Month: April 2009

Juli Berwald testified at the Texas evolution hearings:

Maybe evolutionists and creationists can't find common ground because they really aren't even having the same argument. Scientists are fighting to preserve their ability to answer how unimpeded by why. Creationists are fighting to have answers to why, unthreatened by answers to how.

David Harsanyi takes a Libertarian view on the debate:

The most sensible solution, of course, would be to permit parents a choice so that they can send their kids to schools that cater to any brand of nonsense they desire—outside of three core subjects.

The left never will allow any genuine choice in our school systems. So it seems highly disagreeable and political to trap kids in public schools and, at the same time, decide where schools fall on controversial issues.

Sow Flowers by Rahman Baba

Sow flowers so your surroundings become a garden
Don’t sow thorns; for they will prick your feet
If you shoot arrows at others,
Know that the same arrow will come back to hit you.
Don’t dig a well in another’s path,
In case you come to the well’s edge
You look at everyone with hungry eyes
But you will be first to become mere dirt.
Humans are all one body,
Whoever tortures another, wounds himself.

Quoted unironically by Doug Feith. He left out those last few lines.

Dupont Circle, District of Columbia, 7.25 pm

The Economist has a very good summary of the study. Andrew Leigh remarks:

I’ve also seen some unpublished work by Christopher Jencks suggesting that the large life expectancy gap between the rich and the poor might be best explained by stress. I’ll post it if I can. The difficult thing for public policy is that the tools in our armoury aren’t very good at reducing stress. We know a lot about raising incomes, a bit about improving test scores, and something about moving people into employment; but stress isn’t an outcome we’re very good at affecting.

Eat it:

Francis Fukuyama opines:

All of this does not amount to a failure of capitalism, but to a failure of American public policy. It is inevitable, however, that the credibility of things that Americans hold near and dear—i.e., liberal democracy and a market economy—will suffer greatly as a result of the crisis. People from Latvia to Korea to Mexico are suffering from a global recession that started in the United States. It started in large measure because of the faith that Americans placed in the ability of free markets to regulate themselves, a key aspect both of Reaganism and of the so-called “Anglo-Saxon” model of capitalism. Alan Greenspan admitted last fall that he was astonished that the self-interest of the financial community did not prevent it from making huge mistakes. Now that the public sector is cleaning up behind them, we need to move from astonishment to a different model of capitalism if we are to fix our own economy, and regain a shred of credibility on the world stage.

The Onion has a plan.

Dreher (still playing the victim) and Linker go another round. Here's Linker:

It seems to me that Rod's opposition to gay marriage and social acceptance follows less from an argument or an assertion about the world, nature, or God than it does from a disposition or temperament — from a disposition or temperament inclined toward fear. (In retrospect, I can see how significant and telling it is that one of the first questions I posed to Rod in my original post was "What are you afraid of?", and that Andrew fastened onto that passage in his initial response and returned to it in the title of his longer post in response to Rod. Fear has been at the center of this debate from the beginning.)

Rod imagines a future in which homosexuality has been brought completely into the mainstream of American life, and he responds with a shudder. But why? What does he fear?

First, as I noted above, he fears change. This is perhaps the most fundamental characteristic of the conservative temperament. (And that's just one of the reasons why I think Andrew is wrong to insist on calling himself a conservative. But that's a topic for another post.) Rod fears that if our understanding of marriage changes to include homosexual unions, this bedrock institution of civilization will collapse. Pretty soon we'll have polygamy. Then before you know it, I'll be taking my golden retriever to dinner parties and introducing him as my fiancé. The assumption behind this fear is that change tends to make things worse — that the primary thing holding civilization together is received custom. Without those limits to channel and direct and limit our actions, human beings will behave like beasts, or worse. We therefore tinker with and change those customs at our peril.

Say what you will about this view of things, try to come up with empirical examples to demonstrate its paranoia, etc. But, in my view at least, it has a certain dignity. I don't view the world that way. I don't fear that if I tell my young son that the men living together down the street are married to each other that he will join a group-sex club in high school or be any less likely to marry when he grows up, or be more likely to divorce. But as a humanist — as a student of human history and culture — I can understand where Rod's fear is coming from, because I've seen it before, and I'll see it again. And I can accept that nothing I say to him is likely to change his tendency to view the world in the way he does. Because temperament isn't the product of an argument; it's what leads you to find certain arguments more compelling than others.

Some new media companies are finally hiring those laid off from print newspapers:

Meanwhile, Dan Gross chronicles how it came to this:

…the newspaper companies that have failed wholesale were essentially set up to fail by inexperienced managers who believed piling huge amounts of debt on businesses whose revenues were shrinking even when the economy was growing was a shrewd means of value creation.