Month: June 2010

Noah Millman picks apart the Douthat column I took issue with earlier today:

Failure is always an option. Ruling it out in advance doesn’t make success probable or even possible – it just rules out doing any kind of cost-benefit analysis of trying to achieve it. Worse, it rules out asking whether “success” actually advances our interests in the region, or actually sets them back.

A reader writes:

I happened to be an exchange student in Potsdam, Germany during the 1998 World Cup and became completely swept up in all the excitement. One of the more surprising expressions of nationalism I experienced was two lines of graffiti, written in English, in a stall in the student dormitory I was assigned to:

Two world wars and one World Cup!
Doo-dah, Doo-dah!

James Surowiecki wants one:

Some [critics of proper financial education] suggest that financial illiteracy is an example of what economists call “rational ignorance”—inattention that is justified because the costs of paying attention outweigh the benefits. But few decisions affect us more directly than the ones we make about our money. Critics also argue that financial education may make people overconfident, and therefore more likely to make bad decisions. In fact, the reverse is true: the less people know, the more overconfident in their abilities they tend to be.

Apparently it can hit the Brown Note:

South Park went there.

Robert Stacy McCain is on to something here:

One of the reasons why there are so few conservatives in America's newsrooms is because the profession of journalism is relentlessly derided by those who claim to speak for the conservative cause. No kid who grew up listening to talk radio could possibly believe that becoming a reporter is a worthy ambition. (To be a talking-head pundit on cable TV, yes; to be a mere reporter, no.) …

There are indeed such things as conservative journalists, but it is a corollary of the anti-journalism worldview of Republicans that conservative journalists are judged not by their skill — the accuracy of their reporting, the readability of their prose, etc. – but by how useful they are in the service of advancing GOP political objectives. Republicans treat conservative journalists with a special disdain, as mere errand boys or stenographers whose job it is to spread the GOP message.

Goldblog backtracks further. TNC takes a step back:

Fallows offered some really wise words on how to criticize people in print, the gist of it being, "Speak to those you would criticize as though they were standing right there."… It's fun to be mean, and it makes your side howl – and sometimes it's even necessary. But  my game is as follows – stating my opinions directly, clearly and without equivocation and without undue malice. I am not a violent writer. Fuck Pat Robertson was cool. But that's a small part of me, that I am endeavoring to make even smaller. When it starts becoming larger, I need to go do something else.

I veer toward the Fuck Pat Robertson model myself. This isn't because I think being rude is somehow acceptable. I'm generally polite if blunt in real life (my life's too short for bullshit). Online, I adopt a bit of a debating persona, the way politicians do in, say, the House of Commons. What Cameron said there to Brown's grimacing face for five years was beyond rude and very colorful, deeply personal and often cheap. But when you saw the campaign debates, it was a much more Fallowsian discourse. This is because there is a convention that parliament is all fun and games (no blood, no foul), and venting in the House is part of the rough-and-tumble of democratic accountability. More to the point, the rudeness is a plus: it helps air stuff that polite people are unwilling to air. It can get to the real point more quickly. And airing stuff is more important in politics than permanent decorum.

The blogosphere is too new to have truly established conventions. But I really want to resist any creeping tide of civility and politeness. Raspberries matter in Anglo-Saxon political life; and if the gap between how we debate in public and how we talk in private gets too large, something else will give. I think the informality of the blogosphere is a perfect place for such venting – and has a different set of expectations than print media. 

That said, I am deeply grateful for the thoughtful engagement of my esteemed colleagues.

Catherine Rampell tries to understand why educated women today are more likely to have children than educated women in the 1990s:

Perhaps this has something to do with Claudia Goldin’s findings that some of the fields that require the most educational investment upfront — like pediatrics, or veterinary medicine — also happen to be fields whose work schedules allow for a healthy work-family balance. High-achieving women who want children may be discovering this, and making their career choices accordingly.

Are there other explanations for why the country’s most educated women are more likely to have children today than they were in the 1990s?

A reader writes:

As someone who leans libertarian, I'm not surprised that Weigel is now being painted as a left-winger. This seems to be the knee-jerk movement response to libertarians. Dave, like Matt Welch, does an excellent job of pointing out how much of movement conservatism is base-authoritarianism and banana republic-style corporatism wrapped up in empty and increasingly meaningless limited-government boilerplate.

This is why Sean Hannity positively loathes Ron Paul. Libertarians often prove the most astute at pointing out how badly conservatism has betrayed its founding principles. When someone who supports liberty and limited government calls bullshit on your party, you can't win that argument so you resort to the "liberal" smear and that pretty much ends the argument.

Real conservatives invite debate. Phony ones shut it down.

For the current right, "liberal" simply means "the other side." Since their side is defined in almost suffocatingly orthodox terms, any critic of any aspect of today's Palinite conservatism is a "liberal." I can see why that is how Mark Steyn or Rush Limbaugh see things. I don't see why anyone else should adhere to their, er, binaryism.

Joel Wing measures the Iraqi oil pipelines:

Weather, bottlenecks, and attacks upon pipelines account for the monthly fluctuations Iraq has experienced in the last few years. Otherwise the country is operating at just about capacity. That's why output has hardly changed in the last 17 months. Its aging infrastructure cannot handle much more. Luckily prices for Iraqi crude have been increasing until May, which has meant a steady income for the government. Even if prices decline more in coming months they will still probably be above the budget's mark, which will mean Baghdad will be able to finance its operations. That will give it enough time and money to hold it over until the international companies get to work with the new oil deals, and hopefully boost production. How much that will be is the real question facing Iraq's petroleum industry.