I’m interested in Jody Bottum’s piece defending Live Action. Bottum wants to consider Rose’s actions under a metaphorical sort of non-war Just War Theory, saying: “Of course, the fight against abortion is also not fought on abstract fields. Its battlegrounds are the political and social worlds, and for those worlds, Lila Rose’s ruse seems to me both fitting and clever.”

Prof. Tollefsen’s response to the war angle is this:

More importantly here, however, it is crucial to point out that the pro-life movement is not, in any but the most distantly metaphorical sense, “at war” with Planned Parenthood. To take such a claim strictly would raise unsolvable problems in terms of just war thought: who, for example, is the legitimate authority that has tasked Lila Rose with this work? And it would justify untenable conclusions, for if anything is justified in war, it is the use of arms. Yet the pro-life movement has, rightly in my view, converged on an understanding that the use of arms to stop abortion is not right: it provides a counter-witness to the value of life; it constitutes an unjustified attack on our nation’s overall legal structure; and it is unlikely either to bring peace or to result in a proportionate balance of benefits over harms. The appeal to war is thus a non-starter.

In other words, you should be careful about using military-grade JWT if you don’t want military results.

-William Brafford

1. The huge rise in occupational licensing.

2. The huge rise in people incarcerated in the war on drugs, and also the scandalous reluctance of doctors to prescribe adequate pain medication (also due to the war on drugs.)

3. The need for more legal immigration.

4. The need to replace taxes on capital with progressive consumption taxes.

5. Local zoning rules that prevent dense development.

6. Tax exemptions for mortgage interest and health insurance

His argument for why these issues aren’t discussed seems persuasive, but then, I agree with him about all six points. In most of these cases, the parties benefiting from these policies are doing so at the expense of the general public. Many arise from simple misunderstandings among the public about macroeconomics.

Immigration is different from the others, however, because the harms of immigration really are general and public. They are merely harms dismissed as irrelevant or irrational by idealistic intellectuals, who tend to believe that cultural goods are unreal or at least can never be rationally preferred to economic well-being. Of course, the general public doesn’t seem to realize how much richer the United States would be if we allowed ten times as many immigrants to enter legally as we currently do. Perhaps if they did they’d be as eager as their pointy-headed fellow citizens to throw ope the gates of El Paso.

More interesting: various comments are made about the unpleasantness of 50s cuisine. I believe these comments are true, but I wonder if the terribleness of the food in the 50s wasn’t related to the magnificent innovations Krugman et al are so awed by. This was, after all, an era in which prophets routinely heralded the imminent replacement of meals by nutritive pills. That this has never seemed an attractive prospect to anyone before or since the middle of the 20th century perhaps offers some insight into the tastiness of that unhappy era’s food.

-David Schaengold

The city is now in the process of filling in the trench; the project is now pretty universally recognized as having been a bad idea in the first place. Who would have designed such a thing? From Antero Pietila’s excellent Not in My Neighborhood:

Downtown Baltimore had been under a massive assault since 1944. That year the city hired Robert Moses to plan a new crosstown expressway. No one could argue against better roads; during the war, the few existing arteries in the city had created one of the nation’s worst transportation nightmares. Moses, New York’s indefatigable parks and roads czar, chose a sunken expressway path. He proposed bulldozing through Howard and Charles streets, piercing the heart of the downtown retail district. His plan would have saved, barely, the Roman Catholic basilica, the Walters Art Museum, and the Enoch Pratt Free Library, but dozens of churches and public buildings were earmarked for demolition. All told, Moses proposed to raze two hundred city blocks and relocate some nineteen thousand residents, most of them black. “Nothing which we propose to remove will constitute any loss to Baltimore,” he assured.

-William Brafford

-David Schaengold

Thanks for reading!

–David Schaengold

Should we start calling post-modern conservatives Observation Deck Republicans? Plumb Liner David Schaengold has his first post up on the League, in which he suggests that the skyscraper may be our modern cathedral:

The greatest of these forms was probably the cathedral in the high and late Middle Ages, which was simultaneously an expression of the aesthetic, economic, and political aspirations of a community as well as an act of humility before G-d, echoing the incarnation by uniting G-d and man. Nowadays we capitalist Westerners have our own entrant, which is of course the skyscraper.

I was initially skeptical. While the medieval cathedral was an expression of the ethic of a whole culture, the skyscraper is a Randian obelisk built for service to a single dominant class. David, however, insightfully discovers both democratic spirit and humility in the observation deck:

Skyscapers are like cathedrals in another way: they contain a place within the building that is natural to treat as sacred. In the cathedral this space was the center of the cross formed by the nave and the transept, and in the skyscraper it is the highest floor of the building. What we use this space for can tell us about ourselves, I think. Observation decks are therefore a symbol of modernity, and an important one. They are open to the public and serve no purpose other than to gratify the mind and the eye with the sight of the city spread out below.

In the comments, Rufus F. asks if the mall may be a similarly important symbol of our age. Another possibility is the one suggested by Barthes, who made this case for the car as cathedral:

I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

It is obvious that the new Citroen has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object .. We must not forget that an object is the best messenger of a world above that of nature: one can easily see in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter (matter is much more magical than life), and in a word a silence which belongs to the realm of fairy-tales. The D.S. – the “Goddess” – has all the features (or at least the public is unanimous in attributing them to it at first sight) of one of those objects from another universe which have supplied fuel for the neomania of the eighteenth century and that of our own science-fiction: the Deesse is first and foremost a new Nautilus.

One of the most suggestive things about Barthes’ view is that his cathedral is not a building. An age that finds its embodiment in a mode of transportation is one that seeks to annihilate space and distance, what Walter Benjamin called “overcoming the uniqueness of every reality.” I think the experience David describes on the skyscraper is part of this. Maybe it’s just because I’m afraid of heights, but I’m less likely to find Christian joy at the top of the skyscraper and more likely to find the demon of modernity. The view from the top of the skyscraper is so far beyond human dimension that it carries that sublime feeling of power and danger one might feel while hurtling down the freeway. Of course, looking down from the observation deck is bound to be attractive to both the masses and the elites in our modern age. I, for one, think I’ll stay planted on my front porch.

-Matthew Schmitz

]]> https://plumblines.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/the-observation-deck-and-the-modern-cathedral/feed/ 1 3769 schmitzelectric n1104862_32604314_8748 https://plumblines.wordpress.com/2010/02/03/grand-old-disco-party/ https://plumblines.wordpress.com/2010/02/03/grand-old-disco-party/#respond Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:07:08 +0000 http://plumblines.wordpress.com/?p=3765 Via the Reticulator, I found this post about an article I commented on last week:

Schrager and his partner set up their first nightclub, in Queens, for $27,000. The more famous Studio 54 — or is that “infamous”? — went up for $400,000.

“Now,” says Schrager, a major real estate developer, “with all the regulations, fire codes, sprinkler requirements, neighborhood issues, community planning boards . . . before you even put on the first coat of paint, you’re into it for over a million dollars. What it’s done is disenfranchise young people.”

And it’s not just disco that’s suffered. It’s worth remembering one sad side effect of all the red tape cities and states put up to new enterprises. It leaves the private sector desperate to focus on the surest forms of wealth generation, less able to serve niche markets. Like discos.

I view this as yet another example of the ongoing rapprochement between conservatism and that most fabulous of dance crazes.

-Matthew Schmitz

-Matthew Schmitz

For me the word “pad” is most immediately and vividly associated with helicopter landings, floating lillies, and the totally sweet places where bachelors live. Feminene hygiene products don’t really enter into it. When I was in college, I briefly worked for something called Wordnet, a project at Princeton University that seeks to create a comprehensive dictionary based on how people associate words. For example, “light” and “dark” are strong associations, as are “green” and “money” or (at least until recently) “Brad” and “Angelina.” If someone had presented me with the combination of “pad” and, um, you-know-what while I was working for Wordnet, the association in my mind would have been almost zero. Shows how much I know about how the other half lives.

A lot of people think Steve Jobs and co. were as clueless as I was, but I think there’s another possibility. While they may have underestimated the potential reaction, they must have had at least some idea of how women would initially hear the name. In a world where corporations span borders and, in the case of Apple, command loyalties as intense as any country, they perhaps thought that they could change such a powerful resonance. Their belief in Apple’s sterling brand and incredibly successful marketing was so unshakable that they thought they could overthrow the associations the word already had.

The iPad story is not about whether Steve Jobs employs enough women, but rather about how one of the world’s greatest brands foundered on the rock of culture. Long-standing mental associations, those things ingrained by experience in a world that is in some ways common to all and in others fractally diverse — the stuff of Wordnet — were too much for the marketing juggernaut and incredible self-confidence of one of the world’s most powerful corporations. In this sense, the iPad debacle is a victory of culture over corporate cult.

Update: Earlier I said that Brad and Jennifer were, until recently, associated. How could I say Jennifer when I meant Angelina?!

-Matthew Schmitz