The 6 official proposals for rebuilding the World Trade Center site have been unveiled and are up on the web. Make sure to view each as a QuickTime animation. I haven’t had a chance to have a good look yet, but a cursory viewing has me choosing the Memorial Garden as my early favorite.
Andrew Sullivan wrote in the Times of London, regarding the AIDS epidemic devastating the Third World:
Why not simply rip off the formulae of existing drugs and provide them to the developing world for free? One answer is that theft is theft. Another is that such an approach could actually lead to a resurgence of HIV.
The reason?
[…] You […] destroy the financial incentive to come up with new drugs, kill off the investment capital that keeps HIV research going, and leave the next generation of people with HIV with next to nothing in the pipeline.
But today in his blog he has second thoughts:
To be perfectly honest, my column last Sunday, though heartfelt, has been troubling my conscience. Perhaps this is one of those instances where prudence needs to be set aside. But judging whether that is appropriate demands a particular kind of prudence as well.
Well, here is a way for Andrew Sullivan to be conscientious and prudent:
Drug companies do not have a market in the Third World for full-cost AIDS drugs. The wealth simply isn’t there. But developing drugs is like developing software; development is expensive while production is cheap. So why not institute an ability-to-pay regime for the intellectual property component of AIDS drug costs? First World countries would pay for AIDS drug research and production, Third World countries would pay for production only.
The argument that this approach would confiscate drug companies’ profits is disingenuous: Drug companies have long been budgeting drug development for their First World markets only. The Third World has never figured in their revenue model.
On the contrary, an ability-to-pay regime is a good business decision for drug companies. It is in their long-term interest to allow cheap copies of their AIDS drugs to flood the Third World, because winning the battle against the AIDS epidemic is now a prerequisite for the development of the Third World, and their ability to become profitable markets in the future. Not to be macabre, but you can’t sell drugs to dead people.
And yes, it isn’t lost on me that this arrangement would amount to an increase in aid to the Third World, paid for by First World consumers of AIDS drugs (and their insurance companies/governments). But this aid is analogous to Microsoft donating their software to poorer schools–with the upshot that more kids will have opportunities to grow up to be consumers of Microsoft products. It’s time drug companies do the same.
Clubs have always had DJs. They would bring their records and spin. More recently, DJs have been been using laptops to create live music from prerecorded loops and samples, and they often do so at Open Air, a bar on my block in the East Village.
Now, we are beginning to see VJs performing live mixing of video to accompany the music. Thanks to Apple technology, all you need is two PowerBook laptops, Final Cut Pro, a mixing panel and lots of footage. The best practitioners of this new art are playing in the East Village at an event called Lapdance, on July 18.
Fatuity watch indeed: The Wall Street Journal’s opinion page blog Best of the Web Today, by James Taranto, took to task a piece by Nicholas Kristof on the New York Times Op-Ed page a few days ago for drawing an “absurd moral equivalence” between our own Christian bigots and Muslim bigots. According to the WSJ, when American bigots sound off, they are nobly exercising their freedom of speech, but when Muslim bigots do the same, they are Saudi operatives. All of them, apparently. Hence no moral equivalence between a Christian minister calling Islam “a very evil and wicked religion” and a Muslim Imam calling Christianity the same.
Bigots start by generalizing. All Muslims are evil. All Americans are warmongers. Such opinions attempt to sever any empathy for the “other,” but ends up denying individuals the responsibility for their actions. In this context, when Taranto defends his point by reminding us that the Sept 11 terrorism attacks were, after all, perpetrated by Muslims in the name of Islam, what he is in effect doing is shielding the individual responsibility of the terrorist with a mantle of presumed collective guilt on the part of Muslims. Not that he is a bigot, of course:
The Weyrich/Lind characterization of Islam as “a religion of war” is far from an accurate description of the whole of Islam, which like any major religion has many theological and cultural varieties. But to a considerable number of Muslims, theirs is a religion of war.
And where have the considerable number of Christian bigots gone, all of a sudden? Oh, right, they’re all individuals.
But the heights of disingenuousness are only reached when Taranto tells us:
Now, we’re with Kristof in finding most of these [anti-Muslim] statements disagreeable.
Which is why I’m sure he must have forgotten this piece on the WSJ opinion page nary 2 weeks ago. Chuck Colson, who brings prisoners to Jesus via his Prison Fellowship Ministries, seems peeved that Islam is making inroads onto his turf. His screed starts innocuously enough:
Islam, which offers brotherhood and solidarity, especially for people of color, is for the most part a law-abiding religion. But not always.
Soon enough, we get to the guts of his problem with Islam:
Those who take the Koran seriously are taught to hate the Christian and the Jew; lands taken from Islam must be recaptured.
…
It’s no accident that Islam’s influence is growing behind bars. The National Islamic Prison Foundation and a Muslim prison outreach program were organized specifically to convert American inmates to Islam.
You don’t say? Just like Prison Fellowship Ministries, only different? The gall of it.
I have no doubt many born-again prisoners take the bible seriously–as in seriously looking for a favorable parole board decision. For Chuck to even start having a case, he’d have to begin by showing recidivism rates for Christians are lower than those of Muslims. I’m willing to bet they’re not.
Vindication is a wonderful thing. The only thing I want to know is, shouldn’t environmental groups have wondered why they were being so ineffectual if the 1% number had been true? Or are they now on board when it comes to cleaning forests?
Ex-World Bank chief economist Stiglitz’s Globalization and its Discontents is quite the flawed masterpiece. It’s too breezy in its outrage (it even uses excalamation marks to express mock horror!) and too personal in its attacks for the tome to stand as the authoritative indictment of the Washington Consensus; the prose skips about frantically like so many grasshoppers, and often the same points are repeated in consecutive chapters, in case we didn’t get it the first time. But what a plague it has unleashed! The last two chapters especially come together to deal a body blow to the IMF that would make any WWF smackdown come alive. The IMF has begun responding in kind–Charles, were you there at the book launch?
Most salient point to take away from Stiglitz’s invective is that gradualism is better than shock therapy, and that the IMF never understood this because they are either stupid or in bed with Wall Street (they get to choose). A dry, footnoted exposition of this argument would likely have convinced me more, but then again I probably never would have read that in the first place. Stiglitz accuses the IMF of mission creep from its original mandate–which was just to provide pooled liquidity to countries with temporary cash-flow problems in the absence of global governance–and here he is most convincing, in part because the argument is framed from the perspective that since the IMF is such a believer in free markets, it should have known better than try to outbluff those free markets when it repeatedly and disastrously insisted on defending overvalued currencies during both the East Asian and Russian crises.
But what’s with the title? Stiglitz is not against globalization, as the book’s name implies, but against how the globalization process has been managed by the IMF. By the last chapter I was convinced the book was originally supposed to have been called “Globalization with a Human Face” but that this would have made him sound like an apologist to the intended audience–the anti-globalization movement. Stiglitz is in fact performing an economic high-wire act–fiercely criticizing one pillar of the Washington Consensus, but doing so in the hope of shielding the other pillar, the World Bank.
Will he succeed? There is very little about the World Bank at all in this book, and it’s a conspicuous ommission that will surely invite scrutiny. This exchange has just begun, and the IMF isn’t taking the blows sitting down. But read the book and get front-row seats.
P.S: The Economist’s review of this book.
Studies show that John Uppington will have a long, healthy life. Hmm, maybe I should have kept that one for the speeches at his wedding in Greece in September…
Ooh, this is good stuff, from the letters page on AndrewSullivan.com:
Contrary to one of your other reader letters, the pledge in schools is not an “expression of their religious views” or even an expression of patriotic views in general. The pledge is ritualized in schools (and forced in many states) precisely because these children do not understand or hold these views. If they did, then they would freely and informally express them and no one would consider it important to have a ritualized coerced pledge. The pledge in schools is pure and simply an authoritarian exercise in indoctrination and an attempt instill both allegiance to the nation (not democratic principles) and allegiance to the authority of the dominant monotheistic conception of God.
In other words, the school pledge is an extremely un-American ritual that is identical in every way to the kinds of blind indoctrination that we despise in other authoritarian societies.
Of course, getting supporters of the pledge to deny their position is un-American is half the fun.
Good guys finish last. Belgium got the Cup’s equivalent of ‘A for effort’ by winning FIFA’s fair play award. If only we’d taken out Ronaldo properly when we had the chance–a red card would have been a small price to pay for a trip to the quarter finals.
And here is a piece where Kim argues that the old powerhouse teams like Italy and France should have won even when they lost against upstarts Korea and Senegal. Complaining about “underdog overload” is like a butler lamenting the demise of old money because the nouveau riche have no class. But then, arguing for the maintenance of the status quo is, after all, the job of the WSJ editorial team.
But Kim does bring up an important question:
“What was a poor fan to do when the underdogs were playing each other? Senegal-Turkey? (Poor, African recipient of World Bank loans? Or poor, Muslim recipient of IMF loans?) I considered flipping a coin.”
The correct answer is to support whatever country threw in its lot with the kindler, gentler, poverty fighting World Bank, and to oppose all evil manifestations of austerity inducing IMF policies. That, at least, is what Joe Stiglitz would have done and he tells you why in Globalization and its Discontents, reviewed here by Felix. I’m reading it now and will report back. PS: Senegal is Muslim too.
All this outrage, but no competent counterargument. Legal experts agree that the ruling draws the logical conclusion from previous case law. The one dissenting opinion in the ruling basically states that the harm done to children coerced into reciting the religious component of the pledge is minimal compared to the fact that a lot of people would “feel good” if the pledge is kept as it is. But the Supreme Court itself has tossed out “feel good” arguments in the past.
The Wall Street Journal had to resort to an ad hominem attack and an appeal to consequences in its condemnation of the ruling. Both are logical fallacies, prissily delivered, and a sure sign that the editorial page doesn’t have an argumentative leg to stand on.
Of course, the outraged, most of whom haven’t read the ruling, are being fed a misrepresented version of it. It is, in fact, about protecting children from undue influence. Unlike children, adults do not suffer coercion when they choose to recite the pledge, or not to recite it, or only parts of it. These are the kinds of decisions adults are capable of making, but not impressionable children. The government should not mandate that children be asked to recite an endorsement of religion. That is not the government’s job.
And yes, those two words do amount to an endorsement. The words “under God” were added specifically for that purpose in 1954, to show that the US was a God-fearing nation, in stark contrast with those Godless communists. The facetious might make the argument that since the cold war has been won, those two words are no longer needed.
Finally: No, American money is not next, as certain alarmists would prefer us to believe. We do not tend to recite “In God We Trust” every time we use money, and hence we are not coerced by the existence on coinage of what is undeniably an endorsement of a religious concept. Other invocations of God, at public occasions such as the start of Congress, serve a secular purpose, and as such have their place. The addition of “under God” served a religious purpose, as President Eisenhower so eloquently put:
“From this day forward, the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our Nation and our people to the Almighty.”