A plummet for Obama. Other polls show stability: around a 5 – 6 point lead for Obama. Nate Silver explains the discrepancies here. Interesting nugget:
61 percent of Obama’s support is ‘hard’ and 39 percent is ‘soft’. McCain’s numbers are the precise opposite — 39 percent of his support is hard and 61 percent is soft.
Improv fun with fifteen sets of identical twins on the subway:
From Titanic magazine:
Barnes agrees with Phil Gramm:
Rob Horning looks at a study on friendship:
…the study suggests that attempts to rationalize friendships in advance may fail to capture what makes friendships work, which may in part be an ineffable spirit of coincidence, hanging over and enchanting everything the friends do together. And even more so, a feeling that the friendship is authentic precisely because there is no good reason for it and no calculation went into it.
Or as Montaigne put it, because it was him, because it was me. My own extended essay on friendship, with reflections on Aristotle, Emerson, Aelred of Rievaulx, Oakeshott, and Jesus, is the last third of "Love Undetectable."
Eli Lake has an open-minded and interesting analysis of how an Obama administration will grapple with international terrorism. It will be no more purist than the presidential campaign. It will work with unsavory characters. And it will aim to kill those terrorists we cannot sway. Money quote:
Susan Rice is tipped to be a senior figure in an Obama administration. Earlier this month, I sent her a handful of questions about counterterrorism policy. Her answers were filled with all the hedges and qualifications that you would expect in the middle of a campaign. She told me that Obama would eschew a "one size fits all approach" to fighting terrorism. "In some cases that may mean strong support for proxies (as in Anbar). In other places it may mean direct U.S. action. In others, it may mean relying more on an allied government or the international community."
But there were several answers she provided that I found highly revealing. She described Obama’s opinion of America’s historic involvement with insurgency and counterinsurgency. She applauded the 1980s arming of the mujahedin resistance to the Soviets: "[S]upport for the Afghan resistance to Soviet aggression was the right decision in the 1980s." And she said that the Anbar Awakening was "responsible for much of the security progress we have seen in Iraq," though she insisted that Sunni militias must eventually be incorporated into state security forces. In light of some of the criticisms that have been lobbed in Obama’s direction, those are pretty suggestive allusions.
Read the whole thing.
Did Bush really do this?:
The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.” He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.
Well at least he didn’t give them all unprompted neck massages.
David Appell seems to think so. Matt wallows in his own worthlessness here and here. I think Appell misunderstands the nature and appeal of blogging. It’s a form of conversation, not a medium of absolute authority. He writes:
It takes weeks and months and years to understand situations, to write from anything like a position of expertise. You don’t get it by quickly flying out to Aspen and back, or by reading an article from the Brookings Institute or from Harvard’s 321 course on Environmental Philosophy. It takes blood, sweat, and tears, it takes going out and looking at rivers, pouring over government reports and spreadsheets, hiking to the tops of mountains for the big picture, calling 25 people a day — precisely the thing the blogosphere does least of.
You bet. Which is why this blog contains not just my musings but links to many other deeply reported stories, essays, specialist blogs, videos, and emails from expert readers, etc. Moreover, different blogs can do different things – and this one has evolved over the years from a purely personal diary of sorts to more of a broadcast hourly magazine. The point is that I don’t expect or hope that any reader relies on the Dish alone. The Dish is a portal as well as well as a blog – to all the information and ideas percolating out there. And my role has evolved from purely an opiner to a web DJ of sorts, re-mixing and finding and editing the thoughts and images and facts of others.
Reality shows are serious business:
A reader writes:
In today’s Moore Award post about PZ Myers you write:
"It is one thing to engage in free, if disrespectful, debate. It is another to repeatedly assault and ridicule and abuse something that is deeply sacred to a great many people."
On Feb. 11, 2006 you posted the following, in relation to the Danish Cartoonists ridiculing Mohammed and Islam:
"The point is this: everyone is supposed to observe the religious constraints of one particular faith, regardless of whether we share it. And if we don’t observe Islamic etiquette … we’re lucky if we only get cursed and condemned. Get that?"
That sounds like a double standard to me. Are we supposed to be more deferential to Catholics than Muslims, when it comes to ridiculing what some of us see as silly and oppressive superstitions? I don’t recall you referring to the Danish cartoonists as "bigots." The only difference I can see here, is that now it’s YOUR personal religion that’s being ridiculed. So of course that makes the offender a bigot.
Another reader adds:
The boundary between respectful debate and ridicule or abuse is frequently in the eyes of the beholder. I can’t help but think of the cartoons of Mohammed published in Denmark and elsewhere. I’m sure some semantic difference between the cartoons and Mr. Myers’ screed could be posed. However, in the eyes of many of the believers of the respective religions, both Mr. Myers’ language and the cartoons “assault and ridicule and abuse something that is deeply sacred to a great many people”. You, in particular, have been especially tough on newspapers that refused to publish the cartoons of Mohammed. Rightly so. Yet many Muslims would appeal to you for some sort of “baseline civility”. In their eyes, you would be inciting others to ridicule and abuse their prophet.
For an Atheist like Mr. Myers, the idea of transubstantiation is just as absurd as Xenu stacking nuclear weapons around volcanoes, reincarnation, taking up snakes and baptizing the dead (or living). Why shouldn’t Mr. Myers “ridicule” something he knows to be a cracker? It’s a cracker, for goodness sake. Which religious tenets is he allowed to ridicule? Xenu’s bombs? Christians that take up snakes? None of the above? What about young Earth creationism? One of Mr. Myers’ more frequent attacks is on the idea of young (6,000 year old) Earth creationism that’s espoused by many Christians and other believers. He’s equally crude with his attacks on those beliefs. Where is your outrage with respect to those lines of attack? Is your lack of outrage due to the fact that you actually agree with him that the Earth is much older than that? Who decides which silly beliefs are worthy of ridicule, sarcasm, etc.? If we assume for the sake of argument that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and all the creatures on the Earth today are the product of evolution, shouldn’t he be able to use a variety of tactics, including ridicule, against those who fight to teach young Earth creationism in the classroom? Similarly, if we assume that transubstantiation is false (which he does), why shouldn’t he be using every rhetorical device available to pound that idea home to whoever will listen?
In many areas of the country, this same argument about civility versus abuse could be made about burning the flag. To many Americans, the flag is deeply sacred, and burning the flag or otherwise using it in protests is a horrendous abuse of a sacred object. However, to my mind, and I presume yours as well, such an act would be a legitimate form of free speech to symbolically protest governmental actions. What if Mr. Myers had used the same language to ask his readers to send him a flag to burn, due to his anger over the government’s torture of fellow humans? Would you have had the same response? As you have documented on your site many times, the Catholic church has many problems. What if a true-believing Catholic made the same post as Mr. Myers in order to protest the repeated child rape by Catholic priests? Reread Mr. Myers’ post as if he were a disgruntled Catholic, upset at his church’s response to the rapes. Would you still have the same response? In part, it’s the abuse of a “sacred” object that gets people to sit up and take notice of what you’re saying. In addition, the abuse of the object speaks symbolically to all of the problems of the entity that the symbol represents.
You have written passionately in the past about your reverence for communion (e.g., “the sacraments, especially that of communion, have always been for me the only truly reliable elements of direction, concrete instantiations of another order”). I suspect it’s this reverence, not unlike the reverence of Muslims for Mohammed, that motivated your post. You are at your best when you have no sacred cows. If indeed you have some sacred cows, I hope you don’t begin to impose them on others.
The Dish 