AFF's Doublethink

Doublethink Quarterly:The New Dominion BluesJohn McCormackCan the GOP win Virginia back?FeaturesToward a Bioethics of LoveHelen RittelmeyerWhat conservatism can offer disability activism.Lonegan’s ChargeJacob LaksinCan a right-wing renegade become governor of New Jersey?The Sex VoteJames PoulosPolitical liberty is screwed. Why libertarians can’t get it up.The Hipster Health Care RevolutionElizabeth Nolan BrownHow one Williamsburg doctor is reinventing health [...]

Female sexuality may be seen as a distraction for politicians, but it’s also a powerful tool when used correctly. And as Palin’s campaign demonstrated, women are getting much more adept at using it to their advantage.

Easy to access, and satisfyingly potent, “sinful” products and pastimes represent a point of civilization that mankind has been pursuing for thousands of years. Abuseable substances and activities should be encouraged as a test of character for the next generation. If people are not forced recognize individual responsibility, civilization will crumble under the weight of all the helpless sheep expecting to be looked after.

The word “onanism” has its genesis in Genesis itself, from the story of Onan, a man killed by God for “spill[ing his seed] on the ground” rather than impregnating his widowed sister-in-law according to the laws of his tribe. Originally interpreted as a warning against the practice of coitus interruptus, the story’s cautions were [...]

As NATO meets for its 60th anniversary in Strasbourg-Kehl this weekend, it has a lot on its plate: war-fighting, peacekeeping, piracy, and more. But the problem for today’s NATO lies not in taking on new missions; it lies in carrying them out effectively.

Europe will be closely watching as leaders of its two most important partners—Russia and America—meet for the first time on April 1. The meeting between President Obama and Russian President Medvedev is expected to be absent of points of tension, but Europeans will try to read between the lines to see if the Obama Administration’s “reset” rhetoric will translate into action or will be stonewalled by the Russians.

President Obama’s decision earlier this month to overturn restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research was widely praised by supporters. Yet even setting aside the moral controversy involved, there are good reasons to challenge the wisdom of devoting public dollars to the cause.

On March 9, President Obama signed an Executive Order clearing the way to lift Bush-era restrictions on the use of federal funds in embryonic stem cell research. The move was widely seen as part of his Inaugural Address promise to “restore science to its rightful place.” But what is science’s “rightful place”? Does Obama himself know?

Nancy L. Rosenblum’s On the Side of the Angels is an ambitious book that both attempts to understand the disdain for parties and partisanship, and also to provide a defense of these institutions. She calls her book an “act of reparation”—an effort to find a place for parties and partisanship within political theory as integral social and moral institutions rather than pathologies we must eradicate.

Why, one wonders, does Jon Stewart’s contempt focus on newsmen to the exclusion of the news makers? Why do Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson deserve scorn and humiliation, but not the leaders they follow lockstep on the left and right? Might it be because they offer easier and more tempting targets to Stewart, while taking aim at actual leaders might dry up his guest pool?

Most people or things that are said to have been enormously famous or influential in their day but now forgotten, turn out either to net a Jesus- or Elvis-worthy tally of Google hits, or never to have been particularly famous or influential to begin with. If any book truly defies the strictures of that much-abused formula, it is surely David Riesman’s Lonely Crowd.

At about the same time that news of the Rod Blagojevich scandal broke in Illinois, a similar “scandal” of sorts was playing out in the rarified world of classical music. The case concerned Gilbert Kaplan, a successful American businessmen who translated an obsession with Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”) into an unlikely second career as a Mahler scholar and amateur conductor. What does his ascent tell us about the future of classical music?

Whenever it seems as though something momentous and exciting is about to happen here, prepare to be disappointed. In spite of earlier signs of a thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations, last week, Cuban president Raul Castro sacked several members of his cabinet, replacing two of the most well-known politicians in the country with military hard-liners.

Zack Snyder’s adaptation of “Watchmen” is slavishly committed to the details of Alan Moore’s original comic book. From its opening sequence to its final moments, Mr. Snyder loyally renders the story as close to the comic book as humanly possible, meaning the need to move the action along often takes a back seat to speeding [...]

Obama’s ongoing task is to honestly assess the place in which Americans find themselves, but he must do so in a way that does not boomerang on him, pulling the country into despondency. He is not off to a great start.

The women who have penned some of the most sought-out advice columns are experts in a kind of social history. Not only have they memorized (and written) tomes on etiquette, social mores, and cultural behavior, they are able to sort out the logic behind the traditional method, what about it is important to retain even in modern society, and how best to apply it.

In October of last year, German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück was clucking about the financial crisis being “America’s problem”. Now, it turns out that Europe may be sliding into a hole wholly of its own devising.

With last week’s passage of a $787 billion stimulus package, for which the words “largest ever” don’t even seem to do justice, the defenders of the free market have gone into hiding. It’s time they found their voice again.

While President Obama tries to wrap up Iraq and Afghanistan and soothe our alliances, the future of the U.S. alliance with Poland is uncertain. Poles fear that they will once again be sacrificed to the Russian machine. Just how much is the new president willing to bargain away?

20 years after he left the Oval Office and nearly five years since hey died, two things seem clear: Ronald Reagan’s achievements were greater than seemed possible at the time of his scandal-filled presidency, and those achievements have been willfully misinterpreted by a Republican Party that often seems blind to the changes that have swept America since the Reagan years.

In contrast to the extraordinary insight that Ronald Reagan demonstrated with regard to the Soviet Union, his assessments of Nicaragua and Iran rested on a perilous measure of wishful thinking. The challenge for us today is to reconcile how greatness can co-exist with profound flaws, as it did in so many of our Founding Fathers.

There is something in the nature of democracy that opposes us to the task of electing the best man in America. We much prefer the opportunity to vote for the man (or woman) who represents the best of America. Ronald Reagan, in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s phrase, was just such a ‘representative man’—less a heroic executive than a popular legislator elected to embody public opinion in a vast district that reached from sea to shining sea.

The fact that John Updike, who died January 27 at age 76, spent so much of his time reviewing books rather than writing more novels says something about how important he considered literary discussion and debate. We’re likely to see less of both with the announcement that the Washington Post is ceasing publication of its Sunday stand-alone book review section.

A moment, please, to investigate…. No, indeed, we belong not to a small country parish in Devonshire, Britannia, in the year of Our Lord 1660; rather, we exist in these United States of America in the 21st century and attend this Catholic Church, in which one is not blessed with one’s own private space in exchange for monies.

The recessionary release of Finnish writer/director Aki Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy through the Criterion Collection’s Eclipse Series—”a selection of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed classics in simple, affordable editions”—is a case of prescient timing.  Worth viewing in any economic climate, this blue-collar suite carries particular resonance in our current era of toppling markets and tightening belts.

A “new era of responsibility” has quickly emerged as the tagline for President Barack Obama’s inaugural address. Yet new eras of responsibility seem to begin every four years in Washington. La plus ça change…

On the eve of what might be called “The Afghan Surge,” NATO is preparing to open new supply routes to support its increasingly precarious mission in Afghanistan. With the U.S. deploying up to 30,000 more troops into the war-torn country this year—and routes through Pakistan under attack—clearing these new supply arteries couldn’t come at a [...]

Danny Boyle has become famous for setting misery to an upbeat tempo. In his latest, Slumdog Millionaire, he sets torture, murder and a corrupt game show to a soundtrack that mixes Bollywood beats and Western pop music.

Barack Obama is thinking of the words of Abraham Lincoln. The President-Elect recently told ABC that “Every time you read that Second Inaugural, you start getting intimidated.” (Lincoln’s First Inaugural is much less intimidating. It’s the one where our first President from Illinois declared, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the [...]

The clock strikes midnight and our cigars are still lit. “Put those out, they’re illegal now!” shouts a man from across the room. He’s only joking, but his voice is tinged with gallows humor. From now on, complaints could bring in fines of $500 per day and the menacingly vague threat of “further administrative action” for any bar that racks up multiple violations. The nanny state is coming to Oregon.

Israel is fighting for gains it’s unlikely to realize, and Hamas is fighting to reestablish the terms of the previous ceasefire, which the U.S. and the rest of the international community are likely to impose on Israel regardless.

A possible model for the imposition of a fair compromise on Israel and the Palestinians might be the 1999 Rambouillet negotiations to resolve the Kosovo dispute. Less important than the actual compromise offered was the method of compulsion, involving a threat against both sides.

My animus against folks is of about a decade-and-a-half’s standing–roughly coinciding with the present extent of my adult life. I cannot recall a single occasion of my minority on which the f-word was used by anyone actually in my presence–whether my parents, my grandparents, my teachers, my principal, my schoolmates, my bus drivers, the school janitor, or, indeed, the homeless dude at the convenience store up the road. Yet today, there’s no escaping it.

An ambitious, talky play-turned-movie, Doubt is a fine film that will leave you with plenty of hesitations and uncertainties of your own.

Change was the touchstone of President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign, and his promise to make a clean break from the Bush administration fueled his success in the Democratic primaries. But if history is any guide, Democrats, the world and Obama himself are likely to be disappointed by the gap between what Washington wants to do and what it has to do.

Milk’s boldness and sheer exuberance make it remarkable both as a potent “message film” and as a striking shift from Van Sant’s previous work. Its Hollywood flourishes and heady drama, even as they skirt sentimentality, secure for Harvey Milk an indelible place in the epic story of the American civil rights movement.

Late last month, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez took a beating at the ballot box, where his party lost gubernatorial races in five states and the mayorship of the capital city, Caracas. These states account for 45% of Venezuela’s population and 70% of its economic activity, making the opposition victory pivotal. Buoyed by historically high revenues at the state oil company, Chavez has spent the last few years exporting his “Socialism of the 21st Century” to Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, among others, but with oil prices now at a four-year low, his leadership is in a precarious position.

If President Obama is to make any progress achieving a durable peace in the Middle East, he needs to understand a central truth of the conflict: The Hamas-Fatah civil war has arguably damaged the Palestinian people much more than it has their sworn enemy, the Israelis. Jonathan Schanzer’s new book, Hamas vs. Fatah, should be Obama’s primer.

With wars, famines, plagues and even pirates besetting Africa, the continent desperately needs the world’s help. Although it hasn’t gotten much attention—or praise—for its efforts, the U.S. has been providing lots of help in recent years. In fact, for all its flaws, the beleaguered Bush administration deserves credit for elevating Africa to more than a foreign policy footnote.

There seems to be no dirtier word in the English lexicon today than “neocon”. To the Left, neoconservatism is tantamount to fascism or Nazism; to the traditional Right, it is pure heresy. But the recent glut of obituaries is premature. The neoconservative school of thought still has a lot to teach us.

The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights has opened its doors in Washington DC. Its founder ruminates on the sorry state of the economy, the slide towards socialism, and the drift of the Republican Party away from its founding principles.

There’s no doubt that Mad Men is well crafted: the writing is sharp, the ensemble cast well-chosen and skilled. Unfortunately—and this might have something to do with its struggle to gain market share—the show is also dull, poorly paced, and manifestly lacking a clear narrative. Identifying its failures points to a trend in television post-Sopranos, and the not unalloyed good impact David Chase’s mobster epic has had on the hourly serial format.

Bush’s penchant for expanding executive power shows that he misunderstood the most important aspect of governmental institutions: They should be one-size-fits all. Officeholders set precedents that will be utilized not only be good, honest, decent men, but also by ambitious, greedy, and abusive men.

American presidential elections are often best read as verdicts on the administrations that precede them, and in that light, Barack Obama’s victory on November 5 marks the long-overdue death of neoconservatism.

The Georgians are building themselves up as a new city on a hill, a beacon of economic liberty in a region that’s rarely known it. They have high hopes to become an example to the world of the power of free markets, a breathtaking example of Friedmanite thinking in the post-communist sphere.

Having exhausted bluster, jingoism, personal attacks, incessant accusations of media bias and outright dishonesty, the appeal to history seems to be the only arrow left in the neoconservative quiver. Yet given how poorly people comprehend current events, is it hard to believe that history won’t be that cruel to George W. Bush?

Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky suggests that the content of experience—the house you live in, the money you make, the misfortunes that happen to befall you—is far less relevant to happiness than the lens through which experience is viewed. It’s a moral as appealing as it is tough to prove on film.

Sometimes we educators in America worry that our universities are becoming too “professional” – that all the old notions of what constitutes a broad liberal education have fallen prey to students’ (and parents’) desire to get a major, get a job, build a career. So it’s a matter of some curiosity when a new university dedicated to liberal as well as professional education gets itself started, and started in so remarkable a place as Iraq.

As it stands now, NASA will retire the remaining Space Shuttles—Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis—sometime in 2010 in order to make way for the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) and a launch vehicle known as Ares I. By shutting down the Shuttle program, NASA will be able to divert precious economic, human and material resources to the CEV program. But there are problems with this.

Lost in all the noise about the ongoing bail-out is an important vote before Congress, slated for November 1, on a controversial plan to overturn the ban on guns in National Parks. The proposed new rule would lift the ban only in National Parks located in states that allow concealed carry in their own State Parks. It’s not just about the Second Amendment, however. People’s lives are increasingly at risk from marauding drug dealers who grow vast quantities of marijuana on federal parkland and jealously defend their turf.