O victory forget your underwear we're free

We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union. I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War.

Tom Braden, first chief of the CIA's International Organisations Division, Modern Art was a CIA Weapon

Enlightened self-interest

As long as redistribution is conceived as a form of charity or compassion (and the Bleeding Left appears to buy this conception every bit as much as the Heartless Right), then the whole debate centers on utility—“Does Welfare help poor people get on their feet or does it foster passive dependence?” “Is government’s bloated social-services bureaucracy an effective way to dispense charity?” and so on—and both camps have their arguments and preferred statistics, and the whole thing goes around and around.…

The mistake here lies in both sides’ assumption that the real motives for redistributing wealth are charitable or unselfish. The conservatives’ mistake (if it is a mistake) is wholly conceptual, but for the Left the assumption is also a serious tactical error. Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people’s sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people. No one ever seems willing to acknowledge aloud the thoroughgoing self-interest that underlies all impulses toward economic equality—especially not US progressives, who seem so invested in an image of themselves as Uniquely Generous and Compassionate and Not Like Those Selfish Conservatives Over There that they allow the conservatives to frame the debate in terms of charity and utility, terms under which redistribution seems far less obviously a good thing.

I’m talking about this example in such a general, simplistic way because it helps show why the type of leftist vanity that informs PCE is actually inimical to the Left’s own causes. For in refusing to abandon the idea of themselves as Uniquely Generous and Compassionate (i.e., as morally superior), progressives lose the chance to frame their redistributive arguments in terms that are both realistic and realpolitikal. One such argument would involve a complex, sophisticated analysis of what we really mean by self-interest, particularly the distinctions between short-term financial self-interest and longer-term moral or social self-interest. As it is, though, liberals’ vanity tends to grant conservatives a monopoly on appeals to self-interest, enabling the conservatives to depict progressives as pie-in-the-sky idealists and themselves as real-world back-pocket pragmatists. In short, leftists’ big mistake here is not conceptual or ideological but spiritual and rhetorical—their narcissistic attachment to assumptions that maximize their own appearance of virtue tends to cost them both the theater and the war.

David Foster Wallace, "Authority and American Usage" in Consider the Lobster

Dominance, Politics, and Physiology

monkey trouble

Via Boing Boing:

Background
Political elections are dominance competitions. When men win a dominance competition, their testosterone levels rise or remain stable to resist a circadian decline; and when they lose, their testosterone levels fall. However, it is unknown whether this pattern of testosterone change extends beyond interpersonal competitions to the vicarious experience of winning or losing in the context of political elections. Women's testosterone responses to dominance competition outcomes are understudied, and to date, a clear pattern of testosterone changes in response to winning and losing dominance competitions has not emerged.

Methodology/Principal Findings
The present study investigated voters' testosterone responses to the outcome of the 2008 United States Presidential election. 183 participants provided multiple saliva samples before and after the winner was announced on Election Night. The results show that male Barack Obama voters (winners) had stable post-outcome testosterone levels, whereas testosterone levels dropped in male John McCain and Robert Barr voters (losers). There were no significant effects in female voters.

Conclusions/Significance
The findings indicate that male voters exhibit biological responses to the realignment of a country's dominance hierarchy as if they participated in an interpersonal dominance contest.

Dominance, Politics, and Physiology: Voters' Testosterone Changes on the Night of the 2008 United States Presidential Election [full paper]

Small and vulgar pleasures

The kind of oppression that threatens democratic peoples does not in any way resemble what preceded it... I want to imagine what aspect despotism could take on in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of men, similar to one another and equal, who gyrate unceasingly to obtain small and vulgar pleasures for themselves with which they fill their souls. Each one of them, isolated at some remove from the others, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his personal friends constitute the entire human species for him: as for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he is right next to them, but he doesn't see them; he touches them and doesn't feel them; he exists only within and for himself and, although he still has a family, one may at the least say he no longer has a country. Above all these men rises an immense tutelary power that alone takes care of assuring their enjoyment and watching over their fate. It is absolute, elaborate, regular, calculating, and mild. It would be like paternal power, if - like it - its goal was to prepare men for virile maturity; but, on the contrary, it seeks only to limit them irrevocably to childhood; it likes its citizens to be happy, as long as they dream of nothing other than being happy.

Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted p76 in How the Rich are Destroying the Earth, Herve Kempf

Do you feel lucky?

Sonatine

I want to avoid politics, because I think the best way to such express such things is how we spend our time day to day. The personal is political, and all that. Still, the idea of McCain / Palin gathering momentum is like watching someone gleefully about to do something stupid, and you feel a responsibility to step in, but then the joy of the moment, and the fact that karma is almost certain to be enacted there and then, is somewhat infectious. I have a tendency to look at jackasses and think just do it, so long as I don't have to pick up the pieces.

American exceptionalism as a faith, the idea that no matter what happens something [i.e. God] will protect it, is one that an English person, especially, can't quite get a handle on. Things fall apart, nations lose their mojo.

That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

Hunter S. Thompson

When you've had a run of luck it's hard not to believe in something, and when you couple that with obvious ability I guess the combination is heady indeed. But pushed far enough these things almost always end badly, which is why they end. The random nature of certain things vs. the apparent reversion to the mean.

Even without ability and little native good sense my luck has held for a long time. I once made a list of genuinely terrible, life-ending / ruining events that I narrowly avoided due to situations beyond my control. It was a long list and a fun thing to do, but a literary exercise, not a practical one. I can see how things could have gone a lot worse for me without some luck, but it's hard to see how things could have gone better without stepping off into fantasy.

There's a Chinese folk story that starts with bad luck, that turns to good luck, that becomes bad, and then good, and then so one, as long as the teller can spin it. ( Mao being asked about the consequences of the French Revolution: "It's too early to tell").

A fun time had listing my narrow escapes, but no fun if I consider some reversion to the mean, which is to some extent why I remain so fearful of cars, suspecting that I'll be on my bicycle ogling some woman when the last line is written.

"What's wrong with a miniskirt? You can cause an accident because some of our people are weak mentally,"

Nsaba Buturo, Uganda's Minister for Ethics and Integrity, here.