We’re too drunk to feel it:

— Gushing articles about how delicious Yang’s Fry-Dumpling in Shanghai is really ought to note that it no longer exists, and the entire block is now slated for demolition to become the home of a “New Business Hub.”

— Speaking of Shanghai, the slogan “Better City, Better Life” currently on banners everywhere to advertise Expo 2010, is pretty awesome.

— Is the Afghanistan peace process selling women out?

— A brain-dead public culture will necessarily disadvantage progressives.

— Jonathan Mark argues in Jewish Week that Israel should become more indiscriminate.

— K-12 performance pay literature review.

— NPR brings the funny

Japandroids “Young Hearts Spark Fire”.

Gregory Djerejian’s long post on the flotilla fiasco contains an important analysis of the continuing ideological delegitimization of Israel and Israelis’ cocoon of denial about its causes:

And last, while there are still other strategic setbacks besides, the continued de-legitimation of Israel among large swaths of global opinion coming out of the ’06 Lebanese conflict, the dismal Operation Cast Lead, the Goldstone Report, and now this latest debacle, is worth highlighting as well. I know, I know, everyone would be beating up on Tel Aviv anyway, we are told by those who are always at the ready to provide carte blanche style rationalizations for whatever conduct Israel might deem appropriate, and with whatever the consequences, but this seems too easy a retort, no?

At this point, if little old Jewish me says something critical of Israeli policy nobody is very interested. That’s just “the usual suspects” going at it again. But the fact of the matter is that my tendency to write in this vein has been responsive to events. It largely began with the attack on Lebanon, which struck me as continuous with the folly of the Iraq war, and intensified over time as Israeli policy has drifted further and further to the right. Or to put it another way, Ariel Sharon’s formation of the Kadima Party made me enormously hopeful that the formation of a center-right party that would isolate Bibi Netanyahu on the fringes of politics could lead to peace. Instead, Israeli politics has shifted so far right that Kadima is now a left-of-center opposition party, and Netanyahu governs in coalition with further-right elements.

Of course irrational bias against Israel is a real phenomenon, but the habit of deploying this concept to deflect criticism has blinded a lot of people to the real opinion dynamics in the world. It’s just stunning to me how swiftly Peter Beinart has been shifted (along with me, Ezra Klein, Eric Alterman, and a seemingly endless list of liberal American Jewish writers) into the category of “knee-jerk Israel-hater who we should dismiss.” And of course that’s to say nothing of how non-Jews (and even worse, Europeans!) who have bad things to say about Israel are treated. The problem with this isn’t that individual people are being treated poorly (I’m fine, Beinart is fine, even the much-slandered Steven Walt is fine) but that Israel seems increasingly sealed off from the notion that there’s a cause-effect relationship between Israeli actions and hostile public responses. All harsh criticism is by definition a manifestation of a worldwide anti-Jewish conspiracy that rather implausibly runs from Kenneth Roth to Richard Goldstone and has unaccountably intensified during a period when, by coincidence, Israeli politics took a hard right turn.

Which is perhaps a long way of introducing the idea that I hope people over there will read Spencer Ackerman’s review of Start-Up Nation and take it to heart, but I’m quite sure they won’t.

(cc photo by kevin dooley)

I agree with David Brooks that the Race to the Top program is pretty great, but having just been participating in a tedious listserve debate about this issue, I think the rhetoric deployed in this paragraph is counterproductive:

Third, the president has better aligned the education system with American values. In every other job in this country, people are measured by whether they produce results. For decades, that didn’t apply to schools, where people were rewarded even as student achievement stagnated.

The fact of the matter is that it’s simply not true that measurement by results is universal in American employment. For example, op-ed columnists at the New York Times are not paid via a rigorous assessment of their marginal impact on readership. Nor, for that matter, are New York Times reporters. In the internet world, it is feasible to compensate writers largely on the basis of the traffic they draw and some people are paid this way but that’s a new phenomenon in the world of media. What’s more, it’s a compensation scheme that most people find unpleasant to work under, so I think it’s unlikely that pure traffic-based performance pay will ever become the rule since, somewhat paradoxically, implementing strict performance pay seems likely to undermine performance. Similarly, I don’t think military units would function better if we had junior officers handing out differentiated performance-related bonuses to the soldiers under their command.

That said, Brook is right that we should change the way we pay teachers! Every year some teachers leave the profession and other teachers don’t leave the profession. And whether or not a given teacher quits teaching has some relationship to how much money he or she learns. Since it is possible to roughly measure how much a teacher’s students are learning, it makes sense to offer more money to teachers whose students learn a lot since that way teachers who are very good at teaching are less likely to leave than teachers who aren’t very good at it. But this wouldn’t somehow transform the labor market for teachers into one that’s just like “every other job in this country” and it’s very hard to see how you could achieve that goal or why you would want to. It just happens to be the case that there are some performance pay reforms to public school salary schemes that make sense.