Month: July 2009

by Chris Bodenner

Adam Serwer has a similar take on the Gates scandal as Conor and myself:

[Police officer] Crowley does not claim to have felt as though he was in danger, and says he believes that Gates was being truthful about it being his residence. So I don't really understand why Crowley stuck around to be yelled at, and it makes me uncomfortable that someone can simply be arrested for the crime of saying nasty things to a police officer under the auspices of "disorderly conduct." I'm not aware of the clause in the First Amendment that exempts police officers from angry criticism. Gates' reaction, if the police report is accurate, may have been inappropriate, but it was understandable, given that he was being accused of breaking into his own home. But if he was arrested simply because Crowley was angry or embarrassed at being mistreated, I don't think that's a defensible reaction.

Could any Dish readers with legal expertise shed some light on that line between free speech and verbal assault? Serwer also discusses one of the most unsettling details from the case:

What really disturbs me though, is the fact that Gates' own neighbor didn't recognize him. Regardless of who is ultimately at fault in the encounter between Gates and Sgt. Crowley, the most frightening thing is that a Harvard professor could be mistaken for a burglar by his own neighbor. I'm not ascribing malice here — it's the nature of race that people react to it without forethought — but the idea that a black man can be mistaken for a criminal trying to enter his own house in his own neighborhood should remind us all that we're hardly living in a post-racial paradise.

by Patrick Appel

Goldblog gets a "scoop."

by Chris Bodenner

America's favorite libertarian hits America's favorite quitter over old-school conservatism:

Paul dismisses her supporters as "more establishment, conventional Country-Club type of Republicans.” "I wonder whether she's energizing the 15-20 year olds," Paul muses. "That would be a question I would have. Because she doesn't talk about the Federal Reserve and some of these issues. She doesn't talk too much about personal liberties, civil liberties, getting rid of drug laws, attacking the war on drugs, punishing people who torture."

Amen. But the Fed? Are teens nowadays really that hot for the gold standard? Actually, according to a profile of young Paulites by Eve Fairbanks last year, more than you think:

It's not about personality worship for the volunteers, the fetishization of a person's capacity to shine in public or persuade. It's about questions like the purpose of our Federal Reserve, which really piques these volunteers' interest, and which just so happens to get a Texas congressman named Ron Paul going, too.

by Chris Bodenner

(Hat tip: GOOD)

by Conor Friedersdorf

Kashmir Hill:

Erin Andrews is a sportscaster for ESPN. She is what many would call a hottie; in 2007, she was Playboy’s top choice for America’s Sexiest Sportscaster.

One of her apparent “fans” hid a camera in her hotel room, and secretly filmed video of her. Fox News is calling the guy a peephole pervert, though it’s unclear how exactly whoever is responsible got the camera in the room. It shows Andrews nude while she is brushing her hair and putting on make-up.

The person responsible posted the video online, and it went viral (and virus-laden)…What Jennie Yabroff of Newsweek (and I at The Not-So Private Parts) find intriguing though is what makes the video so interesting. A hot, naked woman brushing her hair in a grainy video? There’s plenty of better free porn on the Internet. Why is the Andrews video so appealing?

The rest of her post attempts advances what seems to me a compelling answer.

by Patrick Appel

John Schwenkler really doesn't like The Giving Tree.

by Patrick Appel

A few reactions to last night's press conference. DiA:

Selling the country on the details of a health-care plan is tricky. Selling the country on something Barack Obama wants is less tricky. So Mr Obama has allowed Congress to fight over the details of a health-care package while he makes himself the spokesman for some sort of reform. He's tried to bring wavering Democrats on board, reportedly by telling them that a "no" vote would "destroy" his presidency. The narrative of his presidency is driving the timeline here. It is very much about him.

Joe Klein:

He made a strong case for a public option as a way to keep the insurance companies honest and noted that some insurers were making record profits while raising premiums at a time "when most Americans are getting hammered." But he didn't insist that the public option had to be part of the plan, just that he thought it was a good idea.

Kevin Drum:

I'm curious to hear what other people thought, but this really struck me as nowhere near his usual performance.  Obama avoided giving direct answers, rambled a lot, kept interrupting himself with asides, and didn't explain things in terms that ordinary viewers were likely to understand.  He's supposed to be the communicator-in-chief, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people came away more confused than they were when they tuned in.  Bottom line: There were bits and pieces that were fine, but overall I'd give it a C-.

by Robert Wright

Did Muhammad briefly become a polytheist? And if so, why?

by Conor Friedersdorf

Over at True/Slant, I've been writing about one of the sleaziest "pickup techniques" short of drugging. Like many calculated approaches to attracting the opposite sex, its core is deception and manipulation — I dare any Dish reader who clicks through to muster a defense.

What I want to explore in this post, however, are the borderline cases where dating, manipulation and deception intersect. Every so often, there is the dream scenario where new romance is born of ideal circumstances: e.g., introduced via mutual friends, mutually interested people, confident enough to get to know one another without ego or insecurity getting in the way, etc.

But consider a more common scenario: two people who meet in a bar, or on Match.com, both with their share of character flaws. Perhaps one of them is more interested than the other. It is pretty to think the right answer is that any deception or manipulation is wrong — but aren't a lot of things that strike us as fair game actually deceptive and manipulative?

Makeup is worn. Always messy living rooms are cleaned up before one's date arrives. A favorite poem is gleaned from her Facebook profile, memorized, and strategically dropped into conversation. That last seems a more marginal case than the others. Why? Does it cross the line? Why or why not?

I suspect that often our judgments about kosher behavior depends as much on who is involved as the specific scenario in question. A friend comes to us for advice about how to handle an awkward situation wherein she's inadvertently scheduled two dates for the same day — and knowing she is generally an upstanding person, we laugh, sympathize, and help her formulate a solution, whereas if we were on a date with a women who deceived us about having another date immediately following ours — or even worse, a guy our sister was dating pulled the same stunt — the whole moral situation would seem to us entirely different.

I'd be curious to hear dating situations that Dish readers have experienced, or hypothetical situations they've conceived, that shed light on deception, dating, and the way we ought to think about how they intersect. Shoot them to conor dot friedersdorf at gmail dot com, and I'll mull them over and post a followup that lays forth my own thoughts.

by Robert Wright

A reader writes:

To my mind atheism, including the so-called 'New Atheism' project, is not even at its core about God and religion but rationalism, which is to say, a mindset that values reasoned, logical thinking over dogmatism and unwarranted assertions.

I agree that the “new atheists” see their mission as advancing reason. But I think this self-conception can abet self-delusion, making it easier for them to be blind to their own lapses of reason.

For example: 

I think Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett are confused in describing religion as a “virus” of the mind. After all, viruses are typically parasitic—they spread at the expense of the host. And Dawkins and Dennett would surely concede that, say, the Catholic belief in the wrongness of contraception has helped the belief’s hosts—the Catholics—flourish in Darwinian terms. If Dawkins and Dennett were being truly rational, they’d call religious belief a “symbiont” that can be either parasitic or “mutualistic” (i.e. win-win), depending on the belief in question. (Not every single virus is parasitic, but viruses are so frequently so, and so commonly conceived that way, that the term “virus” universally connotes parasitism, as Dawkins and Dennett well know.)

What explains this lapse of reason on the part of the champions of reason? I’d guess that their vision is being warped by adversarial instincts—by their their sense of opposition to religious people, or at least to religious beliefs. Human beings naturally, without even thinking about it, cast their enemies in unflattering light, and “virus” is certainly an unflattering label.

This human tendency to view enemies through a biased lens points to another flaw in the thinking of the “new atheists”—their belief that when religious people display seemingly irrational intolerance or hatred, the root of the problem is religion. No, the root of this irrationality is the same as the root of Dawkins’ and Dennett’s irrational deployment of the term “virus”. When you view people or ideas as your adversaries—view them in zero-sum terms—your unconscious mind does the rest of the work, making you conceive them and depict them in less flattering terms than is objectively warranted. That perception brings out the worst in religion and always has. It doesn’t exactly bring out the best in science, either.