Bob Ross Remixed

Simultaneously sweet and horrifying:



(Via Kottke)

Unfair and Unbalanced

While Ted Turner's CNN news enterprise may still have a reputation for being the unbiased, "just the facts" network amid the hyper-partisan madness of MSNBC and Fox News, its ratings situation has never been more dire. John Hinderaker attempts a character study:

CNN represents the passive-aggressive Left. MSNBC is unrestrained id, but CNN can never fully surrender to its liberal impulses. It tries to maintain a fig leaf of neutrality. But CNN can’t get through the day without betraying what it really thinks, often in underhanded ways. Thus, when CNN did a story on Chick-fil-A today, what did it focus on? The merits of the controversy? The fact that more than one Democratic government official has threatened to violate the company’s constitutional rights, because its CEO is opposed to gay marriage? No. In a dog whistle to its liberal audience, CNN focused on the fact that Todd and Sarah Palin, along with thousands of other Americans, tweeted photos of themselves eating at Chick-fil-A.

The comforting thing about Fleet Street is that you know exactly where any given media outlet is coming from politically. It's generally understood that every outlet has its biases and prejudices. The same could be said Fox News and, to a lesser extent, MSNBC. You watch their programmes in the understanding that their coverage is going to approach every issue from a particular angle. Obviously there's the basic expectation that the news organisation will convey accurate information regardless of their inclinations (Fox doesn't always adhere to this rule), and also that certain parts of the truth won't be obscured.

But what concerns me about outlets like CNN or even the scrupulously neutral Al Jazeera is that they claim to be nonpartisan. I'm always inclined to think that such a claim is impossible to fulfil. The comfort that can be derived from Foxish networks and newspapers is that they don't approach their audience under the guise of impartiality. Again: you know exactly where they're coming from.

This is maybe why I thought it was a sign of progress at the Times when Bill Keller said in the pages of the paper that, yes, America's leading daily has a slight liberal bias — whatever that is. Something else tells me that impartial television networks simply aren't possible. And even if they were, that network would never meet the entertainment criterion anyway.

The Case Against Literary Attire

Apparently book-themed tee shirts have become a kind of fashion statement. Peter Enzinna rebels against this latest development in the sartorial-literary worlds, and the website, Meanfellas, which is making it happen:

The site, purveyor of “Quality Profanity T-Shirts,” offers shirts emblazoned with literary references of varying subtlety. These include advertisements for products such as Soma, the wonder drug from Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” and companies like Calpurnia’s Cleaning Service, named for the housekeeper in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The selection of literary references ranges from Hammett to Hornby ti Hemingway, all across the taste spectrum. “Hey,” they say, to anyone in the room who picks up the allusion, “want to get coffee with somebody who knows the names of several characters from ‘A Farewell to Arms?’”

Because one thing is common through all the designs: If you haven’t read the books referenced, or at least sat through a lecture on them, you won’t understand. And that’s the problem with literary gear in general, writ rather large. As loath as we are to use this word, it’s pretentious: It takes on pretense a certain knowledge, a certain set of tastes, and is presumably shocked when that pretense is proved false. It’s like a secret handshake that you’re making with everyone who comes into contact with your spiffy new shirt, and you’re walking along laughing at everyone for not knowing every step. We must draw the line somewhere, right? What's next, ties adorned with the original text of "The Epic of Gilgamesh?" Boxers featuring the work of Chaucer?

The title of the post is too good: "Oh boy, you probably think you're very clever, with that literary T-shirt and all."

Animal Activism versus Science

The terror tactics of animal rights activists are driving staff out of laboratories:

One female Harlan worker told the Observer: "When you arrived in the morning, you would have to queue for up to five minutes to get through the gates. Their loudhailers were deafening. They would scream at you that you were a puppy killer and would bang on your car. It was horrible. I was left shaking for hours afterwards." A male colleague was equally affected: "It is part of their methodology to equate animal work with paedophilia. If they find out your name, you will appear on their website as a paedophile. It is disgusting." Another Harlan worker found out that his neighbours had all been sent notes claiming that he was a rapist.

Olympic Whining

It's not entirely without reason. Take a look at the following clip, in which NBC broadcasts a spoiler for their own coverage of Missy Franklin's dramatic race:


James Wolcott hates it:

Each Olympics there are a hailstorm of criticisms in the opening days and by the end we're all gripped. The problem this go-round is that with social media (Twitter, Facebook, barbershops, nail salons) the negativity reaches critical mass in no time, like a worldwide premature ejaculation, and a droning bore. I'm bored with my own objections to the Olympics coverage, so imagine how bored I am hearing yours.

Kevin Drum is similarly annoyed.

The "Social" Assumption

The employees of social media companies are mostly concerned with making sure that our friends are involved with as many things in our lives as possible. All of a sudden, there's this strange assumption that we'll actually be interested in sharing the most trivial, banal, and boring parts of our day. Quite wrongly, companies like Facebook assume that everything is better if it's social. The company itself said in a recent earnings hearing:

We believe one of the biggest opportunities we have is to create the identity and social layers that all new apps and websites can be built on top of. We think almost every product is better when you can experience it with the people you care about so over time we expect almost all of these products should naturally become social.

Alexis Madrigal thinks Facebook is wrong:

Whether or not you think almost every product -- TVs, cars, pets, refrigerators, running shoes -- is better when it's "social," will probably determine your gut feeling about Facebook's long-term prospects.

An American in Jerusalem

After the embarrassing shambles that was the London leg of Romney's foreign excursion, Israel must feel like a breath of fresh air. It's the sort of space Romney inhabits comfortably: the phrases he needs are easy to pre-formulate, and the requisite Zionism is a comfortable ideology for him.

Iran is the most pressing issue for Israel at the moment, so Romney takes the opportunity to express some friendly diplomatic solidarity, saying that as president his "highest national security priority" would be to prevent the Islamic Republic from obtaining nuclear weapons. "We must not delude ourselves into thinking that containment is an option," he told the audience, which included a large contingent of American donors who flew into Jerusalem specifically for the speech.

One of the things that immediately stands out here is that Romney's position is not all that dissimilar to Obama's. (Actually, that's true of all their foreign policy.) Apart from Obama's desire for an eventual end to nuclear weapons, it's just in the rhetoric that distinctions can be made. The material policy differences between the two are non-substantial, despite Romney's insistence that he'll take a firmer stance. Obama, though there is much room for criticism, has for most of his presidency delivered an impressive slew of foreign policy victories for the United States. His performance would suggest that the "style over substance" criticism levelled against him during the campaign was either wrong entirely, or at least premature. What Romney will do when his grandiose promises need to translate into real-world action, however, is a subject of considerable doubt.

And then there's this:

Among those who flew here for the event, were the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who has vowed to spend $100 million this political season to defeat President Obama and who wore a pin that said “Romney” in Hebrew letters.

Adelson's kind of big political money most concerning because it has a tightly structured political agenda as its sole motivation. Charles Koch and others might wield their own dangerous (and entirely bought) influence in American politics, none has quite the same singularity with regard to policy goals. Sheldon Adelson's sole concern is Israel, and even though Romney has repeatedly advocated a middle-line 'two-state' solution for the Israeli occupation of Palestine (a view not consistent with his own), Mitt happens to be his best shot.

The distinguishing characteristic here is of course Adelson's Zionism. His belief in Israel itself is galvanised with zeal, and wholly set upon realising the promise of messianic superstition. When he reflected on his service in the military, one of his more memorable comments was that "unfortunately" it was in an American uniform, not an Israeli one. Adelson said he and his wife "care about is being good Zionists, being good citizens of Israel, because even though I am not Israeli born, Israel is in my heart."

Juan Cole calls the sugardaddy relationship distasteful:

It is distasteful that Romney is clearly holding the event in some large part to please casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who first bankrolled Newt Gingrich and now is talking about giving $100 million to elect Romney. Adelson is a huge supporter of far rightwing Likud Party Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and published a free newspaper in Israel to support all things Bibi all the time. Adelson is under investigation for allegedly bribing Chinese officials in Macau in reference to his casino empire there. Since Adelson is potentially an agent of Chinese influence and is a partisan of one of Israel’s most rightwing parties, Romney’s indebtedness to him is disturbing.

Cole also suggests that Romney might like to visit a Palestinian refugee camp so that he can really grasp the crux of the dispute, rather than hobnobbing with the uber-rich in Jerusalem. Courting Israel is one thing, but Adelson is the problem figure. It seems likely that he will be the top individual donor in this election, and it may have occurred to you that all those monetary favours without some kind of political reciprocation. This is what happens when we have a system which allows billionaires to buy policy: people like Adelson do it on a massive scale.

(Image: Reuters)

The Harm of Teaching Algebra

Andrew Hacker presents a case against high school mathematics:

Of all who embark on higher education, only 58 percent end up with bachelor’s degrees. The main impediment to graduation: freshman math. The City University of New York, where I have taught since 1971, found that 57 percent of its students didn’t pass its mandated algebra course. The depressing conclusion of a faculty report: “failing math at all levels affects retention more than any other academic factor.”

He doesn't argue that we remove maths from the curriculum, but instead replace it with a kind of mathematics that is more practical, and more interesting. James Joyner occupies a middle ground on the issue:

Fear of Information Overload Is Not New

It's actually really old:

We might feel overwhelmed, occasionally or often, by all the stuff that is out there -- by the trove of global knowledge so vast that it would seem to defy comprehensibility, let alone comprehension. In all that, however, we are in good company with humans of prior generations. As early as 1550, the Italian writer Anton Francesco Doni was complaining that there were "so many books that we do not even have time to read the titles." The 17th century's Comenius referred to granditas librorum -- the "vast quantity of books" -- and Basnage to the "flood." Gesner, writing not too long after the printing press was invented, bemoaned the "confused and irritating multitude of books."

In 1821, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote the essay In Defence of Poetry, in which he famously declared that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators" of the world. He began it thusly: "We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies." Information overload, or rather the fear of it, is not a new phenomenon.

We have for centuries been concerned about the insurmountable volume of information in the world. Being only able to digest a fraction of the world's texts in a single lifetime is not a new dilemma. In the early days of the internet (I mean the late nineties, when newspapers were still publishing their daily editions between two and three in the morning) it really might have been possible for one person to read everything. Now of course the rate of information production and distribution has been augmented dramatically. Any such ambition would be laughable; just as laughable as the idea that one person could read every book in the world in the nineteenth century. We live in times overloaded with information, yes — but this feeling we have of too much information? It's not peculiar to our time.

What We Really Think of Rhythmic Gymnastics

Brian Phillips says we actually kind of like it, but the gender thing gets in the way:

RG is often not just girly, it's aggressively, in-your-face girly; it's an h-bomb of girliness.4 Looking at the overall culture of the sport, you sometimes get an impression of an ancient, complex civilization made up entirely of 12-year-olds named Bethany. The core aesthetic of RG is … well, there are leotards on which the sequins have sequins. There are pinks that cut your brain. Words like "butterfly princess" and "Euro Disney halftime show" and "the crime scene after the Easter bunny is beaten to death with a vintage Patrick Nagel print" flutter into the mind. If you're a fan who's got the least bit of insecurity about the sports you are watching, it is really, really easy to feel like, OK, at least pro wrestling involves smashing things. It is really, really easy not to give RG a chance.

How Does the Death Penalty Differ From Drone Strikes?

The Obama administration's targeted killing program is just capital punishment in its swiftest, most efficient form:

So America today summarily kills citizens it believes are terrorists who are fomenting violence. And it provides citizens charged domestically with actual violence with a lawyer and a trial and appellate rights. As the drone program rolls on, as "targeted killing" becomes more fundamentally a part of the military's arsenal, you can almost hear the question posed from sea to shining sea: if we can whack a citizen like Al-Aulaqi without so much as a moment's notice, then why do we have to give so much due process to killers like Timothy McVeigh or Ted Kaczynski?

Furthermore:

I believe that the Administration's targeted killing program is constitutional -- and would be found so if the matter ever gets to the United States Supreme Court. But I also believe that, as a form of capital punishment, one which already has been imposed without meaningful due process upon U.S. citizens, the Obama Administration has violated its moral, political and legal obligations to fully explain the justifications for the use of drone strikes.

Previous post on the lethal presidency here.

Does Romney Belong to a Cult? Ctd

This documentary, "The Mormon Candidate," recently aired on the BBC. It's far from nonpartisan, but if you skip to about 43 minutes in, it deals with the idea of religion as an off-limits topic, not to be discussed in politics.

Bloomberg's Fizzy Math

The scientific rationale for the soft-drink regulation is questionable:

For one, the justification for the proposed rule appears to rest largely on a claim that Americans are obese because we “consume 200-300 more calories daily than 30 years ago, with the largest single increase due to sugary drinks.” But nothing in the one citation on which that claim is based, a 2005 article in the Annual Review of Public Health, directly supports this bold claim. Rather, the authors of that study looked at the results of five earlier studies that showed “caloric intake rose by roughly 12% (300 calories per day) between 1985 and 2000, mainly because of increased consumption of grains, added fats, and added sugars.”

The study can be found here.

When Peer-Review Fails

The peer review process showed flaws of its own when it failed to detect "significant, disqualifying" problems in a study which raised doubts about the parenting abilities of gay couples, according to a highly critical audit. Darren E. Sherkat, a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondalem, was tasked with examining the study's flaws:

Among the problems Sherkat identified is the paper’s definition of “lesbian mothers” and “gay fathers”—an aspect that has been the focus of much of the public criticism. A woman could be identified as a “lesbian mother” in the study if she had had a relationship with another woman at any point after having a child, regardless of the brevity of that relationship and whether or not the two women raised the child as a couple. Sherkat said that fact alone in the paper should have “disqualified it immediately” from being considered for publication.

The Week in Review

Monday on the Report, we covered the death of the radical journalist Alexander Cockburn, and discussed his complex rivalry with Christopher Hitchens, to whom he has always been compared, even in obituaries. The peacock's tail is beautiful and decorative for biological, Darwinian reasons, even though Darwin himself was obsessed and confused by the feature. We found that America is a violent country, but not quite as violent as it used to be, and that Americans are generally more concerned about obesity than smoking. In response, I presented a case against strident anti-smoking messages such as the ones produced in New Zealand.

Also on Monday, we examined the political implications of a Romney tax return release and asked why Romney is so difficult to like — and why that might be a good thing. We also linked to an essayistic history of the Norway massacre, and discussed the IOC's refusal to set aside a minute's silence for the victims of the Munich massacre. In other news, semicolons are still difficult, and the science of immortality is not really considered science yet. We took a brief look at the speculation about post-United States Afghanistan, including the role militias may play in the outbreak of civil war. And of course we celebrated Rush Limbaugh's oh-so-sound logic on the Aurora shootings. Please note: Bird watchers are annoying, and songs for Mitt Romney have a kind of hathos effect. Finally on Monday, we considered the then-proposal to pull down the statue of Joe Paterno.

On Tuesday, we echoed David Carr's question regarding what Yahoo actually is, and wondered whether the boy-band One Direction played any role in redefining masculinity. I concluded not only that they were not, but that no such redefinition was taking place. We took a brief look at the neuroscience of hoarding, and the Endowment Effect that causes people to think more of their possessions than perhaps they should. Michele Bachmann's bizarre Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy theory was dismissed as delusional, and so was the idea that Walter Cronkite had been responsible for elevating the integrity of American journalism.

Wednesday began with a continuation of our discussion on the need for commemoration of the Munich massacre. We briefly looked at Angelica Dass' effort to collect and categorise human skin tones, and at the increasingly common trend of outing rapists online. There's a case to be made for the grand statement that Malcolm Gladwell caused Lehman Brothers to fail, and no case to be made for the existence of God based on how beautiful the world is. We applauded the Pentagon's decision to allow uniformed service members to take part in gay pride parades, and at the same time denounced the Boy Scouts' strange decision to ban gay people. The more obsessive the coverage in the event of shootings, the more likely another shooting becomes. We need a different kind of media attention when people are killed by a gunman. Fake artworks can be masterpieces, too. 

I asked whether Romney belonged to a cult, and explored the questionable history of Mormonism. The conclusion? Someone should ask Mitt Romney what it felt like to be a member of an officially racist organisation.

Romney's Gaffes Aren't Gaffes

They're just an expression of his true worldview:

These sorts of trips, Krauthammer said on Fox News Thursday night, are easy. You express solidarity with the allies, listen, nod your head, and say nice things or nothing at all. Instead, Romney questioned his hosts’ ability to run the Olympics, raised doubts about Londoners’ community spirit, and violated protocol by publicly mentioning a meeting with the head of MI-6. “It’s unbelievable, it’s beyond human understanding, it’s incomprehensible,” Krauthammer, normally a paragon of self-confidence, sputtered. “I’m out of adjectives … I don’t get it.” The thing that Krauthammer doesn’t get is that Romney is not the sort of businessman—that his brand of capitalism is not the sort of enterprise—that requires even the most elementary understanding of diplomacy, courtesy, or sensitivity to other people’s values, lives, or perceptions.

Meanwhile, John Cassidy says that the whole affair is a reminder of why the Romney campaign keeps such a tight rein on their candidate. He simply doesn't have the prudence of a polished, experienced politician:

Prick the Bubbles, Pass the Mantle

"There are an awful lot of bubble reputations floating around," Christopher Hitchens once told Brian Lamb. "One wouldn’t be doing one’s job if one didn’t itch to prick." That was some time before he rose to his eventual prominence, but it was a bubble-pricking habit that took him from the pages of the left-leaning Nation to the glossy pages of Graydon Carter's Vanity Fair. He was a famous, or infamous, pricker of so many bubbles — Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, and, most notably, God himself — and of bubbles with such shining reputations that it earned him a reputation as a latter-day sacred cow slaughterer. When interviewing Hitchens for Newsnight, Paxman said of his interviewee that no matter how tough the hide, "if he wants to he'll sting it." Seems like an accurate assessment.

One of Hitchens idols, though he professed not to keep any, was George Orwell. Anthony Lock makes the case for Hitchens (one of my own 'idols') as Orwell's successor:

Hitchens was known to dismiss claims to Orwell’s mantle by listing Orwell’s struggles both in life and as a writer, claiming no desire for either. Nevertheless, it seems that he was incredibly happy to receive such a comparison, and his love of Orwell was so strong that it would be dippy to say that he wouldn’t have felt some verisimilitude for such a title. But his personal concerns about “being one’s own thinker,” and even humbleness when comparing himself to Orwell would have been fighting with him on this. Still, Hitchens deserves the mantle of Orwell simply because his contributions to thought have been the most Orwellian since Orwell. There are many who have employed the blueprints Orwell gave us, but the simple practicality of Hitchens’ “pricking bubbles” principle, whether it be applied by voters, politicians, academics, or bon mot-spilling essayists, is one everyone, everywhere needs to know dearly.

(Image: Charlie Hopkinson)

"I Really Resent You Using the Word 'Torture'"

Amy Davidson has posted a transcript from an interview she conducted with Jose Rodriguez, who spent more than thirty years at the CIA, eventually becoming an instrumental player in instituting some of the United States' most notorious counter-terrorism methods. As it happens, Rodriguez wrote a book about his career, called "Hard Measures", in which he defends his agency's 'agressive' interrogation techniques and tries to explain how it might have saved American lives. Like all of those associated with the shameful campaign of torture, he still refuses to characterise waterboarding and other practices as such, and even expresses a slightly measure of pride at having administered them.

The techniques we employed were sometimes harsh," he told Davidson, "but fell well short of what is torture." Even a cursory examination of some of those measures would reveal both 'techniques' and 'harsh' to be euphemisms almost as laughable as the enhanced/aggressive interrogation line.

Everybody is free to devise their own definition of torture, but the general perception surely has to stand; in other words, that if most people agree that a practice constitutes torture or resembles it, then it should be considered such.

And yet the euphemisms are still making themselves unabashedly open for business. The problem for us is that most of them aren't obviously bullshit until you consider the precise nature of the torture. Everybody's heard of waterboarding, and most people will have at least a vague idea of what is involved in the ghastly procedure. And yet people say that it "simulates" drowning. Even for mainstream media outlets — only some of whom are finally confident to employ the T word in their reporting — it's still a simulation, when in fact it is no such thing. The person being tortured is being drowned, only the process has been deliberately prolonged so that maximum suffering can be achieved; so that the optimum amount of pain can be inflicted on the victim.

If that isn't torture, as the line invariably goes, I don't know what is.

Image of the Day

British actor Rowan Atkinson in his role as Mr Bean, taking part in a performance of Chariots of Fire for the London 2012 Opening Ceremony. While Atkinson played the keyboard, Sir Simon Rattle conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a tribute to the film. (Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

Why the Two-State Solution Won't Die

One of five reasons:

Not that it's problem- or risk-free. But the other alternatives -- the one state illusion, the Jordan option, Israel's annexation, and the status quo option -- are much worse. Whether it's just as a talking point or an actual initiative, the two-state paradigm is here to stay.

Does Money Make People Write Better?

Tim Parks, in the high-paying NYRB, writes that the relationship between money and art is a fraught one:

Clearly we are far away from the minor Renaissance painter who coolly calibrates his efforts in relation to price, unflustered by concerns about his self-image or reputation in centuries to come. In his masterpiece Jakob von Gunten, Robert Walser has his young alter ego commiserate with his artist brother and question how a person can ever be at ease if his or her mental well-being depends on the critical judgment of others. Paradoxically, then, almost the worst thing that can happen to writers, at least if it’s the quality of their work we’re thinking about, is to receive, immediately, all the money and recognition they want.

What about big book deals? Claire Kelley surveys the state of million-dollar book contracts.

James Joyce's Oscar Wilde

From Gordon Bowker's new biography of James Joyce, there's this fascinating excerpt on his distant admiration of Oscar Wilde:

[The Italian newspaper] Piccolo commissioned an article from him on the playwright and he produced an essay which said almost as much about himself as about Wilde. He began by reflecting on the name, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, which implied descent from Fingal, King of the ferocious O'Flahertie clan. "Like that savage tribe, he was to break the lance of his fluent paradoxes against the body of practical conventions, and to hear, as a dishonoured exile, the choir of the just recite his name together with that of the unclean." The sentence rings strangely prophetic of Joyce himself — the exile already regarded as suspicious and morally tainted by many conventional Dubliners. Wilde, he wrote, again sounding strangely self-referential, "grew up in an atmosphere of insecurity and prodigality." He then got in a shot at the rabblement who threw stones at Wilde, quoting his comment in "The Picture of Dorian Gray" that the sins we perceive in Dorian are our own. Finally he lamented a life which ended not only in public disgrace but with Wilde's conversion. He could identify with a genius betrayed; it was the prospect of grovelling recantation that he himself was determined to avoid.

Apparently Joyce became to engaged in Wilde's work that he wrote to his literary executor to ask permission for a translation of "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" into Italian. Evidently, no Italian publisher was as interested in the essay as Joyce was, and his appeal for a translation was rejected.

Another recent article on James Joyce here.

Ultrasounds and Informed Consent

What pro-life advocates argue is required for informed consent, Evan Selinger says, actually constitutes an "inadvertent exploitation of patients’ natural human weaknesses and cognitive tendencies":

In cases where advocates pushed for mandatory ultrasound, proponents insisted that women considering abortion should be subject to robust informed consent policy. From this perspective, ultrasound technology looks like a perfect tool for ensuring women understand the profound ramifications of using surgery to terminate a pregnancy. Unfortunately, discussions of what ultrasound images reveal isn’t limited to objective medical facts....We weren’t just given a frameable copy of an ultrasound image to proudly display. We also received a videotape of moving ultrasound imagery. It was edited to include a superimposed caption on top of the “baby” who cartoonishly states, “Hi mom and dad. See you soon!” Conditioned by this experience, when we returned home and momentarily lost sight of the still image, my wife panicked and exclaimed, “Oh no. We’ve lost our daughter!”

I would generally consider myself to be pro-choice, but in my case it's a slightly squeamish 'pro'. And unlike Selinger, I find it really hard to see the unborn child as a mere fetus. The notion of the unborn child is a real one for me, and the dismissive undertone of the inverted commas around 'baby' suggests a lack of appreciation for the child's human properties. But I also recognise that there may be situations in which it is undesirable for the mother to carry her baby till full-term, and strongly advocate the option for termination of pregnancy where there is a verifiable risk to the mother's health.

When we get to the idea of informed consent, it seems undeniable that the 'informed' part plays to the cognitive tendencies of the parents. Not only undeniable, but almost inevitable. I don't have any problem with using the word 'baby' — since the terminology of informed consent appears to comprise the bulk of the author's argument — and consider the substitution of the word for any other to be de-humanizing in nature. But I also happen to be confident that this information, with the correct terminology, can be provided without appealing to the fragile emotions of parents, and can be conveyed in an objective manner that informs without intent to convince either way.

Required Listening

"Unless You Speak From Your Heart," by Porcelain Raft. Music archive here.

Why Are We Debating Gun Control?

Dan Baum, in Harper's, points out that here was no gun control debate sparked by the Norway massacre:

Compare that to the coverage and conversation after Anders Behring Breivik murdered sixty-nine people on the island of Utøya in Norway, a year ago next Sunday. Nobody focused on the gun. I had a hard time learning from the news reports what type of gun he used. Nobody asked, “How did he get a gun?” That seemed strange, because it’s much harder to get a gun in Europe than it is here. But everybody, even the American media, seemed to understand that the heart of the Utøya massacre story was a tragically deranged man, not the rifle he fired. Instead of wringing their hands over the gun Breivik used, Norwegians saw the tragedy as the opening to a conversation about the rise of right-wing extremism in their country.

All Aurora coverage collected here.

Persecuting the Press Diminishes Us All

Nick Cohen has balked at the arrest of the journalist Rhodri Phillips, who worked for Rupert Murdoch's Sun, as part of the Elveden bribes enquiry. Cohen argues that if it had happened to a journalist in any far-flung country, or even to a journalist from another, more respectable newspaper, there would have been outrage. But Phillips worked for Murdoch, so nobody gives a damn. He also mentions the ban of a BBC documentary on last year's London riots:

Even though the BBC had not discussed the guilt or innocence of the defendants, they had, for example, described how "adrenaline rushes" had powered rioters in London. Prosecutors had said the same about the alleged Birmingham murderers. The BBC had talked about bricks being thrown at cars and rioters seeking to attack the people who threw them. As had the prosecution. There is "a serious risk that this trial and the course of justice would be prejudiced," the judge intoned as he ordered suppression.

I am sorry if I am labouring the obvious, but any portrayal of any riot would discuss adrenaline rushes, stone throwing and retribution, for that is what a riot is. The BBC will be able to show its films at some future date, but the courts have set a menacing precedent. They can now censor with abandon and show a true contempt for the public as they do it. The notion that juries are intelligent and conscientious enough to put aside what they have seen on television or found on the web does not occur to learned judges. They want to ban everything even though complete control in the age of Google is the illusion of fools.

Boris and Romney

The way this London trip has worked out is simply too funny:

Does America Have a Responsibility to Stop Mass Killings?

Yes and no, but ultimately, as Friedersdorf points out, the decision is up to Congress:

I think it's Congress that should decide whether America has a "responsibility to protect" in a given instance. That is partly because I am a stickler for acting in accordance with the Constitution, a rare quality these days. But it's also because, like the Founders, I believe that presidents would be too inclined to start wars if given the prerogative; that the most legitimate way to decide if it's justified to use American resources when our national security interests aren't at stake is to put the question before the representatives of the people; and because the legislative branch is less likely than the executive to misrepresent facts on the ground in a target country.

(This is in response to a panel discussion in Aspen that included Jeffrey Goldberg and Anne-Marie Slaughter.)

Romney's Visit to the "Nation of Great Britain"

That was actually the phrase the GOP nominee used for the name of his host. Of course, no such nation exists (it's the United Kingdom), but never mind. And that was one of his minor incidents. As far as I've been able to tell, according the reports of the mainstream media, this foreign tour was intended to reaffirm Anglo-American chumminess, or some such thing, complete with meetings with Cameron and Miliband and all the rest. There was a faux pas here and there, of course, as one would expect. But there were also slightly more disturbing comments about London's staging of the Olympics.

His was actually meant to be about seeing the Games, but he's generating headlines of a slightly different kind. The situation's all rather entertaining, naturally, since Romney oversaw the Olympics in Salt Lake City, and must be brimming with an arrogance that comes from thinking he's perfectly versed in the challenges of mounting an international on an Olympic scale.

This made me chuckle — a lot:

“There are a few things that were disconcerting, the stories about the private security firm not having enough people, the supposed strike of the immigration and customs officials, that obviously is not something which is encouraging,” Mr. Romney said in an interview with NBC on Wednesday.

That brought a tart rejoinder from Mr. Cameron: “We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world. Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.” The allusion was to Salt Lake City, which hosted the Games that Mr. Romney oversaw in 2002.

The truth is, Mitt Romney doesn't really like Britain. In his book No Apology, he said that England was basically just a small island that made things nobody wants to buy. (At least he got its name right that time, though.) He just doesn't really get the English, it would seem, as this Telegraph columnist points out:

But his comments to NBC, particularly his doubts about Britons’ ability to celebrate the games, showed how poorly he understands the land of his forefathers. If he possessed a smidgeon of insight into the British psyche he would have known that despite all the pre-match whingeing and the carping, that on the night we will celebrate the games with all the gusto and fervour they deserve. We moan, and then we smile; that is just our way.

One nice thing came out of the whole affair, however, and that was that David Cameron has reaffirmed his support for gay marriage. At least the Tories are making progress in that area. As for that Mitt Romney fellow — have you heard? That guy wants to be president.

(Image: "Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for the USA presidential election, leaves 10 Downing Street after meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron on July 26, 2012 in London, England. Mitt Romney is meeting various leaders, past and present, on his visit to the UK, including Tony Blair, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg." Peter Macdiarmid/Getty)

Veepstakes: The Politics of Boring

Mitt Romney needs to walk a fine line between being safe and being boring in his choice of a running mate:

As the shrouded vice-presidential selection comes down to the wire — and amid some signs that the choice could come sooner rather than later — the court of Republican opinion seems to be swinging back toward the notion that a little bit boring may be the right play in a close election in which the challenger can’t afford any mistakes or unscripted drama.

Quote of the Day

"Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to mike land originally.

"Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came." — Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice Part III (here likened by one smart redditor to Obama's "you didn't build that" speech)

David Frum and His Detractors

From Mark Oppenheimer's profile of the columnist in The Nation:

The Astronaut Bride

It's a fairly simple fact, but one that has received little attention and merits much more: the first American woman in space, the late Sally Ride, was gay. Her 1982 marriage is covered in the endnote to the Times obituary with an a strange kind of terseness:

Dr. Ride is survived by her partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy; her mother, Joyce; and her sister, Ms. Scott, who is known as Bear. (Dr. O’Shaughnessy is chief operating officer of Dr. Ride’s company.)

Brushing over the fact like that has led some to suspect that the relationship was taken less seriously by the mainstream media because it was homosexual. Andrew Sullivan had a bone to pick with the newspaper over its inability to confidently confront the fact in the main body of the obituary, and a number of others expressed a similar sentiment. Sullivan wrote:

Now talk about a buried lede! The only thing preventing the NYT from writing an honest obit is homophobia. They may not realize it; they may not mean it; but it is absolutely clear from the obit that Ride's sexual orientation was obviously central to her life. And her "partner" (ghastly word) and their relationship is recorded only perfunctorily. The NYT does not routinely only mention someone's spouse in the survivors section. When you have lived with someone for 27 years, some account of that relationship is surely central to that person's life.

While we're on the subject, 'partner' really is a ghastly word, isn't it? I mean: to anyone who thinks that the semantics of marriage don't matter — that 'civil union' is a perfectly acceptable substitute — should consider how dismissive that sounds. How condescending. The word itself implies that those to whom it is ascribed belong to second class of relationship, and a second class of marriage — and surely, then, a second class of love altogether.

I wouldn't go nearly as far as Sullivan has in calling out the NYT on homophobia. And I certainly wouldn't want them to parade her sexuality around as though being the first lesbian in space is somehow an achievement. But it does make me grind my teeth to see a basic fact so blatantly and carelessly ignored.

(Image via Engadget)

America Is a Violent Country, Ctd

Steven Pinker explored the overall decline in violence in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. He gave an interview last year to Reason. Money quote:

Just a couple of centuries ago, violence was pervasive. Slavery was widespread; wife and child beating an acceptable practice; heretics and witches burned at the stake; pogroms and race riots common, and warfare nearly constant. Public hangings, bear-baiting, and even cat burning were popular forms of entertainment. By examining collections of ancient skeletons and scrutinizing current day tribal societies, anthropologists have found that people were nine times more likely to be killed in tribal warfare than to die of war and genocide in even the war-torn 20th century. The murder rate in medieval Europe was 30 times higher than today. What happened?

Post on the decline of violence in America here.

Is Honesty Overrated?

Lee Periman touches upon the question:

Since Nietzsche, the choice of which version of ourselves we identify with has been widely understood as a choice between lying and truth-telling — to ourselves as much as to others. The moral ideal has become authenticity — a particular kind of honesty. Of course, just about any philosophical ideal is grounded in some sort of honesty: the search for Truth requires truth. Yet Aristotle describes honesty as a virtue only of self-presentation — the balance between self-deprecation and boastfulness. And Plato never lists honesty as a virtue at all, and even distinguishes between “true lies” and useful or noble lies. From the modern to the post-modern era, honesty and authenticity shifted to become much of the telos of life, where before they had been but means in our progress toward that end.

Bad Taste Alert

The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto has something provocative (or rather, something 'WTF' worthy) to say about the Aurora shootings:

I hope the girls whose boyfriends died to save them were worthy of the sacrifice.
— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) July 25, 2012

Dan Amira says it's a pointless thought:

It's an odd question — were they worthy? — because they were clearly worthy to the boyfriends who died saving them. That's all that matters. Whether they are good people who donate money to charity or volunteer at homeless shelters, or whatever else Taranto has in mind when he uses the word worthy, seems irrelevant.

But it's okay, of course. He says he's sorry.

Penn State's Vacated Victories

On Monday, the NCAA made what can only be described as a strange decision. It determined that all of Penn State's on-field victories from 1998 until 2012 were to be erased, or 'vacated', thus stripping Joe Paterno of his coaching record. Gary Alan Fine senses an Orwellian kind of madness to the decision, the kind that only comes when someone attempts to edit history:

The more significant question is whether rewriting history is the proper answer. And while this is not the first time that game outcomes have been vacated, changing 14 seasons of football history is a unique and disquieting response. We learn bad things about people all the time, but should we change our history? Should we, like Orwell’s totalitarian Oceania, have a Ministry of Truth that has the authority to scrub the past? Should our newspapers have to change their back files? And how far should we go? Should we review Babe Ruth’s records? Or O. J. Simpson’s? Should a disgraced senator have her votes vacated? Perhaps we should claim that Joe McCarthy actually lost his elections. Or give victory to John Edwards’s opponent?

Previous coverage of Penn State here.

(Image: "The now empty Joe Paterno statue site outside Beaver Stadium at Penn State University in State College. The university announced Sunday that it was taking down the monument." Paul Chaplin, via The Patriot-News)

Against Liberalism

After falling out of favor with those on the Left over the circumcision debate, Giles Fraser explains why he doesn't consider himself a liberal:

All of which presents an opportunity to clear the decks and say why I am not a liberal. No, I'm not a conservative either. I'm a communitarian. Blue labour, if you like. But certainly not a liberal. What I take to be the essence of liberalism is a belief that individual freedom and personal autonomy are the fundamental moral goods. But I don't buy this. What we need is a much more robust commitment to the common good, to the priority of community. It is intellectual laziness and a form of cheating to think we can always have both.

Norman Geras doesn't buy it:

He either doesn't know what he's saying or else he's underwriting a sinister form of precedence that could be used to justify any form of trampling on the interests of human individuals. For, unless one recognizes that individual freedom, personal autonomy, more generally, the fundamental needs and interests of individual persons, are themselves the proper and original source for conceiving any type of 'common good', one leaves no restraints upon what the common good may be said to be. 

Does Romney Belong to a Cult?

I'm just going to say it: Romney's Mormonism is a serious problem. In general, I don't subscribe to the view that a candidate's religious views are somehow off-limits for political discussion. Ask anyone with any knowledge on the matter, and they'll tell you that a Mormon is Romney: like most people who can somehow summon faith into their lives, his faith has assumed a kind of centrality. So therefore it would be foolish as a discerning observer not to question the influence his religious convictions may have in shaping his time in office, should he be granted it.

It would be silly to think that the Mormon thing will get out of Romney's way if he were to become president. He is, after all, pretty serious about the church:

In Mitt Romney’s case, not only is he a privately devout Mormon, he has donated millions of dollars to his church and once served as a bishop in the Boston ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is reasonable to conclude, then, that his Mormon faith will inform the decisions he makes if he becomes president, even if he is reluctant to openly discuss it.

To compare, in Obama's case, his religion informs his moral and ethical decisions, no doubt, but not his politics.

The American Right too often makes it seem as though God and government are inseparable, and while these two things needn't necessarily connect, the thrust of Mormonism as an issue (and it is an issue, believe me) into the race makes the unholy marriage of religion and politics in the United States more troubling still. To have a serious Mormon contender for the White House would have been wholly unthinkable not all that long ago. (Still, a black president was never considered a likely prospect before 2008, either.) And yet here we are.

I have little clue as to whether 'cult' is an appropriate description of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as Robert Jeffress has insisted. Nor am I entirely sure where the line between religion and a cult should be drawn.

Who am I to judge? Who is to say that the interpretation of history preached from the LDS pulpit is any more ridiculous or laughable than those of, say, the Catholic Church? That is, the Rome-based institution of which I am, by no choice of my own, a member. Is that not just slightly cultic? Will Jesus Christ return — don't laugh — in Missouri rather than Israel, as the Mormon faithful are told to believe with all their heart and soul? I wouldn't bet on either outcome as likely, but I think you get my point.

When it comes down to a simple matter of distinction between a cult and a religion, things can get hazier than you might expect. There are cult-like properties in every religion, but in America's very own homegrown religious practice, they seem almost too good, too clichéd to be true. They have a president, whom they regard as a prophet, and who is steeped in papal infallibility. There's the infamous underwear, to mark them off from the rest of us, as well as the commitment to a puritan rejection of anything remotely indulgent, like alcohol, sex, or caffeine. Sounds fabulous, right? Its members can be ordered to shun those who show signs of losing interest, and it is believed that the church can be even harder to leave than it is to join. How charming.

Some have said that it's this lack of openness that distinguishes Mormonism as a cult. While I don't quite understand the appeal myself, it's encouraging that anyone can wander into a Catholic parish and sit down and feel fairly welcome in the company of its members. We have made a habit of considering religions to be more benign than sinister. But there are exceptions to every rule: for example, only a cretin trembling with fear of retaliation from the deluded would be so generous as to describe Islam as benign.

And then there's this loathsome little nugget: recently Church leaders have taken to amassing the souls of the dead, and performing posthumous conversions. Perhaps you didn't know that the six million victims of the Holocaust are now counted as LDS adherents. What's more, once the ghastly practice had been discovered and condemned by outsiders, there was still a reluctance to stop the divinely-inspired campaign of identity theft.

The crass enterprise inspires a resounding "how dare you?" response. And rightly so.

Faux Masterpieces

The Times interviews a creator of masterful art imitations:

Spreading half a dozen of his Guardi replicas across the living room floor, Mr. Perenyi said he developed his artistic technique on his own and learned the forensics by working for a restorer and a frame maker when he was in his 20s. Through extensive research and trial and error, he figured out how to simulate the telltale signs of age: the distinctive spider-web cracking in the paint, the tiny dots of fly droppings, and the slimy green look of old varnish when viewed under ultraviolet light. One of his best, he says, was a Heade-style passion flower that Sothebys sold as a new discovery in 1994 for $717,500. A copy now hangs over his fireplace.

How Not to Cover a Shooting

J.J. Gould proposes a different kind of coverage in the event of shootings like the one in Aurora:

One way is that, rather than merely adopting a code, and promulgating a norm, about not featuring certain things in their coverage of mass murder, our better media can do what our better media has always done as a matter of vocation: It can go on the attack and shame those responsible for social exploitation -- in this case, their fellow media outlets for their journalistic failures in covering stories like the Aurora killings.

And on the subject of politicization, Max Read says there's no such thing:

James Holmes did not materialize in a movie theater in Aurora this morning, free of any relationship to law and authority and the structures of power in this country; nor did he exit those relationships and structures by murdering 12 people and injuring several dozen more. Before he entered the theater, he purchased guns, whether legally or illegally, under a framework of laws and regulations governed and negotiated by politics; in the parking lot outside, he was arrested by a police force whose salaries, equipment, tactics and rights were shaped and determined by politics. Holmes' ability to seek, or to not seek, mental health care; the government's ability, or inability, to lock up persons deemed unstable — these are things decided and directed by politics. You cannot "politicize" a tragedy because the tragedy is already political. When you talk about the tragedy you're already talking about politics.

(Video via Helen Lewis)

Progress Here, Regress There

You might recall that the Boy Scouts of America stirred up controversy when they decided to enact a ban on gay people. One of its members, an 18 year-old, explained the initiative: "The vast majority believe that homosexuality is morality wrong. To allow them in would destroy Boy Scout organization." Nice, huh? Conversely, the Pentagon has decided it will allow uniformed military personnel to march in gay pride parades. Andrew Rosenthal applauds:

Such steps, in the direction not of mere tolerance but of acceptance, make the Boy Scouts’ decision to exclude gay members seem all the more ridiculous. If you’re gay, you can serve openly in the military, and march in uniform in San Diego, but you can’t work as a scout leader in your spare time.

I sense something's wrong here.

The Argument from Ugliness

In a nutshell:

he general problem for theistic teleological arguments is that the world is a mixed bag. Yes, there is order, pleasure, goodwill, and beauty aplenty. But there’s also disorder, suffering, hate, and ugliness. Now, if we are reasoning from effects to a cause, then the cause of the mixed-bag universe must be a mixed bag as well. But God can’t be a mixed bag.

Contrary to how it might appear, I don't really pick fights with the religious. (Okay, maybe sometimes.) But it's an activity I recommend highly: it is almost never boring, and never a waste of your time, even though it can be awfully tedious and frustrating. Atheists generally repeat each other in their arguments, because the position is always more or less the same; so even at the risk of being called predictable, we don't mind sounding like broken records. The primary pleasure of debating religion with its most ardent believers is that you never — never — know what they're going to say next.

But there are a couple of things you hear regardless of whom you're debating and when, and one of them is a lengthy oral dissertation on the beauty of the world. They seem to assume that a lack of religious feeling demonstrates a lack of appreciation for nature (what atheist hasn't been asked if they've seen the sky on a clear night?) and that this is somehow a valid argument for the existence of a creator. Neither preposition is true, of course. It obviously hasn't occurred to those who advance an argument for God based on the beauty of His creation that you can't credit the deity with only the beautiful things.

All your work is still ahead of you.

(Image via NASA)

Outing Rapists Online

It's becoming increasingly common, and if it weren't for the ethical issue of making public claims that have not been proven in a court of law, it would work.

Did Malcolm Gladwell Cause Lehman to Fail?

University of San Diego professor Frank Partnoy, in an interview about delaying decision-making, said recently:

I interviewed a number of former senior executives at Lehman Brothers and discovered a remarkable story. Lehman Brothers had arranged for a decision-making class in the fall of 2005 for its senior executives. It brought four dozen executives to the Palace Hotel on Madison Avenue and brought in leading decision researchers, including Max Bazerman from Harvard and Mahzarin Banaji, a well-known psychologist. For the capstone lecture, they brought in Malcolm Gladwell, who had just published Blink, a book that speaks to the benefits of making instantaneous decisions and that Gladwell sums up as “a book about those first two seconds.” Lehman’s president Joe Gregory embraced this notion of going with your gut and deciding quickly, and he passed copies of Blink out on the trading floor.

The executives took this class and then hurriedly marched back to their headquarters and proceeded to make the worst snap decisions in the history of financial markets. I wanted to explore what was wrong with that lesson and to create something that would be the course that Wall Street should have taken and hopefully will take.

Felix Salmon wrote to Gladwell to ask him if he thought he had effectively caused the recession. He replied:

What Colour Are You?

Angelica Dass is recording and cataloguing human skin tones and displaying them against Pantone shades in an effort to 'collect' them all:

The goal of the project is to record and catalog every possible human skin tone for posterity. Dass uses an 11 x 11 pixel of each model’s face and assigns the skin tone a Pantone value from it. She then creates a background in that very shade and shoots the subject in front of it. Considering that Pantone is the leading authority on color in the world, the result is a clinical chromatic inventory/art work that shows off how truly colorful we humans can be.

Refusing to Commemorate Munich, Ctd

Despite mounting pressure, the IOC still refuses to set aside a minute's silence for the victims of the Munich massacre. On Monday, I agreed with Tablet's Deborah Lipstadt that the massacre is, fundamentally, a non-political issue and should be commemorated at the 2012 Games, but balked at the accusation of anti-semitism or anti-semitic sentiment. The IOC maintains that it does not wish to involve itself in politics, which seems like a weak excuse. Paul Mirengoff expresses my view better than I could:

Cronkite Syndrome

Conrad Black reviews Douglas Brinkley’s new biography of Walter Cronkite, and takes a dim view of his politics:

Brinkley tells us that “Walter Cronkite forfeited electoral politics to protect the integrity of American journalism.” It is mind-reading to surmise his motives, though premonitions that McGovern was going to run the most disastrous and incompetent campaign in U.S. history may have figured in them. Given his position, he should not have allowed his name to be bandied about as a political candidate. By his endless subtle attacks on the U.S. effort to salvage a non-Communist South Vietnam, Cronkite contributed importantly to the destruction of the integrity of American journalism.

Bachmann Boost

The idiotic conspiracy theory peddling Michele Bachmann has been doing lately is really very her. So I shouldn't be surprised. But I can't help but feel that someone who has risen so high as a politician could be so incapable of rational thought. Her baffling and seemingly unprompted quest to expose Islamic infiltrations in Washington is not only perplexing in how unfounded it is, but how stupid a move it is politically, too. It would seem as though her witch hunt is really only assisting her Democratic opponent:

Graves said he’s seen an “uptick in financial support” on the ground in the 6th District as Bachmann’s quest to rid the federal government of “Islamist” infiltrators has dominated headlines. Many of Bachmann’s fellow Republicans, including her former presidential campaign manager Ed Rollins, have condemned her recent charges, especially the ones aimed at State Department staffer Huma Abedin.

And the other question here is what effect it will have on the Republican establishment. Even they're already getting concerned. Establishment Republicans are making the savvy political decision of distancing themselves publicly from her. Bachmann's dedicated pursuit of this bullshit theory linking a top Clinton aide to the Muslim Brotherhood isn't a positive PR campaign, but when it's put in perspective really only marginally more embarrassing than her ill-fated foray into the science behind vaccination, or her frequently expressed interpretation of history. Sure, it's pretty bad, but I don't think it will have an effect nearly as great as the one Juan Cole is projecting:

Just as Arizona governor Jan Brewer’s campaign against Latinos has helped deprive GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney of support in that community, Bachmann’s targeting of Muslim-Americans and, implicitly, Arab-Americans, could hurt Romney in those communities.

In any case, if her fellow Republicans can avoid becoming tangled in her conspiracy theorizing, then they might be able to avoid becoming tainted by her brush.

Why We Love to Hoard

Tom Stafford says it's often due to what he calls the Endowment Effect:

This might sound like a nonsensical riddle, but if you’ve ever felt overly possessive about your regular parking space, your pen, or your Star Wars box sets, then you’re experiencing some elements behind the psychology of ownership. Our brains tell us that we value something merely because it is a thing we have. This riddle actually describes a phenomenon called the Endowment Effect. The parking space, the pen and the DVDs are probably the same as many others, but they’re special to you. Special because in some way they are yours.

And the fix, apparently, is easy:

Now, knowing the power of the bias, for each item I ask myself a simple question: If I didn’t have this, how much effort would I put in to obtain it? And then more often or not I throw it away, concluding that if I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t want this.

(Video: You might remember the show about compulsive hoarding. If not, it's hugely entertaining.)

One Direction as Role Models

Over at the blog of the Oxford University Press, Mark McCormack seems optimistic about the influence of the boy-band One Direction, who he says are, in a way, redefining masculinity:

One Direction are just one example of a vast number of famous men to embody this softer, more inclusive masculinity. Yet crucially, such behaviors are not limited to celebrity elites. Rather, these men both model and mirror the gendered behaviors of today’s youth. When researching for my latest book, I found that British youth are redefining masculinity for their generation. Undertaking ethnographies of three British high schools and hanging out with the male students, it was evident that the homophobia, violence and emotional illiteracy of the past have vanished for these young men. Toxic behaviors have been replaced with hugging, cuddling, and loving.

Well, that's charming — but not particularly true. The wider implication that we're witnessing a change in the meaning of masculinity is maybe true in media and entertainment, but it would be difficult to argue that such a change has materialized in the real world, too. Also, the post gives the group a little too much credit for whatever it is we're seeing, assuming it's anything at all. The message is still much the same, only with better clothes.

So, What Is Yahoo?

David Carr has a question for newly-appointed Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer:

I’m going to take a whack at it and say that Yahoo is a media company, mostly by accident (more on that in a bit). Yes, its headquarters in Silicon Valley are filled with technologists and have the familiar trappings of a digital enterprise — foosball, anyone? — but for most Americans, Yahoo is where they get news.

In business, people will tell you that everything else is secondary to being first. And Yahoo, despite its tattered reputation, is No. 1 in 10 content categories, according to the measurement service comScore, including news, finance, sports, entertainment and real estate. Yahoo reaches more than 75 percent of the total Internet audience in the United States, with 167.2 million unique users in June. On any given day, 30 million or more people stop by. Globally, about 700 million people visit the site in 30 languages every month.

If you're here, I'm guessing you're not one of them.

Paterno on His Pedestal

Maureen Dowd asks if it would be right to pull down the statue of disgraced Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, in her words, "as though he were Saddam Hussein." She writes:

Paterno is the tragic figure in the case, the man who went to church and taught his players “success with honor,” but succumbed to supporting depravity. His name was derived from the Latin word for father, and JoePa was the beloved paterfamilias of Happy Valley. So how did he crack his moral compass? It’s the story of “Faust,” a morality play that unspools daily in politics, banking, sports and the Catholic Church. It has taken many artistic forms, from puppet theater to the Marlowe and Goethe plays to opera to a buoyant musical that was also a sports morality tale, “Damn Yankees,” about a middle-age real estate agent who sells his soul to be a slugger named “Shoeless Joe” Hardy for the Washington Senators.

Though some of the columns caused a little controversy, I actually thought Dowd's reporting from the Sandusky trial was excellent — not everyone agreed. On the question of whether or not the statue should be removed, she's a little clearer. "If I were the Decider, I’d leave it up," she wrote. "But I’d put up another darkly alluring statue behind Paterno, whispering in his ear: Mephistopheles."

(Image: "With Joe Paterno's statue in the foreground, a plane dragging a banner that said "take the statue down or we will" circled Beaver Stadium for about 3 hours." Photo by Michael Bryant)

A Song for Mitt Romney

Actually, I take back all those thing about Romney's supporters not being enthusiastic:

Bird-Watchers Are Annoying

Or at least Laura Helmuth certainly thinks so:

Quote of the Day

"The villain in The Dark Knight Rises is named Bane, B-a-n-e. What is the name of the venture capital firm that Romney ran and around which there’s now this make-believe controversy? Bain. The movie has been in the works for a long time. The release date’s been known, summer 2012 for a long time. Do you think that it is accidental that the name of the really vicious fire breathing four eyed whatever it is villain in this movie is named Bane?" — Rush Limbaugh

The Neuroscience of Immortality

Ken Hayworth, a 'veteran' of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a self-described "outlandishly futuristic thinker", believes that he can live forever. It's just he has to die first. Most people are unconvinced, though:

To Hayworth, science is about overturning expectations: "If 100 years ago someone said that we'd have satellites in orbit and little boxes on our desks that can communicate across the world, they would have sounded very outlandish." One hundred years from now, he believes, our descendants will not understand how so many of us failed for so long to embrace immortality. In an unpublished essay, "Killed by Bad Philosophy," he writes, "Our grandchildren will say that we died not because of heart disease, cancer, or stroke, but instead that we died pathetically out of ignorance and superstition"—by which he means the belief that there is something fundamentally unknowable about consciousness, and that therefore it can never be replicated on a computer.

Afghanistan Without America

Vanda Felbab-Brown explains the complicated logistics of getting out of Afghanistan, and concludes:

The pace and shape of the U.S. and ISAF drawdown in Afghanistan, which are yet to be fully determined, will produce far greater pressures than simply logistical ones. How many U.S. troops are left behind in Afghanistan after 2014 and what roles they retain will influence whether civil war will, in fact, materialize. Ultimately, although Pakistan is likely to continue cultivating vicious allies like the Haqqanis, an unstable Afghanistan will destabilize Pakistan, too. Resolving the logistics to get out of Afghanistan on schedule is important. But staying in Afghanistan in a sufficiently robust and wisely structured presence so that security can be strengthened and Afghan governance improved is even more crucial. The worst possible outcome would be to be rushing out of Afghanistan and then lacking even the logistical routes to do so.

The question right now is whether a U.S. withdrawal will lead to civil war. A recent New Yorker story by Dexter Filkins confronted the dangerous prospect. In particular, he discussed the massive power imbalance between the government and Afghanistan's various militias:

Semicolons; So Tricky

I just can't get over the recent slew of articles on the most-feared of all punctuation marks. This from Mary Norris' post at Page Turner:

In college, whenever I used a semicolon in a paper, it came back to me with a big red circle around the offending member. I thought semicolons were just inflated commas, and I realized that I had no idea how to use them, and was afraid it was too late to learn, so I decided to do without them. I stuck with what I knew: the common comma, the ignorant question mark, the occasional colon, the proletarian period.

Previous post on semicolons here.

For Lack of a Better Romney

Ezra Klein quotes a friend of his, who put the election in these "depressingly clear" words:

This election is a choice between a Democratic president who voters don’t think is able to solve our economic problems and a Republican candidate who voters think is committed to the same doctrines and institutions that helped produce them.

What would the better Mitt Romney look like? Klein says that he would tell a more honest story about the human cost of doing business:

Rather than denying that Bain’s activities sometimes hurt workers, he would admit it. Rather than offering paeans to free enterprise and risk taking, he would acknowledge that the modern economy isn’t fair and is sometimes downright cruel. Workers lose their jobs, their health insurance and their self respect because management is insufficiently farsighted, or because advances in shipping technology make it cheaper to move a factory to China. But the solution, he would say, isn’t to make our companies less competitive. Rather, the answer is to make our government more compassionate and more effective in helping those left behind.

I think the quality in Romney people find most offensive is the creeping insincerity and disingenuousness that underlines his every vapid utterance, and that's a fairly accurate assessment without going into the vacuity and dullness of his tired refrains about belief in America or some other platitude. Romney's words make Obama's "Yes We Can" phrase look promisingly articulate and revealing. Unlike Obama, whose character seems to suit perfectly that all-too-twentieth-century word 'genuine', in most people's eyes Romney is a distant Wall Street master of the universe who doesn't really understand how the country works. The propensity to laugh awkwardly in uncomfortable moments and at inappropriate times is only the tip of the iceberg.

But not even Romney's status as a like-ability challenged candidate counts among his top issues as a candidate. Undoubtedly his greatest hurdle will be to give his base something in him to throw their energy behind. At the moment, I think it would be fair to say they have nothing.

Conor Friedersdorf had an interesting take on Romney's likability issues, saying that it's probably better that nobody really likes him, and cites the arguably disastrous presidency of George Bush as an example. In general, conservatives tend to be better presidents if their supporters aren't too keen on them:

Refusing to Commemorate Munich

In spite of a prolonged effort to have a minute's silence set aside at the 2012 Olympics to remember the Israeli athletes who were murdered at the Munich games in 1972, the IOC remains steadfast in its refusal. Deborah Lipstadt is outraged:

The IOC’s explanation is nothing more than a pathetic excuse. The athletes who were murdered were from Israel and were Jews—that is why they aren’t being remembered. The only conclusion one can draw is that Jewish blood is cheap, too cheap to risk upsetting a bloc of Arab nations and other countries that oppose Israel and its policies.

I have long inveighed against the tendency of some Jews to see anti-Semitism behind every action that is critical of Israel or of Jews. In recent years some Jews have been inclined to hurl accusations of anti-Semitism even when they are entirely inappropriate. By repeatedly crying out, they risk making others stop listening—especially when the cry is true.

The accusation of anti-semitic sentiment here is perhaps a little much, but so is the IOC's characterization of the massacre as a political event.

Obama Ahead in Florida

Good news:

A new Survey USA poll in Florida finds President Obama leading Mitt Romney by five points in the important battleground state, 48% to 43%.

"Is he coming? Is he? Oh God, I think he is."

GQ has published Sean Flynn's definitive essay on the Anders Breivik Norway massacre.

When Cockburn Was Bigger than Hitchens

Though they later sparred and went in different directions politically, with Hitchens becoming the better-known writer, Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens were once much the same in terms of their reputation:

There were certainly many similarities — both were witty, charismatic Brits who wrote about politics with a literary flair. Both started out on the left, but while Cockburn stayed there, Hitchens swung way over to the right. Hitchens’ fame now greatly overshadows Cockburn’s, but it’s easy to forget it wasn’t always that way. Back in the 80s the two shared very similar politics and and probably roughly equivalent name recognition in political journalism circles. In fact, Cockburn, who back then had a regular political column in the Wall Street Journal (!), probably had a higher profile than Hitchens.

No obituary for Cockburn was complete, it seems, without some mention (sometimes extensive discussion) of their rivalry. No, seriously. One I came across devoted most of the piece to explaining why Hitchens was inferior.

Initial post about Cockburn's death here.

The Fatter of Two Evils

Americans, 67 percent according to a Gallup poll, are more afraid of getting fat than smoking cigarettes. Daniel Engber says they've got it all wrong:

The analogous number for those who consume at least one pack of cigarettes per day is 3.7, meaning that heavy smokers are almost four times more likely to perish than nonsmokers, about double the risk associated with obesity. Estimates of avoidable deaths reflect this difference in the odds: According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, smoking accounts for an excess mortality of more than 400,000 Americans every year, compared to just 112,000 for obesity. That's despite the fact that there are many more fat Americans—obesity rates are now 50 percent higher than smoking rates.

This is particularly true as smoking becomes less socially acceptable as an activity. In New Zealand, smoking is generally perceived as a profoundly anti-social habit: something to be scorned and treated with contempt. The government has declared it their goal to wipe out the consumption of tobacco by 2017, and is pushing ahead with a plan to deprive cigarette packaging of basic branding — a policy that conforms with the other equally-infantilising social legislation here. (You might remember that New Zealand was the first to introduce a ban on smoking in restaurants and bars.) It must feel like such an insult to be treated as though you can't make good consumer decisions on your own.

I'm genuinely fine with governments broadcasting ads advocating 'smokefree' spaces and anti-smoking measures — even the strident ones, which tend to be easy to ignore. But I think we may be well advised to dispense with the notion that legislation, not a natural evolution in opinion as new information emerges, is to be credited with curbing the tobacco problem.

Alexander Cockburn, RIP

The writer who made a career of being a contrarian, though he stopped short of courting the title, has died of cancer:

Alex kept his illness a tightly guarded secret. Only a handful of us knew how terribly sick he truly was. He didn’t want the disease to define him. He didn’t want his friends and readers to shower him with sympathy. He didn’t want to blog his own death as Christopher Hitchens had done. Alex wanted to keep living his life right to the end. He wanted to live on his terms. And he wanted to continue writing through it all, just as his brilliant father, the novelist and journalist Claud Cockburn had done. And so he did. His body was deteriorating, but his prose remained as sharp, lucid and deadly as ever.

Jesse Walker remembers discovering the author as a fourteen year-old:

I pick up a copy of The Nation, which I've heard of but never read before. Inside I find a two-page spread labeled "Beat the Devil," written by someone named Alexander Cockburn. The feature fascinates me: First it's talking about Jesse Jackson, but then suddenly the subject is Vanessa Williams, the Miss America who had to give up her crown when an old nude photo shoot turned up in Penthouse. "And she was not just posing with anyone," wrote Cockburn. "She was posing with another woman. I doubt even a full repudiation of Louis Farrakhan and all he stands for would have gotten Williams off the hook at that point." [...] I had never read anything like this before. It wasn't that the article was stylish and erudite; it's that it was a stylish and erudite response to a porn shoot, a column that casually mixed culture and politics, serious analysis and jokes. The op-ed page in the daily paper wasn't like this at all. I was hooked, and I got in the habit of picking up more free copies of The Nation at the bookstore.