Hitchens battles Edward S. Herman
the Nation

These two are going at it in the letters pages of the Nation. (Herman is a Chomsky collaborator, although I don't know much more about him than that.)

Hitchen's prose is so dazzling that I sometimes forget that it's possible to disagree with him. I'm glad to see that there is someone out there who will do it for me. Herman:

Hitchens tells us now that Bush's war is doing wonderful things, not only for civilization but for Afghanistan as well--bombing it "out of the Stone Age"--with "no serious loss of civilian life" and "an almost pedantic policy of avoiding 'collateral damage.'" Marc Herold has calculated, on the basis of news reports alone, that more than 3,500 Afghan civilians have been killed by US bombs, more than in the Trade Center bombings, which Hitchens considered an extremely serious loss of human life. Hitchens ignores the effect of the war--and deliberate Bush actions denying food supplies--on a starving population, which has frightened all those working in food relief. Erwin van't Land, of Doctors Without Borders, stated in late November that "the situation deteriorated during the past two months of bombing, as large parts of the Afghan population dependent on international aid for survival [some 3.5 million people] did not receive it."

posted by neel master at 5:37 PM

Informing Ourselves To Death
by Neil Postman

Another possible conclusion is one expressed by George Orwell - also about 50 years ago - when he remarked that the average person today is about as naive as was the average person in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages people believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our science, no matter what.

But I think there is still another and more important conclusion to be drawn, related to Orwell's point but rather off at a right angle to it. I am referring to the fact that the world in which we live is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact - whether actual or imagined - that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world which would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction. We believe because there is no reason not to believe. No social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical or spiritual reason. We live in a world that, for the most part, makes no sense to us. Not even technical sense. I don't mean to try my experiment on this audience, especially after having told you about it, but if I informed you that the seats you are presently occupying were actually made by a special process which uses the skin of a Bismark herring, on what grounds would you dispute me? For all you know - indeed, for all I know - the skin of a Bismark herring could have made the seats on which you sit. And if I could get an industrial chemist to confirm this fact by describing some incomprehensible process by which it was done, you would probably tell someone tomorrow that you spent the evening sitting on a Bismark herring.

posted by neel master at 1:55 PM

The New Politics of Consumption
by Juliet Schor

The economic model presents the typical consumer as deliberative and highly forward-looking, not subject to impulsive behavior. Shopping is seen as an information-gathering exercise in which the buyer looks for the best possible deal for product she has decided to purchase. Consumption choices represent optimizing within an environment of deliberation, control, and long-term planning.

Were such a picture accurate it would be news (and news of a very bad sort) to a whole industry of advertisers, marketers, and consultants whose research on consumer behavior tells a very different story. Indeed, their findings are difficult to reconcile with the picture of the consumer as highly deliberative and purposive.

Consider some of the stylized facts of modern marketing. For example, the "law of the invariant right": shoppers overwhelmingly turn right, rather than left, upon entering a store. This is only consistent with the rational search model if products are disproportionately to be found on the right side of the aisle. Or consider the fact that products placed in the so-called "decompression zone" at the entrance to a store are 30 percent less likely to be purchased than those placed beyond it. Or that the number of feet into a store the customer walks is correlated with the number of items purchased. It's far harder to square these findings with "rational" behavior than with an unplanned and contingent action. Finally, the standard model has a very hard time explaining the fact that if, while shopping, a woman is accidentally brushed from behind, her propensity to purchase falls precipitously.

Credit cards present another set of anomalies for the reigning assumptions. Surveys suggest that most people who acquire credit cards say that they do not intend to borrow on them; yet roughly two-thirds do. The use of credit cards leads to higher expenditures. Psychological research suggests that even the visual cue of a credit card logo spurs spending. Survey data shows that many people are in denial about the level of credit card debt that they hold, on average underestimating by a factor of two. And the explosion of personal bankruptcies, now running at roughly 1.5 million a year, can be taken as evidence of a lack of foresight, planning, and control for at least some consumers.

posted by neel master at 1:52 PM

It is not often that the musical tastes of any two of your authors really approach each other, and less often still that we find the three of ourselves in agreement. But here we are, all three of us enormous fans of Sleater Kinney. Since Jason has just posted a tour diary and I have a surprising lack of interest in reading or blogging any intellectual mumbo jumbo, I will give to you another tour diary entry, this one short and frankly not all that interesting. But it was written by Carrie Brownstein, the generosity of whose vocals incurs a debt whose repayment I herewith submit.
posted by neel master at 1:50 PM