A reader writes:
Chait finds “Israel distinctly more sympathetic than Hamas”. Comparing a political party to a country in a way that makes a people, the Palestinians, seem like terrorists is a distortion of the first order, in a column supposedly about distortions where Chait criticizes the idea of comparing the United States to Al Qaeda in the same paragraph.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Kagan Worship – Dahlia Lithwick | ||||
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Dan Froomkin vents legitimate frustration at the pointlessness of it all. Robbie George writes glowingly of Kagan’s “personal integrity” (is there anyone who doesn’t like her?) but rightly asks for more aggressive scrutiny than in the recent past. In Kagan, it seems to me we have reached a new level of utter blankness. Her entire career has been about never taking a stand on anything of any substance – free coffee for students! – while networking in a way to neutralize any conceivable opposition. And she is walking back from her earlier demands for more clarity and transparency in Senate confirmation hearings. Josh notes that liberals are worried about an Obama Souter. I just don’t believe that Obama is that prone to risk. I predict that if confirmed, she’s much more likely to surprise on the left than on the right, in so far as those terms mean much any more. I mean she favors a powerful central government’s power to organize and regulate our lives for our own improvement. And she will not see the court as an obstacle in that government’s way. Libertarian she ain’t.
But I’m guessing. We’re all guessing. None of us has a clue – including those who say they are close to her. There are so many things we don’t know about this person about to get enormous power over us for life. Which is why I have so far found this nomination so disturbing.
“Susan B. Anthony would be proud of Governor Palin’s consistent, passionate witness for women and the unborn, and especially her commitment to the families of children with special needs. Governor Palin is the modern personification of the authentic leadership modeled by early women’s rights trailblazers like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Our nation’s earliest women leaders understood that women’s rights could never be advanced at the expense of the broken rights of innocent unborn children,” – Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser.
The WSJ finds that Republican support has firmed up and doesn’t look like budging, in large part by anti-incumbent discontent among those older, whiter voters who are most determined to show up:
The voters who said they were most interested in the November elections favor Republican control of Congress by a 20-point margin, with 56% backing the GOP and 36% backing Democrats—the highest gap all year on that question.
Sprung notes how far he is from where public opinion has swung on the actions of this Congress. Me too. But doing difficult but necessary things imperfectly is my idea of political progress. And eighteen months is a very short time in which to judge the impact of any mandate at all.
Via Ambers, a prediction from Conservatives For Palin:
In both speeches, Palin cited President Ronald Reagan as a driving influence in her life and political career, drawing great attention to the fact Reagan was born and educated in Illinois — the state in which we believe Palin will officially launch her 2012 presidential bid on February 6th, 2011…Reagan's 100th birthday. She'll do it – we betcha – in either Tampica or Eureka, two cities in our state intimately connected to Reagan. And she'll do it in the face of all the naysayers and talking heads in the Lamestream Media who obsessively strive every day to destroy her, to ridicule her, to mock her, and to tear her down. Because the media wants Barack Obama to win a second term, and they know Sarah Palin is the only thing that can stop that.
This creature of News Corp will run against the media – in the name of Reagan, the man from Hollywood and General Electric. Yes, history can repeat itself as farce. And yes, at some point, the Republican party (or what's left of it) will have to choose.
Drum responds to my query. He thinks that when he dies his "consciousness/ego/soul simply ceases to exist" and it doesn't bother him that is own "existence won't last forever" and it never has:
For what it's worth, my instinct tells me that this is primarily an aspect of temperament you're born with. Either you have a strong emotional reaction to the idea of eventual nonexistence or you don't. If you do, religion is the most common way of dealing with it. The particular religion you choose is obviously mostly cultural, passed down from your parents and peers the same way you learn a particular language as a child, but the motivating fear itself probably isn't.
But either way, does this really reveal something essential about what it means to be human? In one sense, yes: a knowledge that someday we'll die is unique to humans (though fear of death plainly isn't), and our response to that knowledge has been a defining feature of human cultures for millennia. Still, there are hundreds of other things that are unique to humans too, and I don't think there's any special reason to give this one pride of place.
I take the former point entirely. I find Kevin's final statement unpersuasive. To be human is to be aware of our own finitude, and to wonder at that. Montaigne argued that to philosophize is to learn how to die. Camus put it differently: men die and they are not happy. For me, this last thing is our first thing as humans. It is our defining characteristic, even though some animals may experience this in a different way.
And our ability to think about this casts us between angels and beasts. It is our reality. Facing it is our life's task.
Warsaw, Poland, 1.15 pm
The CBO says it may cost more than originally projected. Ezra Klein looks at the upside. Douthat at the downside.
Scott Adams wonders:
I assume some of the best engineers in the solar system are working on [the oil spill clean up]. So what we have here is a pure case of brains against oil spill. It's the Manhattan Project for natural disasters.
The Scott Adams Theory of Predictable Disasters states that any catastrophe that society at large can predict far in advance won't happen, usually because scientists and engineers figure a way to head it off. So while an oil spill of this size wasn't predicted by the general public, the slow motion ecological disaster from this point forward is predictable. Admittedly, this is a grey area for the theory because this particular disaster is happening on a relatively fast schedule. It will be a good test of the robustness of the Scott Adams Theory of Predictable Disasters.
Julia Whitty worries:
Voiced or not, addressed or not, the problem of overpopulation has not gone away. The miracle of the Green Revolution, which fed billions and provided the world a sense of limitless hope, also disguised four ominous truths about Earth's limits. First, the revolution's most effective agents, chemical fertilizers of nitrogen and phosphorus, are destined to run out, along with the natural resources used to produce them. Second, the fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides that grew the food that enabled our enormous population growth in the 20th century bore expensive downstream costs in the form of polluted land, water, and air that now threaten life. Third, crop yields today are holding stubbornly stable and even beginning to fall in some places, despite increasing fertilizer use, in soils oversaturated with nitrogen. The Green Revolution's duplicitous harvest — giving life with one hand, robbing life-support with the other — also masked a fourth ominous truth. We're running out of topsoil, tossing it to the wind via mechanized agriculture and losing it to runoff and erosion.
A forum on this topic can be found here.
The Dish 