Politics & Communication with Joshua Gee

David Brooks has a great article today highlighting President Obama’s often-overlooked successful work on education reform. However, near the end, one sentence bugged me.

Brooks:

Over the next months, there will be more efforts to water down reform. Some groups are offering to get behind health care reform in exchange for gutting education reform. Politicians from both parties are going to lobby fiercely to ensure that their state gets money, regardless of the merits. So will governors who figure they’re going to lose out in the award process.

What groups could he be talking about? I can’t think of, off the top of my head, a group that would have any kind of significant interest in both issues and the clout to make any kind of offer like that worth considering. Teachers unions? They are already solidly behind health care reform. Medical teachers associations? I don’t think they even exist. If Brooks knows of any groups offering a craven deal like that, he could have used his nationally-read column to call them out.

It is too bad he didn’t, because some people say that pundits often use the “some groups/people” convention to create straw men that artificially increase the drama around an issue for the sake of the argument.

Presented, essentially without comment, the top two stories from today’s New York Times:

• States Slashing Social Programs for Vulnerable
• Crisis Altering Wall Street as Big Banks Lose Top Talent

I don’t recommend you read them one after another, as I just did, unless you want your head explode from pure rage, as mine is currently doing. Also, guess which story got more prominant play on the front page of America’s newspaper of record.

Much to my delight, pirates are the current topic de jour. The New York Post has been front-paging the story of Richard Phillips all week, Meet the Press had several naval experts on this morning morning and The New York Times had an Op-ed from Robert Kaplan, one of my favorite security thinkers, about what weakness the rise in piracy has exposed in the United States Navy.

Much pirate news coverage has a somewhat “zany” tone to it, the kind of inflection that TV news anchors use during live remotes from a day before Thanksgiving sale or in coverage of the President’s new dog. Because of that, and the joking among many (including me) that this is just an amusing diversion, I thought I might be useful to highlight that these pirates arnt cartoon characters, they are dangerous and desperate men. From Kaplan’s Op-ed:

Somali pirates are usually unemployed young men who have grown up in an atmosphere of anarchic violence, and have been dispatched by a local warlord to bring back loot for his coffers. It is organized crime carried out by roving gangs. The million-square-miles of the Indian Ocean where pirates roam might as well be an alley in Mogadishu. These pirates are fearless because they have grown up in a culture where nobody expects to live long. Pirate cells often consist of 10 men with several ratty, roach-infested skiffs. They bring along drinking water, gasoline for their single-engine outboards, grappling hooks, ladders, knives, assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and the mild narcotic qat to chew. They live on raw fish.

It is also important to remember that pirates were ALWAYS dangerous and desperate men (and women). Though they have been partially disneyfied and completely romanticized, pirates as we think of them were never anything like Captain Jack Sparrow. Under the Black Flag, an excellent history of Caribbean pirates, gives some descriptions of what they were really like:

The overwhelming majority were seaman… analysis of the Anglo-American pirates operating in the western Atlantic and Caribbean at the time shows that 98 percent were formerly seamen in the merchant service or the Royal Navy or had served in privateers… Their faces and arms were burned and weathered to the nut-brown color of Robert Louis Stevenson’s sea captain Billy Bones… They were tough and ruthless men capable of savage cruelty and murder… Most pirates were by nature rebellious and lazy. They were notorious for foul language, and for prolonged bouts of drinking, which frequently led to quarrels and violence. They came together in an uneasy partnership, attracted by the lure of plunder and the desire for an easy life.

The practice of going into action armed to the teeth is confirmed by numerous accounts of pirate attacks. The carrying of several pistols was not simply to frighten the enemy but was also a wise precaution… Pirates were also in the habit of wearing their weapons when they were off duty.

Pirates were mostly young men in their twenties… most of the men in the buccaneer ships were French and British, but all crews tended to be multinational… A considerable number of the men on the pirate ships were black.

If all that doesn’t do it for you, maybe the best way to disabuse yourself of the idea that pirates were romantic figures is to think about what raping, pillaging and plundering really means.

One thing that Kaplan didn’t go into in his Op-ed is how many of the Somali pirates used to be fisherman or come from fishing villages (f0r more insight into the Somali pirates, read this GQ article on them). When you add that fact in, there really are enormous similarities between the two groups. In both cases, you are dealing with young men with few skills or jobs prospects who know a lot about boats and sailing and turn to crime at first out of desperation but later because of the lure of being rich. Because there are so many similarities, (though there are key differences, like the ships of Somali pirates being primarily short-range and having bosses who are land-based) I would imagine that there are lessons that we can draw from how classical piracy was stamped out as we try to curtail piracy in Somalia. More on that later as I continue rereading Under the Black Flag.

Editors Note: I really thought my post about Under the Black Flag would be a chance for me to blog something (relatively) original, but stupid Matt Yglesias has already read and recommended it over at his blog. Also, while I was writing this post, the AP reported that Capt. Richard Phillips was freed by a U.S. raid. Doesn’t do much to change the underlying situation but good for him and his family!

There was an excellent Op-Ed yesterday in the New York Times from Douglas J. Feith and Justin Polin of the Hudson institute describing how Taliban fighters in the Swat Valley bombed the shrine of Rahman Baba, the most revered Pashtun poet.

The bombers took aim at the poet’s shrine because it represented Sufism, the mystical form of Islam that has long been predominant in India and Pakistan. The Sufism of Rahman Baba generally stresses a believer’s personal relationship with God and de-emphasizes the importance of the mosque. It refrains from exalting violence and war and praises such virtues as tolerance, devotion and love. Its practice relies extensively on dance, music and poetry. Some of Sufism’s most esteemed poets and scholars are women.

The extremists are determined to destroy Pakistan’s moderate Sufi tradition — by claiming the exclusive right to fly the banner of Islam and asserting this claim through cultural, educational and violent means. Through intimidation, they silence musicians, still dancers and oppress women. As a result, artists and performers areleaving Pakistan’s Swat Valley and the North-West Frontier Province in droves.

Feith and Polin go on to write how the United States should work to support the local Pushtun tribes who oppose the Taliban and even suggest building a radio station to broadcast shows that would “revive the collective memory of Sufism and inspiring opposition to the Taliban. Other programs could highlight the cultural and physical devastation wrought by the Taliban and Al Qaeda.”

The question then becomes: Who is this man and what did he do with Doug Feith? Where was this kind of nuanced thinking when Feith was the former undersecretary of defense for policy during his time at the Pentagon? For those that don’t know, he is a major neoconservative thinker and was one of the main authors of the dummied up intelligence that drove us into the Iraq War.

Despite the source and though I don’t know much about this kind of cultural diplomacy (yet), this idea strikes me as sensible. We won’t win if we try to make the average citizen pick between the United States and the Taliban. People in that area don’t really like the US that much and don’t know enough about it to view it as something to aspire to; ideas like “democracy” and “freedom” are too intangible to inspire much of a following. However, by investing in forms of mass communications promoting the Pushtun’s own culture (Radio, internet, text messages), we could actually inspire some resistance to the Taliban. The downside to this are that we could also inspire backlash against the United States and Pakistani governments by inflaming Pushtun tribalism. Also, the Taliban is much better at fighting this kind of war (they know the area and major players better than we do and won’t hesitate to kill suspected collaborators). Still, imho this approach is a more nuanced and at least as important as just sending guns and supplies to our allies in the region or the Pakistani government.

With all the brouhaha regarding the stimulus, Times Traveler reminds us it could be worse:

Taft Considers Proposing an Income Tax
Thursday, March 25, 1909

The problem of how to increase federal government revenues has reached a point where President William Howard Taft is seriously considering an income tax proposal.

‘Too much of the revenue, some of the revisionists are saying, is to be derived from the tariff on necessities of household use. If the Republican Party was beaten in 1892 because the McKinley bill made the women pay a few cents more for their tin dippers, what will happen, they ask, to a party that puts up the cost of cheap stockings and women’s and children’s gloves, that taxes the supper table $8,000,000 on tea, the breakfast table $10,000,000 on coffee, and the dinner table $2,000,000 on spices, in addition to the $52,000,000 tax on raw sugar, which is finally included in the price of the refined article?

What Obama really needs is to distract people by discovering a new continent.

Shackleton’s Feat Is Highly Praised; It Is Taken as Proving the Existence of an Antarctic Continent

I didn’t finish the Battlestar Galactica  finale until around 3:3o am EST because I was on a bus for most of the night. So I basically finished the finale, said “oh my god” over and over with my hands to my head for about five minutes, then passed out.

All in all it was a rather jarring experience that didn’t give me the opportunity to fully consider and understand last night’s finale. As such, I spent today trying to read all the BSG commentary I could. I found it surprisingly hard to come by so I thought I would aggregate what I could find here.

• The New York Times wrote a combination review of last night’s episode/eulogy for the series. My mom loved the article, but that is because it was written for people who have never watched the show. It raised some good points about the characters overall, but the stuff about the Book of Mormon and Alcoholics Anonymous really lost me.
• The LA Times, in contrast, had nothing but accolades. They loved the show, and they loved the finale. Since I liked the finale, I like this review  even though it is less ambitious than some of the others.
• Salon had a critical review of the finale/a summation of the final season. They had me playing along until the review called Admiral Adama the series’ most controversial figure (wtf?) and started hating on Edward James Olmos’ acting ability. REVIEW FAIL. Don’t frak with the old man.
• TV Squad loved it. Their review features lists of the episode’s high and low moments. Literary junk food to be sure, but worth scanning for the “ZOMG THAT WAS AWESOME” factor.
• Yglesias didn’t care for the finale but doesn’t say why. Sad.
• Friend Greg went to the cast and crew screening of the finale at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences theater. Friend Greg is now known as “that asshole named Greg I used to be friends with who is married to that actress from Battlestar.” Shmuck.

I will keep an eye out but probably not post any other reviews here except for my own. Check my tumblr for other reviews I come across. I am still working out my own thoughts about the episode so I might try to write something up later.