Matthew Yglesias

Steals Don't Matter

Chris Broussard's take on Cavaliers training camp:

New coach Mike Brown has spent almost all of camp focusing on defense. No surprise there. After all, his last two stops as an assistant were with San Antonio and Indiana, two of the top defensive teams in the league.

Cleveland, on the other hand, was a defensive joke last season. They were clueless against the pick-and-roll and opponents enjoyed sinking 45 percent of their shots against the Cavs.

That will end this season. . . .

Hughes and James bring another intangible -- anticipation in the passing lanes. They were first and third, respectively, in the league in steals last season.

But look. LeBron and his third-ranking steals was on the Cavs last season and they were a bad defensive team. Hughes was on the Wizards and they were a terrible defensive team. I've only seen LBJ play twice, so I won't speak to him in particular, but if you watched Hughes last season it was clear that he got a lot of steals in part because he was making poor choices -- taking unwise risks -- and not making a real contribution to his team's defense. Bruce Bowen, widely regarded as the best perimeter defender not suspend all year, ranked 63rd in the league in steals. San Antonio and Detroit, probably the two top defensive teams in the league, ranked 17th and 20th in the league in team steals.

Obviously, all else being equal it's better to steal the pass than not to steal the pass. But all else isn't equal. Lots of steals do not a solid defense make.

Dowd on . . . Something

Man oh man is Lindsay Beyerstein mad about Maureen Dowd's book excerpt. Amanda, too. I'm not sure Dowd was really trying to say what they think she was saying. Indeed, it's rarely clear to me what Dowd is trying to say, and giving her greater length to expound her ideas doesn't seem to have alleviated that. What I will say is this: The news that the feminist movement has not, in 1.5 generations' time, succeeded in achieving everything one might have hoped is not really that big a surprise when you think about it. Consider how the civil rights movement must have looked in 1905 -- so full of bright promise just 40 years ago, now wracked on the inevitable shoals of racial realities. And yet today Rosa Parks has a state funeral.

Lucky Me

Most of the devices I use to tell time -- cell phone, computer, cable box -- are sufficiently sophisticated to have automatically adjusted during Sunday morning's "fall back" period. As a result, I forgot that one device -- my alarm clock -- was not so equipped. As a result, when I finally dragged my ass out of bed this morning I thought I was running about 30 minutes behind schedule. Really I was 30 minutes ahead! They should screw around with time zones every weekend.

Rumble on the Hudson

New Look Knicks looked not so good in last night's pre-season game. Of course, pre-season is weird so we saw an awful lot of Penny Hardaway for some reason. The Kidd-less Nets' strong performance seems to indicate that if the Kidd-Carter-Jefferson troika actually plays together all season without big injury problems, New Jersey will have a strong team. In light of the improving East, that hardly guarantees anything, but I think it makes sense to mention them in the same breath with Indiana, Detroit, and Miami. Tragically, this bodes not-so-well for my adopted Wizards and other middling Eastern Conference teams.

Free Milk!

The basic new school anti-feminist line goes something like this: Women want to get married; men want to have sex; if unmarried women are willing to have sex and society isn't willing to massively stigmatize them then men won't want to get married because "why but the cow when you can get the milk for free?" Said contentions have been the subjects of a few posts around here recently. Elsewhere, Phoebe Maltz and Amy Lamboley confirm that women are not, in fact, cows so the whole free milk analysis is somewhat lacking. Let me just add to their remarks a quasi-mathematical observation.

Grant for the sake of argument that men are more interested than women in promiscuous sex, since this seems to me to be the case. It follows from this that women will have an easier time procuring promiscuous sex. Therefore, though there ought to be individual variation in the level of interest in "buying a cow" there shouldn't be any systematic, gender-linked disagreement on this subject. The reality of contemporary life doesn't live up to the lurid imagination of conservative intellectuals. People who both want lots of promiscuous sex and succeed in having it won't be very interested in relationships. There are, say, more men in the "want" category but more women in the "succeed" category. The gender balance in the both/and category should be about even. The only reason for this not to work out is if women don't like sex at all. If they are, in other words, literally cows.

Then there's the question of double-standards. Actually existing traditional marriage wasn't really a fantasyland of monogamy. Rather, it was a world in which wives who cheated were severely punished, but men who cheated really weren't as long as they kept paying the bills. See Anna Karenina for more. Also the fact that nowadays most divorces are initiated by women.

Message Movies

Last weekend, I went to see Good Night and Good Luck. It's a really elegantly made, well-executed film. On the other hand, it kind of hits you over the head with its message pretty crudely. That's not so bad, but its message isn't really all that interesting. Worse, there's a real lack of psychological depth; McCarthy is just bad and Murrow is just good and that's all there is. I sort of hesitate to criticize the film too harshly on these terms because I think it's a very common problem in movies and often doesn't seem to bother people all that much. Clearly, you've got a liberal film here so conservatives are inclined to criticize it and judge it by standards they don't apply to other things, where stark, black-and-white narratives are usually virtues. That said, it bothered me.

By contrast, The War Within is really fantastic. The marketing of this film was, to me, misleading. I was expecting a pretty hokey look at the hidden dangers posed by Muslim immigrants in the United States. It's actually a much more sophisticated film that takes its protagonist -- a would-be suicide terrorist -- quite seriously. There's a pretty clear liberal message here, too, but much better done. The whole point is to draw the various characters -- good, bad, and otherwise -- in psychologically real ways and try to show how and why these terrible things come to pass. Basic filmmaking attributes, suspense, romance, drama are all there, the acting is good, and most important of all it cuts against the vast mountains of cant under which this entire subject has been buried for the four years under the name of moral clarity.

Republic Dogs

Via DeLong comes "Republic Dogs", a truly brilliant bit of philosophical humor. Better even than the celebrated "Fog-Like Sensations".

Credit Where Due

It should be said that all credit for discovering Brio belongs to Miss Nicole Cliffe, a woman of outstanding moral character, blessed with an encyclopedic knowledge of Christian Web sites and a curious affinity for the antebellum South.

More Brio

In many ways, the funniest thing about Brio is that their advice columnist looks like she's a lesbian, haircut-wise. Also, she dispenses advice like this:

Someone who claims to be bisexual (sexually attracted to both males and females) doesn’t sin until he or she yields to temptation — either physically or mentally acting out the sin in the mind. Let me also remind you that the emotions and desires you’re feeling as a teenager don’t define who you are! All your hormones are waking up and going wacko right now. You may think you have a crush on another female, when in reality you simply admire her and her feminine qualities. You’re still in the process of becoming. So don’t be so quick to label yourself. Again, what you feel doesn’t define who you are. Your identity is in Christ. Your relationship with Him defines you. And you are His princess!

That column via a rightly-skeptical Phoebe Maltz who also offers tales of prom-time sin. Still, what I really appreciate about the magazine continues to be its old-school take on "modesty"

Dear Susie:

I’m a 17-year-old guy who’s doing his best to pursue God’s plan for purity. I want to say something to Christian girls that they might not realize: The way you dress really does affect guys.

Modesty isn’t some outdated, legalistic rule from the early church. When you wear revealing clothing, you’re adding fuel to the forbidden fire of lust in a guy’s mind that he’s trying so hard to put out.

As men of God — and brothers in Christ — we Christian guys are commanded to respect you and to be pure with our thoughts, eyes and actions. But it would help us so much if you, as our sisters, would really think about how the way you dress influences us.

Jeremy
McAllen, Texas

Hi, Jeremy!
We don’t know how you sneaked into Brioland, but we’re glad you did! Thanks for your openness and honesty about the temptations guys face when girls wear things too short, too tight or too low.

Awesome. Again, individual responsibility flies out the window. Ross Douthat, by contrast, is a smart dude and was educated by the finest conservative thinkers in the land so he offers the new school take where feminism is bad for women. Needless to say, he's totally wrong, but I decline to explain why at the moment because there simply isn't time. The salient fact of the day, however, is that most divorces are initiated by women.

Swoopes

Ah. The much sought-after intersection of basketball (or at least basketball-related program activities) and politics -- Sheryl Swoopes is a lesbian:

Most of the players around the league already know I'm gay, and I do feel like there's a sisterhood among lesbian players. We know we're not going to get the support from a lot of other people. But the talk about the WNBA being full of lesbians is not true. I mean, there are as many straight women in the league as there are gay.

If the WNBA is really half gay that actually would be quite a lot of lesbians in proportion to the overall population. Not sure if that's what she meant, though, or if she was just speaking without thinking it through.

Fun With Brio

The greatest publication on the planet bar none is Brio, published by Focus on the Family and designed to provide a Christian counterpoint to Seventeen and so forth. For example, you can read about how tight shirt-wearing sluts are ruining bible study:

Say your friend Brad is standing before your youth group because your youth pastor asked him to read a passage from the Bible. Brad pauses as he’s reading to make eye contact with the group, just as his speech teacher taught him to do.

The moment Brad looks up, he sees a girl wearing a tight T-shirt. Immediately, Brad’s mind is distracted from the Lord and the Bible — two things he’s truly interested in.

Brad’s able to keep going. He doesn’t let on that he’s no longer concentrating on the words coming from his mouth. But in fact, for the rest of the evening, Brad feels uncomfortable around the girl he spotted, struggling between sinful thoughts and wanting to treat her as a sister in Christ.

All because of a T-shirt? you might think. Yes — all because of a tight T-shirt that showed too much of a girl’s body.

There's something refreshing about this perspective. Contemporary anti-feminism tends to be all-too-slick, filled with clever arguments about how controlling women's sexuality is something we need to do for women's own good. Here we get the real deal.

Spurs Win!

Following up on yesterday's theme, the Spurs are universally predicted to win the Western Conference by ESPN's NBA writers. Now it's true that their offseason acquisitions probably won't really help them very much. That, however, is basically because they were already a ridiculously good team. Now they're both ridiculously good, and essentially injury-proof due to phenomenal depth. What's more, having Van Excel around to back up Tony Parker should be a real asset since Parker is usually very good but sometimes goes into funks.

It's also worth noting this about Tim Duncan. In 2004-05 he average 20.3 points, 11.1 rebounds, 2.7 assists, 2.6 blocks, and 0.7 steals per game. In every metric except blocks, that was his worst season ever. The odds of him playing somewhat better are pretty good. Meanwhile, there's good reason to believe Parker and Ginobili still have their best days ahead of them.

UPDATE: See also:

The Spurs received 77 percent of the vote among the approximately 25 GMs who responded. That percentage is the highest a team has received in the four years the survey has been conducted. The defending champions got 96 percent of the vote to win the Western Conference and 100 percent to win the Southwest Division.

Yup. Eastern Conference should offer some good races this year, however, and several top-notch teams. I'm surprised 78 percent said Tim Duncan was the best power forward. I can see the case for thinking he's better than Garnett, but surely it's not such an overwhelmingly clear choice. KG is really good. Certainly, if you switched him and Duncan, the Spurs would still be the best team in the league and the T-Wolves would still be mediocre at best. Can't blame him for that situation.

Fantasy

I like basketball and lots of my friends have enjoyed fantasy football or fantasy baseball leagues, so I thought I might do a fantasy NBA team this winter. Then I started looking into it and discovered some startling facts. Many sources regard Shawn Marion as the third-best fantasy player in the league. Back in the real world, Marion is the third-best player on the Phoenix Suns. It's universally acknowledged that Yao Ming is better than Shaq. Absurd. Importantly, this doesn't seem to be insane draft analysis. Rather, the rules in force at the most common leagues actually justify this sort of thinking but that just means people are playing with silly rules.

Meanwhile, in the real NBA I don't see how the Spurs could possibly not repeat as champions. I mean, sure, maybe Kwame Brown or Darko Milicic will magically surface as a superstar, but back in the real world not so much. Nick Van Excel, Fabricio Oberto, Brent Barry, Michael Finley, and Nazr Mohammed sounds like a mediocre lineup until you realize that none of those guys are starters.

For The Kids

Like everyone else, I don't really see an argument in what Maggie Gallagher purports to be an argument about same-sex marriage. It's just a collection of non-sequiturs. Nevertheless, her claim that we need to save "the once-privileged conjugal vision of marriage" as consisting of "the reality that humanity comes in two halves, male and female, who are called to join together in love, not only as a private satisfaction, but in order to make the future actually happen [i.e., have children]" strikes me as worth exploring. In Gallagher-land, this is the time-honored understanding of marriage that only recently has come under assault from SSM advocates and others who see marriage as about intimacy and self-fulfillment.

There are all kinds of historical problems with this account, that I assume you can find spelled out elsewhere. It also strikes me, however, that this "for the kids" mentality is actually pretty novel and in many ways on the rise. I probably haven't seen this better-expressed anywhere than in an article by another reactionary, Caitlin Flanagan's otherwise pretty objectionable "The Wifely Duty":

For many couples child-rearing has become not merely one aspect of marriage but its entire purpose and function. Spouses regard each other not as principally lovers and companions but as sharers of the great, unending burden of taking care of the children. And make no mistake about it: American middle-class families have made child-rearing a dauntingly complex enterprise. My children are still very small, but it has been made abundantly clear to me by friends and acquaintances that I had better get in the market for an SUV or a minivan, because I am soon enough going to be shuttling the children and their friends to a bewildering series of soccer games, soccer parties, soccer tournaments. Already I throw birthday parties with guest lists and budgets that approximate those of a wedding-rehearsal dinner. The curious thing about this labor-intensive variety of parenting is that it has arisen now, when parents—and specifically mothers—have less time to devote to their children than ever before. One can't help finding in these developments a frantic attempt at compensation for the hours some professional-class mothers spend away from their children. Mothering, which used to be a rather private affair (requiring, principally, a playpen, a back yard, a television set, and a coffeepot), has now adopted a very public dimension. Why, of course Sarah So-and-So is a good mother: little Andrew is at Gymboree, Music Rhapsody, Bright Child, and Fit for Kids every week! All of domestic life now turns on the entertainment and happiness not of the adults but of the children. At vacation time my husband and I don't drag our little boys through the Louvre, as I was dragged at a tender age (because my parents wanted to see it, and it would never have occurred to them to consult their children about where to go on holiday). Rather, we check into hotels with elaborate children's pools and nightly fireworks and huge duck ponds.

I've never been married or had children, obviously, but this rings true to me. To an almost shocking extent, nowadays American couples that want to be thought of as doing right by their children dedicate themselves to their kids' contentment almost exclusively. For a parent to participate in some amusement they don't really care for because the kids like it is totally normal. To demand that the kids put up with something the adults want to do is unthinkable. People inconvenience themselves by moving further and further toward the fringes of urban areas in order to be able to afford houses and yards that are, by world standards, simply enormous and huge swathes of these massive spaces are given over to the children. Sentiments like "children are to be seen and not heard" couldn't be be more dead. In essence, couples are expected to more-or-less give up on their lives for a couple of decades in order to raise their kids. To do anything less -- to inconvenience or annoy your children or deprive them of something they might want to do or to have for the sake of something you want -- would be abhorrent and neglectful.

To some extent, of course, it's good to see people dedicated to their children. On the other hand, it's not so surprising that as social expectations of what parents are expected to do for their kids of skyrocketed, that people are increasingly disinclined to actually have children while those who do have children to seem to be increasingly driven a bit batty by the experience. Would it be so bad if the typical middle class family decided to only put in 90 percent of the effort that you usually see today? That would still be an awful lot of effort, after all. And given that humanity has survived for thousands of years, it's obvious that kids do not, in fact, require the extraordinary level of pampering provided to typical American kids nowadays in order to survive.

Icing the Kicker

Vikings win with a last-second 56 yard field goal. So here's my question: Is there any actual evidence that "icing" the kicker actually accomplishes anything at the professional level? The theory behind it is intuitive enough, but intuition isn't evidence. This seems like an issue that would be amenable to pretty straightforward statistical analysis.

UPDATE: From comments, an account of one study that finds a real icing effect. The statisticians were working with a relatively small data set, but it would be reasonably easy to add newer games into the analysis and see if the result continues to hold up. If you really gathered a lot of data, you might even start to see if certain kickers are notably more iceable than others.

Mexicans are People Too!

CANCUN, Mexico (CNN) -- The center of fierce Hurricane Wilma brushed Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula on Friday as thousands of tourists huddled in shelters and hotels in the deadly storm's path.

So says CNN. And the people who just live there?

The Trouble With Democrats...

... is their poor choice of tie colors. For whatever reason, the rule in America seems to be that if you want to be a powerful (male) public figure you need to stick to red ties and blue ties.

Convergence

I was going to say that no matter how awful Jonah Goldberg's forthcoming book may be, it at least has a clever and original cover image. It seems, however, to have been merely ripped off from a white supremacist pop band. At any rate, as you'll read here actual neo-nazis share Rush Limbaugh's views of black quarterbacks and have a taste for NASCAR.

Avenue C

The New York Times discovers Avenue C. I haven't lived full-time in NYC since 1999 and this nevertheless strikes me as astonishingly out of date. And why is it in the travel section?

I like the Porch.

Who Rates The Raters?

Questions about who's more overrated than whom are hard to answer because it's hard to know how highly-rated someone is. Ross and I agree that Ridley Scott is a better director than Quentin Tarantino, but Ross seems to think Tarantino is more highly rated than Scott, whereas I have the reverse impression.

A Cop-Out

I have no capacity whatsoever to evaluate the controversial Harpending/Cochran study purporting to show a genetic basis for Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence that's related to the high levels of lysosomal storage diseases among Ashkenazim, but I can tell you that the end of Jennifer Senior's New York magazine article on the subject is a gigantic cop-out:

Yet in America, that sense of otherness, which for so long has served as a kind of incentive to strive and achieve, may be dissipating. “I’m no demographer, but I think what’s happened in the U.S. is the normalization of the Jew,” says Leon Botstein, who, as the president of Bard College, has seen all sorts of students cross his field of vision. “They’ve become as complacent and culturally undistinguished as the average, suburban, white middle-class American.”

And maybe that’s the price we pay for our current freedoms. Not, as Seinfeld or Larry David might say, that there’s anything wrong with that.

There's something to that, but significantly less than one might think. See this, for example:

Moreover, Jews have achieved an extraordinary measure of success. Six out of 10 Jewish adults have a college degree, more than any group except Asians.

More than 41 percent report a household income of $75,000 or more, far above any other group surveyed. Fewer Jews than members of any other group reported worrying about losing their jobs or going without a meal. Far more reported investing in the stock market and shopping via the Internet. . . .

What is particularly striking is that unlike the other groups, the country to which Jews are attached is not one their grandparents came from, but Israel, one which for the most part they have only read of in newspapers or learned about in religious school. . . .

Nowhere, though, is it clearer than in the simple fact that Jews are more likely to identify themselves as liberals than any other group. Some 49 percent of Jews called themselves "liberal" or "very liberal," compared to 42 percent of Blacks and about one-third of every other group. . . .

Jews are overwhelmingly pro-choice, with 61 percent saying the decision should always be left to the mother. Among other groups, the figure ranged from 40 percent of Blacks and Asian Americans to 29 percent among Italian and Arab Americans and 24 percent of Hispanics who were fully pro-choice. . . .

Jews are also the most supportive of letting the federal government set education policy, the most supportive of campaign donation limits and the least supportive of increasing the military budget. In general, Jews showed a greater faith in the power of the federal government to do good than any other group.

That good will does not spill over to the United Nations, which received lower marks from Jews than from any other group surveyed. . . .

Jews attend worship services less regularly than any other group surveyed. That, in fact, was one of the most striking differences the survey found between Jews and the others.

Jews, in other words, while "normalized" to a large extent compared to the past remain distinctive. We're very wealthy and highly educated compared to the general population. Not only are Jews more likely to have gone to college than most groups, but the super-selective colleges are very disproportionately Jewish. Despite high incomes, Jews are very liberal; despite being very liberal, Jews are very hostile to the UN. Jews don't "control the media" but for a tiny minority of the population, an awful lot of us are journalists. Also -- college professors, Supreme Court justice, US Senators, etc. Also take a look at this:

This paper compares the occupational distributions in 1990 and 2000 of adult white men and women for American Jews and non-Jews, after adjusting for the changes in occupational classifications. The data are from the microdata files from the National Jewish Population Surveys (1990, 2000/01) and the 1990 and 2000 Censuses of Population. Among both men and women, American Jews had a greater proportion in the high level occupations (managerial and professional) in 1990, and the difference increased over the next decade. Among Jews and among non-Jews, there were only small gender differences in the proportions in the high level occupations. Thus, religion was more important than gender in explaining occupational patterns. American Jews of both genders experienced a continued decline in self-employment over the decade, and a continued shift among those in managerial and professional jobs away from self employment and toward being salaried workers.

Jews are different. Why I couldn't say.

Seven

For whatever reason, I'd somehow managed to have never seen Seven even though it was a big hit among my friends when it came out an everyone seems to have agreed it was good. It showed up in the mail from Netflix and I was prepared to be disappointed -- something my friends all loved when we were fifteen could easily turn out to be crap. But it wasn't crap -- it's good -- though as far as male-oriented David Fincher movies starring Brad Pitt goes I still think Fight Club is better.

Yuppie Paradox

It seems that you can no longer access Gap.com with Safari. Who, exactly, do they think shops at Gap.com? Firefox here I come....

Panda Delay

Via Catherine, the panda cub's public debut has been delayed till December. Certainly, a sad moment for we panda-lovers. On the other hand, breaking China's ironclad grip on world panda supplies has to be a national priority and it just wouldn't make sense to do anything that might jeopardize our small cuteness reserves.

Things I've Never Worried About Before

I don't really now how reliable Gregg Easterbrook is as an astronomy commenter, but this bit of whimsy is probably worth a second thought:

Are Gamma-Ray Bursts the Mushrooms Clouds of Outer Space?: Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful events humanity has observed. In some, for an instant one point in deep space appears to emit more energy than all the stars of a galaxy combined; the brightest recorded such burst, whose light reached Earth in 1998, was so intense that for an instant the source seemed more luminous than the entire universe combined. Relatively long gamma-ray bursts are believed caused by the collapse of giant stars much more massive than our sun. Last week, astronomers in several countries jointly declared their belief, based on results from a spacecraft NASA launched to study gamma bursts, that brief gamma-ray bursts are caused by collisions of neutron stars, which are the dense remnants of old, dying stars.

Maybe this analysis is right, but allow me (actually, you can't stop me) to repeat a fear I expressed here last year: that gamma bursts are muzzle flashes, "the emission lines of horrific weapons being used by civilizations that have acquired fantastic knowledge compared to us, but no additional wisdom." The standard pop-cultural assumption is that advanced aliens will be benevolent, freed of primitive belligerence. What if instead space aliens are at the Henry Kissinger level of development in terms of morality -- but equipped with star drive and gamma bombs? It just seems spooky as if we might be observing the evidence of distant combat using weapons of cataclysmic power.

Let's hope the professionals have that right.

Tarantino

Tyler Cowan remarks:

Director: Quentin Tarantino. He is overrated but Reservoir Dogs is a classic.

If you think Reservoir Dogs is a classic (and I agree that it is) then how much sense does it make to say that Tarantino is overrated? It seems to me that one classic film is sufficient achievement to merit a high rating. Think about it the other way 'round. Jackie Brown is incredibly awful. But fifty years from now, who would care if it had been slightly-above-average instead? Nobody would want to watch a fifty year-old slightly-above-average film anyway -- it wouldn't make sense. You try to watch fifty year-old classics. The people who make them are the great filmmakers, just as the people who write the classic novels are the great authors. Wildly inconsistent quality is problematic when you're looking at a contemporary figure. You see Pulp Fiction in the theaters and enjoy it. Then you rent Reservoir Dogs and love it. Then Jackie Brown is release, you buy your ticked, and you curse the name "Tarantino." But in the long view, it does't matter.

Which isn't to say that Tarantino is the greatest director of all time. Anyone who said that really would be overrating him. But I don't hear anyone saying that. He deserves to be rated highly, however, which is what he is.

Anonymean

TNR's funny rundown of Bush administration incompetents includes this:

Some of Buchan's erstwhile colleagues in the White House press corps were left speechless when her new assignment was announced in February. One White House reporter who worked closely with Buchan for five years called her "the most useless in a Bush universe of enforced uselessness. She took empty banality to a new low."

"Tell us what you really think," remarks Brendan Nyhan. But I think that should be a serious injunction. It's admittedly a lighthearted piece, but we see here too simultaneous examples of bad media trends. On the one hand, this isn't really an appropriate use of anonymous sourcing. It's just random sniping, and people who want to say that sort of thing should be prepared to stand behind it. More importantly, though, every time you get a glimpse behind the curtain at the White House press corps you hear sentiments like these. But the people doing the talking quite literally control the media. Their coverage ought to reflect their actual views of the Bush administration and its personnel. But it doesn't. Talk to someone who covers the White House informally, though, and you hear this kind of thing all the time. But why won't they tell us what they really think?

Cruel Intentions

A random topic, yes, but mention in today's Slate and I wholeheartedly agree:

One of the advantages of trashy genre movies is that they are free to re-create the more outsized histrionics of traditional theater—the conventional plotting, the overt choreography in staging, the explicit portrayal of villainy and innocence—in a way that serious film usually avoids. In Cruel Intentions, a prep-school version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Roger Kumble revels in this sort of artifice. The centerpiece of the story is the cynical jousting between the cad Valmont (Ryan Philippe) and his scheming stepsister Katherine (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who bets him that he can't bed a celebrity virgin (Reese Witherspoon). Kumble stages these encounters as acerbic little chamber dramas, each with a dancerly use of exquisite Upper East Side spaces. Indeed, of all these movies, Cruel Intentions is the closest to being not so much a guilty pleasure as a plain old excellent film, except that it cranks up the raunch with gratuitous girl-kissing and rampant teenage sex. One scene culminates with Gellar delivering what may be the filthiest come-on in the history of teen movies. Also, its "tragic" ending is a bit of a clunker.

Highly underrated, its flaws notwithstanding. Also -- good songs.

Allied Guilt

Writing in The Nation, Mark Anderson considers a renewal of public discussion in Germany of German suffering during the second world war:

To raise such questions doesn't diminish the barbarism and inhumanity of the Holocaust. Nor does it cast doubt on the need to defeat Hitler. Much of the bombing--even including, perhaps, the late destruction of Dresden in February 1945--had an explicit military rationale. (The English historian Frederick Taylor has recently argued that the city housed many small munitions factories and that its railway hub was being used to funnel German soldiers to stop the Red Army's advance from the East.) What is more, not all of Friedrich's methods can be defended: He deliberately appropriates Holocaust terminology to describe the Allies' "extermination" techniques or the "crematoria" of burning buildings, and he makes copious use of traumatized contemporary witnesses, whose accounts are notoriously unreliable. But Friedrich is a provocateur, not a Holocaust denier. A former Trotskyist who has written books on Wehrmacht crimes in Russia and the scandal of Nazi judges in the Federal Republic, he knows that National Socialist ideology aspired to create an empire "cleansed" of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and the infirm, and based on a racial hierarchy in which Russians and Poles were reduced to slavery. But in exploring these questions he does indict the means by which the Allies forced Germany to surrender. The strategy of "total war," he argues, engendered evil on both sides, and though Hitler initiated the practice, the Allies followed him down an ultimately criminal, unjustifiable path. In this sense The Fire represents the continuation of his generation's indictment of National Socialism--except now the finger is pointed at the Allies, and sympathy is extended to the civilian Germans who were their victims. . . .

These are the tactile memories of childhood, more Kafkaesque than Proustian, that lie beneath the generational conflict that has etched itself so forcefully into postwar German history. It has taken a long time for the "good Germans" of 1968 to recover them, and to acknowledge the depth of their own familial connection to the horrors of the war. The fact that German memory is now focused on the dead of Dresden and Hamburg, and the raped women of Berlin, won't neutralize Holocaust memory. That lesson is too deeply ingrained in the German psyche, and the millions of tourists who now flock to Berlin every year to visit the "Holocaust Mile"--stretching from the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, past Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe to Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum--will make sure that it stays there. The real question is whether the victors of World War II will be willing to examine the historical simplifications that have long provided a consensus about the "good war." If the recent resurgence of war memories in the new Berlin Republic has anything to tell us, surely a crucial element is the importance of individual historical experience that resists the either/or logic of victimhood. In a sense, arguing over whose victims can be counted is another way of continuing the war--a war that may truly be over only when we stop feeling the need to deny the Germans their stories of suffering and loss.

I'm a bit less sanguine. While this sort of German thinking certainly isn't Holocaust denial, it does seem to me to be eliminating some important distinctions. Most notably, however horrible Allied attacks on Germany were at times, the Germans had choices. Not only did Germany choose the war, while its adversaries had it forced upon them, but at any time the Germans could have surrendered. When they did, eventually, surrender they were treated extremely kindly by at least the western Allies. Stalin's USSR being, well, Stalin's USSR those Germans overrun by the Red Army suffered a worse fate. But even so, conditions in East Germany were far kinder than conditions would have been in the Eastern Europe Hitler would have made. It's easy to forget that for all the evil Hitler did, the true evil lay in what he would have done had he won. But lasting longer, Mao and Stalin wracked up bigger body counts. But had Hitler won, the plan was to kill or enslave the entire population of Eastern Europe. It would have been an endless, infinite darkness. Under the circumstances, giving up was not an option. For the Germans it was. The guilt for Dresden has to be apportioned at least equally between its Allied perpetrators and the Germans who preferred enduring it to seeing Nazi dreams dashed.

On the other hand, I more-and-more think that the mythologizing of World War II has been exerting a pernicious influence on American political culture. That it was a "good war" there can be no doubting. But it's worth recalling that it was also a bloody, savage mess not a splendid little victory. One would hope that a greater consciousness of what was actually involved in fighting and winning the war, thereby laying the preconditions for the reconstruction of Germany and Japan and the creation of the post-war order, would do a little something to ameliorate the militarism which seems to have gripped our society. War is not a pleasant undertaking, and inflicting it on a foreign population is not a nice thing to do. At times, it's preferable to the alternative, but the hair-trigger mentality we developed post-1991 is not serving the world well.

Excellent

I bet you wish your blog was the top Google result for "I've come to accept that this band is much more likely to autograph someone's Ph.D. dissertation than someone's ass. It's just as exciting, but you use a different pen." Apparently, I have a Becks comment to thank for the distinction.

Hail Mary

Aha! Just what the Knicks need, a center who might be a star or might be dead. Since absolutely nothing has worked out well for the team in years, I can't say I'm especially optimistic about that particular gamble.