What do these words have in common?

address, inquiry, mustache, advertising, cigarette, locate, addict, rebound, mama, princess, abdomen, finance, recess, defect, research
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All words that, in British English, were once accented on the second or third syllable, but, thanks to our glorious American influence, are now accented on the first! (Or were made into nouns [addict, research] and then accented on the first!)

George W. Bush's Marxist heritage

Three lessons the Bush administration learned from Trotsky and Stalin:

1) Democracy is good (when the right people win)

Trotsky's amazing transformation from a supporter of Lenin and totalitarianism to a foe of Stalin and friend of democracy just happened to come at the same time he was thrown out of Russia and the Party. True socialist democracy, he believed, is shown to be such by the fact that the workers (read: Trotskyists) win elections. Similarly, the Western world regularly rejects free and fair elections when they don't lead to the right result. If the people the West supports don't win, the election's result can't be 'really' the will of the people, and the people in question can expect to see itself ostracized (like Austria in the 90s) or even denied food aid (like Palestine more recently).

2) The people are with us (they just don't know it yet)

We are giving the people what they want, since we are on the crest of the wave of history. Just a little longer, and they'll realize they want the form of government we choose to give them.

3) Whether a war is aggressive or defensive matters less than its class character

Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin believed that in any war, the side of the proletariat is the right side. Whether the proletariat started the war or not matters little--morality doesn't apply to a conflict between capitalist imperialists and the proletariat. Class is all we should notice. Hence Trotsky's prediction that World War II would end with all the capitalist countries allied against the Soviet Union.

Similarly, the Bush doctrine of 'preemptive war' and the plausible-sounding theory that democracies don't fight each other.

(This theory is in fact deeply doubtful. Its most well-known exponent defines 'democracy' as a system in which two-thirds of adult men can vote. But this definition is invented solely to support the author's thesis--if any more than two-thirds of adult men were required to be enfranchised, ancient Athens wouldn't qualify as a democracy. Any less than two-thirds and the Confederacy would. 'Democracies never fight each other' only if we arbitrarily categorize some societies (like the Confederacy and Sparta) as oligarchies, and some not-very-different ones as democracies.)

The more I learn about Marxism, the more I realize that the troublesome thing about a government is not its specific policies but rather the structure and nature of governmental power. In other words, high taxes on the rich versus high taxes on the poor matters much less than totalitarianism versus liberalism.

Out-of-wedlock births in the lower classes

A recent book I read provides an interesting portrait of what sociologists lately call 'the under class'–this is thought to be more PC than 'the lower class'. The book is Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas. It's an attempt to explain to middle-class readers (well, the authors only talk about the middle class, so I assume they mean middle and upper class) why poor women often have children out of wedlock, and at a very young age (a mean age of 21, including many women who gave birth at younger ages, even thirteen and fourteen).

The poor are different from us; they have less money. The personal touches in this book give us glimpses of a strange new world--one where a sixteen-year-old boy will tell his girlfriend, 'I want to have a baby by you'--and she takes it as a compliment! There are a few fascinating statistics–"the poor, the less-educated, those living in poor neighborhoods, and those raised in single-parent households tend to have far fewer friendships than their more advantaged counterparts." And, of white women who have never had a premarital birth, 89% will get married before they turn 40. We're all doooomed....

But, the authors say, poor women have many of the same beliefs about marriage as the rest of us. Most people today of whatever class believe that marriage is difficult and divorce is to be avoided, and that for that reason, people should wait to get married until they are older and until they know and trust their prospective partners very well. There is a perception that getting married means settling down--the end of travel, fun, career change and flexibility. With these beliefs, it makes sense that members of the lower classes don't marry early. So the question is not, 'Why don't they get married?', but rather, 'Why do they have babies?'

SImply put, because the perceived costs of having children are lower, and the perceived benefits higher. As for the benefits, what would you do if you had little or no higher education or career ambitions to look forward to? Having children might seem like the only really meaningful thing in your life–the only thing giving you hope for the future. When asked to imagine what their lives would be like without children, the women in the study typically said things like, 'I'd be dead.' 'I'd be in jail.' 'I'd be depressed.' 'I'd still be partying.' 'I'd be on drugs.' These seem to be the other options.

As for the costs, the out-of-pocket costs of having children are the same whether the mother is 30 or 13. But the opportunity costs of children are very different for different classes. Specifically, they're much lower for the lower classes.

The public often assumes that early childbearing is the main reason why so many girls from poor inner-city areas fail to complete high school, go on to college, gain valuable work skills, or earn decent wages, but there is virtually no evidence to support this idea. Any childbearing at all, and especially early childbearing, has huge opportunity costs for middle-class women. But disadvantaged girls who bear children have about the same long-term earnings trajectories as similarly disadvantaged youth who wait until their mid or late twenties to have a child...Early childbearing is highly selective of girls whose other characteristics–family background, cognitive ability, school performance, mental health status, and so on–have already diminished their life chances so much that an early birth does little to reduce them much further.

The authors focus on the agency of the women in their study, and it seems as though these women chose to become pregnant, rather than being coerced into it by their boyfriends or by a lack of access to birth control or abortion. This leads the authors to ignore some signs of lack of agency–a really amazing passivity, not just in some cases, but in most. For instance, only 17% of these women's pregnancies were planned. Some were 'accidents', but, bizarrely, the plurality were described as 'in between' an accident and a planned pregnancy. Typically, the woman will say that she didn't want to get pregnant, but that she wasn't using any birth control. It is almost impossible for me to understand how a person could leave such an important decision up to chance–but hey, it's the traditional way. The women studied say things like, 'The baby happened', 'God gave me this baby' and so forth.

I wonder if this lack of agency is related to their socioeconomic statuses. Making a decision is a skill like any other, and needs to be practiced. We read that children who have grown up under circumstances display 'learned helplessness'–they have learned that nothing they can do can make a positive difference in what happens to them, and that actively doing anything often brings punishment. So they take no action. They may express preferences, but they do not intervene in their own fate. Maybe for the lowest classes, something similar happens.

On magical thinking

Why is it, that, before a job interview, I obsess over my shoes and think of the answers to interview questions, instead of accepting that the result of the interview is almost entirely out of my control? Malinowski* has the answer!

When a man feels himself impotent in a practical situation, whether he be savage or civilised, whether in possession of magic or entirely ignorant of its existence, passive inaction, the only thing dictated by reason, is the last thing in which he can acquiesce. His nervous system and his whole organism drive him to some substitute activity....The substitute action in which the passion finds its vent, and which is due to impotence, has subjectively all the virtue of a real action, to which emotion would, if not impeded, naturally have led.

Now that my attention has been drawn to it, I see such magical thinking everywhere I look. Whenever I start to care about petty things, it's because subconsciously I think these details have magical power over things that matter. If I brush my hair more often, people will like me. If I do the dishes, it means my life is under control. And other absurdities. The antidote is provided by La Rochefoucauld, who says:

Those who concern themselves too much with little things usually become incapable of great ones.
Ceux qui s'applique trop aux petites choses deviennent ordinairement incapables des grandes.

*Bronislaw Malinowski, the early 20th-century Polish-American anthropologist, used to be rather famous in social-sciences circles, but his ideas have since been discredited/assimilated into the mainstream. I am not ashamed of being behind the times.

In The Illusion of American Omnipotence, DW Brogan pointed to a state of mind which he called “ the illusion of American omnipotence”--defined as “the illusion that any situation which distresses or endangers the United States can only exist because some Americans have been fools or knaves.” When the Chinese Revolution occurred, instead of concluding that this was a response to massive strategic and economic realities largely beyond our control, millions of Americans were apparently convinced that this enormous country had been in our pocket, and had been lost or stolen only because of the mistakes (or treachery) of Roosevelt, Marshall, and Acheson, mistakes which could easily have been rectified by greater statesmen like Walter Judd or Senator Jenner.

---Hofstadter

6 things to hate about Feminism

--at least mainstream feminism, specifically the kind in this article:

http://community.feministing.com/2009/09/on-beauty-and-its-consequences.html

1) It exaggerates the benefits of being male.

"Men are presented with an endless supply of female flesh as a reward for good capitalist behaviour..."

Hmm, do I know anyone who has "an endless supply of female flesh"? And when I think about men who get a lot of female attention, it doesn't really seem like society is awarding women to them in little gift bags. In fact, women seek out rich or confident or otherwise attractive men--but that sort of formulation makes it seem like the women are acting freely, clearly an unacceptable implication.


2) It exaggerates the disadvantages of being female.

In this worldview, just as men get everything they want, women get nothing they want. Should you seem angry about being accosted or harassed on the street,

"society will look at you with great alarm, and declare you a man-hating, ugly hairy bitter feminist."

Any woman who has ever rejected a man is then excluded from society if not shot--I couldn't make this up, people:

"Should you reject your would-be suitors, you are a bitch and risk getting shot in public or private places. At the very least you will be ostracized, you will be considered difficult, or you will be ridiculed on some other account."

3) Like many liberal theories, this sort of feminism is utopian. We plow straight ahead trying to change the basics of life, without considering that it might not be possible. This is rebellion against nature itself; for instance, when woman's status as a sexual being is described as tyranny:

"...this purpose which was created for you, without your consent, without you getting a vote on the subject, well before you were born."

4) Sexist tropes in the media are considered more revealing than the trends of actual life. For instance, the author ignores a long list of female heads of state, leaders of opinion, and intellectuals in the real world in order to criticize Hollywood.

"Whatever else you achieve - intelligence, education, talent, saving the world, etc. - must be done in heels, with long flowing hair, and a surgically-enhanced figure like the one on Lara Croft, because otherwise: well, poor you."

This person has been watching too many movies! Actual women in power aren't subject to the standards of blockbuster movies--rarely do they have long hair or wear revealing clothing, and if Hillary Clinton isn't the leader of the free world, well, the problem was not her cup size.

5) It's fucking depressing! "You are not in control", "you have probably been harassed, groped or assaulted", "you have no right to your own beauty", "whatever joy you may have felt at being pretty evaporates", "society declares you an awful person", "being angry and depressed is logical and lucid", "men will consume and destroy you", "you are a chicken in a slaughterhouse".

Is this really what young women new to the world and to men need to hear? This just makes me afraid to leave the house. Maybe that's the idea.

6) Men are the enemy; they are not vulnerable or well-intentioned like women; they never worry about the right thing to do, never feel guilty, and never apologize. Any sympathy for them is misplaced. They must be humiliated and CRUSHED:

"Remember the men who do these things to you are not playing fair, they will never consciously apologize of their own volition, and they will never hesitate to crush you if you threaten them. You must give yourself the right to do the same to them. Never feel sorry for them, never apologize, and never look back...You will have to reject and humiliate men, without mercy, very loudly, in front of as many people as possible, when you don't want men looking at or touching you if they are doing this. Of course, this will make you look like a bitch, which is a daunting prospect, but as a woman you have those two choices: bitch, or victim."

(I kind of like that last line. Although why 'consciously apologize'? An unconscious apology is a priori impossible.)

"Should this scenario happen in the office, you may be told you are disturbing the workplace peace and atmosphere and you may have to come out kicking and screaming against this injustice, which will probably get you fired, and will force you to go to a Human Rights Commission which may or may not award you a few thousand dollars after five years of litigation and blacklisting during which your career is completely destroyed."

That's right, a woman who rejects a coworker's advances will be reprimanded, fired and finally blacklisted. This wasn't true even 80 years ago.

It's painfully clear that the author has had annoying experiences with men on the street and coworkers. I sympathize--well, contra her claims, most people of either sex sympathize with women who are harassed by clueless men. The author's arrogance and blindness comes in when she assumes her experience and female experience are congruent. Would you say that you don't mind being complimented or hit on? Or that you think you have power over men? Or that your male coworkers are kind and professional? Or that you've never been raped or assaulted? Just wait, says the author. My terrible experience is the Truth of women's experience, and if neither you nor anyone you know experiences it this way, you should probably feel guilty about being privileged.

One of the most ignorant books I've read

This is a review of Ellen Ruppel Shell's book, 'Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture." Using 'cheap' as an insult proves nothing so much as the speaker's class prejudices. This book falls into that same trap. In an attempt to imitate objective journalism, the book contains many true narratives and well-documented facts. Then, on top of those facts, we are given a list of the author's opinions. There is little attempt to convince the reader that one follows from the other, and, often, the facts and the opinion don't seem even theoretically related.

For instance, her section on Ikea makes some valid points. Although Ikea says its wood is sustainably harvested, they haven't proved it; some people find Ikea furniture hard to assemble (although I think it's fun); and Ikea stores are big and sparsely located, so people have to drive farther to get to them. Then, without warning, she concludes the section with this:

Flatpacks of medium-density fiberboard hauled out of sprawling warehouses and cobbled together with IKEA's notorious L-shaped, six-sided Allen wrench are not tasteful, comfortable furniture. They are a facsimile of tasteful, comfortable, furniture.

None of this has come out of what she wrote before. I could excuse the woman's bias if she would at least be precise about what she objects to. What has the 'notorious' Allen key done to her? It seems like a pretty useful tool to me.. Or is it the flatpack or the size of the warehouse that we should hate? An example of the power of rhetoric to describe perfectly neutral things in terms that repel. And the question of how people can think they are comfortable in a chair, while Shell knows they are not actually comfortable, is a little beyond me.

Shell doesn't understand class:

Even for a book on the subject of material things, the author is materialistic. The word 'cheap' is used solely to disparage. The implication is that people who buy cheap goods are selfish, careless or at least short-sighted. Never once does the author recognize that we might not be choosing between 'cheap' goods and quality goods, but between 'cheap' goods and nothing. She consistently equates brand with quality, and appears to think it is morally wrong for a brand to produce a cheaper version of itself, because it betrays the 'trust' she has in brands. Outlet stores, where poor people can buy the same brands rich people do, are morally suspect for this reason.

A philosopher might question whether a Coach bag of questionable quality hawked by clerks who do not know the provenance of their merchandise is the Coach bag of our dreams...the uncoupling of brand name and product can't help but confuse us and, over time, even undermine our trust.

Dear God, imagine people losing faith in Coach! Actually, a person who trusts in a brand deserves to be disappointed--and incidentally, a philosopher would not be dreaming about a handbag. And if the people who shop at discount stores are content with the prestige value of their 'Coach' bags, why should the author take it upon herself to tell them they should find their purchases worthless? Buying a knockoff makes a lot more economic sense for most of us than paying full price. People who buy Coach bags don't care about the quality of the stitching. Does the author really think a handbag that costs $800 is 40 times better than the $20 one? Price may be an indicator of quality sometimes, but not here.

She doesn't understand history:

In Adam Smith's England, she thinks, people of every class bought high-quality products for a fair price. And because people knew the merchants from whom they bought, the merchants never exploited their customers. "You can only cheat your neighbor once." So, no grocer ever adulterated his merchandise, no innkeeper ever added fraudulent charges to his bill, no worker ever absconded with his wages. People were honest and good. All that changed because of international corporations and globalization.

Shoddy clothes, unreliable electronics, wobbly furniture, and questionable food have become the norm...The combination of quality and value, once available to the many, is now affordable only to the few.

Is this idealism, or just stupidity? First of all, there _were_ cities in the 18th century, London, for one, so people weren't always buying from their neighbors. And even in villages, people in the past didn't "buy local" in order to make a political statement--they had no other choice. And when you're buying local because transportation and communication over long distances are prohibitively expensive and take forever, you have no choice but to continue buying from your neighbor. Even if he puts vinegar in his wine or plaster of Paris in his bread (both formerly common practices). Anyone who has read a single 18th century novel or history knows that dishonesty, then as now, existed wherever dishonest people did.

And definitely doesn't understand economics:

She appears ignorant of the basic idea of comparative advantage:

Haiti once exported rice. Today [after a tariff reduction], three-quarters of the rice on Haitian dinner plates comes from the United States. Paying for imported food requires cash, and acquiring that cash usually means getting a job providing the First World with something it wants--either raw materials, such as timber, minerals, or coffee, or cheap mass-manufactured goods.

Yes. That's how it works. This is an example of the author writing so as to suggest that what she describes is bad--avoiding the trouble of actually giving a reason why it's bad. She seems to think buying food when you once produced it is an unqualified evil. So farmers are a priori better off than factory workers. Also, local food is a priori better than imported food, and when business provides cheap imported food which poor people can buy, this is bad, and governments should step in:

Rather than flooding markets in developing countries with cheap food, thereby weakening incentives to grow and process food locally, aid should be given directly to the poor to help them purchase food at fair prices.

She also thinks Americans, unlike every other people in history, are incapable of developing new skills in response to changes in economic incentives:

The idea that more and more Americans can reinvent themselves into ever more challenging work is a pipe dream.

I am glad I read the book, although I wish I had stopped with the sociology and skipped the opinions. There are several interesting bits--for instance, I didn't realize that a store's setting one price for everyone was, at one time, a revolutionary move. A interesting aside is that printing coupons or offering rebates is really a way of offering two prices--the person who is sensitive about spending money will clip the coupon, and buy your product--the person who cares less, or is less organized, will have his attention drawn to your product, and buy it without bothering to redeem the coupon.

But, my God, this is one of the most ignorant books I've ever read. And yet I have seen no critical reviews of it. The quality of the author's mind or scholarship doesn't seem to matter so much as the fact that the conclusions she comes to sound progressive and plausible--and support the rich, liberal belief that virtue can be attained by shopping at upper-class-coded stores rather than other stores.