What Does Obscene Mean?

The Sacrament of Confession

2010-03-27T06:31:00.000-07:00

I'd like this digression on obscenity to be about the abuse of language or politics or aesthetics or justice or the even the environment. But no.

They were deaf, but they were not silent. For decades, a group of men who were sexually abused as children by the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin reported to every type of official they could think of that he was a danger, according to the victims and church documents.

They told other priests. They told three archbishops of Milwaukee. They told two police departments and the district attorney. They used sign language, written affidavits and graphic gestures to show what exactly Father Murphy had done to them. But their reports fell on the deaf ears of hearing people

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The only thing in any sense just about this is that the Catholic Church worked so hard so keep this quiet in service protecting its reputation. And we get to see how nicely that worked out. It's the apotheosis of moral corruption, and hopefully the long-arc subtext of any and all retellings of what is unfortunately certain to be an ongoing situation. Any assumption that it is not is just more of the same. And as any Calvinist can tell you, even the church will get what it deserves.

Monocultures of any kind, actually

2010-03-07T07:19:00.000-08:00

From financial wunderkind Felix Salmon, via Grist, on how monoculture is like triple-A collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), i.e., agricultural innovation as harmless as the financial innovation. ah, insight:

The point here is that a disease-resistant crop is a lot like a triple-A-rated structured bond: they’re both artificially engineered to be as safe as possible. That would be a wonderfully good thing if no one knew that they were so safe. But if you’re aware of a safety improvement, that often just has the effect of increasing the amount of risk you take: people drive faster when they’re wearing seatbelts, and they take on a lot more leverage when they’re buying AAA-rated bonds.

The agricultural equivalent is the move to industrial-scale monoculture, “safe” in the knowledge that lots of clever engineers in the US have made the crop into the agribusiness version of a bankruptcy-remote special-purpose entity.

But the problem is that bankruptcy-remote doesn’t mean that bankruptcy is impossible: just ask the people running Citigroup’s AAA-rated SIVs. If and when the unlikely event eventually happens, the amount of devastation caused is directly proportional to the degree to which people thought they were protected. When something like that goes wrong, it goes very wrong indeed: artificial safety improvements have the effect of turning outcomes binary.

Essentially, you’re trading a large number of small problems for a small probability that at some point you’re going to have an absolutely enormous problem.

GMOs make sense only from a profits standpoint - production costs minus the cost of labor = profits. In no other way does monoculture - the practice of growing a single crop year after year over a wide area - proffer anything but a route to a quicker spread of blight. Which itself is another way to say 'seeing everything from a profits standpoint.'

What could be more blighted than that?

Triumph for democracy

2010-02-21T09:47:00.000-08:00

Obscene = this guy's presence in a decision-making position in the government, at all. Disgusting is his whining about how, because nobody gets along any more, he quit:

When I was a boy, members of Congress from both parties, along with their families, would routinely visit our home for dinner or the holidays. This type of social interaction hardly ever happens today and we are the poorer for it. It is much harder to demonize someone when you know his family or have visited his home. Today, members routinely campaign against each other, raise donations against each other and force votes on trivial amendments written solely to provide fodder for the next negative attack ad. It’s difficult to work with members actively plotting your demise.

Screw you. You know what? You are still a boy. This whole piece is utterly disgusting.
It is a major triumph for the senate and democratic governance generally that it was able to drive this complete f%^king tool from its ranks. May others heed the call as well.

Stop Digging

2010-01-24T12:43:00.000-08:00

The first thing you do when you realize you're in a hole, right?

Grist has this story on a recent debate between RFK, Jr., and Don Blankenship, CEO of mountaintop-removal mining firm Massey Energy Co.,:

The mystery to me going in was why Blankenship agreed to it. What possible incentive is there for a corporate CEO to put himself in a risky situation, publicly defending a widely reviled product? What’s the upside? Why not just buy some ads or hire more lobbyists?

Having watched the debate, I’m more mystified than ever. If that was supposed to be damage control, I’d hate to see damage. Blankenship had every advantage, with a friendly hometown crowd eager to applaud him and a moderator who helpfully read off pro-coal facts during commercial breaks, but he was painfully and obviously outmatched by Kennedy. I guess it’s easy to get over-confident when you’ve effectively purchased a state government and broken the law with impunity for years.

He didn’t seem even cursorily prepared. Kennedy reeled off fact after fact about declining mining employment in WV, the age of Appalachian ecosystems and the impossibility of recovering them after MTR mining damage, the enormous health and economic impacts of coal on Appalachia, the size of Chinese investments in clean energy, the number of Clean Water Act violations from Massey, and on and on and on. Every fact was geared toward a plea to West Virginians: look, this man is making himself rich by making you poor. He’s sapping your state of jobs, income, health, and a future.

In response Blankenship had nothing but ressentiment and nativism. Over and over he dismissed Kennedy’s facts as “rhetoric” and “just false” claims that “you can find on the internet,” but not once did he refute or even convincingly contest a particular claim. He asked the audience to dismiss them based purely on crude stereotypes about out-of-state environmentalists.

His very first rebuttal drew on a familiar conservative trope: environmentalists are are overly emotional and rely on extremist rhetoric rather than facts and cool reason. But no sooner had the words left his mouth than he was talking about how the coal industry is really “your neighbors” and “Sunday school teachers,” working to create down-home energy so terrorists don’t come over and kill us. He warned that pesky regulatory constraints from do-gooders mean “we all better learn to speak Chinese.” This is what reasoned, non-emotional rhetoric looks like, I guess: if you criticize my company you hate Sunday school teachers, love terrorists, and want to surrender national sovereignty to Red China.

Disaster Reporting

2010-01-17T09:20:00.000-08:00

The tone varies tremendously on how news about disasters is conveyed, the stereotypes that emerge or are re-inforced and the narratives, fictitious or real, that take hold. Campus progress, via, published a good interview with Kathleen Tierney about the behavior of major media outlets reporting on large-scale disasters:

Do you think that because the victims of both Haiti and Katrina were poor and black, the media approached the stories with a certain perspective?

Definitely. There is an institutionalized racism in the way these poor black disaster victims are treated. The victims of Katrina were treated with so much presumption, as if you could assume they were going to loot, because they were black. Just like we know that the people in Haiti are bad because they’re black. Black men especially are demonized. During Katrina, the media picked up on every rumor—whether it was raped four-year-olds in the Superdome or people shooting each other. Actually, for a paper me and a couple of my graduate students wrote called “Metaphors Matter,” we found some transcripts of TV programs in which members of the media expressed regret. They were saying, “We really blew it during Katrina; we acted on all of these rumors.” I myself was on Jim Lehrer’s show, where they were asking about the looting [in Katrina], and I got into it with a police officer, and he ended up agreeing with me that it was a myth. It’s not real. I thought the media would have learned something after Katrina, but evidently they haven’t. Here we go again

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The people of Haiti are up against a lot already without us bringing our fears of the poor and non-white to the table. This backwards reflex has us still in the cave, despite out evident progress. It's the way we can tell ourselves so much about the world to rationalize our own behavior. And not about doing nothing at times like these - but about doing so much at all other times to further this state of affairs instead of pushing it to point of elimination.

Hey, MLK day tomorrow! Let's stay home from work and simmer over those who brought us such an ungracious work stoppage with all that protest singing and German-shepherd taunting.

Really Powerful Female Characters

2010-01-10T09:16:00.000-08:00

In advance, I promise to re-visit this more frequently. Because it's appalling. And not just because I spend so much time thinking about female characters.

This was on LG&M last week, and I'm basically stealing it - but check out SEK's point about comics, which is replicated everywhere, despite vertical clout of Sandra Bullock.

craziness

2010-01-03T07:44:00.000-08:00

Just another name for nothing left to lose.

I saw this article a couple of days ago, about the millions of people living on nothing but food stamps. Nothing. but. food stamps. No other cash income.

And in the middle of the article, the reporter finds a Republican to denounce the situation, but (of course) he says this:

“This is craziness,” said Representative John Linder, a Georgia Republican who is the ranking minority member of a House panel on welfare policy. “We’re at risk of creating an entire class of people, a subset of people, just comfortable getting by living off the government.”

Mr. Linder added: “You don’t improve the economy by paying people to sit around and not work. You improve the economy by lowering taxes” so small businesses will create more jobs.

They literally say that about everything. But... tax cuts would help people with no other cash income. What... eventually? How about groceries this week?

Title

2009-12-20T08:14:00.000-08:00

Also see today's Rich column.

A Lethal Combination

2009-12-13T07:38:00.000-08:00

"Medical ventriliquism" indeed. The onset of a condition associated with loss of sexual interest, among other things; a new generation of people allergic to their own mortality; and a pharmaceutical industry that works nights and weekends devising new ways to separate you from your money.

Along the way, television commercials positioned hormone drugs as treatments for more than hot flashes and night sweats — just two of the better-known symptoms of menopause, which is technically defined as commencing one year after a woman’s last menstrual cycle.

One commercial about estrogen loss by the drug maker Wyeth featured a character named Dr. Heartman in a white coat discussing research into connections between menopause and heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and blindness.

...

The suits also assert, based on recently unsealed court documents, that Wyeth oversold the benefits of menopausal hormones and failed to properly warn of the risks.

When I started this last month, I thought it might be somewhat difficult - meaning it would test my own ability to exploit the subject consistently and over time... exactly the very reasons to pursue it. But it's turning out that you don't even have to scroll down the page of the most-read news site - one that treats its readers in a generally childish fashion - to find glaring examples of gross obscenity. Which is itself...

damn.

Amounts of Stuff

2009-12-12T07:37:00.000-08:00

Do we even realize this is happening? What does the level of abundance imply? is it mere and innocuous prosperity? Is there such a thing?

The self-storage industry has published its own almanac since 1992.

It's industry trade group proudly touts that "There is 7.4 sq.ft. of self storage space for every man, woman and child in the nation; thus, it is physically possible that every American could stand – all at the same time – under the total canopy of self storage roofing."

And of course, this is not counting our houses.

Daniel Pink, in an infomercial-type presentation that I uncomfortably recommend, broaches this little-talked about subject that is a creeping symptom of our nature. The way it encapsulates what we are doing to ourselves and the landscape is uncanny. It's the flag of slothful indulgence.

Not to mention, bigger than the film industry? What does it mean when the markets with real growth potential are prisons and self storage?

Masterpiece

2009-12-07T17:33:00.000-08:00

Of finance, or art... or whatever it was.

In a gear-changing sign that the art market is shaking off the recession, Sotheby's auctioned off $134.4 million worth of post-war and contemporary art earlier tonight at its Manhattan salesroom, including a smoky sheet of dollar bills by Andy Warhol that sold for $43.7 million. The sale total surpassed the auction house's own goal of $67.9 million to $97.7 million - and outperformed its $125 million sale of contemporary art last November.

After a year of cautious bidding, the mood in the salesroom Wednesday night grew increasingly upbeat, with fashion designer Valentino Garavani and jeweler Laurence Graff among the winning bidders. The night unquestionably belonged to Warhol. The Pop artist is a household name, but his early 1960s silkscreens rarely surface at auction. That's why at least five bidders, including dealer Jose Mugrabi, chased after the artist's "200 One Dollar Bills," a seminal 1962 piece that Sotheby's last sold more than two decades ago for $300,000. A telephone bidder got it tonight for $43.7 million - over three times its $12 million high estimate - or $218,812.50 for each silkscreened dollar bill in the painting

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Just stop and start anywhere.

Rigged, The Game Is

2009-12-05T10:15:00.000-08:00

It means getting consulting advice on a war strategy from the people who are going to help you sell the war strategy.

When Gen. Stanley McChrystal decided to launch a sweeping review of Afghanistan strategy, he reached out to a small, but influential, group of national security wonks.

McChrystal’s “strategic assessment group” included Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and his wife, Kimberly Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War; Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations; Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Andrew “Abu Muqawama” Exum of the Center for a New American Security; and Jeremy Shapiro of the Brookings Institution.

It wasn’t a particularly unusual move: The military — like corporate America — likes to bring in consultants for an outside view. Take the Joint Campaign Plan for Iraq, the document that lays out the U.S. military’s near-term and long-term goals. That document gets a fresh look every year, and the most recent review included input from think-tankers.

But as our friend Laura Rozen observed, it was also a way to win the hearts and minds of an important constituency: The foreign-policy pundits and op-ed writers who would help sell the new strategy to the public.

With apologies to The Clash, this indecision's killing them.

The 116

2009-11-28T06:54:00.000-08:00

Via HUMNews, Juan Cole offers up this little gem.

Of 237 countries and territories in the world, the 4 largest newsgathering and distribution companies that supply the world with 90% of news do not cover 116 of them.

These 116 countries or territories contain 4 billion people over half the world.

63 of these media-ignored countries and territories are desperately poor.

All this has security implications for the United States. What do you want to bet that in the late 1990s, Afghanistan was in the 116? Hard to know an attack was being planned out there if you don't know the place exists.

What HUM does not say is that the ignoring of the 116 comes from the news corporations' profit motive, which is increasingly driving them to ignore most real news in favor of infotainment. Desperately poor 4th world countries? Not entertaining.

We definitely live in a fishbowl of athlete/celebrity scandals and missing white women, but things are actually much worse than you might imagine. You could take the FT and be better informed about extra-border issues, greatly ignore cable news to remain aloof about such things as balloon hoaxes and Michael Jackson. But this should be what the intraweb is all about - allowing you to peruse aljazeera.net and your local paper within the same 30 minute window.

I still think that anyone taking two weeks off of American television - which itself requires at minimum a trip abroad, to a remote locale - would be, upon seeing it again, so appalled by the advertising alone that they would be loathe to return to levels of former usage. But absent the fifteen days off, we're not availed to that little window of contempt our corporate overlords have for us, or we should have for them.
Damn.

Gobsmacked, Bloodthirsty

2009-11-22T07:57:00.000-08:00

It could be offensive to be so characterized, especially when you don't normally think of yourself in this way. For example, we think of ourselves as a peace-loving society, only interested in defending our right to profit from the interlopers of regulation and taxation. All the while, we subsidize a build-up of the most awesome armaments known to man. Plus, we're fascinated by them.

Here is Wolf Blitzer and Barbara Starr talking last night on CNN about the Iranians and what the U.S. might to do them; it's really pitch-perfect:

BLITZER: Regarding Iran, a new report raises some disturbing possibilities about its nuclear program, and that's prompting fears from the United States over how to respond.

Let's bring in our Pentagon correspondent, Barbara Starr.

Barbara, what are you learning?

STARR (voice-over): Iran's once secret underground nuclear fuel enrichment plant. The Pentagon is worried Iran is now burying weapons factories so deep, that the current arsenal of bombs can't reach them, leaving the U.S. with no viable military option if a strike was ever ordered.

This new Air Force 15-ton bomb may change that calculation.

JOHN PIKE, GLOBALSECURITY.ORG: We'd certainly be able to take this out with a massive ordnance penetrator, the 30,000-pound boss.

STARR: This is the massive ordnance penetrator, or MOP, now being rushed into development to be carried on B-2 and B-52 bombers. The most likely targets? Iran and North Korea, which are believed to have buried weapons facilities hundreds of feet underground or into the sides of mountains.

PIKE: Some of those would probably require this massive ordnance penetrator simply because they are buried so deep and no other bomb would be able to certainly destroy them.

STARR: At 30,000 pounds, the MOP, some experts say, will be able to penetrate 650 feet of concrete, a significant boost over current bunker-busting bombs like the 2,000-pound BLU-109, which can penetrate just six feet of concrete, and the 5,000-pound GBU-28 which can go through about 20 feet of concrete.

GEOFF MORRELL, PENTAGON SPOKESMAN: This has been a capability that we have long believed was missing from our quiver, our arsenal, and we wanted to make sure we've filled in that gap.

STARR: No air strikes against North Korea or Iran appear to be in the works, but Iran says it could start enriching uranium here in the next two years, and both the U.S. and Israel want to ensure that Iran cannot manufacture and assemble a nuclear weapon.

All of this has now led to more funding for the MOP. The Pentagon plans to have the first bombs available by December 2010, two years earlier than planned.

STARR: Now, the Pentagon likes to say it's not helpful to speculate on future military targets, but certainly this weapon gives the Pentagon, Wolf, an option it hasn't had before -- Wolf.

BLITZER: It's a huge, huge bomb, Barbara. Thanks very much for that.

Emphasis mine... theirs... somebody's.

Social Order vs. Education

2009-11-21T08:18:00.000-08:00

The concept of competing interests is unruly, but the skyrocketing growth of corrections spending versus how much we spend to educate people is... what's the word? We separate these ideas of inflicting punishment, enlightenment and responsibility in such a way as to introduce higher order confusion among the populace, both in terms of incentivising the lame-ass and self-defeating rhetorical populism candidates use to win office, and how we all (mis)understand budget priorities. Taxes and what we do with them are disconnected from the realities they perpetuate - California-style tax revolt focuses on the taking, not the consequences. Again, it's... what's the word?

Any search will introduce a disaster of examples.

Even the idea that both are viable routes to achieving the same thing - a safe and stable society - is absurd. Can they be exchanged as funding priorities? If we at all unpack these notions, we see that the suitcases are just stuffed with wishful, lazy thinking, that enforcement of harsh principles in terms of poor school performance would cut down on the costs of other kinds of enforcement.
The costs of incarcerating such a large segment of our population are spiritual in nature. The arrival of the monetary costs are mere reminders of the travesty.

I Ask You

2009-11-15T06:46:00.000-08:00

More than this?

Asked about the Congressional statements, a lobbyist close to Genentech said: “This happens all the time. There was nothing nefarious about it.”

Biosimilar, indeed.

McFate

2009-11-14T06:06:00.000-08:00

It can be difficult, or at least problematic, to characterize obscenity in this day and time; we're so jaded, careless and personally over-exposed in ways that even the most extroverted would have found obscene just decades earlier that it can be difficult to establish benchmarks in any way other than arbitrarily.

So we might harken back to other eras for contrast. Now, often we do this to verify and showcase the fruits of our own openness, to show how prudish our forebears were in service to illuminating our own sense of civilization - unmindful of the connections we re-establish to our present and prudish pageantry.

Nonetheless, the shocking travesties of the past do carry a certain quaintness in our minds when harvested this much later, set in a frames of 1s and 0s and ogled, as it were. They comfort us, in a way, and reassure with objective relief about how things have changed for the better. And have they.

Take, for instance, Nabokov's Lolita. Dealing as it does with one of three taboos of mid-century book publishing, the then-unknown Nabokov, in order to safeguard his tenured status at Cornell, tried to publish the book anonymously. After being rejected by Simon & Schuster, Viking, New Directions and many others because of its pornographic content, Lolita was finally published under his own name in 1955 by Olympia Press in Paris.

The initial run of 5,000 sold out and brought him recognition in Europe. Heated debates by critics in England - both on the book and about the relative safety of young girls - captured the interest of U.S. publishers, leading to the first American edition by Putnam and Sons in 1958. With the repetitive use of words like obscene, incest, scandal and pornography in subsequent book reviews, Lolita's commercial success was assured, and further, a lesson had been learned. But what lesson? One, obviously, that societal mores can be overwhelmed by financial performance. It is silly to even ask whether the successful book, rather than the supposedly pornographic manuscript, has more value.

If a societal taboo can be overwhelmed by financial success, when it is not one but the other which has by far the more deleterious implication, can we determine which is which? The question is, which is more obscene - a cunning literary treatment of an adult man's fascination with a pre-pubescent girl, or abandoning a supposedly absolute moral line because it is a proven money-maker?

Now don't you feel better?

Shocking

2009-11-07T20:00:00.000-08:00

It's shocking, the extent to which anyone finds any of this interesting. But still, to keep working, to remain still for long enough to follow a few thoughts and then find the words to describe them and maybe the music to make them sing. That could be good enough. Shocking, even, in this day in time. But should that be considered obscene?

In fact, by the most casual definition, mere attention greatly fails to register. We expect it to be paid somehow, as though it was the last and ultimate currency and even though we've no plans to exploit it for anything other than itself - not exactly much of a trade. What we could 'get' in exchange for a real shock - discomfort, momentary awkwardness, shaking ground - the things that move needles, we relegate to levels of unimportance and lack of impress in order not concern ourselves with problematic thoughts and actions. If the implications of a thing are no great matter, the thing itself is less of a bother - and we move on to identify other more consensus-oriented offenses everyone can agree on. That, for lack of a better word, unite us. So instead of being divided over matters of conscience, we unite for the sake comity. What's obscene, again?

The sensibility to be crossed is the prejudice to be excavated, lifted out the ground and set right, if not upright, in standing and safe for mixed company. We mire in the dirt and soil with soul in peril - would that it be saved or at least spared the indignity of its own depraved nature. Would that the useless Gommorahs find purpose in staining the very ground on which they are situated, harken back to a time when reproach was in supply and offense, a tactical ground to be sieged and thoroughly pilfered in good time. Was there more or less shock in supply? Is it a quantity that ebbs and flows? How do we recognize gross offenses in a randomized outcome culture based on 1s and 0s?

But the pilfered imagination grows defenseless in all this scrawl - and seeks for old ground to claim as new: bad words, uncovered genetalia, blasphemia - benign outlets for canned offense are at the ready, as is the missionary to zeal to prosecute and subdue it.

All the while, rage evolves, too.

So which of these is obscene?

Let's Find Out

2009-11-07T19:54:00.000-08:00

Shall we?