Vox Popoli

Speaking of my disdain for all things New York, these are the ten books that the New York Times claims were the best books of 2007. I leave it to you to determine whose description of them is more accurate:

Fiction aka Thinly Disguised Autobiography

MAN GONE DOWN
By Michael Thomas. A black writer writes about how hard life is for a black writer.

OUT STEALING HORSES
By Per Petterson. Translated by Anne Born. A Norwegian writer writes about how hard life is for a Norwegian writer. This masterful epitome of Scandinavian literature goes a long way towards explaining why all literate Scandinavians drink heavily.

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES
By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. A whacky writer writes whackily about the whacky shenanigans of some whacky writers. The so-called “romp” entirely fails to be even moderately amusing.

THEN WE CAME TO THE END
By Joshua Ferris. A writer who desperately wishes he’d been a part of the dot com boom indulges in literary schadenfreude about how life may look easy for investment bankers and technology executives, but actually, it’s hard. At least he wishes it was.

TREE OF SMOKE
By Denis Johnson. A writer who has never felt truly alive since protesting the Vietnam War ended writes about how hard he imagines life must have been for those who fought in the Vietnam War.

Nonfiction

IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran. A Washington Post journalist who visited the Green Zone for a week writes about how frightening and scary life is inside the Green Zone. Also, it’s hard on visitors.

LITTLE HEATHENS: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression. By Mildred Armstrong Kalish. An white woman from Iowa has to reach back almost sixty years in order to write about how hard life is for a white woman in Iowa.

THE NINE: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.
By Jeffrey Toobin. Doubleday, $27.95. A Washington lawyer writes about a law court in Washington DC. No one who isn’t a Washington lawyer cares.

THE ORDEAL OF ELIZABETH MARSH: A Woman in World History.
By Linda Colley. A woman no one has ever heard of writes about how life was hard for an 18th century woman that no one has ever heard of. No one cares.

THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth Century.
By Alex Ross. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30. The New Yorker’s music critic writes about music that was played in New York City at one time or another. No one outside of New York City cares.

You have to admit, after perusing this list, that whole concept of a post-literate culture suddenly isn’t looking so terrible after all.

Last year was a good year for the blog. The number of visitors and commenters has increased significantly, there are still a fair amount of intelligent comments mixed in with the usual nonsense, and all of this occurred in spite of the blog becoming more unrepentantly quixotic than it had been previously.

There are bigger blogs and there are better blogs, but there is no blog where the blogger enjoys himself more thoroughly. This looks to be an interesting year ahead of us, in every sense of the term, so keep your mind open, your bookshelf stocked, and your gun handy.

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry over Englishmen who won’t work complaining about immigrants who won’t work using up all the social services:

“I went to a food van yesterday for a sandwich and all I got was a cup of tea and crust of bread. There wasn’t enough to go round because the foreigners had all turned up. I got there 10 minutes late the other night and the food was nearly all gone. It never used to be like that. I get angry when they eat one meal then ditch their plate and go round for seconds, leaving nothing for latecomers.”

Then Alex reveals how groups of Poles and Slovaks gang up to attack the Brits and drive them from the most lucrative begging spots.

The Social Welfare state will not survive. It cannot. So, it’s mostly a matter of deciding whether to trash it before it crashes or trying to pick up the pieces afterwards. Thanks to women’s suffrage and the large “feel-bad” vote, we can rest assured that it’s the crash scenario that’s in the cards for everyone.

David Frum continues to demonstrate his ignorance of basic economics:

There are three fundamental things we want a money to do.

1) We want money to maintain a stable domestic price level.

2) We want money to maintain a stable relationship against other currencies.

3) We want money to be freely convertible into goods, including other moneys.

OK, so here’s the problem: No money can achieve all three of these good things…. The classical gold standard that prevailed in the United States for most of the period from 1789 to 1933 met requirements 2 & 3 – but not requirement #1….

Since 1971, we have lived under a regime that goldbugs denigrate as “fiat money.” The Federal Reserve tries to emit enough money to meet the needs of the US and global economies, with minimal inflation. Since 1982, the Fed has done a better and better job – and Americans have enjoyed a quarter-century of strong growth with infrequent and mild recessions. This new regime meets requirements 1 and 3: domestic price stability and free convertibility. It does not meet requirement 2: exchange-rate stability.

No wonder Frum’s predictions are reliably off-track. He makes statements that are not only wildly erroneous, but easily verified to be incorrect. Now, there are more fundamental concerns with a fiat currency than the three he lists here, but in the interest of demonstrating how badly he aft agley we’ll limit the analysis to the turf of his choosing. Consider his statement that the current fiat regime meets the requirement of domestic price stability, thus making it preferable to the gold standard which he claims does not provide price stability. In fact, the dollar has been significantly LESS stable domestically than it has been against most currencies not printed by the Zimbabwean government, unless by “stability” Frum actually means “smoothly declining into total worthlessness.”

From 1971 to 2006, that “stable” currency lost more than 80 percent of its domestic value. What was worth $100 in 1971 cost $518.96 in 2007. And that’s sans those “volatile food and energy” costs since, of course, no one ever eats food, heats their home or drives their car. By contrast, the fiat dollar has lost only 30 percent of its value since 1971 against the world’s currencies. So, that’s two strikes against the dollar and none against gold (at least in relation to the fiat dollar) by Frum’s own standard.

Nor does Frum even begin to address the primary argument against a fiat currency, which is that it is a hidden tax on those who save money rather than spend it, or better yet, borrow it. Perhaps he’ll finally admit that he’s wrong when the markets finally give up the ghost and the Keynesians and monetarists finally confess that the magic printing press will not and cannot solve the problems caused by the price bubbles it previously created.

Amusingly, Frum blithely recommends that his critics should do “some basic reading” rather than email him. But it’s quite obvious that it is Frum who needs to read Econ 101; he’s obviously quoting various statistics and opinions from economists without understanding the context behind them. Deflation!=recession anymore than inflation means economic growth.

And to summarize a more monetarily sophisticated argument: if you believe in a fake currency, you are a fake conservative.

Book-shredders, anyhow:

“This boy got up and his visual aid was a Bible and a book. And he got up and started his speech by saying ‘Now, this piece of crap’ and pointed to the Bible…. He took the Bible and he said, ‘I’m going to do this because I can. I’m going to do something that your stupid, little minds aren’t going to be able to comprehend and he took the Bible and started ripping out pages.”

The funny thing about vicious little atheists like this is the way in which they project their own tiny, self-restricted minds upon others. What sort of cretin believes that it’s impossible for Christians to comprehend people attempting to destroy the Bible, considering that the Bible has been outlawed and destroyed by authorities in nearly every nation in which atheists have held power?

Destruction is what atheists do, it’s their historical idiom. The only thing the infantile infidel neglected was to announce that his ability to destroy the Bible was a proof of the non-existence of God. That was the common Soviet practice when destroying churches.

As for the brat, will anyone be truly surprised when he ends up as yet another school shooter?

UPDATE – if you’ll excuse a very bad pun, it seems the kid was taking a page from the Soviets after all: ‘See, I can do this to the Bible and not be harmed because it is not true.’

UPDATE 2 – Speaking of taking pages, it seems only right to pay homage to some of my more hysterical critics in noting Professor Myers’s unique approach to teaching: ” I think classrooms should be extremely uncomfortable places for students…. Slapping students… is a good thing”

Alex Massie turns to the great comic novelist to explain why Hillary fills all rational men with horror:

In my sourer moments I find myself persuaded that Bertie Wooster’s verdict on aunts also applies to politicians: “It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.”

Never is this more the case than during a Presidential campaign. The sheer ghastliness of the front-runners is something to behold. Or not, as the case may be.

Try as I might, for instance, I find it hard to warm to Hillary Clinton even as I acknowledge that some of the hysteria surrounding her is absurdly overblown. And yet, there’s something to it too. This story in today’s Washington Post about Hillary’s struggle to appeal to male voters won’t have pleased the campaign much, (it’s pretty anecdotal for one, and, for another, she is doing slightly better with white men than might be imagined). Still, it’s undeniable that there’s something about Hillary’s demeanour that puts people off. It’s not as simple as her being a woman, though that doubtless disqualifies her in some folks’ eyes, but that she’s a particular type of woman.

Rum-tiddley-tum
The Rodham-Clinton’s come
Rum-tiddley-tay
How Hell is going to pay

And don’t miss the punchline on Massie’s post. We are most amused.

As I wrote in my column today, I was pleasantly surprised by Jonah Goldberg’s new book, which was of particular interest to me because it was a topic that I had once considered addressing myself. Goldberg utilized a very different approach than I would have, as those who read both LF and TIA will probably recognize, but his might be the more effective approach in dealing with a reading public that is almost completely ignorant of matters historical.

The bizarre thing about much of the foolish criticism that is being directed Goldberg’s way – the greater part of it by people who haven’t read the book and know literally nothing about Italian Fascism, American progressivism, the Social Gospel or “the politics of meaning” – is the confidence with which these critics proudly stand on an intellectual foundation of absolutely nothing. My atheist critics look like heterodox theological experts by comparison.

For example, I read Fascisti: Gli italiani di Mussolini, il regime degli italiani by Giordano Bruno Guerri earlier this year, and while the Italian historian’s focus is, understandably, entirely on Italian Fascism proper, his conclusions are often very similar to Goldberg’s. Guerri finds great significance in the religious aspect of Fascism, repeatedly referring to its “liturgies”, “myths” and “rites”, and describes how the sacralization of the State was not only a central aspect of Italian Fascism, but also Russian Communism and German National Socialism. Guerri even notes that Fascism was the first deliberate attempt to create a new secular religion – shades of both Jean Meslier and Michel Onfray – since the French Revolution.

Since I haven’t hesitated to flame the superficial and evanescent books put out by syndicated columnists such as Michelle “what is this ‘research’ of which you speak?” Malkin, David “Nostrawrongus” Frum, and Ben “water is wet” Shapiro, (to say nothing of the lightweight polemics written by the likes of Al Franken and Michael Moore), it only seems fair to put down the flamethrower and give credit on the rare occasion when credit is rightfully due. I should probably mention that I did not rate or review Dinesh D’Souza’s What’s So Great About Christianity but rather contented myself with an interview with the author because its subject matter has a fair amount in common with my own forthcoming book.

I am admittedly a harsh reviewer, but if you’d waded through as much sewage as I have in three years of sitting on one SFWA jury or another, I suspect you’d have a limited capacity for enduring literary drivel too. By the way, I’m interested in knowing what the Cavalcade of Evil aka the Dread Vox Ilk think of these interview/review columns, do you want more of them or are they likely to get tedious more than once every six months or so? My own experience tends to lead me to think that there’s a need for such things, but then, perhaps the reason there are fewer in-depth book discussions than books out there is because no one really wants to read them.

Courtesy of an Althouse commenter:

Oh you missed the good part when he [Huckabee] spoke so condescendingly about women and abortions and “doing it because of inconvenience” or the like..as if women who choose abortion just go out for a milk shake and some fries afterwards and talk about boys to the girls.

It was nauseating. My wife, daughter and daughter-in-law and two of their local friends were in the room. He lost 5 votes instantly.

You know, I really don’t care if your average member of the SS-Totenkopfverbände agonized over his specific role in the Endlosung or not. It is the evil act that condemns one, not whatever difficulty one happens to experience in deciding to commit it or not. This guy clearly doesn’t realize the irony of the situation he described, because the only reason the five women reacted so negatively to Huckabee – whom, I should add, I do NOT support – is because they wish to be able to murder their offspring for exactly the reason he denigrated.

It is impossible to discuss any political issue with the average woman for more than five minutes without concluding that women’s suffrage was one of the most significant avoidable disasters of the 20th century.

Sometimes PZ doesn’t even try to make sense:

Ron Paul isn’t just a small-government obsessive: he’s a no-government radical. And at the same time he wants every positive function of government to vanish, he wants what amounts to a police state in place to keep the rest of the world out, all out of fear of those strangers with different customs and ideas.

How, pray tell, would one go about running a police state with no government? PZ needs to travel more. Living as he does in rural Minnesota, he has absolutely no idea how migration – not immigration – is completely destroying civilized cultures everywhere from Scandinavia to San Antonio. Like many reactive atheists, he harbors too much hatred for Christianity to think through the massive differences between one theistic culture and another. If Christianity fades away, you don’t get Happy Happy Scientopia, but rather the slavery, child sacrifice and female chattel of unleashed pagan culture. If you’re lucky, you might get rule by enlightened jihad.

Interestingly enough, one Pharyngulan harbors a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between Christianity and libertarianism than many libertarians and non-libertarian Christians. Libertarianism is philosophically incompatible with atheism, at least the right wing libertarianism tradition Paul comes from. The whole tradition is based around the Lockean arguments about liberty and the state of nature and property, and every single one of these arguments is based on scripture, every one. The liberties of the libertarian have a purely religious basis as does the argument for property.

This is why I’m so amused by ignorant folk like Feckles, who actually believe there is a fundamental dichotomy between evangelical Christianity and libertarianism. In fact, the primary appeal of libertarianism is that it easily encompasses those of widely diverse creeds, including atheism, so long as they reject the idea of using government force to impose their own creed on others.