Month: May 2010

Or, as TDW puts it, "The most fun you’ll ever have watching a Darwin’s beetle get laid, guaranteed."

A reader writes:

Your reader referencing the Gulf's "Dead Zone" oversimplifies the reasons behind the lack of oil-covered wildlife. My wife works at the Environmental Defense Fund and told me the workers in the Gulf are using chemicals that dissolve the oil, making it heavier than water, so it sinks down and is absorbed into the sediment, rather than resting on the surface for birds or other larger animals to get coated. So the less sexy issues are plant, plankton, algae, and larvae life being threatened – in addition to unseen implications for fish and coral.

Another writes:

The focus on dead animals would be misguided anyway. This is not your run-of-the-mill oil spill. The real threat is not the loss of animal lives; it is the risk to human lives. The potential for the destruction of acres of wetlands accelerates the loss of New Orleans' natural protection from hurricanes by 50-100 years. That's the biggest problem here. That's what journalists should be reporting on and columnists should be pitching proposals to rebuild our natural defense barriers, not whining and wondering about the lack of dead dolphins.

More on the wetland threat here. A TPM reader reviews the new math on the size of the oil spill. New images of the spill at the Big Picture.

(Marshland is seen as efforts continue to contain BP's massive oil spill on May 11, 2010 in Venice, Louisiana. Oil is still leaking out of the Deepwater Horizon wellhead at a estimated rate of 1,000-5,000 barrels a day. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.)

Fallows follows up:

If there is a point that, above all the others, I wanted most to convey in this article, it is not "everything is going to be OK" or "Google is our friend" or even "here comes a torrent of new advertising money!" Rather it is a cultural/attitudinal argument about the press and everyone who cares about it. Far from being autumnal and despairing and mournful about a supposed golden age that has passed and fatalistic about the doomed state of public information and the resulting lapsed state of society, people who care about the media should (according to me) recognize that technological upheaval, and the resulting business shifts and forced individual innovations, have been the norm rather than the exception in our enterprise. Clever and ambitious people, especially but not only young people, will find new ways to do the work a society needs of them — and to make a living while doing so. There will be parts of a future press establishment that will be worse than what we know now. There will be parts that are better. That is how it has always been. This paragraph, near the end of the story, is what I really believe:

Ten years from now, a robust and better-funded news business will be thriving. What next year means is harder to say. I asked everyone I interviewed [at Google] to predict which organizations would be providing news a decade from now. Most people replied that many of tomorrow's influential news brands will be today's: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the public and private TV and radio networks, the Associated Press. Others would be names we don't yet know. But this is consistent with the way the news has always worked, rather than a threatening change. Fifteen years ago, Fox News did not exist. A decade ago, Jon Stewart was not known for political commentary. The news business has continually been reinvented by people in their 20s and early 30s–Henry Luce when he and Briton Hadden founded Time magazine soon after they left college, John Hersey when he wrote Hiroshima at age 32. Bloggers and videographers are their counterparts now. If the prospect is continued transition rather than mass extinction of news organizations, that is better than many had assumed. It requires an openness to the constant experimentation that Google preaches and that is journalism's real heritage.

An Iranian girl holding her mother's hand attends the funeral of Iranian armed forces who were killed during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) after the Friday prayers in Tehran on May 14, 2010. Iran held a funeral for 89 soldiers who were discovered by a searching team on the Iran-Iraq border. Photo by Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images.

In response to this post on gay MPs in Britain, Joyner asks:

Granting that the House of Commons is somewhat larger than the combined U.S. House and Senate, how can the numbers be that different?   Sure, there are parts of the country that where religious fundamentalism makes it hard for gays to run for office; but one imagines that’s true in the UK, too.  But there are numerous urban centers in the United States where gays have lived openly since before Archie Bunker went on the air.  And whole swaths of the country where rugged libertarianism is the norm.   How come…few open gays are in senior positions in American politics?

One of his readers answers:

Part of what's at issue, I think, is that Britain has been much more tolerant on these issues than many parts of the United States have been…Also, I don't know that it's so much that there are more homosexual politicians in the UK as it is that there are more open homosexual politicians there.

Hari contends that "the British people have not got what they voted for." Norm Geras, a Labour supporter himself, counters:

[Y]es, they have. Or, put in slightly more qualified form: they have got a perfectly legitimate outcome within the range of what their collective vote permitted. The claim that this isn't what the British people voted for is predicated on the assumption that a democratic electoral system aims, or should aim, to yield results that perfectly reflect the preferences of the totality of voters. But, apart from the fact that no method of aggregating preferences can guarantee this, it is not what an electoral system does. An electoral system is, rather, a set of rules for giving some approximate expression of voter preferences and then translating the result (in candidates elected) into a governing arrangement. If the vote is fair and the count is accurate and the rules for forming a government from the elected representatives are duly followed, then to complain that this isn't what the people voted for is beside the point.

Steinglass compares politicians and bloggers:

[F]or Elena Kagan, as for many people operating in government, the way to make sure nobody pigeonholes you as part of one ideological camp or political clique, or dismisses you as somebody's lackey, is to be relentlessly technical and positive. If you're down in the wonky weeds on every issue, and always congratulating everyone for sincerely addressing an important problem that everybody needs to work on, you're fine. For bloggers, on the other hand, the way to make sure nobody pigeonholes you or dismisses you as somebody's lackey is to be relentlessly cynical and negative. As long as you're constantly bemoaning the hypocrisy and stupidity of all political actors (yourself included), you're golden; you're nobody's lickspittle.

This is itself too cynical for me. It is also possible for a blogger and (to a lesser extent) a politician to have a complicated view of the world and be honest about it. Not to be popular, not to be golden, not to prove you're "nobody's lickspittle" – but because it's what you honestly think and believe.

That is seriously what I try to do here, and longtime readers can judge for themselves how successful I have been. I am simply trying to understand the world as I see it – and my own experience is obviously the filter. I'm hard to pigeonhole not out of any strategy but because I am who I am, and my life has pushed me into all sorts of apparent contradictions and conflicts … which are less of a contradiction or conflict when you can see the totality of someone's life and thoughts. By opening up about this, I hope the Dish fosters more complicated thinking and fewer pigeonholes.

Because almost all of us are complex and contradictory in this modern world, and all of us deserve an equal chance to be heard.

Contra Kinsley, Friedersdorf argues that small government can solve problems.