Did you see last Saturday's episode of Austin City Limits? It was an absolutely extraordinarily super excellent blast of rock music at its best, featuring, first, Sonic Youth and, then, The Black Keys. The video is embedded below from the ACL web site.
Sonic Youth has long been a favorite of mine. Even after all these years, they remain experimental rock's avant garde. I like their stripped down and unadorned style in performances for live audiences. They play rock the way it should be played on a stage and this particular performance was one of the best of their's that I have seen (on video). The Black Keys are an insanely talented new band. Their music sounds to me like straight-up guitar-driven blues. Both bands have incredibly gifted guitarists and frighteningly good drummers, in Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth and Patrick Carney of the Black Keys.
Curiously, the Black Keys chose not to play their big hit, "Your Touch." But, again, the video is available on YouTube and is embedded below.
The English film director Beeban Kidron (Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason) has directed Sex, Death and the Gods, a BBC documentary on the devadasi custom in India. This vicious custom, although illegal in India since 1988, continues in a few areas. Destitute mothers -- often devadasis themselves -- sell their young daughters into sex slavery. The sale itself is framed as the mother dedicating her daughter to a life of service to a God. But nobody is under any illusion that it is anything but prostitution. This is an especially vivid example of how religion can be used as a fig leaf for any kind of atrocious behavior, whether it is murderous violence and terrorism or the sale of children into sexual slavery.
Here is a video with scenes from the documentary and excerpts from an interview with the filmmaker. See also:
Beeban Kidron on the devadasi system As told to Joanna Moorhead The Guardian, Friday 21 January 2011. [The film-maker is outraged by the practice, but says that 'evil mothers' are not to blame.]
'Devadasis are a cursed community' by Nash Colundalur The Guardian, Friday 21 January 2011. [Southern India's devadasi system, which 'dedicates' girls to a life of sex work in the name of religion, continues despite being made illegal in 1988. A veneer of religion covers the supply of concubines to wealthy men.]
Glenn Beck, the talk-radio superstar and ultra-vicious right-wing propagandist on Fox TV, is in the news. In a series of broadcasts he has accused Frances Fox Piven, a 78-year-old liberal academic, of proposing -- in an article co-authored with her late husband 45 years ago -- a plan to “intentionally collapse our economic system.” Moreover, as Brian Stelter writes in today's The New York Times, he has accused her on television this week of being "an enemy of the Constitution." Not surprisingly, "Anonymous visitors to his Web site have called for her death, and some, she said, have contacted her directly via e-mail."
These threats against Prof. Fox Piven can't be taken lightly. As the recent horrors in Tucson have reminded the world, the United States remains a country where idiotic and suggestible people can easily get hold of automatic weapons and copious quantities of deadly ammunition.
Although I do not watch Beck's program, I think I have an idea of his basic approach to propaganda: He starts by describing a government initiative that most people would find innocuous. He then uses the slippery slope argument -- the last refuge of every debater who realizes that he has no case -- to argue that the initiative, no matter how reasonable -- or even appealing -- it may seem, is only a start and that in the end all your rights will be taken away and you will become a slave of the government.
As proof, I give you -- ta da! -- Beck's Sept. 14, 2010 program. Beck begins with a gratuitous and vulgar attack on Michelle Obama, the first lady, and her anti-childhood-obesity campaign. He then launches a prolonged attack on Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, the recent bestselling bestselling book on behavioral economics and its policy implications, by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, two world-renowned academics.
Last fall semester, I had introduced a new course on behavioral economics, and one of the textbooks I used was Nudge. To illustrate my lectures, I had been scouring the Internet for related video, and it was this search that had led me to Glenn Beck's program. I couldn't believe that one of the most popular programs on TV was devoting 15 precious minutes to a textbook that I was teaching from. This had never happened before and will almost surely not happen again. I was appalled by Beck's insane attempt to turn what was essentially a deep and policy-oriented treatise -- see the reviews in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Time, and The New York Times -- into some sort of blueprint for a program to enslave all Americans. But I was thrilled that I had something to impress my (largely apathetic) students with. After this, they would not be able to say that what I was teaching did not matter. The textbook was on TV, for heaven's sake!
Nudge argues that the choices that we make are in may cases distorted by deep-seated psychological weaknesses and that, as a result, government policy may be able to intervene to make us all better off without in any way taking away our freedom to choose as we please. (Take, for example, the fact that many Americans save far too little for retirement. Many workers do not bother to even join the pension plan available at work, not through conscious decision but simply because they are hobbled by procrastination. Thaler and Sunstein suggest that the current opt-in system be replaced by an opt-out system. Under an opt-in system a worker must write to his or her employer to be included in the company's pension plan. Naturally, many don't bother to do even that. Under an opt-out plan, on the other hand, every employee would automatically be enrolled into a pension plan, but would be able to opt-out by simply checking a box on a card. Such opt-out systems do not take away a worker's freedom to not join a pension plan, but have been found to dramatically increase enrollment rates and saving rates. See Thaler's article in Newsweek.) In his program, Glenn Beck -- what a coward! -- actually does not take on the argument of the book. He simply distorts the book's argument! He says that eventually "a nudge will become a shove" and that the freedoms that Americans take for granted will be taken away.
Thaler and Sunstein repeatedly clarify that they are against any reduction in a citizen's freedom to choose. They call their approach libertarian paternalism, to emphasize this very point. And yet, Beck completely ignores this! In short, Beck makes no argument against the Thaler-Sunstein proposals, distorts what the book says, and uses the slippery slope argument to frighten his largely semi-literate audience. As a coup de grace, Beck calls Cass Sunstein -- who, before joining the Obama administration, was a professor of constitutional law first at the University of Chicago and then at Harvard, and is one of America's most distinguished legal scholars -- the "most dangerous man in America." Twice!
Please read Brian Stelter's article on the Fox Piven affair. It seems that Beck is simply recycling the strategy he used against Nudge.
This post is about "Equality, a True Soul Food," By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF in today's New York Times. This is the sort of article that makes The New York Times a great newspaper.
I had read Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's "The Spirit Level" last year. It was an eye-opening experience. I remember finding it difficult to understand why a book with such deep policy implications had been by and large neglected by the mainstream media.
I discussed Wilkinson and Pickett's findings in my Behavioral Economics course in the recently concluded fall semester -- the PowerPoint presentation that I used is available here.
Traditional economics -- which is usually concerned with the nature of a society made up of rational people -- finds it hard to understand why the mere fact of inequality would affect a rational individual: after all, why should your happiness depend on someone else's income or wealth?
Heterodox economists -- most prominently Thorstein Veblen in "The Theory of the Leisure Class" -- knew that there was something missing in the economist's disregard for the effect of inequality on our psyches. So did the American humorist H.L. Mencken. In "A Mencken Chrestomathy" (1949), he defined "wealth" as "any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband!" (By the way, the inflation calculator at the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that $100 in 1949 is equivalent to $919.34 in 2010.)
Wilkinson and Pickett show that -- like it or not -- inequality affects us in a profound way. It corrodes our souls, and, eventually, our bodies too.
Please see their web site for more about the data underlying their book.
