Month: May 2010

"I’m feeling grateful to the prez these days because we happen to be in the middle of a bunch of midsized crises. There’s the oil spill in the Gulf (which is verging on a big crisis, I guess). There’s the Times Square bomber. There are various floods in Tennessee and elsewhere. The European Union is falling apart over the Greek debt crisis, and so on and so on. It’s good to have a president with equipoise. It seems to me that Obama is handling his role, which ranges from the marginal to the significant, in these events with calm professionalism. He’s active yet not annoying. He’s not taking credit for everything. He’s not creating friction by making any missteps. He is calm, cool and collected," – David Brooks on our temperamentally conservative president.

Via Stuttaford, some clarity from the WSJ:

Mrs. Duffy had confronted Brown with the central fact of his economic record. Since 2000, public spending in Britain has grown faster as a share of GDP than any other country in the 28-member OECD — up 17 percentage points to 53% of GDP, compared to 15 points for Ireland and 10 points for Iceland. By comparison, Spain's grew by eight points and Greece by three points. If Gordon Brown had matched spending with tax increases, Labour would not have been re-elected twice.

They were like Bush on steroids. Hence the massive hangover.

Sunder Katwala raises the alarm. Chris Brooke summarizes:

Roughly speaking, the idea is that in the event of a hung parliament, David Cameron isn’t going to wait patiently for Gordon Brown to deliberate at leisure over his future as prime minister, but is going publicly to declare victory and demand “the keys to Number 10″ (which is a funny expression, as the famous front door to 10 Downing St doesn’t have a keyhole in it); and that he’ll be cheered on in doing this by the rightwing press…

And yawns:

The bottom line is that politics is about power, and if the Tories are the only ones willing to play hardball, then – bluntly – good for them.  If the Queen discredits herself along the way by being pressured into being openly partisan, then that’s a good thing, as it’ll work to hasten the end of this stupid monarchy.  And if voters disapprove of what the Tories are doing, then they’ll punish them when they get the chance. That’s democracy.

On Friday, Britain's post-election politics could look alarmingly like Iraq's. The real story may be after this election, not before it.

(Hat tip: Harry)

More Colbert Bait from a fantastic site:

Conclusion after the jump:

More here.

The complexities of the Times Square bomb plot escape many in the media. It's a story that does not fit into any easy pre-fabricated ideological narrative.

A reader writes:

I think there's something important that's by-and-large been left out of this discussion.  To me, the most alarming thing about the 3L email incident is how it demonstrates what I suppose you might call "Liberal Epistemic Closure.'  This woman attends a university.  She, like other bright young people with an independent, contrarian streak, wrote in an email that she was disinclined to accept the dogma of her environment as gospel simply because it was what she'd been spoon-fed and told to believe, and pointed out (quite fairly) that scientific conclusions tend to be somewhat warped by the political and cultural climates in which the studies take place.  She was doing what people should be doing in academic environments: questioning accepted truth.  But questioning accepted truth doesn't mean the rejection of that viewpoint, it means that she was playing around with ideas, asserting her right to engage with them until she was able to reach a satisfying conclusion on her own terms, as opposed to allowing her mind to be molded by popular prevailing opinion.

People like that are vital to society.  We need them.  They should be celebrated, not vilified.   In fact, one could argue that the entire purpose of a liberal arts education is to teach people to think in an independent, contrarian, "I'm not going to think what you tell me to think until you convincingly demonstrate to me why I should" way.  Academia should be the safest place for people to explore ideas and ask questions.

However, when this woman tried to do that, not only was she shot down by her peers and labeled as a racist, her email was leaked to the outside world, where she's pilloried, bullied, had her reputation utterly destroyed, and, quite possibly, her life ruined.  On blogs, people have left comments saying that she should never have been allowed into Harvard Law in the first place – in other words, suggesting that university applicants conform to some kind of ideological litmus test as a condition of admittance. The dean of Harvard Law, instead of defending the intellectual rights of the young minds under her care and the sanctity of the academic environment, instead chose to throw this young woman under the bus by issuing a statement that did nothing but cover her own ass.  The liberal and academic communities' response to questioning – not even rejecting, mind you, simply questioning – liberal dogma is evidently to engage in a mass, Hester Prynne-style public shaming.  And nobody is horrified by this?

Here's the thing: if people have questions about race and ethnicity that they're not allowed to ask, and are in fact publicy rejected and shamed for doing so, they're going to go someplace where those questions are accepted.  And I don't think we'd like the answers they get there.  Right now, I'll bet dollars-to-doughnuts that the only letters of support this woman is receiving are probably from white supremacist groups.  Is that really where we want to drive young people who think these thoughts and ask these questions?  Isn't it possible to present a convincing intellectual argument for "our side" while keeping it in the realm of ideas, as opposed to attacking the people as individuals?

Another writes:

I'd only like to add that the strength of opinions elicited by this discussion illustrates the very issue our original emailer was attempting to describe. Even when made in the abstract, as in this case, any mention of a link between race and intelligence brings forth the most intense political opinions. How do you think this hullabaloo affects those scientists who, as honestly and ethically as they can, choose to study the link between geographic variation and any sort of biological trait? Would you choose a topic of research knowing that you would cause a ruckus and risk marginalization every time you mentioned your work? In other words, if you're just trying to get funding, which side of this issue would you make sure your research came down on?

Mike Tyson commits to a no-cannoli life:

Tom Dollar thinks that Cameron should learn from Canada's hung parliament:

So what can David Cameron learn from his friends in Ottawa? The principal lesson is Go Big or Go Home: voters would rather see the government boldly pursue its agenda than dither over coalition-building. A hung parliament does not have to mean inertia, and a plurality of 308 seats should give the Tories enough leeway.

Chris Bertram says he's voting for Labour:

[H]ere’s the decisive thing for me. We all know that the next few years in the UK are going to be tough and that the volume of cuts that each party would make are about the same. Where there is a difference is in the distribution of the pain. If the Tories are in power it will fall on the very poorest and most vulnerable. The Lib Dems will be better than that, but they too will appease their middle-class base. A Labour government will still hurt the most vulnerable but less so. Labour aren’t going to win, but it would be very very bad if they came third. Their base, again, composed disproportionately of the worst-off, would become still more marginalized. So share of the vote counts too, even in a first-past-the-post system. I’m voting Labour.

Bubión, Spain, 11.20 am