Month: May 2010

Oliver Burkeman makes a distinction:

We are raised, the theory runs, in one of two cultures. In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything – a favour, a pay rise– fully realising the answer may be no. In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid "putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes… A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept."

Neither's "wrong", but when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results.

Chait takes issue with that last line.

"I'm not gonna answer that with all these people here," – Elena Kagan, joking when asked a question by Susan Collins in public.

Serwer counters Green and Ponnuru:

Somehow, it doesn't occur to either of them to mention that Kagan is less controversial because she's white, because she's not the first woman on the Court, the first Jew, or even the first Jewish woman. Her nomination to the Court isn't perceived as a usurpation of a position of power meant for white people. And it's really quite odd that Green and Ponnuru conclude that Sotomayor wasn't "safe" to vote against. Only nine Republicans voted for her. How is a vote in which three-quarters of the party's caucus votes "no" not a safe "no" vote?

I find the hand-wringing over this interesting because I can't imagine a scenario in which Sotomayor could have been confirmed with Kagan's resume.

David Boaz needles the DEA and the Obama administration:

I had a chance to meet with drug czar Gil Kerlikowske and his top aides last year, as part of a series of outreach meetings as the new team planned its strategy. It doesn’t look like my advice was taken. Of course, I probably didn’t help my case by noting that our last three presidents have acknowledged using illegal drugs, and it is just incomprehensible to me how they can morally justify arresting other people for doing the same thing they did. Do they think that they would have been better off if they had been arrested and incarcerated for their youthful drug use? Do they think the country would have been better off if they had been arrested and incarcerated? If not, how do they justify punishing others?

E.D. Kain asks:

Is anybody made better off by being incarcerated for a non-violent crime such as smoking marijuana – their records tarnished, their ability to get a job or even sometimes an apartment permanently hindered?

Isn't that fun?

Leonhardt defends his article:

I certainly agree that the two situations are not equivalent. Greece’s fiscal problems are worse than ours, and both our underlying economy and our political institutions are stronger than theirs. But the last statistic Mr. Krugman cites highlights why I think the comparison is relevant: “we have a long-run fiscal imbalance of 6-plus percent of G.D.P.” So to get our budget in order, we would need to come up with revenue equal to more than 6 percent of gross domestic product, either through tax increases or spending cuts. (That number comes from this paper, by the economists Alan Auerbach and William Gale.)

That’s an enormous amount of money. Military spending, for instance, is now less than 5 percent of gross domestic product. Medicare’s budget is now about 3 percent of G.D.P. Coming up with the necessary cuts and tax increases — even over many decades, the relevant time frame — will not be easy.

Balko looks at the reforms Columbia, Missouri Police Chief Ken Burton has agreed to since video of his department's SWAT team in action went viral:

Unfortunately the changes—while small steps in the right direction—still miss the point. Burton says his department will no longer conduct SWAT raids at night. They won’t conduct raids in homes where children are present. Suspects will be under constant surveillance until the raid is carried out. And raids will be conducted within a shorter period of time from when police get the initial tip about a suspected drug dealer. But the Columbia Police Department will still conduct volatile, violent, highly aggressive forced-entry raids on people suspected of consensual, nonviolent drug crimes. That is what’s wrong with the YouTube video. Changing the time of day of the raid doesn’t change the wildly disproportionate use of force.

Over at The Future Of The City, Friedersdorf questions the place the Big Apple holds in the popular imagination:

Even if New York is a peerless American city, an urban triumph that dwarfs every other in scale, density, and possibility; even if our idea of it is the romantic notion that Joan Didion described, "the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself;" even if you've reveled in the fact of the city, strutting down Fifth Avenue in a sharp suit or kissing a date with the skyline as backdrop while the yellow cab waits; even if you've drunk from the well of its creative springs, gazing at the Flatiron Building, or paging through the New York Review of Books on a Sunday morning, or living vicariously through Joseph Mitchel or E.B. White or Tom Wolfe or any of its countless chroniclers; even if you love New York as much as I do, revering it as the highest physical achievement of Western Civilization, surely you can admit that its singularly prominent role on the national scene is a tremendously unhealthy pathology.

I feel exactly the same way. I love it to death, but would never live there. And the narcissism of its inhabitants (yes, I know I'm not exactly one to talk) is deeply irritating. It's much less different than it once was; and nowhere near as interesting as it believes. A reader response here.

In case you missed it: genius – pure genius:

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