Mike Konczal (aka Rortybomb) has a really fascinating thought experiment over at his blog wherein, a la Star Trek (and later Southpark) he transforms into “Evil Rorty” in order to make a point about the predatory nature of credit cards on the poor, the cognitively weak, and other more disadvantaged types. The point he’s making is basically that the whole “irresponsible borrowers deserve what they get” argument is a false one, and I tend to agree.

The whole process of luring in irresponsible borrowers and then saddling them with fines, fees, and extremely high interest rates strikes me as fairly awful. People with very little credit and fairly poor credit – high risk people like college kids, poor people, and so forth – are nevertheless given high credit limits, are lured in with perks and benefits, and are then pushed into a cycle of debt that is often extraordinarily hard to recover from. Many of these people were high enough risks that responsible lenders should never have extended so much easy credit to them to begin with.

At the very least, already we have two irresponsible parties – the borrowers and the lenders. Both have incentives to get into bed with one another.  The borrowers are typically low income or young. Having a line of credit increases their standard of living, at least at first, giving them some financial wiggle room, more purchasing power between paychecks, and a lifeline in case of emergencies. A relatively short line of credit is usually enough for this. A thousand dollars in case the car breaks down or in case you run short on bills and still need to pay for food and gas.

The lender has a more insidious incentive: when the borrower inevitably fails to “act responsibly” the irresponsible lender starts making some real money. That’s why they don’t give out just a thousand dollar credit limit but rather two, three, five thousand dollars – on top of other credit card companies who have already extended similar lines to the same borrower.

People who don’t see a problem with this relationship usually focus on the borrower rather than the lender as the sole irresponsible party, but that’s a wrong-headed way to look at things, especially since many of the people who get into these situations are young, ill-informed, and not prosperous or wise enough yet to manage the sort of responsibility that comes with having credit. In America, this sort of borrower is considered fair game, and the people who lend to them are called “bankers”. In more civilized places we refer to these people as “loan sharks”. In civilized places the burden of determining who is a responsible borrower falls on the lender’s head. This is what separates bankers from loan sharks.

This also reminds me of Bastiat’s parable of the broken window. Let me excerpt a bit of that here. Imagine the window in question is actually an unsustainable credit card debt and the expense of fixing the window is the expense of paying all the fines and interest on that debt: [Read more →]

I’m a little more than half way through the second book of Steven Erikson’s sprawling Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy series.  And I must say, Erikson takes epic fantasy to a whole new level – and from what I’ve heard, the books get better as the series unfolds. Certainly the second – The Deadhouse Gates – is far, far better than the first – Gardens of the Moon.

I keep thinking back to R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing series, which was the first series I started since George R. R. Martin’s books that I thought was anywhere near as engaging or well written as Martin’s masterpiece – and I have to admit, I’m enjoying the Malazan books a lot more than Bakker’s work. While I think the actual prose found in The Prince of Nothing is better than Erikson’s, I also think that Bakker suffers from an obsession with characters who you simply have to hate.  You don’t love to hate them – you just hate them.  You don’t care about any of their fates.  You watch them suffer dispassionately, because you know that each and every one of them is awful and probably deserves it.  Even the characters you think have some shred of decency – when pressed – compromise that decency to become slightly more awful.

It’s sort of a masochistic experience. It gets hard to take.  I think Bakker wants us to believe that this is just the ugly truth – that humans are just selfish, manipulative and despicable at their core. Whether or not he’s right, it makes for some agonizing reading after a while, no matter how fascinating his world and the history of that world may be, or how lush and dark his prose.

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I’m not a widely published writer.  In fact, I’m not really published at all except in my various self-publishing venues.  (I mean to change that when I get around to it….)  But I do write in various forums, and it’s remarkable to me how differently I end up writing from one place to the next.  I don’t mean just the experience after the fact, either – the experience of engaging with commenters and so forth – but the actual process of writing changes between writing here at The League and elsewhere (at True/Slant or David Frum’s site or at the assorted other places I’ve guest-posted).

Here at the League when I write a post I have in mind the potential conversation that will ensue.  I feel like many of the readers and commenters here know me on a somewhat personal level or at least on as personal a level as is possible online.  And I ‘know’ many of the commenters.  There is an understanding between us, an ongoing relationship with its incumbent expectations and history.  People who have been reading me a long time know that I have flip-flopped on entirely too many issues, and many expect that I will continue to do so.  I am changeable.  And here at this particular venue, I feel free to explore ideas with that openness to change.  I can use my weaknesses to my advantage.   [Read more →]

I finally saw Avatar (in 3D) without anyone threatening to beat me up.  It was everything I thought it would be.  The 3D was cool.  The glowing plants in the jungle were really quite pretty.  The special effects were spectacular.

But for all its spectacular spectacle, beneath the blue-skinned exterior there wasn’t really any meat.  It’s basically Ferngully meets Dances with Wolves.  It’s a crowd pleaser if the crowd happens to be a new-agey set of anti-war, anti-capitalist environmentalists or, in other words, Hollywood.  The native Americans Na’vi are perfectly in tune with nature, and Avatar’s director, James Cameron, treats them like directors have been treating native people in Hollywood for decades – as noble savages.  The word “condescending” leaps to mind.

The evil soldiers are made all the more wicked because they’re working for a private corporation whose sole mission is to destroy the natural world of Pandora in order to strip it of its precious minerals (or mineral, rather – unobtanium to be precise….)  They are not only violent and callous, they are also greedy and imperialistic and doing it all not for love of country but for love of money.  The only people who are almost as noble as the savages are the scientists – and the wayward marine and heroic protagonist Kevin Costner Jake Sully.

Anyways, I won’t summarize the story.  I still think you can enjoy the film if you go in with low expectations for the plot.  Like I said, the visuals are really amazing.  I haven’t seen a movie in 3D in ages and it was entertaining.  I wasn’t ever bored even if I wasn’t ever really emotionally engaged, and even if I thought the plot was a bit contrived and a bit too much of a cliché.  That didn’t take away from the cool monsters and the battle scenes or the glowing flora and fauna.

I think Jonah Goldberg is right on the money here:

What would have been controversial is if — somehow — Cameron had made a movie in which the good guys accepted Jesus Christ into their hearts.

Of course, that sounds outlandish and absurd, but that’s the point, isn’t it? We live in an age in which it’s the norm to speak glowingly of spirituality but derisively of traditional religion. If the Na’Vi were Roman Catholics, there would be boycotts and protests. Make the oversized Smurfs Rousseauian noble savages and everyone nods along, save for a few cranky right-wingers.

I’m certainly one of those cranky right-wingers (wanna see my decoder ring?), though I probably enjoyed the movie as cinematic escapism as much as the next guy.

No, Cameron wasn’t trying to be controversial.  He was sailing in calm waters and he aimed to please.  And as an escapist jaunt in an alien world, it was a pretty good flick.  It wasn’t deep.  It didn’t have the emotional appeal of other epics like Braveheart.  And speaking of Mel Gibson films, it certainly paled in comparison in terms of quality or depth to Gibson’s marvelous Apocalypto.

It is what it is, and it can be a fun ride if you don’t expect anything more.  It is, as Douthat termed it, a “gorgeous disappointment.”

So far, Joe Lieberman is edging out Glenn Beck.  If you’d like to vote for the worst person of 2009, head over to my True/Slant digs and cast your ballot….

I know that columnists rarely write their own titles but this Maureen Dowd column lives up to the awfulness of its headline. I suppose I just don’t see the nation actually freaking out as much as the political class is over the Nigerian bomber story, let alone the media.  The politicos and media are having a collective hissy fit, of course, but most people are worrying more about new TSA restrictions than they are about the attempted attack.

What Dowd is trying to say eludes me. Obama is too Spock-like apparently. He should panic with the rest of us. He should drag out Roman columns and fill the stadium and announce his grand plans to destroy Yemen, Nigeria, and Alabama in an even bigger, better War on Terror than the last one. Yes, the left and the right are once again uniting in their fear of the Evil Terrorists, and lambasting the president for just sitting there. Do something, Obama!  Anything!  Anything will do!

Then there’s Dick Cheney, prattling on about how Obama is insufficiently crazy – not nearly as crazy as the last administration – and is only ‘pretending’ to try to kill every last Muslim terrorist on the planet.

Cheney is trying to get the nation’s pulse racing, and Dowd is hoping to get the president’s pulse racing.  Apparently if everyone has a high enough pulse we’ll be okay. Fear is good because it keeps us safe.  Or something.

Me? I say we’re overthinking this.  I mean – who is the real enemy here?  Terrorists?  Democrats?  This guy?

No.

It’s airplanes.  And if we can’t keep people off of them with increasingly restrictive security scans, full body x-rays, no checked luggage, and hours-long lines, we should just get rid of them altogether.  It beats firing people every time something almost goes horribly wrong. And it’s relatively cheap. We could even use the dismantled craft to build low-cost housing, killing two birds, you might say, with one stone.

I’ve heard of crazier ideas before.

Maybe – but it helps if you go into science and technology…graphic after the jump… [Read more →]

Fantasy is a genre dominated by sword-and-sorcery epics, mysterious dragons, and tyrannical sorcerers.  Few fantasy novels have joined the ranks of ‘great’ literature, and fewer still have crossed over into the contemporary literature aisle.  The Lord of the Rings has of course become iconic, and the Harry Potter books were inexplicably popular among non-fantasy readers. But when trying to find a book to compare to Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, I came up pretty much empty-handed.

This is the trouble one has categorizing the sort of book that receives high praise from such disparate authors as Junot Diaz and George R. R. Martin.  It is a book you might read in a class on contemporary literature, but its plot is rooted squarely in the realm of the fantastical, drawing upon Narnia and other fantasy works a great deal, but tackling themes rarely found on a fantasy bookshelf.  The novel’s protagonist, Quentin, struggles not only with magic, but with loss and heartache, and the clumsy pains of young adulthood.

I had a chance to talk with Lev Grossman about The Magicians, his thoughts on magic, and whether the world he explored and created in this novel might see a second run.  Lev attended Harvard and Yale before ditching academia and remaking himself as a journalist. He’s written for a number of publications including the Village Voice and The New York Times, and was hired by Time magazine in 2002 as its book critic.  The Magicians is his third novel.

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On Sunday my wife and I go to Avatar 3D.  When we get into the theatre it turns out all the good stadium seats are taken (at least those in pairs) and the only ones left are way up in the front where you have to lean back to see.  We never sit in the front because it gives us headaches. We’re half an hour early to the late morning show, but not early enough.

“You’re kidding me,” my wife says. I watch as some people in front of us take the last remaining seats way in the back.

“I knew we’d be too late,” I say.  But I always think that, so nobody listens to me anymore.

There’s a couple sitting right in the middle of the theatre with a seat on either side of them.  I walk over and ask if either seat is taken and they shake their heads.

“Would you guys mind scooting over one seat so my wife and I can sit together?” I ask in my best apologetic voice.  This usually works in whatever situation.

Cold stares are flung back at me. Tangible anger.  ”No,” they both say, shaking their heads and glaring.

“Really?” I say.  ”Just one seat over?”  I repeat the part about how this would allow me to sit next to my wife.  Maybe they didn’t hear that.  Or maybe I didn’t hear them correctly.

“No,” the guy says.  He’s probably about thirty-five, give or take a few years, and has a “don’t fuck with me” look on his face.  The woman is about the same age.  She’s giving me her very best, most practiced glare.  I stare back for a second, still working through my surprise.  I’m not used to this sort of smug hostility.

“Seriously?” I say finally.  ”It’s just one seat over.”

“We showed up early so that we could sit where we want and we’re not going to scoot for you,” the guy says.  He has his best pissed off, tough-guy expression going by now.  It’s even angrier-looking than the “don’t fuck with me” look he had on a second ago.  The woman glares even harder.  I imagine he’s doing this to impress her.  I get the unnerving feeling that this whole act turns her on somehow.  The seat to the left or right of them is still dead-center after all. The movie would be just as good one seat over.  I think about explaining this to them, but the exact phrasing eludes me. I imagine the use of reason or any sort of appeal to their better nature would be a wasted effort.

So I stare, baffled but also a little angry at this point. I haven’t encountered this before.  People around here are generally pretty friendly. The holiday season – especially just after the Big Day and the shopping ceasefire  - is usually when people are at their most relaxed. Ours is a community of hippies and lackadaisical west-coasters, mountain bikers, and college kids. Stoned townies and friendly transients.  Still, we’re experiencing our own brand of social decay.  A kid was shot and killed here on Christmas. It was drug related. This has been happening more frequently the past few years.

“Don’t you stare at me,” the guy says. Very tough sounding.  That “don’t fuck with me” look has really seeped into his speech at this point.  He’s warming up.

I continue to stare.  No witty rebuttals leap to mind.  A woman behind the couple offers me the seat next to her. I politely decline. We need two seats. People all around are murmuring and shaking their heads.  The dude is pretty loud and belligerent this whole time.  Putting on a show. Not what you expect when you go to the movies. Stupid teenagers throwing popcorn (and worse) at each other, sure, but not adults acting like petulant children. I figure at this point I’ve become part of the problem, and turn to leave.

“Un-fucking-real,” I say, instantly regretting it when I notice kids seated a few rows down.  They’ve heard worse, of course, but then I realize again that this sort of thing only adds to everyone’s discomfort.

Behind me I hear the guy say, “You want me to kick your ass?  You don’t talk to me like that!” And then, mimicking me,  ”Un-fucking-real…” at which point my wife bursts out laughing.  I chuckle, too, as I glance back at the guy.  Laughter is contagious.  He’s half out of his seat by now, but only half.  My wife’s laughter has shaken him I can tell.  There’s a bit of a nervous look about him now.  He doesn’t know that I’m a pacifist. Maybe he thinks my wife is laughing because I’m more dangerous than he thought. Maybe he’s suddenly wondering if he made a mistake.

He looks about 5′ 7″ give or take a a couple inches.  Stout, but not very.  It’s hard to tell because he’s mostly sitting down.  The sort of guy who makes up for his diminutive stature by acting like a bully.  Statistically, I’m sure he can get away with this sort of thing because most people don’t like to get in fights at movie theatres, or anywhere really. I’m 6′ 2″ and I’ve certainly seen better days, but still… I chuckle and shake my head and walk over to my wife.  We ignore both of them.  We look around the theatre for any seats we might have missed.

I figure they deserve each other, these two sad, angry people.  I figure guys like this are always looking for a fight, no matter how stupid the reason.  I figure my wife laughing at him is probably the best response.  Nothing wounds a tough-guy’s ego like a woman’s derisive laughter. Hell hath no fury….

There are no other seats. We go get our money back from the manager and leave the theatre and drive to pick up our daughter. The movie will still be here next week. We’ll go see it on New Years. I hear it’s a good big screen flick in spite of its pantheistic leanings. I don’t report the guy. I don’t break his nose or do any of the other things that I imagine myself doing in some other alternate universe where I’m a badass who doesn’t take shit from self-satisfied little assholes in movie theatres. I don’t get arrested.

I think about how I can write about this later – how it ties in to this theme of an atomized culture. Social decline. The apathy of a nation with too many toys and too few relationships. Kids shot and killed on Christmas day. The end of neighborliness. Entitlement and resentment and sad, empty threats. The new and improved modern alters constructed to sate our spiritual atrophy. Box offices and talk shows. A society of strangers, quick to anger and quicker to forget.

But I’m not sure it’s any of that, actually. Maybe it’s just two sad angry people in a movie theatre itching for a fight, looking for meaning at the end of a fist. Trying to impress one another. Maybe it was just foreplay at our expense.

And even there, maybe I’m trying too hard. Maybe we just should have showed up to the movie earlier. We could have had those two magical seats ourselves, right there in the middle of the theatre where the sound is just right – where the picture is perfect and clear and all the colors glow and shine more radiantly than anywhere else. Where the actors look that much sexier and the 3D is just that much more three-dimensional – where it really leaps out at you. Where the world is good and comfortable and safe and full of hope.

I can see where Jane Hamsher’s tea-party/populist left united front thing could seem appealing as a movement against something (the no-good politicians in Congress and their corporate special-interest shenanigans).   [Read more →]

David Brooks has several good reasons why people should support the healthcare bill – and in true David Brooks fashion, he also offers some reasons why the bill is not good.  Chief among these:

The first reason to oppose this bill is that it does not fundamentally reform health care. The current system is rotten to the bone with opaque pricing and insane incentives. Consumers are insulated from the costs of their decisions and providers are punished for efficiency. Burkean gradualism is fine if you’ve got a cold. But if you’ve got cancer, you want surgery, not nasal spray.

Well let’s flip this on its head, because I’m one of those healthcare bloggers who would have really liked to “fundamentally reform health care.”  You see, watching it all go down in Congress – and especially in the Senate – I realized that America was never going to fundamentally change the status quo, at least not in one fell swoop.  We weren’t going to implement the sort of free market the Cato Institute was pushing for, anymore than we were going to expand Medicare to cover every American.  We weren’t going to adopt a Singaporean or a Dutch system or even the French system that Matt Welch recently waxed poetic about.

No, we were going to pass something vastly compromised, far from perfect, but still pretty major.  It’s big enough and bold enough that conservatives are decrying it as socialism, and conservative enough that members of the further-left are calling for its demise.  But here are the things it does that I think are fundamental and important, and really overlooked by many proponents and opponents of the bill. [Read more →]

The Senate bill isn’t perfect.  It builds upon many things in our system that we’d do better simply doing away with.  It isn’t as fiscally sound as many would like, and I’m not at all sure that many of the more fiscally responsible measures in it will ever end up being enacted.  Such is the nature of our Congress.  When it comes time to make the hard choices they’re often kicked down the road.  Unlike Wyden-Bennett, it doesn’t cover 99% of Americans while paying for itself.  It neither creates the large cost-sharing pools I’d like to see, or spurs enough competition to make up for the lack of these larger pools (or pool).  And while single-payer would probably be more efficient (especially if you think of health insurance as an operating system, which in many ways it is) we’ll likely never get either to single-payer or to a real free market solution anytime soon.  We will be plagued with imperfection and compromise because that’s the nature of the beast, and the beast, dear reader, is here to stay. [Read more →]