Month: June 2010

Drum hops on the thread:

Did adults abandon movies because movies got juvenile? Or did movies get juvenile because adults abanonded them? I've never come to a firm conclusion about this myself, but I suspect it's more the latter. As a social experience — for dates, for hanging out with your friends, for getting out of the house — movies are as good as they've ever been. And that's a big part of what kids want out of their pastimes. But adults? They mostly just want to relax with a bit of good entertainment, and they have a whole lot of other options for that these days. Options that, from an adult point of view, are generally superior.

Jonah Lehrer notes Watson’s flaws. The computer is slow on the buzzer:

Those players on Jeopardy are able to ring the buzzer before they can actually articulate the answer. All they have is a feeling, and that feeling is enough. These feelings of knowing illustrate the power of our emotions. The first thing to note is that these feelings are often extremely accurate…The second important feature of these feelings of knowing is their speed. As Thompson makes clear, it’s the speed of these inexplicable hunches that allow the human contestants to defeat Watson…

The larger point is that we won’t get a genuinely “human” version of artificial intelligence (not to mention more energy efficient computers) until our computers start to run emotion-like algorithms.

Video via Niraj Chokshi.

Yglesias ignores the drama over whether McChrystal will retain his job:

The policy question here is more important than the fate of one man. The military can easily continue to pursue a McChrystal-style strategy on both the Afghan and US media fronts under different leadership. The more important question facing the White House is how they feel about that [strategy].

Today on the Dish, General McChrystal's comments created a firestorm in the blogosphere. Even Kristol felt he should resign. Andrew's take here and here. Stephen Biddle looked on the bright side of Afghanistan and the Texas GOP went off the deep end. BP took its PR to Twitter, the Big Picture took stock of the spill, and another worst case scenario emerged. We chronicled another odd lie.

In assorted coverage, Saletan studied the blood ban for gays, Adam Serwer antagonized the GOP over Faisal Shahzad's guilty plea, Plumer preferred climate change legislation over EPA intervention, Chris Good looked ahead on Prop 8, Steinglass suggested decriminalization over legalization, and Friedersdorf praised Continetti for having the courage to say that Roosevelt wasn't a fascist dictator.

In other commentary, Jonah Lehrer disagreed with Clay Shirky over cultural consumption, Steven Zeitchik noted a surge of kid movies, a Dish reader cheered them on, and cancer survivor Ananda Shankar Jayant shared her love for dancing. Readers continued the discussion on public executions and others contributed to the fall of the fourth estate. Seth Masket wondered why the right hates soccer. Incredible goal here.

Von Hoffman award here and cool ad here. Ex-gay hathos here, Haggard's tweets here, and Colbert bait here. MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here. The latest winner of the VFYW contest here.

— C.B.

Jay Rosen encourages reporters to be more transparent, against "using opacity as a tool of power," for accountability in government, and against demagoguery. Ambinder asks how these guidelines are supposed to function in real life:

Tonight, I'm learning a lot about the back end of how the Rolling Stone article about Gen. McChrystal came to be written. I could share everything I know immediately, thus satisfying the transparency and anti-opacity principles, but in order to figure out who ought to be held accountable and why, I'm going to have to use that information to gather other information and then make an informed decision.

There's no doubt that I will NOT able to identify, by name, all of the sources I've spoken to. I will always do my best to relate to the reader the biases of the sources, but if my goal is to explain to people what's really happening, and I think that IS my goal, then I'm going to have to … well… sacrifice at least one of the principles (opacity) for another (accountability).

Adam Serwer reflects on Shahzad's guilty plea:

Unlike those individuals who will be tried by military tribunals, Shahzad can make no credible claim to being a soldier. He is a traitor, an attempted murderer, and a hapless terrorist whose fragile ego is clinging to a warrior narrative because it's the only way he knows to hold on to the last shred of dignity he has. With the sharp knock of a judge's gavel, that meager comfort was denied. That's exactly how it should be. 

The question now becomes, why are Republicans so eager to give every suspected terrorist that very comfort?

Kristol writes that McChrystal probably has to go. Kori Schake wants him to stay:

McChrystal's comments are not particularly wide of the norm — this is what war-fighters sound like when they're talking to each other. It's not polite, and it certainly isn't politically correct, but these are people doing deadly work. They develop cynical attitudes about civilians and our often impractical ideas. They do not feel understood, much less appreciated, by the political wheelers and dealers in Washington, and politically-motivated attacks on McChrystal will aggravate that. Let us not forget George Orwell's caution that "we sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm." This is what rough men sound like, and we shouldn't want to wring that toughness out of them. They will not long remain a war-winning army if we do.

Ackerman analyzes the White House response:

None of [Gibbs's remarks] sounds like a White House that’s ready to scrap its counterinsurgency strategy in the year to go before it begins to shift to a heavier focus on training Afghan forces and withdrawing troops. But McChrystal will have to reiterate his commitment tomorrow to working with the team that, in many ways, signed onto a strategy he himself largely convinced the president to support. “This is bigger than anybody on the military or the civilian side,” Gibbs said. Translation: McChrystal can go or stay, but the strategy has been set. And that may be the greatest irony of the entire McChrystal imbroglio.

Chris Good surveys gay rights activists:

"If this case is decided on the strength of the arguments, our side wins, hands-down, all the way up to the US Supreme Court. However, we know that on our issues, a win can be tenuous and the legal process can take years," Marc Solomon, marriage director for Equality California, one of the state's most prominent membership groups for gay rights, wrote over e-mail. "So we are working extremely hard right now to change hearts and minds in the direction of fairness and equality to gain solid majority support for the freedom to marry in preparation for a 2012 ballot campaign."