Month: May 2010

Bruce Bartlett sees little difference between tax credits and direct spending:

To see just how similar a refundable tax credit is to direct spending, imagine that instead of having the Defense Department pay $1 billion to Lockheed Martin…for some spare parts for the Air Force, it instead gave it a $1 billion refundable tax credit that was tradable. If Lockheed Martin didn't have at least a $1 billion federal tax liability, it could simply sell the unused portion to another company that did. Either way the company gets paid $1 billion and $1 billion worth of resources are extracted from the private sector for government's use.

A reader writes:

I've been thinking of the Israeli invasion of Gaza in response to Hamas's rocket attacks in light of the South Korea's response to North Korea's sinking a South Korean military vessel. At the time, the meme that won me over re Gaza was "no country would put up with such attacks without responding."

For example, Goldblog stated

"No country in the world could afford to ignore such attacks. And no country would. An elected government, such as Israel's, has a basic, overriding responsibility — to protect its citizens from the organized violence of their enemies. Of course, it can do this in part by negotiating with its enemies (assuming its enemies recognize Israel's right to life) but its immediate mission must be to stop the violence, which is what Israel is now trying to do. Whether it succeeds or not is an open question (It is Hamas' indifference to Palestinian life, not Jewish life, that makes it a formidable foe, in the manner of Hezbollah) , but Israel must try to use all of the tools of national power to stop attacks on its citizens. Otherwise it is simply not a serious nation, one that does not deserve sovereignty."

Why are we not hearing the same arguments regarding South Korea? Is it an unserious country, not deserving sovereignty?

Of course not, it's making a rational decision that you don't invade a country with nuclear weapons just across your border without really really good cause. And even the deaths of dozens of sailors isn't a good enough cause. It’s the same decision that Mexico would make if we started lobbing rockets at Juarez.

Anyway, I'm sure I'm running straight into a TNC fake equivalency buzz saw, but this incident has made me rethink my support of that invasion. I think the reason that Israel's reasoning rang so true is because we've spent the last 20 years as the sole superpower, when we're upset, we can invade and most countries can't stop up. So of course we would respond to this type of analysis.

Israel is in the same position, Hamas cannot defeat it militarily and thus this response makes sense. They are bombing us, we should respond.

Whether the steps I took to get there are flawed or not, I've flipped positions. The only way this situation ends well is if Israel is willing to accept behavior from radical Palestinians that most countries with an overwhelming military advantage would not. It’s the only way to marginalize those elements and to rally support for (what I hope is) the majority that want peace.

I'm more mindful of the British example, since I lived during it. For years, IRA terrorists bombed Britain's pubs and shops and eventually nearly killed the entire cabinet in the Brighton hotel bombing. Those terrorists lived among the population in both the republic and Ulster? Did Britain bomb Ireland in response? Were republican areas in the north sealed off and pulverized as happened in Gaza? Were British casualties one hundredth of Irish casualties in response?

None of this happened. Margaret Thatcher no less accepted what became known as an "acceptable level of violence" because the alternative would a) have caused domestic outrage and b) made the situation far, far worse and recruited a new army of terror. Again, one has to ask: why is Israel different?

A disturbing report from the Guardian on the emergence of a fast-growing, racist, anti-Muslim group in Britain called the English Defense League, allegedly the most potent neo-fascist movement in Britain since the 1970s:

David Quigg has a good rule:

When I was a newspaper reporter, I inevitably imagined my profile subject’s grown children coming across my article someday. I aimed to write something that would be accurate, skeptical, analytical, and empathetic — something three-dimensional enough to give those hypothetical offspring some useful piece of the truth of who their mom or dad was. Maybe that makes me “too stupid or too full of (myself).” I don’t think so.

Always God's work.

Ryan Sager maps the connections:

[W]hat do we find from large-scale, international surveys of life satisfaction? According to two new working papers from John Helliwell and Christopher Barrington-Leigh, economists at the University of British Columbia, we find that money matters to happiness — but not entirely in the way one might think. Money does matter quite a bit when it comes to the difference between poverty and Western levels of prosperity. The difference in happiness between Denmark and Zimbabwe is large, and it’s mostly (though not entirely) explained by per capita income.

But once you’ve reached a level of prosperity such as that in the developed world, income starts to pay diminishing returns. For instance, in Ireland, according to Gallup, 97.5% of people report having a network of friends they can count on; in France, this number is a bit lower, at 93.9%. The difference that living in a country with an Irish level of having friends makes in happiness, though, as calculated by Helliwell and Barrington-Leigh, is equivalent to roughly a 20% boost in income. Similarly, they’ve found by looking at data from the Canadian General Social Survey, feeling like one “belongs” to one’s community, province, or country can have a much bigger impact on happiness than variations in one’s income.

A reader writes:

This is why I love your blog.  You start by relating an anecdote about an angry Sarah Palin, and by the end of the discussion, you have me buying Robert Frost collections on Amazon.  The input from readers around the world with incredible knowledge and perspective give every subject such complexity and richness.  And the curated emails are 1000% better than any strand of repetitive, anonymous comments. 

Please stick with this format forever!

We will. It's simple really. Instead of a computer algorithm and message boards, we have emails and we read them and edit them and try to make it all connect together. This has evolved as the Dish has grown and matured. And with each improvisation, we find new challenges. One thing we hope to do soon is to find a place on the page where you can easily read entire threads from beginning to end. We're very close to adding new staffers to help us do this.

What it really means is that this is your blog as much as ours. From Window Views to personal tales and theological and spiritual discussion, the content on this blog is now increasingly generated by you and filtered through the pre-frontal cortex of me and the sous-chefs.

Vaughan Bell describes an experiment in the 1950s where psychologist Milton Rokeach "gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for two years in Ypsilanti State Hospital to see if their beliefs would change." They didn't:

These tales are surprising because delusions, in the medical sense, are not simply a case of being mistaken. They are considered to be pathological beliefs, reflecting a warped or broken understanding that is not, by definition, amenable to being reshaped by reality. One of most striking examples is the Cotard delusion, under which a patient believes she is dead; surely there can be no clearer demonstration that simple and constant contradiction offers no lasting remedy. Rokeach, aware of this, did not expect a miraculous cure. Instead, he was drawing a parallel between the baseless nature of delusion and the flimsy foundations we use to construct our own identities. If tomorrow everyone treats me as if I have an electronic device in my head, there are ways and means I could use to demonstrate they are wrong and establish the facts of the matter—a visit to the hospital perhaps. But what if everyone treats me as if my core self were fundamentally different than I believed it to be? Let's say they thought I was an undercover agent—what could I show them to prove otherwise? From my perspective, the best evidence is the strength of my conviction. My belief is my identity.

David Sloan Wilson runs the Evolution Institute, a public policy think tank. From a candid Nature interview:

As we speak, we are establishing our first consulting relationship with a religious congregation in Binghamton to explore their religion and spirituality and to help them be more effective as an organization [by using evolutionary tools]. I think the benefits we provide will be so great that we will be sought after by other congregations.

…I piss off atheists more than any other category, and I am an atheist. One of the things that infuriates me about the newest crop of angry atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, is their denial of the beneficial aspects of religion. Their beef is not just that there is no evidence for God. They also insist that religion "poisons everything", as Christopher Hitchens subtitled his book. They are ignoring the scientific theory and evidence for the "secular utility" of religion, as Émile Durkheim put it, even though they wrap themselves in the mantle of science and rationality. Someone needs to call them out on that, and that person is me.