of people to walk around and all listen to the same music. It's like carrying a ghettoblaster in 1985 except it holds more music, batteries last longer, better sound quality, don't get kicked off the train, and you have your own secret content you're sharing with those people. (Yes, you do lose the 'Talk to me and I'll kick your ass' aesthetic, but it more than balances.)

This seems really obvious to me. Then I thought it would never happen, but bluetooth finally seems to be taking off in cellphones after being stillborn for several years. The Voice says people are now doing iPod swaps when they rendez-vous. Well, for God's sake, let them listen to each other's music at the same time, wirelessly, dammit! How fricking obvious is this?!


You might ask why thinkness has any authority to talk about get-rich-quick schemes. Not so much, but I will say that I thought of MP3 players over a year before they came out. ('It's just a hard drive that plays MP3s. Like a MP3 Walkman.') They laughed at me. Now I laugh at them, although I am locked up in a tiny little padded room.

Other ways to get rich quick: caffeinated beer, tupperware with the lid attached (it folds down and attaches to the bottom when open). If you make a lot of money with my ideas, at least give me a link, eh?

Life and death, GMO-style

Another interesting trend in genetic engineering is using the technology for targeted assassination, wiping out cells or perhaps even whole species. (And I promise this will be more interesting than yesterday's overly-detailed post.)

Here is some of the bigger stuff that's afoot in this field:

• Scientists at Duke created a GM virus that attacks and kills brain tumors in mice and "nonhuman primates" within 6 hours. How did they do it? They used the polio virus and changed its internal ribosomal entry site (IRES), which is a sort of key that a virus uses to infiltrate a cell, take control of it, and force it to create more viruses, killing the poor cell. They switched the polio virus' IRES with the virus that causes the common cold, the rhinovirus, which does not affect the brain. The engineered virus still attacks the cancer cells. I don't know the biology so well, but this sounds amazing to me, though I am a little wary of whether the virus may attack a few normal brain cells.
  
  
• Another side of the genetically-engineered virus story is that scientists can create killer viruses. A team at St Louis University spawned a beefed-up mousepox virus that was immune to individual vaccines and killed all mice it infected. They also found a two-drug mixture that protected against the virus. This research follows a similar study from Australia three years ago where researchers accidentally made a mouse-killing super virus but did not find a cure. The researchers say bad guys can make these killer viruses so we should make them first and figure out how to protect against them. Mousepox is very similar to smallpox, "which is believed to have killed more people than all wars and epidemics combined."
  
  
• Other scientists are working on killing out entire species, like the mosquitoes that carry malaria and dengue fever. This is fairly far off, but they're working on making recessive, especially selfish, "knock-out" genes that propagate better than your conventional Mendelian-propagating gene. The gene would spread through the entire population and when any individual has two knock-outs it dies. Not only is it unclear whether this will work technically, it also raises concerns about wiping out species and the potential that knock-out genes could end up in places we don't want 'em.

GMOs spreading

Seems to me one of the biggest issues concerning genetically engineered crops is their containability. Transgenes can certainly escape from their intended recipients. [You can use any one of a number of cliches: tough to keep a lid on, Pandora's box, genie back in the bottle, cat out of the bag, etc.] There's been a fair amount of news about this recently and it will be a very important issue into the future.

Roundup of what's going on:

Can gene flow happen?

• Last fall Science News did a pretty comprehensive summary of what's known about gene flow. The answer is basically yes, genes flow pretty easily through cross-pollination, but this article doesn't discuss horizontal gene flow, i.e., through non-procreative means from one organism to another.
• A recent study found that 10 out of 25 foods sold as organic or GMO-free in the UK contained measurable amounts of GMO. Six of them were below the legal limit of .1% but 4 were above.
• The USDA tightened rules on biopharmaceuticals (plants engineered to produce medicines) slightly last year, but the National Research Council said recently that food or feed crops were bad choices for biopharmaceuticals unless they were grown under strict confinement. The fear here is that they will cross-pollinate with normal crops and then -- oops! -- there's morphine in your corn flakes.

• Belgium recently rejected an application to grow GMO rapeseed because it might pollinate with non-GMO rapeseed and cause problems for conventional farmers.
• CrapLife [sic] America, an agribusiness trade group, gave $150k to defeat a measure in California's Mendocino County that would have barred any planting of biotech plants. The other side has so far raised $18k. (Sound familiar? Last year CrapLife gave $3.7M to defeat a measure in Oregon that would've mandated labeling of all foods including biotech.)
• Germany established preliminary plans for a law that says farmers growing GMOs are liable if their crops contaminate nearby conventional crops through cross-pollination. At least Germany's in its right mind.
• Earthjustice sued the USDA last year saying the feds should better regulate open-air testing of biopharmaceutical GMOs and do environmental impact statements. Most of the biopharm uses food crops, and all the info about them is kept secret. There have been two problems with biopharm stuff in the Midwest already. (Beware that this is an Earthjustice press release.)

• Wired says insurance companies don't want to touch GMO seed companies because the FDA doesn't regulate transgenics -- it says they're "substantially equivalent" to conventional crops, and don't need further oversight. It's pretty unclear how litigation issues surrounding GMOs will work out in the US: Farmers won a $110M settlement against Aventis CrapScience [sic] because it may have contaminated their own crops, and people who said they had allergic reactions got another $6M.
• One of the biggest spreading-GMO cases around just hit the Canadian Supreme Court last month. It's farmer's seed-saving rights versus corporations' IP rights. We won't hear the decision for months, but it'll be big news. (Here's a long, personal view from Percy Schmeiser, the farmer fighting Mean Mr Monsanto in the case.)

The coalescing Big knock on Bush

I'm seeing a very interesting phenomenon pop up after Bush's Meet the Press appearance. While news outlets mostly carried it pretty drily, just summarizing what he said [transcript for ya], a consensus is building among some pretty shrewd analysts. It's basically the same as the one advanced by Saletan, though not involving the Greek philosophy: Bush is unhooked from empirical reality.

- Saletan said it. ("He doesn't change his mind for anything, whether it's polls or facts... Bush has a difficult relationship with the truth, [as did Clinton]. It's just a different—and perhaps more grave—kind of difficulty.")

- The NYTimes editorial board said it. ("The fuzziness and inconsistency of his comments suggest he is still relying on his own moral absolutism, that in a dangerous world the critical thing is to act decisively, and worry about connecting the dots later.")

- Bob Herbert said it. ("Iraq has shown us the trouble that can lurk in the gaps between reality and whatever it is that George W. Bush believes or says... Mr. Bush would do himself and his country a favor by establishing a closer relationship with reality and a more intense commitment to the truth.")

- Joshua Micah Marshall said it. ("Since he's not willing to confront the debacle of the weapons search, the fiscal mess, or what's happening on the ground in Iraq he comes off sounding evasive, incoherent and out of touch with what's happening on his watch.")

- I've been convinced of it for years. I'm glad to see it picking up steam in the media -- it could form a powerful narrative working against Bush in the election.

Plato, Aristotle; abstract, concrete; digital, analog; monkey, robot

thinkness thinks all the time about differences between abstract and concrete existence. (It first came up overtly in a post about the difference between the 'technical' information contained in a recipe and the 'practical' information stored in a cook's brain.) There are lots of different ways to frame this distinction, like 'abstract & concrete' or 'digital & analog'. 'Monkey versus robot' is the whimsical one I think about that addresses human nature -- our concrete parts sympathize with the monkey, our abstract parts with the robot, and they forever will fight over humanity's soul.

Slate's William Saletan just added another dichotomy to the mix: Plato vs Aristotle. Plato believed in an ideal that existed beyond the material world [represented by his Allegory of the Cave], whereas Aristotle, his student, developed a much different, empirical view of understanding. Bush, he says, is a Platonist because he believes in ideas and cares not a whiff about facts. Saletan cites Dean as first putting forward this observation when he said if the Bushies "have a theory and a fact, and [the two] don't coincide, they get rid of the fact instead of the theory," but Saletan fleshes it out well.

Color -- animatronic Lincoln

That's the whole quote right there. It's in reference to John Kerry [who happily points out that his initials are JFK], from Mickey Kaus via Michael Kinsley's latest Slate column. I love animatronics -- there's something so spellbinding about those doppelgangers, that parody of life. Perhaps Kerry would fit in with the Chuck E. Cheese band. Hey, it might be even better if they made a whole animatronic-president band -- Mt Rushmore meets Chuck E. Cheese.

Btw, I really like Kinsley's columns. I'm sure I disagree with him on tons of issues, but I like that his columns don't really answer any questions. They're funny, they draw good connections, and they don't present smug answers. He's the anti-Friedman. [If you're not all news junkies, Thomas Friedman is a columnist for the NYTimes who writes mostly about the Middle East, and mostly in a tone like he is God and this latest column is another fucking testament or something.] The Seattle Weekly just did a good, positive piece on Slate.

Kinsley could fit in with the attitude I like from the Humble Approach Initiative. Friedman is suspect at best.

Too good to go

Technology Review looks at '10 Technologies That Refuse to Die.' I like when people don't buy into unnecessary obsolescence. Of course, it would be nicer if people used less paper [the classical example mentioned in the article].

Cutter Kennedy

Last year a whole fracas emerged surrounding ads using John Kennedy's likeness to sell Bush's income-tax cut. Kennedy, Bush said, was a tax cutter, and his tax cuts helped the economy. Ted Kennedy, John's younger brother, got pissed. ['Don't you exploit moy brotha, you consahvative ahsshole,' or something like that.] Republicans came out in force to say Bush was right: Kennedy did push hard for tax cuts. Zell Miller, a conservative Democratic senator from Georgia who wrote a book saying the Dems are too liberal, said the Dems don't win in the conservative South -- as Kennedy did -- partly because they love taxes so much.

What gets lost in this debate is what are the actual tax rates. All these Republicans say Kennedy was a tax-cutter. But does that mean he would always be a tax-cutter? Maybe he thought there would be some happy optimal point -- if taxes were above that they should be lowered and if they were below that they should be raised. I mentioned this to my brother the other day and said I thought that the top marginal income-tax rate in 1960, when Kennedy was elected, was something ridiculously high, like 90% [Bush lowered it from 39.6% to 33%]. I said I thought that sounded a little weird, so I just looked it up. I was wrong. The top marginal rate was !94%! when Kennedy came into office. He wanted to lower it to 65%, and Congress settled on 70%. Amusingly, I found this in an article on a libertarian site talking about how Kennedy was one of the few Democrats with a brain because he cut taxes. This point is so dumb I want to cry: Kennedy lowered taxes because they were extremely high. There is no reason one should conclude that because JFK wanted to lower taxes from 94% to 65%, he would also want to lower them from 39.6% to 33%. Maybe he would want to raise them to 50%! Who the hell knows!?

One interesting thing about this, I think, is the sociology of being a 'tax-cutter'. Many economic conservatives [and liberals, I'm sure] seem to think of this as a badge of belonging as much as a policy position with a specific goal. 'Kennedy was a tax-cutter because he lowered taxes to 65%. Bush is a tax-cutter because he wants to lower them to 33%. I am a tax cutter because I am lobbying my senator to lower them still further.' Saying you're a tax-cutter is supporting a certain ideology more than a particular position. But at some point doesn't the tax rate become a question best considered by analysis? [Perhaps at every point??] 'I support freedom and individuals over the government, so taxes should be lower. Bush and Kennedy agree with me, because they lowered taxes.' There's a word for this kind of thinking: facile. I could go on about why a person would need this kind of identity badge, but it's going to get nasty and long-winded, so I'll stop here.

[Btw, The New Republic pointed out an obvious weakness in Miller's analysis: Democrats have trouble in the South now because of racism.]


Color - whatever floats your boat

Regarding his tax cut, Kennedy said, 'A rising tide lifts all boats.'