Rob the Bouncer’s book
I highly recommend it as a good read from a first-time novelist. It’s a pretty good illustration of why I have my doubts about the universal franchise. It’s also a pretty good way to scare your kids out of the club scene.
Morality and Philosphy
We’re Rats, So We Race
A New York Times article [via Instapundit] titled, “In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich” explores why many people with assets and sometimes incomes in the millions who live in Silicon Valley don’t feel particularly rich. One paragraph gets to what I consider the heart of the effect.
But many such accomplished and ambitious members of the digital elite still do not think of themselves as particularly fortunate, in part because they are surrounded by people with more wealth — often a lot more.
Telling Stories
Jonathan beat me to one of the core ideas of a post I’ve been working on for a few days – a post about evil, art, and self-delusion. Here goes anyway.
Concerning the New Deal, John Updike is a poet in the Platonic sense. And I don’t mean that as a compliment.
The impression of recovery–the impression that a President was bending the old rules and, drawing upon his own courage and flamboyance in adversity and illness, stirring things up on behalf of the down-and-out–mattered more than any miscalculations in the moot mathematics of economics.
To which the great Greg Mankiw replies:
When evaluating political leaders, it is better to trust “the moot mathematics of economics” than “the impression of recovery.”
Wise words, but hardly new ones. In the fourth century B.C.E., Plato is said to have uttered pretty much the same thing:
Evil
This is quite a good Belmont Club thread. Be sure to read the comments too.
(One of the Belmont commenters mentions this video, which I liked, about evil and The Sopranos. I don’t think I’ve watched the show more than once, in part because I don’t watch much TV but also because I don’t find criminals appealing as subjects of drama. Or maybe I don’t want to find them appealing. Familiarity breeds contempt or at least nonchalance, and the phrases, “there but for the grace of God…” and “don’t go there” come to mind. One way to avoid heroin addiction is to avoid lesser drugs, because once you try the lesser drug and find that you are not immediately disabled by addiction it becomes easier to try heroin. Wretchard and the narrator of the YouTube video apply a variant of this theory to evil behavior. I think they have a point.)
(Cross posted at 26th Parallel.)
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Related posts:
Telling Stories
Zielenziger – Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation
Zielenziger, Michael, Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation
While Michael Zielenziger was the Tokyo bureau chief for the Knight Ridder chain of newspapers during the 90s, he learned of an unusual pattern of reclusive behaviour in young Japanese men — the so-called hikikomori (literally, “pulling away, being confined“). Numbering in the thousands, they were shutting themselves off in their rooms — from friends, family, career, and society in general — for years at a time. As a Western journalist he found himself largely alone, at the time, in taking an interest in the subject. It was all but ignored by the Japanese media.
In talking to Japanese sociologists and health professionals, Zielenziger found that this behaviour seemed to be a relatively new phenomenon. It didn’t appear in the global bible of mental health disorders (the DSM IV). Its particular set of symptoms didn’t appear in Western countries, nor in Japan’s Asian neighbours. Japan’s increasing affluence in the 70s and 80s seemed to correlate roughly with a baffling new behaviour afflicting those most likely to benefit from the country’s economic success. The economic downturn of the 90s seems to increase rather than decrease the incidence of hikikomori.