Restaurant guides and food snobbery

A rushed piece before I drop off the edge of the internet-access world:

An article in this week’s New Yorker describes a secretive sit-down the author had with one of Michelin’s restaurant reviewers. My first impression while reading this piece was of how snobbish the whole restaurant rating business truly is. In today’s post, I try to pinpoint why it is snobby and how we could/are likely to do restaurant reviews better in the future.

on religion

In the past two days, we’ve seen two pieces in the New York Times on religion. One by columnist Nick Kristof argues that we are seeing detente in the religion/atheism debates, moving away from the acrimonious, all-or-nothing approach from recent years and towards a softer, more diffuse, and less specific vision of spiritualism. The second is a straight news item reporting that voters in Switzerland voted to amend their constitution in order to prohibit the construction of minarets on mosques. The article hypothesizes that this recent ban is an indication of Switzerland’s becoming less tolerant and more skeptical of Muslim immigrants.

Looking at these two news stories, most people would notice contradictions. Which one is it? Is religious debate becoming more acrimonious, or are religious attitudes moderating? But if we look further, we notice that the Kristof piece and the news bulletin aren’t contradictory; rather, they are both indicative of the common trends in religious debate in the western world. Unfortunately, this trend is unambiguously bad for us.

out and about

I’ve got a hectic schedule coming up. I’ll be on the coast and in a game reserve through the end of November, and after that I’ll either be backpacking along the coast or in Addis for a week, before spending a week in Cape Town. Internet connections will be spotty at best, so this blog might not get updated as regularly as before. But things will settle down for a few weeks in mid to late December, so I’ll get back into it then. In the mean time, if anyone can think of an engaging job that lasts for 6 months and starts in February, let me know.

In the bush

I’ll be gone on a 7 day roadtrip to Blyde River Canyon and Kruger National Park starting early tomorrow morning. On the off-chance that my 3G works way out there, then I might have something to post. Or not. Otherwise, you’ll just have to wait for me to get back and come up with new ideas.

Until then, I leave you with one of my favorite webcomics. Seriously, check it out.

Catholic strategy, take 3

This is my third post in a series (see previous posts  here and here) criticizing the Catholic Church’s strategy regarding gay marriage and abortion. The brief version of the argument goes like this: as a rational actor, the church should view its strategic choices as either 1. go for broke now and push back against the gay marriage tide but also risk becoming irrelevant int he future, or 2. bide your time, keep moderates in the fold, and play long ball. My instinct is that option 2 would be much more fruitful for them, given their goals. The risk is just too high that today’s younger generation will be completely turned off by their anti-gay marriage antics. After all, if just the under-35 crowd made the laws in this country, we’d have legal gay marriage in 38 states by now.

So with that as background, does it make sense for the Catholic Church to continue to make opposition of gay marriage its Waterloo? The latest development: the Church gave DC an ultimatum, threatening to stop providing social services in the city if the city council votes in favor of recognizing out-of-state gay marriages. Classy.

This seems ridiculous on several levels. First, why make your stand at gay marriage? Why not make these puerile threats over decisions to go to war, support abortion rights, fail to provide an adequate social safety net, failure to reduce crime rates, etc? I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure there is no theological reason to highlight gay marriage over any of these other social priorities that the church professes to believe in. Secondly, the Church looks like a bully for picking on DC. DC is a poor city with high need for social services, so it’s an easy target for a threat like this. Did the church make such threats in Maine, Massachusetts, Iowa, California, New Hampshire, Vermont when similar issues were being decided? No. Bullies pick on the weak kids. Principles are easier to stand up for when the opposition is the DC city council rather than the supreme court of Massachusetts.

Anyway, that’s the last I’ll have to say on the subject, until the next time the Catholic Church decides it doesn’t want under-35 people to be welcome at communion.

Education reform part 2: teachers unions play nice … for now

In my first primer on the coming legislative battle over education reform, I said that we would have a better sense of how seriously the administration is taking education reform when the Department of Education released its finalized rules for the Race to the Top competition. Would the rules be watered down, or have real teeth? How would the teachers’ unions respond? What divisions would we see within the Democratic party?

We have some answers on that now, and it is looking more promising than ever for comprehensive education reform in 2010.

Nudging

‘Nudging’ is the buzzword of the year among reformers and policy wonks. A term popularized by Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein, a ‘nudge’ is a soft push in the right direction by structuring a choice to make the chooser more likely to opt for the desired outcome. Why go around prohibiting negative behaviors when you can more easily discourage them by giving the individual more information? It’s an elegant solution to the problem of how to tackle large societal problems without infringing on personal freedom of choice.

But nudging has its limitations, perhaps more than its proponents at first realized. Today I look at a few of them and predict that while nudging is likely to become more common in public policy than it is today, its role will be more limited than originally thought. Nudging isn’t a panacea, it’s just one more tool in the public policy toolkit.

The case for viewing churches as political agents

I’ve had some feedback from yesterday’s post (which looked at how the Catholic Church was pursuing a strategy of vocal social conservatism that was likely to increase the church’s decline in the US).

The main criticism I got was that you can’t really expect a church to behave like a political party and pursue a Big Tent strategy in order to grow. The Catholic Church’s moral conservatism isn’t designed to adapt, after all, it’s designed to proclaim the church’s version of the truth no matter the popularity of those principles. As one private commenter put it, “a church can’t be seen to be mercurial with morality.”

I agree that it is crucial for a church to stick to its guns and elaborate on its defining principles. I disagree, however, with the idea that a conservative morality means that the Church cannot adapt, compromise, or prioritize.  If we refuse to see the politics in religious institutions, then we’re not giving religion its due respect as a vibrant part of human life. In fact, I think all churches can be viewed as political animals very similar to political parties, with similar options and strategies. Let me lay out the case:

The Catholic Church’s strategy for America: fewer members, one voice

The Catholic Church has been busy getting involved in US politics in the last few weeks. The Church’s decisions, however, are incompatible with a ‘big tent’ strategy aimed at growing membership. Like the Republican Party, the Catholic Church’s move towards ideological purity risks further alienating the moderate parishioners it needs to grow.

Why tea parties? Why not coffee parties?

Just a quick note before I leave for our weekend trip to Lesotho: Why do Conservative Populists insist in having “tea parties”? They think they are referencing the famous Boston Tea Party of 1773, in which a band of colonists expressed their anger at British rule and the taxation of imports like tea, by boarding a ship transporting tea and dumping it in the harbor. The original Tea Partiers were really telling the British: “Screw your tea. If we can’t buy it at market prices, we don’t want it.” The point is that destroying tea became a symbol of American patriotism on that glorious night in 1773.

But in 2009, modern-day tea partiers actually wear tea bags, bring them to rallies, and mail them in to their members of congress. Waiving a tea bag, not destroying it, has become the Conservative Populists’ symbol of their own patriotism. That’s kind of weird, when you think about it. You can just hear the original ‘baggers of 1773 rolling over in their graves, saying “You’ve got it all backwards!”

If they’re just going to ignore the original symbolism anyway, they could have picked a better beverage. Coffee, perhaps. The drink of the common man, coffee is apparently consumed by 50% of Americans in an average of 4 cups per day. A good ol’ Cup o’ Joe – there’s nothing more American than that. I bet most of those tea partiers don’t even drink tea more often than a couple times a year. I mean, we’re not British for Christ’s sake!

 

Ok, with that I’m done. Have a good weekend, everyone!