Month: December 2009

A cogent case for declaring the entire Trig story worth retiring immediately.

Peter Beinart compares:

The best precedent for all this is what Nixon did in the late Vietnam years. For roughly two decades, the U.S. had been trying to contain "communism" — another ominous, elastic noun that encompassed a multitude of movements and regimes. But Vietnam proved that this was impossible: the U.S. didn't have the money or might to keep communist movements from taking power anywhere across the globe. So Nixon stopped treating all communists the same way. Just as Obama sees Iran as a potential partner because it shares a loathing of al-Qaeda, Nixon saw Communist China as a potential partner because it loathed the U.S.S.R.

Nixon didn't stop there. Even as he reached out to China, he also pursued détente with the Soviet Union. This double outreach — to both Moscow and Beijing — gave Nixon more leverage over each, since each communist superpower feared that the U.S. would favor the other, leaving it geopolitically isolated. On a smaller scale, that's what Obama is trying to do with Iran and Syria today. By reaching out to both regimes simultaneously, he's making each anxious that the U.S. will cut a deal with the other, leaving it out in the cold. It's too soon to know whether Obama's game of divide and conquer will work, but by narrowing the post-9/11 struggle, he's gained the diplomatic flexibility to play the U.S.'s adversaries against each other rather than unifying them against us.

(Hat tip: Weekly Standard)

What are the chances?:

(Hat tip: Sager)

Catholicism has all but destroyed itself in one of its most sacred grounds, Ireland. The revelations of decades of serial abuse, sadism, cruelty and neglect of children in its care, and its hierarchy's callous, persistent and evil cover-up of the same, has led many Irish to wash their hands of this corrupt institution entirely. If it were a secular institution that had engaged in this kind of horror, any government would force its immediate closure and prosecution of its top officials. Instead we have this statement from the spokesman for the diocese of Derry:

“There is no good in saying other than the truth. The church at this state has no credibility, no standing and no moral authority. The issue is now one of trust, and that is why it will take the rest of my lifetime as a priest to build up that trust again, because the trust and confidence in the church has been broken on a fundamental level."

At a fundamental level. And yet this perpetrator of a mass conspiracy to abuse and rape children, is now threatening in my own diocese to drop its charitable projects because DC is about to legalize marriage equality. It's like listening to Karl Rove lecture on fiscal responsibility and war-management.

David Roberts vents about the challenges involved in energy conservation:

The most puzzling behavioral phenomenon to understand when it comes to building efficiency is that Most People Won’t Do Sh*t (MPWDS). “Most people” includes people who could make money by doing sh*t, people who say they will do sh*t, even people who have promised to do sh*t. I’ve heard from people who write about energy efficiency for a living, know exactly what to do to make their homes more efficient, and still don’t do sh*t. It’s hard to disentangle the reasons why—some mix of status quo bias, hyperbolic discounting, and loss aversion to begin with—but it’s clear that public surveys and polls about this tend to be misleading. What people say they’re willing to do and what they demonstrate they’re willing to do are very different things. Attitudes don’t translate into actions.

Heather Mac Donald labels a trend:

It is an iron-clad rule, presumably taught in journalism schools, that when discussing black single mothers and their children, one must never, ever ask: Who and where is the father, and how many fathers are there?  Tens of thousands of articles have been written about the struggles of black single mothers, and the appearance of their children is always treated as a virgin birth. Not only are there no fathers in sight in such articles, there is no curiosity about where the fathers are and why they’re not stepping up to the plate.  Instead, the reader will learn in great detail either about the callous lack of taxpayer-funded social services or, as in the present article on black infant mortality, about the provisions that a wise and benevolent government has made available to the mothers and their miraculously-conceived children, who seem to appear with the same inevitability as the tides.

A classic from Ilya Somin, who can't quite seem to even believe his own post:

There is always the outside chance that Palin is deliberately pretending to be much more ignorant than she actually is, as Dwight D. Eisenhower did when he was president; perhaps for the purpose of getting her political enemies to underestimate her (which was one of Eisenhower’s motives). However, there are many obvious differences between Palin’s situation and Ike’s, such as the fact that only one of them had already proven his competence beyond reasonable doubt by successfully commanding the Allied forces Europe during World War II (a feat that required considerable policy knowledge and intellectual ability, among other things). 

Yes, that whole winning World War II thing is not quite the same as seeing Alaska Russia from your house, is it?

A new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology finds that loneliness can easily spread through a social network:

[A] person's loneliness depended not just on his friend's loneliness but also on his friend's friend and his friend's friend's friend. Participants were 52 percent more likely to be lonely if a person to whom they were directly connected (one degree of separation) was lonely. For two degrees of separation, the number drops to 25 percent and 15 percent for three degrees. […]

An odd look or phrasing by a friend that wouldn't even be noticed by a chipper person could be seen as an affront to the lonely, triggering a cycle of negative interactions that cause people to lose friends. The upshot: A lonely person is likely to lose touch with another person, who in turn gets cut off from others, and both end up on the fringes of a social group.