"Stiffed" was written by Susan Faludi, not Barabara Ehrenreich.

Posted at April 12, 2007 9:45 AM in response to Imus Will Be Fired by Friday: Count On It

When you think about the complexity of women's global political challenges, it's worth wondering, Why don't we have an International Women's Month, instead of a single day? This day doesn't receive the publicity it deserves, and one day is over before you know it. Because even small symbols can affect the way we think about issues and can change the media's perceptions, I think something like this (or at least a designated week) ought to be considered. And Katha, great work as always.

Posted at March 8, 2007 7:04 PM in response to Happy (?) International Women's Day

A distinction should be made between intellectuals (feminist or otherwise), on the one hand, who can have one kind of cultural impact, and who can offer one kind of message to young women and men, and groups (feminist or other activist kinds), on the other, who (as befits a movement with more tangible goals) need to concern themselves relatively more with articulating a coherent agenda in a more unified way. Sure, the two categories can and should inform each other. It’s generally not good, for instance, even in terms of their own goals for major feminist groups to sound scripted or alarmist or doctrinaire.

But the differences between the categories of intellectual and activist are worth maintaining. For instance, while I have major problems with Levy’s insightful argument, her turning women off isn’t one of them. It’s a writer’s job to raise sometimes provocative, unsettling challenges to prevailing norms when the writer notices arguably problematic social trends, even though doing so may irritate people in the short term. I think her argument is overly simplistic in some important ways, but she is raising a real problem.

Of course, writers can be activists, and writing, activism, but playing that role effectively also involves first separating the two roles conceptually and deciding how to integrate them, retaining important elements of each without unduly hindering or corrupting the other.

Posted at February 27, 2007 4:56 PM in response to The Feminist Sorority

I think corndog's 2:56pm comment begins to get at a critical element of a movement, properly defined -- coordinated action. The netroots will remain fabulous if all they do is provide a haven for fundraising and for communication, including strategizing and disseminating underreported news. But it won't be a movement, at least in the more ambitious sense of the term. It's one thing to value decentralization, and we would hardly be members of the netroots if we didn't have some inclinations in that direction. But it's another thing to say that decision-making should not only flow up from internal debate and an eventual (substantial, not perfect) consensus but that it should never result in collective action. E-mail and letter-writing campaigns (Social Security, court nominations, media consolidation, etc.) are one example of this sort of thing that's come into vogue, but this aspect of a mature movement's mobilizing power has not yet, I think, really come into its own on the left. I'm not saying we should always act in lock step but I do think the whole of the netroots or at least of many of its component organizations should be larger than the sum of their parts.

Posted at January 16, 2007 4:05 PM in response to Institutions Talk, Enthusiasm Walks

It's really not fair to make the assertion that "[i]t's all about Israel" unless you actually have evidence for it. They also supported intervening in Bosnia and Kosovo, which didn't help Israel so far as I know. They're overenthusiastic about war, as the headlines have shown for years now, but I don't know that Israel is necessarily relevant to their motivation or to an effective critique of neocon thinking.

Posted at January 9, 2007 4:02 PM in response to Beinart's Latest Libel Against Liberals

I wonder whether something like the hedge fund mentality (power is a mandate, mobilize the base, centralize control), in addition to driving Bush 43 governance, operates more broadly within the political debate, narrowing the limits of debate and press coverage to a center-right so-called consensus. Third-party candidates, for instance (whose candidacies, to be sure, are not always wise) are excluded from debates and media attention. If so, there's an inherent instability in this artificial narrowing progressives need to organize to respond to.

Any shakeups that occur will not automatically move debate in a left direction, of course. But it may be naive to assume the corporate globalization and militaristic hegemony assumptions that frame domestic policy and foreign relations today will persist unchanging into the future. They too have their risks, problems they persistently fail to address. This doesn't mean a simplistic socialist template will work in an increasingly complex world, but it does suggest we need to do fresh, proactive thinking on the left, and not meekly cede dynamism to the centrists and the right wing.

Posted at December 28, 2006 7:50 AM in response to The Presidency as Ruined Hedge Fund

The line item veto is more selective in its interference with spending, so it stands to reason that it might be of particular value for a president who, for whatever reasons, has not exercised the general veto power previously.

Posted at June 28, 2006 7:13 PM in response to Silly Season

Echoes of Harry Frankfurt. And the implications of this attitude need to be spelled out. For one thing, how likely are we to attract allies next time we have unique information about a serious and hard-to-handle threat? For another, what does it say about how much truth about our Iraq progress are we likely getting from the administration? If they're apt to say what they think we want to hear, then in addition to judging the evidence available to us, we have reason to suspect worse news is being hidden, distorted, and underplayed. The latest headlines of new joint military campaigns, negotiations, and tactical gains in this or that city fit into a long-standing cycle of one step forward, two steps back. It's rolling a stone up a hill and then standing atop the hill in front of the stone to announce the achievement and obscure its slide back down to the base. Past time, surely, to gauge the terrain for ourselves. Even more telling than its absurd optimism is a substantial pessimism that's snuck into hawkish rhetoric, implied by the bases, arguably by the massive embassy, and by the shabby numbers and picture that emerge when you get them discussing details about Iraqi force readiness and cohesion.

Posted at June 25, 2006 2:57 PM in response to Bad Faith

Peter,
I'm enjoying your book--I'm only on p. 50--and my question so far is how you decide when the likely moral benefits of military intervention outweigh the moral costs. I agree with you that sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good, but not always. How you draw the line is an important question, particularly given the compelling and substantially dishonest case that can be made for interventions (in Iraq, for example, involving professing not merely belief, but certainty about WMD, despite substantial IC debate and ambiguity evident in the Oct. 2003 NIE). The real decisons are likely to be at least as fuzzy a lot of the time. I was impressed that you acknowledged theoretical, not just factual error about that decision (even Bush says he was wrong about some things factually, because he was given bad intel, which is a typical case of passing the buck disguised as coming to terms with mistakes). (Also, I might mention your book is written in a lucid, readable style.) As a political and strategic matter, however, every decision to refrain from military action can and likely will be cast by hawks as evidence of wavering and weakness. So elaboration of the criteria and of the theory that should weigh in on these decisions, allowing for the fact that every case is unique, would be helpful.

Posted at June 5, 2006 7:35 PM in response to Writing The Good Fight