Month: October 2009

Gruen Transfer:

In shopping mall design, the Gruen transfer refers to the moment when a consumer enters a shopping mall, and, surrounded by an intentionally confusing layout, loses track their original intentions. Spatial awareness of their surroundings play a key role, as does the surrounding sound and music. The effect of the transfer is marked by a slower walking pace and glazed eyes.

Acme Corporation:

… or A Company that Makes Everything is a fictional corporation that exists in several cartoons, films and TV series, most significantly in the Looney Tunes universe, where it appeared most prominently in the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons, which made Acme famous for outlandish and downright dangerous products that failed catastrophically at the worst possible times.

Objectum sexuality: 

… is a pronounced emotional desire towards particular inanimate objects. Those individuals with this expressed preference may feel strong feelings of arousal, attraction, love, and commitment to certain items or structures of their fixation. For some, sexual or even close emotional relationships with humans are incomprehensible. The term objectum-sexuality was coined in the 1970s by a woman named Eija-Riitta Eklöf Berliner-Mauer from Liden, Sweden, who was married to the Berlin Wall.

A reader writes:

Alex Massie wrote:

"It also demonstrates how far American popular conservatism has diverged from its counterparts in Britain and the rest of Europe." That gets it as wrong as it could.

What it actually demonstrates is how divergent American popular conservatism has always been from its counterparts. 

THIS is the American popular conservatism that gave rise to Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Sinclair Lewis.

THIS is the American conservatism wherein comfortably lies Elmer Gantry.

I don't think you Brits have ever quite understood that. You have instead read the thoughtful writing of conservative intellectuals and assumed this was more or less what American conservatism was. NO!

Yes, the thoughtful ones exist, but they are a minority, and now they have lost control of the tiger they rode.

Some deliciously disturbing shots to get you in the Halloween spirit.

Caleb Crain writes an open letter in response to Mark Greif's On Repressive Sentimentalism:

[Y]ou imply that marriage is a surrender of sexual liberty. I don't think that's accurate. Marriage is Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell standing side by side in the closing scene of His Girl Friday, nattering on with the same jollity when handcuffed to each other as when not handcuffed. Marriage is indifference to handcuffs. There are always opportunities to escape. The strange discovery that makes marriage possible is that one has the liberty not to—the liberty to make the same choice, day after day—and that one happens to want to make a consistent choice. It is a paradox, at least.

Will one happen to want to make the same choice forever? Maybe not. Separation and divorce are always possible, in our world, and maybe they give marriage its poignancy. The possibility of separation proves that no two people stay chained to each other unless they want to. It even seems to be the case that people who want to stay chained to each other sometimes can't manage to. It is at any rate an error to think that marriage is a surrender of liberty. It is an exercise of it.

Julian Sanchez outlines a cognitive bias:

Nietzsche wrote at length about the tendency to define the good as whatever is opposed by some hated other. Unfortunately, he called it “slave morality”—a term I’m not going to touch with a ten-foot pole in the current climate—and only some of what he says about it is really applicable in our context, so I’ll use “oppositional morality” instead. Whatever natural instincts we have toward this kind of binary in-group/out-group thinking are probably exacerbated by a political system that ultimately pushes people to pick one of two viable teams, even though this is a poor fit for the variety of worldviews and interests in a large and diverse population. Otherwise incoherent coalitions are bound together by each defining themselves, somewhat circularly, as the negative of the other.

Scott Adams wonders how much punditry is an act:

I enjoy sampling the content from the far left as well as the far right. When I listen to Limbaugh, I generally have two reactions:

1. I don’t agree with the viewpoint expressed.
2. This man is an entertainment genius.

Talk show hosts have no legal or ethical obligation to do anything but entertain.

And judging by their successes, Limbaugh and Beck are brilliant at their jobs. I find it mind boggling that anyone believes a TV talk host is expressing his own true views.

You could make a case that the things Limbaugh and Beck say influences the gullible masses in ways that are not helpful to society. But that’s probably true of every pundit, left or right. It’s a price of free speech.

Do you think that Limbaugh and Beck have the same views in private as they spray into the entertainmentsphere?

Tony Woodlief asks for economic book recommendations from the left:

The maddening thing about reading Hayek is that I come away thinking, “If only leftists had a proper understanding of economics and society, they would stop their infernal meddling and let people be about the business of living productive lives.”

Then I think that perhaps I’m being just as muddle-headed as I think leftists are. Admittedly, I was a leftist before I read any economics, but maybe I read the wrong kind. Maybe there’s some whole other set of thinking and philosophy out there that will bring a right-thinking person to a leftist point of view.

This got me wondering what books thoughtful leftists and small-c conservatives/small-l libertarians might recommend to one another.

Megan and her commenters take a shot at answering the question.

The Freakonomics sequel is taking some heat for questionable analysis, especially for their writing on climate change. Here's Bradford Plumer:

In just a few dozen pages, Dubner and Levitt manage to repeat the myth that the scientific consensus in the 1970s predicted global cooling (quite untrue), imply that climatologists are unaware of the existence of water vapor (no, they're quite aware), and traffic in the elementary misconception that CO2 hasn't historically driven temperature increases (RealClimate has a good article to help with their confusion). The sad thing is that Dubner and Levitt aren't even engaging in sophisticated climate-skepticism here—there's just a basic unwillingness to gain even a passing acquaintance with the topic. You hardly need to be an award-winning economist to do that.

What's more, as Joe Romm reports, the main scientist that Levitt and Dubner actually interviewed, Ken Caldeira, says they've completely twisted and mischaracterized his views—a glaring bit of journalistic malfeasance. And, as Matt Yglesias points out, one of Dubner and Levitt's arguments rests on the (demonstrably wrong) premise that solar panels are always black. Now, as a journalist, I'm all in favor of having people write about things they're not an expert in—and mistakes do happen—but this is a little absurd.

Stephen J. Dubner addresses the Freakonomics chapter on global warming here but doesn't respond to any of the substantive critiques.

Today on the Dish, Andrew assessed Obama's strategic mind here and here. Steve Coll and Andrew address what the president is confronting in Afghanistan, Julian Sanchez took down the Washington Times over its gay paranoia, and Pareene pwned Hiatt.

Some bizarre balloon-boy footage here and here. Beck's bizarreness continued, with reader reactions here and here.  Creepiness on the far right covered here and here. Palin's chances in the 2012 primary looked good, but, blessedly, her growing unfavorables will stop her (particularly when compared to Obama's).

Our Camo Closet series on DADT continued, and Andrew squeezed in some dog blogging.

— C.B.