Dan Ariely tested out an alternative to posting calorie counts at fast food restaurants - simply asking customers if they'd like to downsize their side dishes:
We carried out this intervention before and after calorie labels were put in place, and found that while calorie labels had no effect on the number of calories consumed, the offer to downsize did! As much as a third of the customers who were given the offer decided to take less food (compared to ~1% who asked to downsize on their own) and consequently ate less (yes, we even weighed their leftovers), showing that a simple offer to downsize can go a long way toward encouraging a healthier diet. The conclusion: Offering people a chance to exercise self control can be effective, but we need to stop people, slow them down and offer them to take a better path at the moment when they are placing their order.
Bioethicist Allen Buchanan believes that cognitive enhancement will produce major societal gains:
[P]art of what makes having your computer so valuable is that hundreds of millions of other people have computers. Similarly with literacy, if you were the only person who knew how to read certainly that would give you some advantages, but you wouldn't have nearly as rich a world as the one we live in where billions of people are literate. ... Think about the kinds of interactions that we now have, and the kinds of enjoyments and productivity we can have because of the Internet. If you try and ramp that up, if you magnify it by many orders of magnitude, you might begin to get an idea of how human life could be if many hundreds of millions of people were cognitively enhanced.
Recent neuroscience suggests that the right side of the brain wants to present reality as a unified whole while the left side aims to break things up into their component parts. Iain McGilchrist's book tackles the rivalry between the two. Gary Lachman summarizes:
McGilchrist argues that in a left-brain dominant world, the emphasis would be on increasing control, and the means of achieving this is by taking the right brain’s presencing of a whole and breaking it up into bits and pieces that can be easily reconstituted as a re-presentation, a symbolic virtual world, shot through with the left brain’s demand for clarity, precision, and certainty. Furthermore, McGilchrist contends that this is the kind of world we live in now, at least in the postmodern West.
We are not environmentalists now because we have an emotional reaction to the wild world. Most of us wouldn’t even know where to find it. We are environmentalists now in order to promote something called “sustainability.” What does this curious, plastic word mean? It does not mean defending the nonhuman world from the ever-expanding empire of Homo sapiens sapiens, though some of its adherents like to pretend it does, even to themselves. It means sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the world’s rich people—us—feel is their right, without destroying the “natural capital” or the “resource base” that is needed to do so.
It is, in other words, an entirely human-centered piece of politicking, disguised as concern for “the planet.” In a very short time—just over a decade—this worldview has become all-pervasive. ... The success of environmentalism has been total—at the price of its soul.
Kingsworth followed up on his piece with a conversation with authors Lierre Keith and David Abram and has more on his blog.
(Photo: Animal rights activists and environmentalists shout slogans and hold banners during a protest to demand action to combat global warming as experts hold UN climate talks, on December 3, 2011 in Durban. By Stringer/AFP/Getty Images)
“Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind," - George Orwell in “Politics and the English Language."
Misha Friedman photographs tuberculosis patients in Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Russia. Friedman, formerly a logistician for Doctors Without Borders, grapples with the implications:
Most of the people you see here are dead. My images have not really helped them. Maybe they’ll help people in the future. Maybe they’ll help with fund-raising here and there. But to these particular people, they did not help. So that part is harder, being kind of just a photographer.
Polina, above, was brought to a St. Petersburg hospital with tuberculosis, hepatitis C and HIV.
Clare O'Connor profiles Manoj Bhargava, creator of the 5-Hour Energy drink, who spent his 20s traveling to Indian monasteries:
Bhargava claims he spent those 12 years trying to master one technique: the stilling of the mind, often through meditation. He still considers himself a member of the Hanslok order and spends an hour a day in his Farmington Hills basement in contemplative silence. ... Bhargava takes a shot of his creation every morning and another before his thrice-weekly tennis game. He shakes his head at the suggestion that taking shots infused with caffeine is at odds with his quest for inner stillness. “5-Hour Energy is not an energy drink, it’s a focus drink,” he says, turning one of the pomegranate-flavor bottles around in his hands. “But we can’t say that. The FDA doesn’t like the word ‘focus.’ I have no idea why.”
In a separate story, O'Connor examines the ingredients:
A new study claims to have found the specific gene that determines a toddler's willingness to share. Oddly, it's the same gene that's been called the ADHD gene, the bully gene, the brat gene, the drinking gene, and the slut gene. David Dobbs explains how this can be:
[The] long-dominant risk-gene hypothesis, generated first in the mid-1990s, asserts that certain heavily studied gene variants, most of which affect neurochemistry, create higher risk of mood or behavior problems in people who weather rough childhoods. By offering an explanation of why some people are more vulnerable to life’s troubles than others, the risk-gene hypothesis became one of the most influential ideas in behavioral science and a prime model of how genes interact with environment to affect mood or behavior.
This new hypothesis, however, the plasticity hypothesis, acknowledges those genes magnify vulnerability in people with rough starts — but adds that they also create greater strength and happiness in people who don’t suffer troubled childhoods. ... The so-called risk genes, in short, don’t just create risk or vulnerability; they make you more attuned and reactive to your environment, whether bad or good.
A dead beetle lies on the path through the field. Three pairs of legs folded neatly on its belly. Instead of death's confusion, tidiness and order. The horror of this sight is moderate, its scope is strictly local, from the wheat grass to the mint. The grief is quarantined. The sky is blue.
To preserve our peace of mind, animals die more shallowly: they aren't deceased, they're dead. They leave behind, we'd like to think, less feeling and less world, departing, we suppose, from a stage less tragic.
Robert Krulwich eulogizes the poet who died last week:
Wislawa Szymborska's passing is as precious as that beetle's. No more. No less. She taught us about weight in the world. We all have it. Every last one of us.
Robert Birnbaum quotes a beautiful passage on human nature and reading from Szymborska.
Aleksandar Hemon describes finding spirituality while playing soccer in a torrential downpour:
The Tibetan goalie and his Tibetan friends, whom I had never seen before and never would after that day, are playing a game on the field completely covered with water, as if running in slow motion on the surface of a placid river. The ground is giving off vapour, the mist touching their ankles, and at moments it seems that they’re levitating a few inches above the ground, untouched by the flood. Lalas and his wife are watching them with perfect calm, as if nothing could ever harm them. They see one of the Tibetans scoring a goal, the rain-heavy ball sliding between the goalie’s hands. The goalie is untroubled, smiling, and from where I am, he could be the Dalai Lama himself.
So this, gentlemen, is what this little narrative is about: the moment of transcendence that might be familiar to those who practise sports with other people; the moment, arising from the chaos of the game, when all your team mates occupy the ideal position on the field; the moment when the universe seems to be arranged by a meaningful will that is not yours; the moment that perishes – as moments tend to – when you complete the pass; and all you have left is a vague, physical, orgasmic memory of the instant you were completely connected with the world around you.
Peggy Kamuf tracks our primitive instinct for accumulation:
People really couldn’t settle down in one place until they figured out reliable storage methods for the fruits of their labors. Because they don’t store food in any quantity, hunter-gatherers have to keep moving to better hunting and foraging grounds. The anthropologist James Woodburn has made the distinction between “immediate return” and “delayed return” economies, terms he uses to classify foraging societies that consume their food within a day or two, as if there were no tomorrow, as distinct from social organizations that practice some kind of food storage. Most anthropologists agree that immediate-return societies are typically nonhierarchical and egalitarian, more egalitarian at any rate than delayed-return societies. Which suggests that social inequality couldn’t really get a foothold until people developed a storage capacity.
Chris Lehmann's piece from last October recently emerged from behind a paywall at Harper's. He offers a religious explanation for Romney's unabashed ambition:
Mormons, unlike adherents of most mainline Protestant denominations, have very little ambivalence about the acquisition of wealth. One scours the endless, incantatory pages of Joseph Smith’s revelation in vain for any suggestion that wealth complicates the spiritual lives of believers. Not for Mormons the queasy business about the camel going through the needle’s eye before a rich man enters the Kingdom of Heaven. Instead, paradise is pretty much set aside for the enterprising rich, whose upward mobility is thought to persist even in the three-tiered scheme of the Mormon afterlife.
Earlier discussion of the tiered Mormon afterlife here.
The theme goes back to the beginning of Western literature, the Odyssey:
Odysseus, finally returned home after twenty years, discovers Argus, the dog he’d trained as a puppy, ancient and flea-ridden and lying on a heap of manure (yes, okay, Homer was laying it on a little thick here, but the detail sure does stick). The broken dog is too weak to stand up, but his ears perk up at the sound of his long-absent master, and he wags his tail and drops his ears. Odysseus, in disguise, pretends not to recognize Argus, but sheds hidden tears at this display of affection from his old dog. Argus, apparently having fulfilled his sustaining desire to see his beloved master one last time, is then seized by “the dark finality of death.”
That's the moral of Shimon Edelman's new book, The Happiness of Pursuit. An excerpt:
[T]he pursuit itself -- the journey rather than the destination--is what really matters... the seeker after happiness returns home, only to grow restless and eventually succumb to the lure of a new journey. On the basis of the understanding developed throughout the book, the following practical advice is offered as a way of summing up its lessons in seven words: when fishing for happiness, catch and release.
Edelman elaborated in a recent interview with Lucy McKeon. He says happiness usually isn't a thing, either:
An infographic offers a side by side comparison of how the religious and non-religious spend their time:
Sociologists have generally concluded that people who are very religiously active tend to be less engaged with the secular world, opting to stay sequestered in their faith communities. But in a comprehensive survey, the Pew Research Center found that the 40 percent of Americans who are religiously active are more engaged in all kinds of community organizations and activities than their non-religious neighbors.
Theo Anderson thinks Romney's picture-perfect life hurts him with Evangelicals:
It’s all well and good that [Romney] made a fortune and has apparently been a faithful husband for decades. But to really reach evangelicals’ hearts, he’d have to talk about some big failures along the way, and the role that his faith played in changing his life. If he could, it wouldn’t matter that he’s a Mormon, just as it hasn’t mattered to evangelicals that Newt Gingrich is twice divorced and a Catholic. Gingrich’s late-in-life conversion and his owning up to past sins absolve all that. The key for evangelicals is the transforming power of faith, not the denomination or tradition that one belongs to.
Julian Baggini traveled the US gathering stories of those persecuted for not believing. But not all atheists want to play the victim card:
[Sam Harris] agrees that the situation for atheists is “analogous to being gay and in the closet for many people”, and it is striking that virtually every atheist I spoke to talked the language of being “out” or “in the closet”. Nevertheless, Harris argues “it’s a losing game to trumpet the cause of atheism and try to rally around this variable politically. I’ve supported that in the past, I support those organisations, I understand why they do that. But, in the end, the victim group identity around atheism is the wrong strategy. It’s like calling yourself a non-astrologer. We simply don’t need the term.”
How Evangelical pastor John Piper recently described Christianity:
God revealed Himself in the Bible pervasively as king not queen; father not mother. The second person of the Trinity is revealed as the eternal Son not daughter; the Father and the Son create man and woman in His image and give them the name man, the name of the male... God appoints all the priests in the Old Testament to be men; the Son of God came into the world to be a man; He chose 12 men to be His apostles; the apostles appointed that the overseers of the Church be men; and when it came to marriage they taught that the husband should be the head. Now, from all of that I conclude that God has given Christianity a masculine feel...
Rachel Held Evans rounded up the many voices in disagreement. Paul Anthony's counterpoint:
The men didn’t get it. They betrayed, abandoned and hung him on a cross. Yet while he was there, who stayed with him? The women. They got it. They stayed at the cross. They returned to the tomb, and as a result, were the first to see the risen Christ. The crucifixion and resurrection stories do not have a “masculine feel.” Indeed, the whole life of Christ is decidedly opposed to the masculine norms of his day.
The pleasure-deadening devices "have not been significantly improved since the 1800s, when rubber first replaced the then-standard animal intestines." Paul R. Abramson and L.J. Williamson can't understand why:
[A]lthough we've been chasing an HIV-prevention vaccine since 1984, we've still got nothing to show for it. Imagine how far those same hundreds of millions could go toward the development of a better-feeling condom — a condom people would actually wear. After all, there is one area in which condoms don't suck: They prevent sexually transmitted infections. To date, we haven't even found a vaccine to prevent one of the many strains of HIV. Even if an omnipotent AIDS vaccine were developed, it would still leave untouched syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia and every other sexually transmitted infection. Compare that to the simplicity of the one-size-fits-all-diseases barrier method: the simple condom. Chasing a vaccine has so far been a losing game. But a great-feeling condom could be an epic win.
The Dish also ran a popular thread on why female contraception hasn't evolved much in the past few decades.
(Image: 110-year-old condoms made from the swim bladders of fish)
Natasha Scripture wonders whether differing faiths should be a deal-breaker:
I do feel, in general, we are -- and are entitled to be -- harsher on our partner's views than with someone who isn't going to raise children with us, i.e. the checkout guy at CVS. My boyfriend says I have a visceral reaction to anything Christian, but it's because deep down, I know he wants to proselytize me. He's even admitted he hopes I'll "come around." ... I don't understand how he could be the way he is (what do he and God talk about all day long anyway?), and he doesn't understand how I can be so nebulous when it comes to spirituality. I think it's a deeply personal thing; he believes it's a shared, communal experience that should be discussed regularly at church and at the dinner table.
The ways in which the characters in A Separation struggle for truth and honor, while yielding sometimes to compromise and falsehood, is not foreign to us. Few other films made last year give such a striking sense of, "Look—isn’t this life? Isn’t this our life, too?" In a complete world of film-going, we should no longer tolerate the label "foreign film," especially since it seems likely that a film from France in which the French language remains tactfully silent is going to stroll away with Best Picture. The Artist is a pleasant soufflé, over which older Academy voters can wax nostalgic. But A Separation is what the cinema was invented for.
Roger Ebert posed a related philosophical question to the film's director, Asghar Farhadi:
There's an ancient ethical question, I mentioned to Farhadi in an online conversation. "Your wife and your mother are both drowning -- which would you rescue?" Is there a correct answer to this question?
Newly wealthy residents of the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are turning to wine in a big way and have been dramatically pushing up the prices of the world’s most prestigious products. Prices for premium wines, especially from France, have gone through the ceiling, primarily due to demand from China. Château Lafite Rothschild, Bordeaux’s most famous label, is selling at astronomical prices. A decade ago, an American consumer would pay $100 or so per bottle. Today, in New York City, a bottle of Lafite goes for $1,600.
Puritans first issued paper bills because they owed Britain money to fund their war against France. The Civil War required even more:
To foot the bill of the Union Army's campaign, the government had to issue $450 million in greenbacks (about $8.1 billion in 2011 dollars). They may have been un-constitutional, but they worked, making it possible to buy equipment and pay soldiers. War has a habit of quieting concerns about currency's backing.
It turns out most people won't notice the difference between paté and dog food, so long as the latter is suitably presented with the right sort of garnish. And as for our ability to discriminate wine, even experts may confuse a white wine with a red when it is served at room temperature in a dark glass. And we'll enjoy soggy old potato chips, it turns out, if our chewing is accompanied (over head phones) by the satisfying sound of crunching. ...
Context matters, and so do our attitudes and expectations.
After reading that fact-checker's back and forth with an uppity author, Hannah Goldfield considers the tension between art and nonfiction:
The conceit that one must choose facts or beauty—even if it’s beauty in the name of “Truth” or a true “idea”—is preposterous. A good writer—with the help of a fact-checker and an editor, perhaps—should be able to marry the two, and a writer who refuses to even try is, simply, a hack. If I’ve learned one thing at this job, it’s that facts can be quite astonishing. This is not to say that truth cannot be found in fiction. As E. M. Forster famously wrote, “Fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the evidence, and each of us knows from our own experience that there is something beyond the evidence.” But fiction does not lie to us—it creates other worlds, with other rules, that, if rendered well, can tell us something true about our own world.
He worked at Lloyd’s Bank of London and enjoyed it:
Like Eliot at the bank, we know Wallace Stevens sold insurance, but nobody wants to think about the poet at the water cooler, or, even worse, pouring over actuarial tables. Same goes for William Carlos Williams being a doctor: Do we want a man so skilled with words to perform our annual physicals? It’s fine for a writer to have a quirky or strange day job, like nude model, “oyster pirate,” even garbage man. Yet the point of the writer’s life must remain to end up at the writer’s desk somewhere, with all that nonsense left behind.
The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order—not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.
[Google Calendar offers] a strange waste of space, forcing you to look at three weeks of the past. Those weeks are largely irrelevant now. A digital calendar could be much more clever; it could reformat on the fly, putting the current week at the top of the screen, so that you always see the next three weeks at a glance. Why don't computer calendars work like that? Because they're governed by skeuomorphs -- bits of design that are based on old-fashioned, physical objects. As Google Calendar shows, skeuomorphs are hobbling innovation by lashing designers to metaphors of the past.
In a new paper (pdf), M Keith Chen explores the interplay between language and fiscal responsibility:
Languages differ in whether or not they require speakers to grammatically mark the futurity of events. For example, a German speaker predicting precipitation can naturally do so in the present tense, saying: Morgen regnet es, which translates to ‘It rains tomorrow’. In contrast, English would require the use of a future marker ‘will’ or ‘be going to’, as in ‘It will rain tomorrow’. In this way, English encodes a distinction between present and future events that German does not.
David Berreby summarizes Chen's findings on "future time reference" (FTR):
His analysis suggests that if your language's syntax blurs the difference between today and tomorrow (as do, say, Chinese and German) then you are more likely to save money, quit smoking, exercise and otherwise prepare for times to come.
You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to VFYWcontest@gmail.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book. Have at it.
In Katherine Boo's new book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, she follows a 19-year-old trash scavenger through a Mumbai slum. A snippet:
It seemed to [Abdul] that in Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they avoided. A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught.
Monica Potts praises Boo's realistic portrayal of poverty:
Alongside disturbing moments, like a man slowly dying of a leg injury, she offers beauty: a secret spot where boys watch parrots nest in a fruit tree, a eunuch’s dance in an empty temple. But the first onslaught of monsoon shows how overwhelming the place can be: "Hut walls grew green and black with mold, the contents of ten public toilets spewed out onto the maidan, and fungi protruded from feet like tiny sculptures—a special torment to those whose native customs involved toe rings."
Elaine Blair focuses on the author's ability to show how well-intentioned fixes often fail:
"Through cupcakes, seemingly innocent little ‘treats,' we can project fantasies of who and what we desire to be. Instead of connecting us to others, however, cupcakes keep us separate and add to our sense of isolation. ... [C]upcakes evidence the narcissism born of the Internet by feeding us in shallow and un-nutritious ways. Similar to the way we cruise the Internet looking for bite-size and delicious bits of information, cupcakes enable us to cruise the sugary world of self-indulgence," - Paul Hokemeyer, psychotherapist.
In many ways, the Chipotle burrito is very similar to the iPhone. Founder Steve Ells invented a way to maintain the basic speed and experience of the standard fast-food experience and make the quality of the food a little better. The better food costs a bit more money, but consumers turn out to be happy to pay a premium for a superior product. A similar insight is behind privately held Five Guys, a burger-oriented fast-food concept that’s also grown rapidly over the past several years. At the other end of the health spectrum there's Chop't, the assembly-line salad chain that’s taken New York and D.C. by storm but hasn’t yet gone national. All three chains are, in their different ways, raising the bar for food quality in a quick-service setting.
Quentin Hardy parses a new survey showing that one-in-five male coworkers and one-in-eight female ones have joined a conference call from the toilet:
This is, in a sense, a testimony to our collective passion for communication and contact over all other needs, and a lesson in how quickly ideas of decorum adjust to the times. It is also a decent read on brand-related habits. If someone is making or taking calls while on the toilet, they are most likely using a BlackBerry. Using an app or playing on Facebook most often is done on an iPhone. And in general, Android owners are more likely than owners of other phones to use them on the toilet.
French historian Robert Muchembeld argues in his book, History of Violence, that crime fiction and novels about war have given young men a way to indulge in violent fantasies without actually going out and stabbing someone. Or, over the last few years, they could stab someone playing Grand Theft Auto rather than stab someone while actually committing grand theft auto. This is the blood-and-gore version of the argument that that more pornography leads to lower sexual violence.
The Dish has previously covered the neurological phenomenon of synesthesia, when senses are connected to one another. Nabokov, for instance, saw letters and numbers as specific colors. Artist Perry Hall has created a new app, Sonified, that enables the rest of us to experience light, colors and movement as sounds (example seen above). Steve Silberman is impressed:
I boarded a streetcar here in San Francisco, slipped on a pair of headphones, and aimed my phone out the window just as the train streaked past a row of brightly painted Victorian houses, accelerating through shafts of sunlight and shade on its way into a tunnel. The effect of the audio-visual-kinesthetic link-up was unexpectedly profound. Instead of feeling like Sonified was imposing its digital soundtrack on the world, I felt I was accessing a layer of reality that is normally hidden from us. It was like a little dose of Morpheus’ red pill in The Matrix.
Gabriel Sherman's cover-story on Wall Street regulations has been making the rounds:
Wall Street’s traders have found themselves on the wrong end of the market—a predicament that many of them have never seen before. Before the crash, when compensation slid, the banks risked seeing their top talent run for the doors to rival firms or hedge funds. Now, with a glut of hedge funds and an industrywide belt-tightening, bank chiefs are calling their star traders’ bluffs. "If you’re really unhappy, just leave," Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman bluntly told Bloomberg TV a few days after his bank announced its meager bonus numbers.
For New York’s bankers and traders, the new math suddenly reordered their assumptions about their place in a post-crash city. "After tax, that’s like, what, $75,000?" an investment banker at a rival firm said as he contemplated Morgan Stanley’s decision [to cap bonuses at $125,000]. He ran the numbers, modeling the implications. "I’m not married and I take the subway and I watch what I spend very carefully. But my girlfriend likes to eat good food. It all adds up really quick. A taxi here, another taxi there. I just bought an apartment, so now I have a big old mortgage bill."
CNBC may have to revise its dating guide. Matt Taibbi is flabbergasted that Sherman's piece gives short shrift to the massive problems in Europe:
Friday on the Dish, Patrick went another round with Dreher (supporting arguments here and here), I corrected a popular misinterpretation about a poll on Syria and guessed at an explanation for the Democratic about-face on Guantanamo, and Chris weighed in on the women in combat controversy. Santorum led nationally (!) seemingly in part because he was the anti-Romney, Rick's ultimate victory became an actual possibility, Mitt overdid it at CPAC, and Paul had a shot at Maine. One jobs report was purported to be critical to the election, people overrated the NRA's influence in election years, the primary was probably going to go on for a while, a reader pushed a third party candidate, and some things were worth losing elections over. Ad War Update here.
Obama (arguably) meep-meeped on the contraception issue, Dems started parodying the GOP's extreme culture initiatives, and the Komen debate got a coda. Arming the Free Syrian Army still wouldn't help, Egypt faced the possibility of becoming Pakistan, al-Qaeda looked to Somalia to survive, Germany scared Europe, and rubber duckies explained the Greek crisis. The GOP failed at pop-culture and abandoned the mandate for unclear reasons. The atheism debate raged on, McMansions were on the wane, Jeremy Lin's story was extraordinary, life got better, and online activism got smarter. Malkin Nominee here, Creepy Ad here, Hathos Alert here, AAA here, Tweet of the Day here, FOTD here, VFYW here, and MHB here.
Thursday on the Dish, Patrick slammed Maggie Gallagher's closemindedness on marriage equality and defended his position against criticism while Chris deepened our understanding of Gallagher here and here. I kept up the the God debate and criticized the idea that ridiculous levels of defense spending were necessary to stop genocide. We discovered Romney could very well fall short of the winning delegate total, found the roots of his "flexibility" in his business background, saw him on thin ice in the culture war debate. Santorum created real problems for the GOP and Ron Paul snuck away a fair number of delegates. A third party candidacy was not viable, the longer primary was damaging the Republicans, and marriage equality and Obama's legacy were at serious issue in the campaign.
We surveyed the ongoing debate on the contraception mandate (which might not be the best issue for the GOP), discovered an extraordinary speech (above) on marriage equality from the Washington fight, wound up the "Power of Pink" thread, noticed that the Constitution was going out of style, and declared it "Best CPAC Ever!" A new film smelled like propaganda for the Navy SEALs, analysts debated arming Syrians against the regime, and a fatwa got sent over Twitter. "Europe" had similar income distribution to the US, the profit incentive hurt the financial sector, privatization had risks, an adorable child explained logos, and the Prius fallacy/rebound effect got scrutinized. Being a patient was traumatic, good pain doctors were in short supply, power explained male violence, and waking up was scientifically fascinating. AAA here, Yglesias Nominee here, VFYW here, MHB here, and (an awesome) FOTD here.
Wednesday on the Dish, I threw my hat into the ring on the birth control debate and Patrick explained why the Birthers aren't going after non-white Republicans. We compiled reax to Santorum's hat trick, insta-explained the impact on the race, tried to see if Romney could spin this (probably not), wondered if Mitt was losing his narrative, saw the aura of inevitability waning, and thought that regaining it might cost him the general. Santorum started to be taken seriously by some while Pawlenty was pitied. The enthusiasm gap reversed, the "Obama independents" became a thing, and there's a new Ad War Update here.
Sympathetic liberals opposed an intervention in Syria, Egypt's junta waged war on NGOs, and American novelists shirked from war. We found more Prop 8 reax, secular marriage sustained assault, and the Komen discussion continued. America's mobility problems were spotlighted, shifting from communism was hard, energy efficiency wasn't solving sustainability issues, and self-driving cars were a ways away. Opponents of pot legalization hallucinated and readers pushed back on the defense of doping. Your childhood made you fat, human attachment to reality got dissected, auteur theory was (debateably) bunkum, and a gorilla played the recorder. View from your Airplane Window here, Hewitt Nominee here, Yglesias Nominee here, Hathos Alert here, Chart of the Day here, AAA here, FOTD here, VFYW here, and MHB here.
Traverse City, Michigan, 11.55 am
Tuesday on the Dish, Patrick called the primaries a huge loss for Mitt, Chris worried about the aftershocks of the Komen war during an election year and lowered the curtain on the Dish's operating procedure, and I tried to nail down the atheist/theist divide, didn't buy that Russia's veto over Syria was payback for Qaddafi, and argued that Ron Paul wasn't a fair test of libertarianism's appeal among young GOPers given his serious weaknesses on social issues. We profiled the crazy, irrelevant Missouri primary, hunted for Romneymaniacs, counseled Romney to speak up about his Mormonism, noted the distinctly non-dead "Not Romney" vote, saw more problems with women for Gingrich, told Newt to drop out, pooh-poohed the Santorum surge, marked Obama's turn towards SuperPACs, shined a light on the field's misperception of Reagan, and ferreted out some of the press' own biases in covering the race
On the "Prop 8 is unconstitutional" front, we posted the 9th Circuit's ruling against Proposition 8, corralled a few reax to the decision, spotlighted to pop-culture's influence on the ruling, and wondered if the Supreme Court might refuse to hear it. Rich people dominated marriage, single people had it rough, Charles Murray's definition of American "closemindedness" about values was odd, our prison system horrified, and the Komen debate continued. Israel wasn't slouching toward theocracy, France's election mattered, global censorship went private, and the war debate had gatekeepers. MIA's middle finger got overblown, Clint Eastwood declared it "Halftime in America" at halftime, doping found a defender, and vegetarianism was almost certainly better for animals than eating meat (and yes, Chris, that video was definitely gross. You got me.) Moore Award here, AAA here, VFYW here, MHB here, and FOTD here.
Monday on the Dish, Patrick explained why he thought Romney had wrapped up the race and Chris was creeped out by Pete Hoekstra's "China took our jobs" Super Bowl ad. We questioned Romney's appeal in the Midwest, linked his campaign strategy firmly to the economy, noted Gingrich's money problems, were unsurprised by Newt's difficulties with women voters, smelled a Santorum surge in the offing, and wondered if Ron Paul's strategy was working out. GOP turnout continued to flag and movement conservatism faced a policy crisis.
We offered two possibleexplanations for Russia and China's defense of Syria at the UN and examined if whether there was anything we could do to end Assad's murder spree. We also used some statistical magic to predict whether new Arab democracies would stay that way, found growing fear among Christian communities in majority-Muslim countries, and worried about the Greek economic crisis. The Super Bowl got some uncharacteristic play - the decision to let the TD in and the linebacker who caught the game-changing interception both saw the spotlight.
On the culture war front, the internet took credit for reversing Komen's decision to defund Planned Parenthood, readers blasted Komen's original decision, and the organization both crassly commercialized cancer (follow-up here) and took focus away from broader issues. A reader deepened the contraception and coercion debate, homophobia killed, economics complicated the abortion debate, and Obama caught some chutzpah-riffic flack. The stimulus promoted transparency, squirrel meat found a champion, lazy mornings helped your brain, and 3-D printing sounded awesome. Cool Ad here, Yglesias Nominee here, AAA here, Quote for the Day here, VFYW here, FOTD here, and MHB here.
I've been enjoying your debate with Rod and others, and noticed Rod making the following mistake about the perspective of secular liberalism in regards to these sorts of rights:
"The thing I want to point out in this post is that secular liberalism thinks of itself as values-neutral, but in fact it is as much its own orthodoxy as anything else. As the philosopher A. MacIntyre has long been saying, it is increasingly impossible for us even to talk to each other because our orthodoxies are so divergent."
I think Rod makes a common conservative mistake about the liberal-secular approach to values. Liberal secularism isn't "value neutral" as Rod suggests, but is "value-relative". In fact, one of the most basic criticisms of secular liberalism by conservatives is that it has no fundamental and eternal values, but only relative ones. Which is true. Conservatives make this a huge criticism of liberals, but then tend to forget about it when they see liberals talking about "rights", as if rights are something liberals see as absolute and unbending truths (as conservatives tend to). They don't. They see even rights as relative matters, things that can grow and change and adapt to various cultural circumstances and forces.
This isn't universally true, of course. Some liberals certainly do get absolutist about rights now and then. But the basic liberal-secular movement tends to avoid that kind of absolutism, in favor of a progressive and relativistic approach to rights. In other words, gradually expanding and adapting our fundamental rights to a changing social structure which becomes more and more inclusive over time.
This is how liberalism ends up winning wars while losing arguments. Pitted head to head against the absolute notion of rights and authority that most conservatives promote, liberals don't have strong arguments on the theoretical level. But on the practical level they do, and they tend to win the culture wars where the evidence of ordinary life favors them. That's why they are winning on the SSM front.
Al-Qaeda boss Ayman al-Zawahiri decided to formally merge the group with Somali affiliate al-Shabaab. Christopher Anzalone sees it as a desperate grab for relevancy by al-Qaeda central:
The issuing of this announcement now, during a period when both AQC and Al-Shabab are facing mounting pressures, is telling...AQC, faced with the loss of its founder, Usama bin Laden, and a senior operational leader and ideologue, ‘Atiyyatullah al-Libi (Jamal Ibrahim Ishaywi al-Misrati), last year is reeling from losses inflicted by U.S. drone missile strikes and is struggling to remain a relevant force. Of the two groups, it arguably has the most to gain from formalizing its relationship with Al-Shabab, which continues to control vast swaths of territory in central and southern Somalia. The insurgent movement or its allies also reportedly have made significant inroads into parts of northern Somalia, both in the autonomous region of Puntland and a contested area between Puntland and the self-declared republic of Somaliland. Despite significant military setbacks since last spring, Al-Shabab remains a potent force within the country and its military power, even if it is in decline, remains the subject of pride for the Sunni jihadi current.
Ackerman has a similar take. Bronwyn Bruton and Peter Pham want the US to turn al-Shabaab against itself:
To have a chance at winning in the delegate count, he will need to supplant Mr. Gingrich as Mr. Romney’s major rival in the South. The results in Missouri, a borderline Southern state where Mr. Santorum beat Mr. Romney by 30 points without Mr. Gingrich on the ballot, suggest that he could run strongly if Mr. Gingrich were to bow out.
It is certainly not a straightforward path, but nor is Mr. Romney’s at this point. And so far in this Republican race, betting on the underdog has yielded dividends.
Greenwald is infuriated by a new poll showing strong Democratic liberal support for continuing Bush-era counterterrorism tactics:
I’ve often made the case that one of the most consequential aspects of the Obama legacy is that he has transformed what was once known as “right-wing shredding of the Constitution” into bipartisan consensus, and this is exactly what I mean. When one of the two major parties supports a certain policy and the other party pretends to oppose it — as happened with these radical War on Terror policies during the Bush years — then public opinion is divisive on the question, sharply split. But once the policy becomes the hallmark of both political parties, then public opinion becomes robust in support of it...That’s what Barack Obama has done to these Bush/Cheney policies: he has, as Jack Goldsmith predicted he would back in 2009, shielded and entrenched them as standard U.S. policy for at least a generation, and (by leading his supporters to embrace these policies as their own) has done so with far more success than any GOP President ever could have dreamed of achieving.
