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George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: This short, repetitive book is mostly made of essays available at Alternet, which are well worth reading as a substitute. Lakoff is a linguist with progressive politics, deeply disturbed that progressives have found it difficult to communicate their values – which he believes large portions of the country share, at least in certain domains of their lives – in the face of a well-organized conservative campaign to control the terms of debate. (Like, how did Plan B become “part of the debate on abortion,” as the New York Times told me this morning? How did removing a cell from a blastocyst to perform genetic tests become “creating a twin and then killing it,” as Sen. Brownback says?) So Lakoff analyzes specific political events, situates them in the Strict Father or Nurturant Parent frames, and suggests how progressives can elicit the Nurturant Parent frame to support their programs.
Armand Marie Leroi, Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body: This book explores genetic determinants of body development by looking at unusual outcomes, mostly painful and socially stigmatizing outcomes, from extra fingers to bone instead of muscle to extreme shortness. Though it’s compelling on an individual topic basis, the throughline of “many things can go wrong in the genes!” was not particularly insightful. The end, where Leroi briefly compared these highly visible and generally devalued mutations with the mutations carried by so-called “normal” folks, and speculated about favorable mutations, was the intro to the book I wanted to read.
Eric Schlosser, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market: What do pot, strawberries, and porn have in common? They all partake of the burgeoning American black market – marijuana illegal at every level; strawberries picked by illegal immigrants working for unlawfully low wages; porn flirting with prosecution for obscenity and embedded in a culture of tax evasion. Schlosser’s basic argument – that laws should be fewer and better enforced – is one to which I’m sympathetic. He makes the classic mistake of treating drug use and porn as private matters for consenting adults, whereas low wages and poor conditions for migrant laborers plainly cause broader social harm. It’s simple to make countervailing arguments that pot and porn cause broader social harm and thus deserve regulation, and that barely-paid workers and their employers (who are often dead broke subcontractors themselves, due to careful manipulation by the big processing companies) are making private agreements as consenting adults. The question is whether you find the harm stories persuasive, and whether you think that the resulting regulation is worse than the harm. The most interesting reporting in the book involves the details of strawberry sharecropping, which are distressing.
There’s also a detailed account of one particular porn king, who viewed the US government as the enemy and therefore failed to pay millions in taxes. I agree that nobody should have been trying to put him in jail for making porn, but he was a tax evader! He sent people to bomb stores that stopped paying him when he went to jail. Maybe if his profession had been legal he wouldn’t have turned to violence, just like there’s very little violence surrounding the sale of cigarettes, but that’s not an argument for sympathizing with him. Here especially, two wrongs don’t make a right. Schlosser doesn’t offer any commentary on this guy in particular, but he briefly tells the story of another successful pornographer – one with no apparent tax problems – who runs a big nonprofit aiding family planning in the Third World. Even as prosecutors were trying to send him to jail, he was working with US foreign aid agencies that sought his expertise. That’s the way to do it.
Armand Marie Leroi, Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body: This book explores genetic determinants of body development by looking at unusual outcomes, mostly painful and socially stigmatizing outcomes, from extra fingers to bone instead of muscle to extreme shortness. Though it’s compelling on an individual topic basis, the throughline of “many things can go wrong in the genes!” was not particularly insightful. The end, where Leroi briefly compared these highly visible and generally devalued mutations with the mutations carried by so-called “normal” folks, and speculated about favorable mutations, was the intro to the book I wanted to read.
Eric Schlosser, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market: What do pot, strawberries, and porn have in common? They all partake of the burgeoning American black market – marijuana illegal at every level; strawberries picked by illegal immigrants working for unlawfully low wages; porn flirting with prosecution for obscenity and embedded in a culture of tax evasion. Schlosser’s basic argument – that laws should be fewer and better enforced – is one to which I’m sympathetic. He makes the classic mistake of treating drug use and porn as private matters for consenting adults, whereas low wages and poor conditions for migrant laborers plainly cause broader social harm. It’s simple to make countervailing arguments that pot and porn cause broader social harm and thus deserve regulation, and that barely-paid workers and their employers (who are often dead broke subcontractors themselves, due to careful manipulation by the big processing companies) are making private agreements as consenting adults. The question is whether you find the harm stories persuasive, and whether you think that the resulting regulation is worse than the harm. The most interesting reporting in the book involves the details of strawberry sharecropping, which are distressing.
There’s also a detailed account of one particular porn king, who viewed the US government as the enemy and therefore failed to pay millions in taxes. I agree that nobody should have been trying to put him in jail for making porn, but he was a tax evader! He sent people to bomb stores that stopped paying him when he went to jail. Maybe if his profession had been legal he wouldn’t have turned to violence, just like there’s very little violence surrounding the sale of cigarettes, but that’s not an argument for sympathizing with him. Here especially, two wrongs don’t make a right. Schlosser doesn’t offer any commentary on this guy in particular, but he briefly tells the story of another successful pornographer – one with no apparent tax problems – who runs a big nonprofit aiding family planning in the Third World. Even as prosecutors were trying to send him to jail, he was working with US foreign aid agencies that sought his expertise. That’s the way to do it.
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Though, he's got good insights, and gods know the Democratic Party could stand to listen, and to get its act together...
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