I’d blogged a few days ago about Sarah Palin’s “arrogance born from ignorance”, and Sam Harris has a piece in Newsweek now on the same theme:
What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents—and her supporters celebrate—the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world’s only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth:
“Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child’s brain?”
“Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I’m an avid hunter.”
“But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind.”
“That’s just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink.”
Read Harris’s full piece. While he’s dead right about Palin, it’s equally true that John McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden also have no experience of governance, and have had worrying bouts of sanctimonious self-righteousness. They have to cater to their markets, of course, as does Palin—perhaps her religion-fuelled bluster reflects positioning, not personality. Either way, it’s scary.
If you get the chance, do check out Harris’s excellent book, “The End of Faith.” Sadly, while America may get a black president or a female president soon enough, an atheist contender has no chance of getting the top job. Such it goes…
(Newsweek link via email from Salil Tripathi.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 23 September, 2008 in
Politics
Here’s the WTF news of the week:
Sheikh Muhammad Munajid claimed the mouse is “one of Satan’s soldiers” and makes everything it touches impure.
But he warned that depictions of the creature in cartoons such as Tom and Jerry, and Disney’s Mickey Mouse, had taught children that it was in fact loveable.
The cleric, a former diplomat at the Saudi embassy in Washington DC, said that under Sharia, both household mice and their cartoon counterparts must be killed.
To kill a cartoon mouse, of course, you have to be a cartoon yourself. Is Mr Munajid the man for the job?
(Link via separate emails from Prabhu, Shyam and Vivek.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 23 September, 2008 in
News |
WTF
I find Muzaffar Ali terribly amusing. Consider the two pieces linked below.
Exhibit One:
Bollywood writer-director Muzaffar Ali, who also dons the hat of a painter, says he has borrowed his sense of geometry from the famous artist SH Raza.
Exhibit Two:
Filmmaker and fashion designer Muzzaffar Ali is upset that Amitabh Bachchan’s look in The Last Lear has been styled on him and says he doesn’t want anyone to imitate his looks.
Rituparno Ghosh, the director of The Last Lear, says that Amitabh’s character was “supposed to look like Rabindranath Tagore”. Wouldn’t it be lovely if the Tagore estate now protested that Muzaffar Ali has styled himself after Rabida?
Posted by Amit Varma on 22 September, 2008 in
Arts and entertainment |
News |
WTF
Heh:
A couple of weeks before August 28th—the night that Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for President, in a Denver football stadium—Stuart Shepard, the digital-media director of the lobbying arm of Focus on the Family, one of the most powerful organizations on the religious right, posed a question to his Internet viewers. “Would it be wrong,” he asked, “to pray for rain?” Shepard’s answer, apparently, was no, because he proceeded to do just that. He prayed for there to be rain—abundant rain, torrential rain, “rain of Biblical proportions”—in Denver on August 28th. “I’m praying for unexpected, unanticipated, unforecasted rain that starts two minutes before the speech is set to begin,” he said, adding, “I know there will probably be people who will pray for seventy-two degrees and clear skies, but this isn’t a contest.”
In the event, Obama gave his speech under clear skies with the thermometer at seventy-two degrees.
(Link via email from Sanjeev.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 20 September, 2008 in
Politics |
WTF
The economic commentary of the day comes from Bryan Caplan:
If we really wanted advance warning (and a chance to mitigate) the next financial crisis, we wouldn’t be banning short-selling; we’d be legalizing insider trading.
Read the full post.
Also, David Brooks does some myth-busting in The New York Times:
In the first place, the idea that our problems stem from light regulation and could be solved by more regulation doesn’t fit all the facts. The current financial crisis is centered around highly regulated investment banks, while lightly regulated hedge funds are not doing so badly. Two of the biggest miscreants were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which, in theory, “were probably the world’s most heavily supervised financial institutions,” according to Jonathan Kay of The Financial Times.
Again, read the full piece.
(Caplan link via email from Prashant Kothari.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 20 September, 2008 in
Economics
The WTF lines of the day come from an affidavit filed by the Home Ministry:
Indian society strongly disapproves of homosexuality and disapproval is strong enough to justify it being treated as a criminal offence even where consenting adults indulge in it in private.
So individual rights be damned: We must all live according to the preferences of ‘Indian society’, as determined by the men who run our country. Sometimes I wish I was an ant.
Also read:
The Matunga Racket.
Mommy-Daddy, go away!
Posted by Amit Varma on 20 September, 2008 in
Freedom |
India |
News |
WTF
The partner is an art curator, as some of you would know, and while each show she puts together takes months of work, she just happens to have three big shows taking place in the space of a week right now. I love much of the work on display, so here’s a quick plug for all three.
Of Myths And More opened on Wednesday at Sanstache Art Gallery in Worli (besides Mela restaurant) and runs until October 17. In this show, the invited artists use ancient myths to illuminate their concerns about the modern world. I especially liked the work by KK Muhamed, Santosh Morajkar and Hanuman Kambli, whose paintings seem backlit, so vibrant their colours are.
Bricks and Mortar opens today at Hacienda, a gallery in Kala Ghoda. The show is themed around urban spaces, and some of the work here is quite stunning (and rather large). Examples follow below the fold. This show gets over on September 30.
Art Bazaar is an art fair organized by the Concern India Foundation at Coomarswamy Hall in Fort between September 22 and 25. Different galleries showcase their artists there, and Jasmine has a stall where she presents art by a mixed bag of established and upcoming names. What I like most about this collection is that all the art here is relatively affordable—everything is below Rs 1 Lakh, and the cheapest works are just 7k each. Given the artists on view, that’s quite something. (Again, examples below the fold.)
Jasmine’s previous shows are linked on the right sidebar of her old site, and this is her new site. But be warned that low-res images do not justice to the art on view, so if you’re in Mumbai and interested in art, drop in for one of these shows. You might also happen to bump into me with one of my pet cows.
And now for a sampler of my favourite works from these shows:
Read more...
Posted by Amit Varma on 20 September, 2008 in
Arts and entertainment |
Personal
Proposed Savita Bhabhi storyline: Fannie and Freddie are trapped in a boring marriage. Savita Bhabhi drops in to spice things up.
Update: She could cheer up the Lehman brothers after this.
Posted by Amit Varma on 19 September, 2008 in
Miscellaneous
Good bitchy writing is a joy to read, and no one does it better than Maureen Dowd. She’s most entertaining when she’s tearing into Hillary Clinton, but this takedown of Carly Fiorina and Sarah Palin is as pithily masterful as anything she’s written:
Carly Fiorina, the woman John McCain sent out to defend Sarah Palin and rip anyone who calls her a tabula rasa on foreign policy and the economy, admitted Tuesday that Palin was not capable of running Hewlett-Packard.
That’s pretty damning coming from Fiorina, who also was not capable of running Hewlett-Packard.
Super touché. I’d so love to be a fly on the wall at Dowd’s kitty parties.
Posted by Amit Varma on 18 September, 2008 in
Politics
Rahul points me to this tribute in which a bunch of writers and editors share their memories of David Foster Wallace. Good stuff.
Tragic as Wallace’s death is, I think that suicide is the most dignified way to die: you choose the time and manner of your own passing, and can prepare yourself for it without burdening others. (I know most of my readers won’t agree, and I won’t try to convince you!)
Of course, just as suicide may sometimes reflect humility, in embracing our own mortality, it can also reflect arrogance, as drama queen Yukio Mishima’s seppuku certainly did. But what a writer he was, that Mishima, saving his only bad plot line for his own life. Such it goes…
Posted by Amit Varma on 18 September, 2008 in
Arts and entertainment |
Personal |
Small thoughts
