Month: November 2008

It has killed so many already. Ta-Nehisi gets to the heart of African-American homophobia:

…then there’s the obvious detriment of homophobia–the appalling HIV stats in our community. I always thought the absolute worse part of the Rev. Wright fiasco wasn’t his quasi-damning of America, but the pushing of conspiracy theories in regards to HIV. It didn’t make it better that it came from a guy who’s been doing exactly the sort of outreach we need more of from the black church. Talk to black health professionals out in the field–they understand where the notion comes from, but they hate it all the same. Our unwillingness to talk pushes serious issues under the table. This shit will kill us. It’s not a game.

Saletan attends a talk by David Friedman:

So this is what I asked Friedman: Is there a contradiction between his technological optimism and his premise of radical uncertainty? When I say optimism, I don’t mean a belief that technology will be good; I mean a belief that it will work. His talk was full of bold scenarios: conquering aging, developing artificial intelligence 100 times smarter than us in the next 30 years, and administering mind-control drugs that induce credulity. I agree that these scenarios are fascinating, and when I first came into this field, I took them very seriously. But everywhere I look, the news is telling me another story. The story is that in many fields, and in biology in particular, causality is turning out to be way more complex than we anticipated. The immediate manifestation of that complexity is that even our most conventional attempts to manipulate biology are producing unexpected and often decisive ill side effects.

A  revealing article by James Brazier on why Iran hates the Taliban:

There has been no Western outcry against Saudi Arabia’s mediation between the Taliban and the Afghan government. On the contrary, the Mecca talks were accompanied by senior British and U.S. officials indicating that such discussions were an evitable part of ending the war in Afghanistan. Only one country has denounced the meeting as an unacceptable capitulation to terrorism and extremism: Iran. This position reflects the untold story of Iran’s tussle with Saudi Arabia for regional influence.

From Kathleen Parker’s contribution to Slate’s forum on the future of conservatism:

Palin covered her inadequacies with folksy charm and by drumming up a class war, turning her audiences not just against elites but against the party’s own educated members. The movement created by that superelite, but never elitist, William F. Buckley Jr. was handed over to Joe Six-Pack. Know-nothingness was no longer a stigma, but a badge of honor.

Larison chimes in here.

(Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty.)

A left-liberal twofer! Richard Kahlenberg, booster of class-based affirmative action, continues his campaign:

In college admissions—the subject of the ongoing litigation—Obama could back a vigorous program of economic preferences that indirectly addresses our nation’s history of slavery and segregation and the ongoing reality of racial discrimination.

According to a 2004 Century Foundation study by Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose, economic affirmative action—looking at the income, education and occupation of an applicant’s parents, and the level of poverty in her high school—will produce almost as much racial diversity as current race-based affirmative action: the result would be 10 percent black and Hispanic representation at the most selective colleges and universities compared with 12 percent currently. But counting other economic factors—such as wealth (net worth)—should boost racial diversity further. Wealth represents the accumulation of income over time and thereby more closely reflects the legacy of past discrimination. Likewise, because homes represent the biggest source of family wealth for most Americans, giving low wealth students a preference will also capture ongoing racial discrimination in the housing market.

Courtney Campbell looks at Oregon’s "death with dignity" ten years later:

…the passage of the ODDA led to a greater effort on the part of physicians and palliative and hospice care teams to ensure adequate pain control. A Task Force to Improve the Care of Terminally-Ill Oregonians was established to bring greater awareness to the question of pain management immediately following implementation.

The task force issued an influential report in 1998 that practitioners still rely on a decade later. Institutions involved in pain management developed new protocols, and laws that had raised the prospect of licensure investigations of physicians who provided more pain medication than called for in conventional medical protocols were rescinded. Thus, physicians no longer faced a professional and legal deterrent against the use of personalized pain control methods.

As noted above, the lower-than-expected number of patients requesting lethal drugs can likely be attributed in part to these improvements in the quality of pain management. And even the patients who requested and used lethal prescriptions—recall, 27 percent of those 341 patients said they were worried about inadequate pain control—may not have been experiencing pain in their terminal phase but rather anticipating and hoping to avoid a painful death.

Your worst nightmare is imminent:

Ashley Gilbertson reports on the reporters:

Iraq has all but disappeared from the front pages. A study conducted earlier this year by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that the war occupied just 3 percent of the mainstream media’s news hole. Compare that with 2003, when 9 out of 10 Americans said they were closely following the situation in Iraq—a higher percentage than were following any other topic—and there were, by some estimates, more than 1,000 Western reporters covering the conflict. There’s an ongoing chicken-and-egg debate about whether lack of interest has led to a decline in coverage or vice versa. For whatever reason, today there are only a few dozen Western reporters in Iraq, which is not many more than were there during Saddam Hussein’s last days in power, when staying in the country meant risking detention, or worse.

The Times is being whipsawed by the same economic woes battering the rest of the industry—earlier this year, the paper eliminated more than 100 editorial positions, which was about 8 percent of the newsroom’s total workforce. (So much for the suit of armor.) But unlike virtually every other news organization on the planet, it has not significantly cut back on the number of staff it has on the ground in Iraq, a commitment which costs upwards of $3 million a year. “You can’t cover a story only when interest peaks,” says Bill Keller, the paper’s executive editor. “You have to walk the beat all the time. This is so integral to what readers expect in The New York Times that if we stopped covering the war in Iraq we should just go out of business.”

As I find myself barely able to function this weekend, I did manage to go for a bike ride, walk the dogs, and catch up on a few Netflix projects (finishing off John Adams, "The Savages", the rest of Season 11 of The Simpsons). What is this I’m feeling? Yes, it’s clouded with Prop 8 grief. But it isn’t euphoria. I haven’t felt that since O-Day. It isn’t redemption: I don’t expect that from politics. I realize what I’m feeling is relief.

What I wrote last Monday was not meant casually. Knowing that the Bush-Cheney-Addington axis will be forced out of power is an immense, slackening relief. I’ve felt compelled by politics these past few years in ways I don’t like or enjoy. With men and women finally back in power I can trust to act reasonably and ethically and within the rule of law, I feel less hesitation in getting on with life. A reader makes the point as well as I can:

One, mildly Oakeshottian, point I don’t think is being made enough: one of the pleasures of the week is that it holds out the promise of not having to be obsessed with politics. It is unnatural, it seems to me, to have to care passionately every day about the workings of the central government: only in totalitarian societies, where a knock on the door may come at any time, or in authoritarian ones, where each sneeze of the King has to be analyzed for its potential consequence, does there exist a need to keep the government of the country forever in the forefront of your mind.

One of the blessings of liberal democracy, in theory, is that we delegate the common fate to the most able , intelligent and motivated people among us, and, though we keep an eye on them and make them subject to recall and revision, we can cede our trust to them to do a more or less decent and able job most of the time. We trust them.  For the first time in years, we can say now: the government is in the hands of skillful  people with a sense of the real; we can live the  live sin front of our eyes without worrying that some horror is happening behind our backs.  It would be a mistake, I think, for us all to carry on past the election and into the New Year with the same level of obsessive attention that this year, and the years before, have forced on us.  Good government gives us back our lives.

Another word for this is freedom. And as the constitution is quietly restored, and torture finally relinquished, it grows.

As John McCormack makes clear, this nugget from Newsweek’s reporting doesn’t make a lot of sense:

The day of the third debate, Palin refused to go onstage with New Hampshire GOP Sen. John Sununu and Jeb Bradley, a New Hampshire congressman running for the Senate, because they were pro-choice and because Bradley opposed drilling in Alaska.

The McCain campaign ordered her onstage at the next campaign stop, but she refused to acknowledge the two Republican candidates standing behind her.

Since when is John Sununu pro-choice?