totalitarianism today

Caving on condoms.

Stephen Pizzo attacks the fundamentalists at home by looking at President Bush's appointment record. Pizzo notes that, in a world where information is the key to power, scientific data on condom use, long available on government health Web sites, was removed and replaced by sermons on abstinence and alarmist propaganda that exaggerated the risks of condom use. Regardless of your views on abortion or conception, discouraging condom use is a terrible policy ploy. The rise of STDs should give even the most dogmatic Christians pause-- caring and sharing is not about condemning those who live differently from you to bearing the brunt of bad decisions. Caring involves trying to help them make good decisions. If that decision involves having sex, may it involve using a condom.

WMD and the elections.

Let's hope Robert Dreyfuss is right about this marking the decline of Bush's re-election prospects.

Deal me in.

Art Chung covers the rising popularity of poker for The Village Voice. According to Chung, the increased media attention on poker helps explain the rapidly expanding number of Tuesday night poker clubs. Any poker a.k.a.'s worth sharing? I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours...

Digression on love, war, and anarchy.

For fans of the film Love and Anarchy, the Iraqi version should be coming our way soon, entitled Love and War. Billed as the "first postwar soapie", Love and War will be about two middle-class Iraqi families making ends meet.

Scriptwriter Hassan Dixon says, "This is a story about ordinary people...It is about love under this American occupation. It shows how life goes on despite all the things we are living through." Granted, Love and Anarchy is about an Italian-anarchist peasant intent on political revolution and the assasination of Mussolini who forms a political coalition with a powerful prostitute. However, I draw unabashedly strange correlations all the time. Add this one to the list.

For Sartre, the center does not hold.

Jean-Paul Sartre was a notoriously skanky man who managed to secure a woman whose writing talent exceeded his own, namely Simone De Beauvoir. Not only did Sartre keep Simone by his side for the majority of their adult lives, but he also managed to cheat on her repeatedly. How did the dada of existentialism pull the wool over the eyes of a self-described feminist for so long (remember that De Beauvoir authored The Second Sex)? By casting infidelity as a sort of liberation or freedom, of course.

Desiring total freedom for himself, Sartre wrote, "I dreamed above all of asserting this freedom against women". Satre adored his self-sacrificing mother, and his seduction tactics were closer to nostalgia than Casanova courtships. It seems that Sartre did not actually dislike women-- he did not seduce them and leave them due to any hatred of the female sex-- but rather preferred women to men because they were less inclined to argue with him. By agreeing with him and continuously validating his views and preferences, women comforted Sartre, or made him feel "masculine" in the most conquering sense of the term.

Sartre told de Beauvoir there were two kinds of love: "necessary love" and "contingent love". Contingent love was not important, as it was bestowed upon "peripherals", who held his regard on no more than a "two-year lease". On the other hand, the love he had for Simone was of the permanent and necessary sort-- she was a "central", as opposed to a mere "peripheral". She and Sartre could have their peripherals so long as they remained each other's central, necessary loves. By rule, however, both must show "transparency", or what historian Paul Johnson refers to as "just another word for the favorite intellectual game of sexual openness".

Was de Beauvoir redeemed for her beliefs and defenses of Sartre? Was she rewarded for being his lifelong ally? Did making Sartre the "center" of her universe add coherence to her life's story? Alas, hell no. In 1965, Sartre had secretly adopted one of his young mistresses as his daughter. When he died, his little daughter-mistress inherited everything, including his literary property, and presided over the posthumous publication of his manuscripts. So much for a lifetime of growing old together.

Brash's "new wives".

Carrie Hill Wilner conducts a Nerve.com interview with Susan Shapiro Brash about her book, The New Wife, in which Brash describes the modern young mademoiselles choosing to push prams and play wifey amid the ruins of modern feminism. Actually, Brash reveals that these young wives might not be trapsing on the corpses of feminist canons as much as it seems. Really thought-provoking in the vein of Wendy Shalitt-style arguments and neo-victorianism. According to Brash:

"In the '50s and early '60s, wife was a very prescribed role. With the feminist revolution came the idea that women are entitled to more. This led to the naïve '70s wife, who marched to work thinking that she could have it all. By the middle of the '80s, wives realized this isn't all I had hoped it would be, and the '90s wife really crashed.

The twenty-first-century wife is someone who finally has taken a look at the examples. There's her grandmother, who's probably still married to her grandfather. There's her mother, the baby boomer, who's disillusioned. There's her aunt who's forty and has a great job as a lawyer, but is dealing with fertility clinics. The new wife wants the self-confidence that her mother had in the workplace, the education that the '80s and '90s made a necessity, and the glamour and nourishment her grandmother had. She wants to get married younger, she wants to be available to her husband. She'll be well-educated, but doesn't feel this pull of right or wrong over missing one beat in the workplace. Her attitude is I'll have children young, I'll go back to work and use my degree as I see fit. Women have never said that before."

Job Creation in Poland: The NATO Link.

Polish radio reports that Deputy Defense Minister Janusz Zemke said on 17 March that NATO might invest nearly 2 billion zlotys ($515 million) in Poland. Planned NATO investment projects reportedly include four command centers, fuel-storage facilities, the modernization and expansion of seven air bases, and the installation of six long-range radars. Zemke said the investments, apart from strengthening Poland's defense capabilities, will also stimulate local labor markets. Last month, U.S. Ambassador to Poland Christopher Hill said the possible relocation of NATO military resources to Poland would include
"installations" and "structures" rather than full-scale bases.

Unfortunately, jobs created for military infrastructure require the continuous creation of military infrastructure to avert sudden unemployment and associated costs. Public choice problems abound with this sort of arrangement. Also, it might not be in Poland's best security interests to be associated with US military flexing in Europe, especially now as NATO's mission is being expanded to include security issues in the Middle East.

The Roman empire hypothesis.

Harvard Business School professor Donald Sull argues in his new book,Survival of the Fittest, that a business' pride, as demonstrated in the form of gargantuan corporate buildings, comes before the fall. Sull suggests that investors stay away from companies "whose headquarters win architecture awards", as "these headquarters can mark the beginning of corporate decline". According to the March issue of Forbes, a few companies that have fallen from the heights after winning architecture awards include Levi Strauss, Oakley, Gap, Alcoa, Abercrombie and Fitch, Gannett, Bayer, and Time Warner.

Clearly, however, from this list, there is more than just megalomania to blame. For example, Abercrombie and Fitch's fall has something to do with the entry of lower-priced competitors for the frat-boy-on-vacation look. Levi Strauss suffers from a failure to keep up with the trendy demands of style. Bayer's lawsuits haven't helped it any. Any link between big buildings and big topplings is more coincidental than consequential. Perhaps there is a little self-destructve hubris involved in the building of the these mammoth structures, but I bet the correlation between an upturn in the business cycle and the beginning of a building project is stronger than Sull's theoretical assumptions.

Web lousing.

Alex Kudryki writes for Transitions Online about the intractable cycbercrime problem in Belarus. While the Belarussian government is more than happy to prosecute child porn and other cyber-felonies, it engages in a little cyber-naughtiness itself. In 2001, the state-owned Internet technology company, Belpak, cut off public access to several government-opposition and independent-media websites. Big deal right? Why does this matter? Well, Belpak was the first company to bring the Internet to Belarus and now sells Internet access to other domestic providers of web services. On election day, approximately 50 websites "went down," including the home pages of several newspapers and the website of Uladzimir Hancharyk, the joint opposition candidate. According to Kudryki:

"Web users who understood Internet technologies took up arms: in web forums and chat rooms and over e-mail, they disseminated the technical information needed to help other users regain access to the blocked information. Owners of the disconnected websites quickly set up mirror sites--exact copies of their original sites--on other servers and disseminated the new addresses. Two hours later, most had been blocked. On the morning of 10 September the Internet blockade was lifted and Lukashenka was declared the winner of the election."