Bill Keller: Democracy is dangerous. Maybe we should tone it down.

Media, Politics, , , , , , , , , , ,

If nothing else, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller’s resignation from his position to return to writing columns has accomplished this: instead of inferring his stupidity from years of the Grey Lady’s questionable editorial choices, we can now confirm it directly by reading his essays. After vaingloriously confronting Arianna Huffington — including his now-infamous, yet not inaccurate disparagement of her as “the queen of aggregation” — and variously deriding new media as vapid and emotionless, Keller has now set his sights on the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.

Whether Keller’s latest column, “Why Tyrants Love the Murdoch Scandal,” was penned out of faux-modesty or genuine concern is at once an academic debate and one for which either answer is equally terrifying. For it is not the motive behind his words, but the fact that they exist at all — and in the pages of the vaunted New York Times, no less — that imbues them with such awesome power.

The first signs of trouble appear immediately. Notice, for example, that signature Kellerism: the cloying way he simultaneously feigns to refrain from, while gleefully leaping into, criticism of an arch-nemesis, News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch. “Nor is this the place to celebrate a rival’s troubles,” he writes, before adding, “True, I did pull from my files and savor the indignant letters we received from News of the World’s top editors last year as we prepared to publish an investigation of the paper’s phone-hacking culture and Scotland Yard’s timidity — work that has been fully vindicated in recent weeks.”

But even such condescension is little more than a distracting aside. His real problem lies in the substance of his column. Keller inexplicably uses the fall from grace (from acceptance? from toleration?) of Murdoch’s News of the World to make a broader point about freedom of the press. Apparently, the police and parliamentary investigation of Murdoch’s publication represents some sort of threat to the democratic principle of free expression. We know this because Keller quotes an anonymous South African friend, who notes that his native country, which is already growing increasingly hostile to an unfettered media presence, may indeed find justification for its repression in the goings-on of the phone-hacking scandal. “‘You can be sure they will use the phone-hacking fallout to help make their case,'” Keller’s bizarrely unnamed friend informs him. “‘Nobody pays much attention to the effect of something like this on little countries like ours.'”

Indeed one doesn’t. And that is precisely because the effect is insignificant, if it exists at all. “Despots love to see a free press behaving badly,” Keller solemnly intones. And yet they seem to do just fine in its absence. There is no more enduring truism of totalitarian states than that they will, and do, seize inspiration for their tyranny in the most absurd places. To censor one’s perfectly legal, and even morally necessary, actions in order to appease the beast beyond our shores is patently insane. Paraphrasing Voltaire, if the phone-hacking scandal did not exist, it would be necessary — for dictators around the world, at least — to invent it. By this logic, perhaps Norway should think twice about imprisoning Anders Behring Breivik, for fear this may inspire crackdowns on political protest in Uganda.

Holding sacred democratic institutions hostage to the whims of dictators would seem to be anathema to the current executive editor of the New York Times, which is why its implied advocacy is so shocking. No one is suggesting — even in Britain, where press restrictions are more in vogue — that a nation should block access to the independent media or prevent it from expressing controversial viewpoints. In fact, Keller admits as much: “I’m not terribly alarmed that either Britain or the United States will significantly roll back the protections that allow us to hold our governments accountable — up to and including the hot scrutiny of stories like the WikiLeaks disclosures.”

What is taking place, however, is the mandatory legal process necessitated by News of the World‘s culture of disdain for the laws of the nation in which it operated. To ignore their incursions would be a far greater abandonment of democratic ideals, and would thus provide correspondingly greater fodder for the consistently bad intentions of undemocratic regimes.

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The Oslo tragedy and media narratives

Media, Politics, Religion, , , , , , ,

The facts of the Oslo bombing and shootings — already being called Norway’s September 11th — are still being discovered, and yet the mass media’s narrative, much like a preemptively written obituary of a public figure, was already neatly in place. Here are a few examples:

Kristian Harpviken, interview in Foreign Policy magazine:

“The only concrete supposition [as to the identity of the attackers] that would emerge in a Norwegian context would be al Qaeda.”

The Wall Street Journal:

“…In jihadist eyes [Norway] will forever remain guilty of being what it is: a liberal nation committed to freedom of speech and conscience, equality between the sexes, representative democracy and every other freedom that still defines the West. For being true to those ideals, Norwegians have now been made to pay a terrible price.” [Note: This quote appeared in the original version of the article, but the WSJ later deleted it along with other modifications, after it became apparent that a non-Muslim, non-al Qaeda-affiliated person was suspected of the crimes.]

Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post:

“This is a sobering reminder for those who think it’s too expensive to wage a war against jihadists. I spoke to Gary Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute, who has been critical of proposed cuts in defense and of President Obama’s Afghanistan withdrawal plan. ‘There has been a lot of talk over the past few months on how we’ve got al-Qaeda on the run and, compared with what it once was, it’s become a rump organization. But as the attack in Oslo reminds us, there are plenty of al-Qaeda allies still operating. No doubt cutting the head off a snake is important; the problem is, we’re dealing with global nest of snakes.'”

I could continue with additional quotes, but these and other, similar proclamations have already been covered and debunked by the likes of James Fallows at The Atlantic, Benjamin Doherty at Electronic Intifada, and especially Glenn Greenwald on Salon.com.

The point is that, not only is the media’s first instinct to jump to the Islamists-as-terrorists trope, but, as Greenwald helpfully exposes, sometimes the mistaken attribution to Islamic fundamentalists is the only prerequisite for labeling an act as “terrorism” in the first place. Thus, a horrifying act can only be terrorism if it’s committed by a Muslim; conversely, no matter how gruesome the act, it is not terrorism if it’s committed by someone other than a Muslim.

As it turns out, the story is already taking shape quite differently than initially reported. The New York Times’ lead article now states:

The Norwegian police on Saturday charged a man they identified as a right-wing fundamentalist Christian in connection with the bombing of a government building in central Oslo and a shooting attack on a nearby island that together killed at least 92 people.

As stunned Norwegians grappled with the deadliest attack in the country since World War II and a shocking case of homegrown terrorism, a portrait began to emerge of the suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, 32. He was described as a religious, gun-loving Norwegian obsessed with what he saw as the threat of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration to the cultural and patriotic values of his country.

“We are not sure whether he was alone or had help,” a police official, Roger Andresen, said at a televised news conference. “What we know is that he is right wing and a Christian fundamentalist.”

The enduring tragedy of the Oslo attacks is that the laughable performance of our mainstream media will go undetected and un-criticized by most, because it is far more convenient to stick to an accepted script than to question the prefabricated story-lines we’ve come to expect. The word “terrorism,” when used to such dubious and unproductive ends, has gained precisely the opposite of its original meaning: as my friend Sam described it, “This sort of language quickly becomes bloated beyond its meaning and has the tendency to pervert anything that precedes it or follows it. It is eager and anxious to be helpful but in doing so tries to excuse itself from being complicit with the historicity of the problems it is trying to rectify.”

By jumping to call anything and everything that is perpetrated by Islamists “terrorism” — even when, as in this case, the entire conjecture as to the identity of the participants was incorrect from the start — and refusing to use the same word to describe actions taken by other disaffected groups, we’ve stripped the word of all meaning. “Terrorism,” much like “Hitler” and “Nazi,” has undergone such a grotesque transformation in usage that it’s lost any true power it once had as a descriptor. Unfortunately, it seems very unlikely that anyone in a position of power is likely to notice or care.

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Debt ceiling hijinks?

Politics, , , ,

So if this is simply a Republican negotiating tactic, yesterday would be a good time to get serious.

And now it’s almost tomorrow. Or, to borrow a movie title in the service of a horrible cliche, it’s almost The Day After Tomorrow.

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A brief thought about inverted scrolling on Mac OS X Lion

Technology, , , , , , , , , , ,

I downloaded and installed Max OS X Lion yesterday, and probably the most immediately noticeable update is the way in which you use the track pad to scroll. Previously, if you wanted to see text below the bottom of the visible page, you swiped with two fingers in a downward direction, and the page would scroll down in response. Now, the default has switched so that, to see more text below, you must swipe two fingers up, not down (and vice versa).

There is a certain logic to this. First of all, in direct opposition to the title of this post, it’s not really inverted scrolling: the way we’ve always scrolled is actually the inverted version, and this update “corrects” that. We are moving definitively in the direction of Apple Singularity: the convergence of user experience across all Apple products. Due to the massive rise of the iPhone and iPad, both of which are entirely touch-based, users have grown used to swiping down to scroll up and vice versa, because it feels natural to do so when you’re interacting directly with a screen.

The problem I see with trying to integrate the iPhone/iPad experience with that of a MacBook Pro, for example, is that there is a long history of user interaction with computer visuals, and that history is completely unaccustomed to the new “inverted scrolling” method. Most obviously, to move a cursor around a screen, you don’t touch the screen: you use the track pad. But when using this track pad, since you’re not physically (and I use the word “physically” here in a metaphorical sense, not literally) swiping a page up and down like you do on the iPhone or iPad, the natural expectation is for the cursor to move in the same direction as your finger movements.

This is still exactly what happens when you’re simply moving the cursor. But now, the moment you want to scroll, you’re forced to override your instincts and scroll in the opposite direction of what you want to see, despite the fact that the act of moving the cursor is handled exactly oppositely. So you basically have two sets of track pad rules for the same device, a MacBook Pro. On the iPhone and iPad, you only have one set of rules, which is to scroll in the opposite direction of what you want to see, and it feels natural because a) those devices have always only worked that way, and b) due to the touchscreen, you actually feel as if you’re swiping a physical piece of paper up or down, which would correspond perfectly to the movements you’re making on the screen. On the computer, you’re using a trackpad; you’re not swiping on the screen, so there’s already a disconnect between your finger movements and what’s happening on the screen.

By throwing “inverted scrolling” (which can be changed, by the way; it’s only a default) into the mix, Apple is either betting that this will catch on long-term on laptops as well, or they’re not particularly concerned with placating their laptop users — a possibility which is increasingly viable, given the incredible revenue growth of their touchscreen devices. I actually haven’t even switched back to the old settings, because in a way I agree: we are inexorably marching towards a touchscreen future (even though, I hope, laptops won’t disappear completely), and on some level it does make sense for all the scrolling rules to work similarly, no matter on which device. It just feels a little strange and unnatural on a laptop, where we’ve had years to get used to another system and where we continue to use that old system when it comes to moving the cursor but have switched to the new one for scrolling.

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Book review: Jackass Investing, by Michael Dever

Books, , , , , , , , , ,

The front cover of Jackass Investing is adorned with images of hundred-dollar bills strewn about in haphazard fashion. The subtitle is “Don’t do it. Profit from it.” Inside, the content is structured not by chapters, but by “myths” that Michael Dever methodically busts one by one. He does this, he emphasizes time and time again, to save the reader from accumulating a “poor-folio.” Even the design of the book’s web site, www.jackassinvesting.com, seems one small nudge away from that of a low-budget Ponzi scheme.

So one can forgive me, I hope, when I confess that these elements immediately recalled for me the overly-gesticulative, used-car salesman aura of Mad Money‘s Jim Cramer. Dever, the founder of Brandywine Asset Management, is not gun-shy with his similes. But I soon learned not to conflate style with substance. Jackass Investing is a very useful book indeed, not least for the clear language Dever uses to rapidly rebut decades of conventional wisdom in the world of investments.

As a relative novice to active investing (I am, however, the proud owner of an E-Trade account and a quickly depleting “poor-folio” of international stocks), I would be hard-pressed to counter Dever’s claims with fact-finding of my own. But that, in a sense, is what makes this book so compelling: the common-sense nature of each of his principles is immediately obvious to financiers and laymen alike.

Dever is especially harsh on the oft-cited philosophy of “buy-and-hold,” a mantra often repeated by the chattering class on TV but which represents, in the author’s words, “neither rocket science nor sound investment advice.” Buy-and-hold is uniquely favorable to a bull market but not much else, and thus its usefulness to investors has “shriveled together with the values of their stock portfolios throughout the secular bear market that began in 2000.”

Jackass Investing is singularly concerned with “return drivers,” those forces pushing specific assets up in value. For much of the last several decades, both individual and institutional investors generally invested in stocks, bonds, and other assets based on the general upward trend of the market, without paying closer attention to the underlying problems. The price/earnings (P/E) ratio was usually increasing as well, signaling that investors were jumping on the bandwagon and were comfortable paying more for the same stock than they would have during a bearish run.

Dever opts instead for a novel trading strategy, one that is simultaneously intuitive and counter-cultural. He carefully explains why experts are not to be trusted, disavows readers of the myth that ratings agencies can protect them from bad investment strategy, and, perhaps most importantly, emphasizes that portfolio diversification is both absolutely vital and almost universally ignored.

“Portfolio diversification,” Dever declares, “is the financial equivalent of magic.” For years, diversifying one’s holdings has usually been defined as taking positions “across multiple asset classes in order to diversify their risk.” In reality, however, many stocks, bonds, and real estate assets are supported by similar return drivers, thus exposing themselves to “event risk.” If the underlying stimulus factor changes or shifts, all holdings — regardless of asset class — could decrease sharply in value.

True diversification, then, means dipping one’s toes into unfamiliar waters. Dever goes into great detail on home-team bias, the principle (unconscious or otherwise) by which investors stick to the familiar, better-known assets, leaving potentially high-value stocks and other financial instruments out of their planning with nary a second thought. “For example,” Dever explains, “while the U.S. equity markets account for just over 30% of the total capitalization of all the world’s equity markets, U.S. institutional investors allocate more than 50% of their money to U.S.-listed companies…Japanese institutions hold more than 80% of their money in Japanese companies, despite Japanese markets accounting for less than 9% of the world’s capitalization.” By shutting oneself out of foreign markets (or futures contracts, or commodities trading, or any other market conventionally deemed overly risky), one is severely limiting significant money-making opportunities.

Here’s where Dever’s approach becomes slightly ambiguous. As I see it, the continued existence of longstanding tropes such as buy-and-hold is due to the absence of a simple alternative. Fundamentally, Dever’s ideas fall into that category. But while the ideas themselves may be easy to grasp, the execution requires a lot more work than its buy-and-hold counterpart. Whereas the latter can be accomplished simply by purchasing a collection of assets and virtually ignoring it thereafter, the former necessitates a more hands-on approach, in which thorough research, investigation, and asset selection all play major roles. Dever would argue that such background work is required for all forms of investing, and that failure to do so will inevitably result in sub-par returns. The question, then, is whether his approach excludes investors without much time on their hands.

I also would have preferred to see more examples of actual trading strategies presented in opposition to the myths Dever debunks in each section. For this he continually refers readers to his web site instead.

Jackass Investing, then, far surpassed my shallow initial judgments and provided clear insights into investing strategies that, as Michael Dever writes, “should not be controversial, but…will be.” Hell, I even logged in to my E-Trade account a few chapters — nay, myths — in, sold off my under-performing BP stock, and loaded up on Renren, a Chinese social network. After all, if 1.3 billion people with rapidly increasing Internet access isn’t a damn strong return driver, I just don’t know what is.

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Return of the prodigal blogger

Miscellaneous, , , , , , ,

After a self-imposed month of absence in June and a carryover helping of apathy lasting halfway into July, today I return. (Like Harry Potter, only with less fanfare.) A voluntary writing ban can last for only so long before disintegrating in a cloud of rusty word-dust. I say rusty because I am. Over a month ago I began posting on my new Tumblr feed (as well as significantly stepping up my Twitter prolificacy), and — due to my utter lack of practice elsewhere — I’d never gotten so much enjoyment out of devising captions.

Notwithstanding my two-pronged double-T social networking pastimes (tweeting and tumbling happily along, I did), long-form writing beckoned, and so here I am. In the blogosphere (I hate that word), long-form can actually mean something approaching book-length, but here I only use it to distinguish these missives here from their more concise 140-character counterparts.

By the way, I just discovered that WordPress has added Google’s +1 button as a sharing option for posts now. This brings me to a somewhat related point, which is that my Houdini-like vanishing act from this blog in June precipitated quite a foray into social networking in general. Google+’s launch roughly coincided with my “blogstinence,” and Twitter helped fill that gaping void known as narcissism-deprivation as well. I also recently acquired a Spotify account and have slowly begun reentering the chaotic and mostly annoying world of Facebook. “Hello, world,” indeed.

I can tell this post is going nowhere, so now’s as good a time as any to wrap things up. But suffice it to say that you should expect to see more of me in the very near future, cobbling together spare consonants, vowels, and the occasional exclamation mark toward whatever ends I please — which theoretically could be absolutely anything, and in practice will consist almost entirely of jokes likening Mitch McConnell to a Thanksgiving turkey.

Oh, and one more thing. I’m moving to Paris next month for grad school. My girlfriend is moving to Alaska for a law clerkship just days before. This seems (and is) vaguely ridiculous, but we’re staying together, which isn’t at all. So I would remind you (and by you I refer, of course, to exactly no one) that, if you could forgive my unannounced sabbatical last month, I would kindly thank you to equally absolve me of any sub-par upcoming performances, which will no doubt include fits and starts and the occasional sputtering “I can’t speak the language and I’m going to fail all my classes.” The first part will be true (at least at the beginning), and hopefully not the second.

I have never read Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, although I’m about to, but yesterday a former French professor emailed me its opening line as a sort of benediction for the coming year: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man,” Hemingway writes, “then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

And with that, I bid you good night.

Simon says….Ronald Reagan!

Politics,

Is it just me, or has there been an abnormally large contingent of Ronald Reagan-related quotes on the GOP’s campaign trail this cycle? Here’s the latest, from Sarah Palin’s PAC web site:

President Reagan once noted that our national anthem is the only one in the world that ends with a question: “O, say does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” It’s up to each generation of Americans to answer that question. I hope we all make it our duty and responsibility to make sure that, YES, our banner still waves over a free and brave nation!

This leads me to wonder to what other ends Palin could trot out the ol’ Gipper. A few ideas:

1. President Reagan once noted that ice cream cones taste better with pickles. I tried it. He was very wrong.

2. President Reagan once noted that the Berlin Wall must be torn down. But the Separation Wall in the West Bank suits me just fine.

3. President Reagan once noted that we have excess prison capacity and a conveniently large number of black and Latino citizens he’d like to lock up, far from voting booths. That’s worked out pretty well for everyone, right?

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The life and wild times of Thomas Friedman

Humor, Media, Politics, , , , ,

Almost six months ago, I began this blog with an inaugural post making fun of Thomas Friedman. I am neither the first nor the last person to do this, and my mocking was not the funniest on the topic either. But for what it’s worth, I thoroughly enjoyed doing it.

Incidentally, it also wasn’t the last time I’d make fun of him on this very same blog. Yup, you got it: Friedman’s gone and done it again. Now I realize the man doesn’t write his own headlines, but one gets the feeling that whoever does that job for him is mailing it in too. His latest column’s title? “Pay Attention.” (I suppose when you reach the level of inanity that Friedman has, blatant pleas for a captive audience are to be expected.) Somewhere in there is an apt metaphor for the last gasp of fast-declining newspapers. But like Friedman, I’m too lazy to elaborate. Why make logical connections when you can make large, specious leaps instead?

Now if I were Sir Thomas, here is where I’d inadvertently run into a [Singaporean bureaucrat/orphaned Cambodian child/Chinese investment banker/taxi driver from any one of those countries]. He’d casually throw out some inauspicious line, like “The traffic here is bad, but an empty road is worse luck than a traffic jam.” Or, “It may not be perfect, but I love my country.” Or, “Dude, stop dictating crappy metaphors into your iPhone while I’m trying to drive here.” As Mr. Friedman, I’d take it from there, weaving in a completely distended argument that manages to mention clean energy, Chinese high-speed rail, and wi-fi, all within a neat 700-word column (written, of course, in under five minutes).

As it happens, I don’t have to do this for him, since Mr. Friedman has taken care of things all by his lonesome. I could tell from the very start that this latest column was a keeper:

I had some time to kill at the Cairo airport the other day so I rummaged through the “Egyptian Treasures” shop. I didn’t care much for the King Tut paper weights and ashtrays but was intrigued by a stuffed camel, which, if you squeezed its hump, emitted a camel honk. When I turned it over to see where it was manufactured, it read: “Made in China.” Now that they have decided to put former President Hosni Mubarak on trial, I hope Egyptians add to his indictment that he presided for 30 years over a country where nearly half the population lives on $2 day and 20 percent are unemployed while it is importing low-wage manufactured goods — a stuffed camel, no less — from China.

Brilliant! The man managed to squeeze in China, tacky gift shops, airports (Thomas Friedman loves him some airports), and an utterly nonsensical plea to imprison Hosni Mubarak for participating in a little thing called globalization. (Later, the essay even closes with this absolute gem: “This is so much more important than Libya.”)

But Friedman isn’t finished, oh no. Just a bit further down, he ruminates: “If elections for the Parliament are held in September, the only group in Egypt with a real party network ready to roll is the one that has been living underground and is now suddenly legal: the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.”

Heavens to Betsy, no! Anything but that! God forbid a democratic revolution actually results in…democracy. Friedman quotes Mohamed ElBaradei, a (non-Muslim Brotherhood) presidential candidate, warning, “You will have an unrepresentative Parliament writing an unrepresentative Constitution.” (To be clear, ElBaradei’s “unrepresentative Parliament” refers to representatives elected freely by the Egyptian population.) Sadly, it never really dawns on Friedman that perhaps a contender for the presidency may in fact have a vested interest in portraying all rivals as less than desirable.

Towards the end, Friedman lays out his case more succinctly:

Free elections are rare in the Arab world, so when they happen, everybody tries to vote — not only the residents of that country. You can be sure money will flow in here from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to support the Muslim Brotherhood.

America, though, cannot publicly intervene in the Egyptian election debate. It would only undermine the reformers, who have come so far, so fast, on their own and alienate the Egyptian generals. That said, though, it is important that senior U.S. officials engage quietly with the generals and encourage them to take heed of the many Egyptian voices that are raising legitimate concerns about a premature runoff.

For those of you keeping track at home, things Monsieur Thomas is afraid of include: 1) democracy, 2) “everybody [trying] to vote”, and 3) outside campaign contributions — the last of which would never happen in the United States, obviously. In Friedman’s intricate mind (which, not unlike the Internet, also appears to consist of a series of tubes), America cannot intervene in Egyptian democracy. It can only pressure the undemocratic Egyptian military to delay voting so the preferred candidates win. Because if we can’t even pull off a little vote-rigging here and there, what was the point of displacing Mubarak in the first place?

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The good, the bad, and the ugly

Politics, , ,

The Good: Egypt permanently opens the border crossing with Gaza.

The Bad: The Saudis are aggressively promoting their vision of stable monarchical rule in order to counteract the protest movements spreading throughout the Middle East.

The Ugly: Freed journalists recount their despair over a colleague’s execution while in captivity in Libya.

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The Economist gives me hope

Politics, , ,

In this week’s Economist, the “newspaper” tackles the Israel lobby, arguing that “AIPAC remains highly effective” for now, but in the long run it represents a movement that is “losing its resonance with younger Jews.”

This is good news. Even better is the fact that J Street gets a mention in the article as well. J Street is another Israel-oriented lobbying group, but operating from the other side (to the extent that another side exists in American discourse on the subject). The group supports President Obama’s entirely un-novel proposal for basing Israeli-Palestinian border on the 1967 lines and in general exhibits traces of critical thinking, both elements that are sorely missing from the knee-jerk reactions of the Israeli and American evangelical blocs.

And while we’re on the subject, Peter Beinart’s exposé on how the lobby’s toe-the-party-line propaganda initiatives are alienating younger American Jews is quite illuminating.

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