Daily Archives: 11 Mar 06

Bush’s Approval Rating Falls

Posted on by
New Low: “More and more people, particularly Republicans, disapprove of President Bush’s performance, question his character and no longer consider him a strong leader against terrorism, according to an AP-Ipsos poll documenting one of the bleakest points of his presidency.

Nearly four out of five Americans, including 70 percent of Republicans, believe civil war will break out in Iraq — the bloody hot spot upon which Bush has staked his presidency. Nearly 70 percent of people say the U.S. is on the wrong track, a 6-point jump since February.” (SF Chronicle)

A few points. Every month from here on out might be a “new low”, it strikes me. And what are the American people waiting for to recognize that the Iraqi civil war is already happening??

Back with a Vengeance

Posted on by
“The best series on television are those in which two opposite things are true at the same time, and The Sopranos is a perfect example: it has exhausted the material and remains amazingly fresh. It’s very funny, except that it is also dead serious. This season is a lot like the others, except that it’s different, and may be the most creative and richly imagined one yet: it begins by going over old ground and yet something new and totally surprising happens.” (New York Times )

The Vendetta Behind V for Vendetta

Posted on by
“With inventions like these, and a body of writing that spans nearly three decades, Mr. Moore, a 52-year-old native of Northampton, England, distinguished himself as a darkly philosophical voice in the medium of comic books — a rare talent whose work can sell solely on the strength of his name. But if Mr. Moore had his way today, his name would no longer appear on almost any of the graphic novels with which he is most closely associated. ‘I don’t want anything more to do with these works,’ he said in a recent telephone interview, ‘because they were stolen from me — knowingly stolen from me.’

In Mr. Moore’s account of his career, the villains are clearly defined: they are the mainstream comics industry — particularly DC Comics, the American publisher of Watchmen and V for Vendetta — which he believes has hijacked the properties he created, and the American film business, which has distorted his writing beyond recognition. To him, the movie adaptation of V for Vendetta, which opens on Friday, is not the biggest platform yet for his ideas: it is further proof that Hollywood should be avoided at all costs. ‘I’ve read the screenplay,’ Mr. Moore said. ‘It’s rubbish.'” (New York Times )

Freaking on Freakonomics?

Posted on by

Malcolm Gladwell responds to those dying to know what he really thinks of Freakonomics, a book for which he wrote a glowing cover blurb. He finds the freakonomic analysis “occasionally frustrating,” he says. His pet peeve is Levitt and Dubner’s highly-touted explanation of the surprise drop in crimes rates in major American cities in the ’90’s in terms of the legalizaiton of abortion. In his own book, Tipping Point, he had favored the so-called Broken Windows theory, in short that crime drops when there are more police on the streets.

Forget for a moment that, in this post, he waffles abit about whether Levitt and Dubner are even conceding or disputing the Broken Windows theory. In the end, he resolves the conflict by appealing to the notion that economic and psychological explanations of behavior do not contradict but complement each other.

“…[W]ho we are and how we behave is a product of forces and influences rooted in the histories and traditions and laws of the societies in which we belong.

But there’s a second dimension to crime, and that is the immediate contextual influences on human behavior…”

Either this is a sophisticated argument that somehow lost me, or it is simplistic, vague and unsatisfying. I suspect the latter. Social scientists have expended endless energy trying to parse the complicated interactions of sociocultural and psychological influences on human behaviors. Gladwell’s assertion that he ‘likes’ psychological explanations better is both abit shamefaced to the extent that he concedes their reductionism, and abit uninsightful about what he himself is up to. Economic explanations inevitably have recourse to the psychological as they dissect how an incentive turns into a motivation. And certain psychological motivations, of course, relate to ‘economic’ incentives. Gladwell’s quibble over how they differ in explaining falling crime rates doesn’t really resolve anything…

And:

The cracks in ‘broken windows’

“A crime-fighting theory that says stopping major crimes begins with stopping small ones has influenced policing strategies in Boston and elsewhere since the 1980s. But scholars are starting to question whether fixing broken windows really fixes much at all.” (Boston Globe) Progressive academic critics seem particularly eager to dismantle ‘broken windows’; finding the war on quality-of-life crime a thinly veiled war on minorities. Champions of ‘broken windows’, notably the egotistical William Bratton, accuse critics of ‘broken windows’ of an anti-cop bias.