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The Obama Wobble: Real or Media Invention?
Posted by John Cassidy
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As Barack Obama prepares for a holiday weekend with his family, the campaign hack pack has a message for him: Get your act together, buddy, before it’s too late! Just a few weeks ago, the conventional wisdom was that the President was virtually unbeatable: game over. Now many media savants and political insiders have spotted an alarming wobble in his victory march back to the Oval Office. “Obama Stumbles Out of Gate,” blared a Friday morning headline on Politico, home base for political junkies of all stripes.
Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei wrote that just three weeks after the President formally kicked off his reëlection campaign,
“Obama, not Mitt Romney, is the one with the muddled message—and the one who often comes across as baldly political. Obama, not Romney, is the one facing blowback from his own party on the central issue of the campaign so far—Romney’s history with Bain Capital. And most remarkably, Obama, not Romney, is the one falling behind in fundraising. To top it off, Vice President Joe Biden has looked more like a distraction this month than the potent working-class weapon Obama needs him to be.“
Conservative commentators and bloggers can hardly contain their glee. At the Washington Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti wrote,
“We are rapidly approaching the moment at which Washington reevaluates the Obama campaign’s reputation for competence and expertise. Every week, one or several of Obama’s surrogates trip over their own words…. One gaffe is an isolated event. Two is an embarrassment. But three or more form a pattern, one that is damaging not only Obama’s precarious chances for reelection but also the fortunes of the Democratic Party.”
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Perhaps. In attempting to rally the base and raise money, Obama has moved from one issue to another over the past few weeks. Surely, he needs to articulate a clearer vision of where he intends to take the country and how he intends to kick-start a slowing economy. But just because Joe Biden can’t keep quiet and Corey Booker and Steve Rattner object to attacks on Romney’s record at Bain Capital, it doesn’t mean that Obama’s campaign is imploding. Biden is Biden. Seizing an early opportunity to try and define the presumptive G.O.P. candidate as an out-of-touch rich guy makes strategic sense—even if it causes some dissension in the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party.
Much of what is happening in the media has nothing to do with the President’s I.Q., or with poor old Joe Biden, or with the missteps of David Axelrod, Jim Messina, and the rest of Obama’s campaign Rottweilers out in Chicago. It is about commentators catching up with the polling numbers and the economic data, which have been indicating for some time that this is going to be a very close race. Having largely written off Romney’s chances in the first few months of this year, the pundits now have to explain why he is suddenly leading Obama in some polls and running very close in others. One obvious, but not necessarily accurate, explanation is that Obama is screwing up.
I ran through some polling data last week. Several surveys published this week confirm it is a dangerous time to be running for reëlection. According to TPM’s poll tracker, almost two thirds of Americans still believe the country is on the wrong track, and according to the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, more than four in five voters think the economy isn’t in good shape. Just sixteen per cent of respondents said they personally are better off than when Obama took office: thirty per cent say they are in worse shape.
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In circumstances such as these, virtually any incumbent would be facing a tough reëlection race, and Obama is no exception. For several months, though, the internecine warfare of the G.O.P. primary and a sharp drop in the unemployment rate, which raised hopes that the economic slump might finally be coming to an end, obscured the picture. It is the fading of these factors, rather than any major stumbles on Team Obama’s part, that explain why Mitt Romney is smiling these days.
The Politico story gives Romney credit for focussing on the economy and playing to his strengths, but that is nothing new. He has been trying to do that all along. A few months back, when the unemployment rate was falling and things appeared to be looking up, his message that Obama doesn’t know what he is doing didn’t resonate. Now it does—even though, as I pointed out yesterday, much of what he is saying is guff. Fifty-five per cent of respondents to the ABC News/WaPo poll said they disapprove of the President’s handling of the economy—a finding that is mirrored consistently in other surveys.
Attacking Romney’s record at Bain Capital will serve to reinforce doubts about his job-creation skills. But they won’t do much to change people’s opinions of the President’s competence as an economic manager. On this front, the critics of his campaign have a point. Rather than simply targeting Romney, the White House needs to be much more forceful in defending its economic record over the past few years, and in laying out proposals to create more jobs. A good place to start would be the American Jobs Act of 2011, large parts of which the Republicans in Congress refused to pass. Here’s a little example the President should be emphasizing in speeches and campaign ads: if the G.O.P. had enacted the whole of the package, tens of thousands of teachers who were laid off by cash-strapped states would still have their positions.
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All sides agree that the election will come down to the economy. If Obama pushes a coherent message on jobs and prosperity, one that combines a critique of Romney and the G.O.P. with a positive vision for his second term, the odd slipup here or there won’t matter very much—not nearly as much as how the next few months of economic statistics come in. Most voters don’t read Politico, or TPM, or follow Twitter all day. They will judge Obama based upon their overall impression of his record, and on the basis of how much they trust him compared to his rival.
On the latter point, the latest polls contain some encouraging news for the President. Americans, skeptical as they are about what he has achieved, don’t necessarily believe that the Mittster would do better. Here are two questions from the ABC News/WaPo poll:
“Q: Regardless of who you support, which candidate do you trust to do a better job handling the economy?
A: Obama: 46%, Romney: 47%
Q: Regardless of who you support, which candidate do you trust to do a better job creating jobs?
A: Obama: 47%, Romney 44%”
It’s basically a tie. On the key issue of the race, neither candidate has the upper hand. As summer beckons, that is the real headline of the day. But, of course, it’s a lot more fun to write about campaign blunders, internal squabbling, and the rest.
“Men in Black 3”: The Uses of the Past
Posted by Richard Brody
“Moonrise Kingdom” isn’t the only movie opening today that’s set in the sixties. “Men in Black 3” is a time-travel action film, in which a comically horrific outer-space creature (Jemaine Clement), arrested by Agent K in 1969 and imprisoned on the moon, breaks out now and threatens to destroy the world—and Will Smith’s Agent J has to go back in time to get Agent K (today, Tommy Lee Jones; then, Josh Brolin) to kill the monster in lieu of capturing him.
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That’s the setup for wan jibes at the spirit of the times (a scene set in Andy Warhol’s Factory delivers one big and leaden kicker) as well as for a goopy emotional drama: Agent J wants to find out what happened back then that turned his partner into an emotionally repressed automaton (and, along the way, he learns several meaningful details about his own past).
In between, the director, Barry Sonnenfeld, weaves a bittersweet fantasy of counterfactual history. The best thing in the movie is the role they give Michael Stuhlbarg, as Griffin, a humanoid intergalactic alien who is able to see multiple versions of the universe and to understand the complex interconnections of various results, and is rendered melancholy by his corresponding inability to inhabit one reality fully at any given time. It’s a lovely conceit that gives rise to one lovely image, set in a fabled place: Shea Stadium, where, in the summer of 1969, the miracle took place. Alone in the stands in the middle of the night, Griffin gazes upon the empty field to “watch” the last game of the World Series play out, in real time, in his mind, as he narrates alternative versions of the outcome. It’s a quiet moment, one in which an exotically artificial construct gives rise to a bubble of true pathos, and, with a quiet voice and a soulful gaze, Stuhlbarg (the cosmic schlemiel of “A Serious Man”) brings it fully to life.
Otherwise, the movie is inert. It’s surprising to see an action film that plays so jitteringly like the stretched-thin, papered-over adornment of an elaborately contrived script that it leaves its framework sticking uneasily out between the edges—and all the more surprising that the grand flashback scheme that’s centered around one of the signal moments of history, the Apollo 11 launch, offers so little mythopoetic payoff.
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This may, in part, be due to the fact that the key event of the time wasn’t the launch or even the moon landing but the moon walk itself, which doesn’t play a part in the film—the closest thing to a touch of historical grandeur is a droll throwaway moment in the capsule with fictionalized versions of Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin. As a result, there’s no emotional charge or grandeur of legend arising from the comic-dramatic graft of the real-life event.
What the movie does suggest, if fleetingly, is the change in attitudes since 1969 regarding race, as in a scene in which Agent J suffers insults and abuse at the hands of a pair of police officers. Yet it’s hard to escape the sense that the movie as a whole pivots on a superseded racial cliché. Smith is, in effect, playing the Hollywood stereotype of the Cool Black Dude—his character’s skills and smarts are at the very highest echelon but he adds to the mix a streetwise heartiness and emotionalism that seems to have been brought out of a musty screenwriter’s cabinet of stock traits. It suggests what Smith has missed out on. He’s one of the most famous and popular actors on the planet, but he has rationed his screen presence out parsimoniously instead of testing himself out with a wider range of directors and roles and movies. He’d likely have been better here had he gotten used to letting go a little more. Instead, he maintains a tone that seems less infused with experience than with cloistered industry norms and expectations—old ones. Or, to put it differently, the nostalgia trip isn’t for 1969, it’s for the nineties.
P.S. Two details ring false. One is strictly factual: the assertion that the Mets had finished in last place every season before they won the series; in fact, the team, which was launched in 1962, finished second-to-last—ninth in a ten-team league—twice, in 1966 and 1968, which mattered greatly to me and my fan’s honor at the time. The other concerns the attribution of the Apollo 11 launch to Cape Canaveral rather than to Cape Kennedy; the facility was renamed after the President’s assassination, in 1963, and I don’t remember hearing it called anything else in the media at the time. Even though it makes sense that, in the framing story, the name would be Cape Canaveral, a whole lot of historical resonance could have been gained by one mention of Cape Kennedy within the flashback. Joss Whedon, with “The Avengers,” did a vastly superior job of creating such resonances. As for Wes Anderson’s perceptive and mightily resonant view of 1965 in “Moonrise Kingdom,” that’s another level of achievement altogether—and another post.
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Title：Human nature
? 1 Brief history of the concept
o 1.1 Socratic philosophy
o 1.2 Modernism
o 1.3 Natural science
? 2 Psychology and biology
o 2.1 Arguments for invariance
o 2.2 Arguments for social malleability
o 2.3 "Emotional amoral egoism”
越障
Human nature
Human nature refers to the distinguishing characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling and acting, that humans tend to have naturally, i.e. independently of the influence of culture.
The questions of what these characteristics are, what causes them, and how fixed human nature is, are amongst the oldest and most important questions in western philosophy. These questions have particularly important implications in ethics, politics and theology. This is partly because human nature can be regarded as both a source of norms of conduct or ways of life, as well as presenting obstacles or constraints on living a good life.
The complex implications of such questions are also dealt with in art and literature, while the multiple branches of the Humanities together form an important domain of inquiry into human nature, and the question of what it means to be human.
The branches of contemporary science associated with the study of human nature include anthropology, sociology, sociobiology and psychology, particularly evolutionary psychology and developmental psychology. The "nature versus nurture" debate is a broadly inclusive and well-known instance of a discussion about human nature in the natural sciences.
1. Brief history of the concept
The concept of nature as a standard by which to make judgments was a basic presupposition in Greek philosophy. Specifically, "almost all" classical philosophers accepted that a good human life is a life in accordance with nature.
On this subject, the approach of Socrates, sometimes considered to be a teleological approach, came to be dominant by late classical and medieval times. This approach understands human nature in terms of final and formal causes. Such understandings of human nature see this nature as an "idea," or "form" of a human. By this account, human nature really causes humans to become what they become, and so it exists somehow independently of individual humans. This in turn has sometimes been understood as also showing a special connection between human nature and divinity.
The existence of this invariable human nature is, however, a subject of much historical debate, continuing into modern times. Against this idea of a fixed human nature, the relative malleability of man has been argued especially strongly in recent centuries—firstly by early modernists such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the latter of whom stated:
“ We do not know what our nature permits us to be. – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
”
Since the mid-19th century, thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, structuralists and postmodernists have also sometimes argued against a fixed or innate human nature.
Still more recent scientific perspectives such as behaviorism, determinism, and the chemical model within modern psychiatry and psychology, claim to be neutral regarding human nature. (As in all modern science they seek to explain without recourse to metaphysical causation.) They can be offered to explain its origins and underlying mechanisms, or to demonstrate capacities for change and diversity which would arguably violate the concept of a fixed human nature.
1.1 Socratic philosophy
Philosophy in classical Greece is the ultimate origin of the western conception of the nature of a thing. The philosophical study of human nature itself originated, according to Aristotle at least, with Socrates, who turned philosophy from study of the heavens to study of the human things. Socrates is said to have studied the question of how a person should best live, but he left no written works. It is clear from the works of his students Plato and Xenophon, and also what was said by Aristotle (Plato's student) about him, that Socrates was a rationalist and believed that the best life and the life most suited to human nature involved reasoning. The Socratic school was the dominant surviving influence in philosophical discussion in the Middle Ages, amongst Islamic, Christian and Jewish philosophers.
The human soul in the works of Plato and Aristotle has a divided nature, divided in a specifically human way. One part is specifically human and rational, and divided into a part which is rational on its own, and a spirited part which can understand reason. Other parts of the soul are home to desires or passions similar to those found in animals. In both Aristotle and Plato spiritedness, thumos, is distinguished from the other passions or epithumiai.The proper function of the "rational" was to rule the other parts of the soul, helped by spiritedness. By this account, using one's reason is the best way to live, and philosophers are the highest types of humans.
Aristotle, Plato's most famous student, made some of the most famous and influential statements about human nature. In his works, apart from using a similar scheme of a divided human soul, some clear statements about human nature are made:
? Man is a conjugal animal, meaning an animal which is born to couple when an adult, thus building a household (oikos) and in more successful cases, a clan or small village still run upon patriarchal lines.
? Man is a political animal, meaning an animal with an innate propensity to develop more complex communities the size of a city or town, with a division of labor and law-making. This type of community is different in kind from a large family, and requires the special use of human reason.
? Man is a mimetic animal. Man loves to use his imagination (and not only to make laws and run town councils). He says "we enjoy looking at accurate likenesses of things which are themselves painful to see, obscene beasts, for instance, and corpses." And the "reason why we enjoy seeing likenesses is that, as we look, we learn and infer what each is, for instance, 'that is so and so.'"
For Aristotle, reason is not only what is most special about humanity compared to other animals, but it is also what we were meant to achieve at his or her best. Much of Aristotle's description of human nature is still influential today, but the particular teleological idea that humans are "meant" or intended to be something, has become much less popular in modern times.
For the Socratics, human nature, and all natures, are metaphysical concepts. Aristotle developed the standard presentation of this approach with his theory of four causes. Human nature is an example of a formal cause according to Aristotle. Their teleological concept of nature is associated with humans having a divine component in their psyches, which is most properly exercised in the lifestyle of the philosopher, which is thereby also the happiest and least painful life.
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发表于 2012-5-26 23:53:45
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