Month: June 2010

Scott Morgan's call to arms:

The bottom line is that if this initiative wins, or merely comes close to winning, it will galvanize our movement behind a victory that's surely just over the horizon. It will show politicians and the press that the recently surging marijuana legalization debate is more than just a fad and that our support base penetrates deeply into mainstream society.

On the other hand, a decisive loss will send a message that the apparent march towards legalization in recent years was little more than a vocal minority exploiting the internet to create a false perception of political momentum. Can you even imagine how eager our opponents are to start saying things like that? Our losses are inevitably exaggerated and twisted by our opponents in a desperate defense of the status quo, and in that respect, the political impact of our victories must be considered in addition to the substance of the reforms themselves.

Scientific American reports on the latest studies of commonalities between the brains of humans and those of animals.

Veronique de Rugy worries:

There is no firm rule on when deficits or public debts are too high relative to an economy’s size. Prior to the crisis, the general consensus was that rich countries could safely have public debts worth 60 percent of GDP. And although Japan’s debt has exceeded 100 percent of GDP for many years, the government has yet to suffer a financing crisis.

However, it doesn’t mean that things won’t change. Investors judge default risks on a curve. They will assess one government against others (for instance, the United States vs. France, Germany, China, and Norway). When the markets do lose confidence in a government’s fiscal rectitude relative to others, a crisis can arise quite quickly, forcing countries into painful political decisions. And this could very well happen to the United States.

And look at the Blair-Brown legacy in Britain!

A reader writes:

Please read the Wired report you linked to. The classified video of gunships is a distraction: Manning also leaked some 260,000 classified Diplomatic Communications – so much that even a supporter of Wikileaks and a former hacker turned him in to the Army. That's the story. That kind of leakage – damaging, deadly even – is not to be dismissed at all.  Very likely treason.

Another writes:

You simply cannot have analysts who take it upon themselves to decide that videos or documents are being improperly classified and fix it themselves. This is why people like Jonathan Pollard are deservedly behind bars for years to come. This young soldier may have acted morally in your eyes, but his conduct was quite simply illegal, unprofessional, and in violation of all his training and the promises he voluntarily gave to safeguard the nation's secrets.

Another:

No one forces you to apply for a security clearance.  In return for classified access, you take an oath, which has both moral and legal force.  You agree not to disclose the information you are entrusted with.  If you don't believe that you can honor this trust, for what ever reason, you have no business swearing the oath.  The United States trusted this young man to honor his oath and not disclose this material.  He violated this trust.

Daniel Ellsberg understood the weight of the oath and expected to go to jail when he leaked the Pentagon Papers.  I don't agree with what Ellberg did, but at least he believed strongly enough in what he was doing to knowingly risk jail.  The young man who leaked the information to Wikileaks clearly did not take his promise seriously.

Matt Welch has a theory about reporters forced to "submerge or even smother their political and philosophical views in the workplace":

Show me the world's most intractable problems–the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the inability to produce mass amounts of energy without negatively impacting the environment, the search for a beer that tastes great and is less filling–and I'll show you reporters in bars having conversations worthy of the Alex Jones show. It's not that they're all Helen Thomases–she is truly one of a kind–but that in the absence of subjecting their own beliefs to journalistic rigor, they are more likely than many would expect to quietly nurture beliefs that outsiders would find surprisingly slanted and even extreme. 

Yglesias nods:

When you get in the habit of arguing about politics professionally, you tend to learn something about what the other side’s counterarguments are and hopefully develop some better arguments of your own. If you just kind of sit around in the vicinity of important issues stewing in your own views but never working on articulating them or developing them, then you’ve set the stage to cut loose with some serious nonsense.

Any time people feel required to suppress their real views for whatever reason, untruths fester without the disinfectant of sunlight. That's why I've always tried to raise some difficult issues – racial differences in IQ, or the impact of testosterone on gender, or the sexual orientation of a possible Supreme Court Justice – as a way to get them on the table. In this, I'm a liberal and always have been. Which means I'm against the cult of journalistic objectivity – which often means simply never asking the questions that really do need to be talked about.

A reader writes:

One question: Was the man wearing a condom?

It is just difficult for me to feel sorry for him when he is compelling his girlfriend to both shoulder the burden of birth control (which is a burden – the hormones wreak havoc on the body) and abortion. If he wanted rights then he should have taken some responsibility for preventing the pregnancy.

The article suggests he wasn't; the closest reference was this: "she was on birth control, she says, though its effectiveness may have been diluted by antibiotics she was taking."  Another writes:

The Bruell-Hedrick case strikes me as very simple – at least ethically, if not legally.  The person with a claim to support from Bruell isn't Hedrick; it's their unborn child.  Hedrick collects the money as the child's guardian/executor, but ethically speaking that money belongs to the child, not her.  Since this child wasn't a party to the agreement between Bruell and Hedrick, it doesn't seem right that it can be deprived of the support of its father.

I remember thinking Bruell's way when I was younger. 

I sent an angry letter once to Ann Landers about how a guy outta be excused from paying child support if he wanted the mom to get an abortion and she wouldn't.  Like many young men, the world revolved around me and my needs, and I always knew what was right after a moment's thought.  That justice was always aligned with my convenience was a happy coincidence and nothing more.  When I grew the hell up, I came to understand that this sort of thinking marked me as a douchebag with entitlement issues, and that a child's claim to support from his father trumps the father's claim to hassle-free intercourse.

A year ago the Dish posted on a breakthrough study showing the effectiveness of a male pill. Discovery News recently asked where the hell it is already.

They’ve always been a guilty pleasure for me, but the quality of some of their songs is sometimes revealed by new and fresh approaches. I loved this from Sharon Clark:

Over the weekend, Greenwald congratulated Limbaugh on his fourth marriage:

The disparity is between (a) what same-sex opponents such as Limbaugh claim they advocate (the law's recognition of only Traditional Marriages) and (b) what they actually advocate (having the law recognize completely untraditional marriages, such as Gingrich and Limbaugh's multiple, serial unions).  They don't really advocate the law's recognition of Traditional Marriage, as they claim; rather, they only advocate that the law bar the untraditional marriages they don't want to enter into (same-sex marriages) while recognizing the ones they do (multiple, serial "marriages"). The point is that one cannot oppose same-sex marriage on the ground that the law should only recognize Traditional Marriages, while simultaneously demanding that the law recognize third, fourth and other multiple marriages following divorce: at least one cannot do so coherently.

I think many "conservatives" are for serial polygamy basically, with social blessing. But for gays? Not even one blessing for one committed relationship. Not that I'd outlaw divorce but it would be good not to have such blatant double-standards. Joyner follows up:

What we think of as “traditional” marriage is in fact ever-evolving.   Even half a century ago, divorce was quite taboo; it’s so commonplace today that virtually no stigma is attached, even among fairly conservative people.   A quarter century ago, it was simply expected that the wife stay at home and raise the children if at all economically feasible; now, that’s fairly unusual.

I suspect that, less than a quarter century from now, same-sex marriage will be so normalized as to fit comfortably within the definition of “traditional.”