Month: June 2010

Beinart serves up an excerpt from his new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris:

How could our forefathers have been so cowardly and immoral? Stalin was a monster; so was Mao, and they both had nuclear weapons aimed at us. Why did we live with that sword of Damocles? Why did we accept their dominion over billions of souls? Once upon a time, the answer was obvious: Because we lacked the power not to.

Franklin Roosevelt knew the American people would not sacrifice their sons by the thousands to keep Eastern Europe from Soviet hands. During Korea, Harry Truman blundered into war with Beijing, and realized that in Asia too, the price of denying America’s communist foes a sphere of influence was appallingly high. Even Ronald Reagan proved so reluctant to challenge Soviet control over Poland in the early eighties that conservative commentators accused him of betrayal. In different ways, all these presidents understood that in foreign policy, as in life, there are things you may fervently desire but cannot afford. And in foreign policy, the recognition that resources are limited, and precious, is even more important since you are not merely spending other people’s money; you are spilling other people’s blood.

William Easterly wants the complexity of extreme poverty to inform our responses to it:

E.D. Kain struggles with school choice:

I want to talk about school choice again, because it’s one of those topics that I have a really hard time coming to terms with, and it struck me over the weekend that this is at least partly because the schools and charter schools in my home town are so much different than the schools and charter schools in say Newark or Cleveland. Here, the public schools are actually pretty good and the charter schools are just another alternative – not really a “way out” from a terrible public education monopoly, but rather give people a different approach to education. Maybe a charter focuses on different teaching styles, or performing and fine arts, or more homework. Choice is really just choice and nothing more. It’s not life and death.

Yglesias berates liberals for scare mongering over performance pay for teachers and Ezra takes on the "first hired, last fired" system.

Jim Burroway analyzes a longitudinal study finding that the children of lesbian parents do better than the children of heterosexual parents. His caveat:

This study is one of the very few to suggest more positive outcomes [for children of lesbian parents] than children from heterosexual families, a claim that would require more research before it could be regarded as anything more than an outlier.  But it’s easy to imagine one reason for this surprising finding. These parents were recruited because they were about to undergo artificial insemination. This means that in every case, these children were brought into the world because they were wanted and planned for. None of them are the product of a drunken tryst in the back seat of a Chevy. These mothers had to investigate options, invest money, and really want to become mothers. This alone can account for the difference.

(Image from here.)

Masoud Shafaee keeps faith:

[T]he regime has lost its religious standing in the eyes of countless Muslims. In a region with an increasing number of devout followers – be they Sunni or Shia – it was always the Islamic component of the "Islamic republic" that earned Iran admiration outside its borders. A year after the election, in the face of overwhelming evidence of state-sanctioned murder, torture and even rape, the regime's moral authority is in shreds. Several of Iran's grand ayatollahs have even publicly blasted the government during the last year. As the late dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri, the former heir apparent to Khomeini, put it: "This regime is neither Islamic nor a republic."

Today, many are speculating about the death of the Green movement. Following a brutal crackdown, the massive protests seen in June tapered off, before being definitively suppressed on the Islamic Republic's 31st anniversary in February. Yet while the streets may now be emptier, the Green movement is far from finished. As the Iranian saying goes, "There is fire under the ash."

Today on the Dish, Andrew laid into BP, demanded the full footage of the flotilla, spotlighted an empty apology from Israel, and went to bat for whistleblowers and Wikileaks. Beinart detailed the Israel-evangelical nexus and readers sounded off on his plea for Gilad Shalit. We also touched upon the Helen Thomas row and caught Palin in another lie.

In assorted coverage, tea-partiers started to get serious on military spending, Andrew Exum slapped his forehead over Fiorina, Bernstein further pegged the GOP as the party of torture, and Andrew Revkin kept a close eye on BP. Ezra Klein laid out his budget strategy, Greenwald had a field day with White House reporters Super-soaking with top officials, Chris Beam lampooned political scientists, Kinsely weighed in on worst case scenarios, Douthat looked for a silver lining in the potential Newsmax-Newsweek deal, and Yglesias predicted an army of elder bloggers.

Andrew and a reader discussed Palin's broken Christianity, another reader endorsed a quieter faith, and Stephen Prothero supported a similar non-faith. Elle renewed the debate over male reproductive rights, Sady Doyle downplayed the perils of hooking up, Laura Vanderkam vouched for working in pajamas, Jonah Lehrer gazed into our memories, Nick Carr garnered a bunch of attention, and a reader shared her recession.

Catholic WTF here. A cool ad for gay marriage here. Hot beard action here. MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here. Details about a new Dish feature here.

— C.B.

Late last week a mural on the wall of a school in Arizona drew national attention because the artists were asked to lighten the faces of the children depicted. Roger Ebert has a beautiful reflection on the controversy and on the progression of his views on race:

I began up above by imagining I was a student in Prescott, Arizona, with my face being painted over. That was easy for me. What I cannot imagine is what it would be like to be one of those people driving past in their cars day after day and screaming hateful things out of the window. How do you get to that place in your life? Were you raised as a racist, or become one on your own?…The hard-won social struggles of the 1960s and before have fundamentally altered the feelings most of us breathe, and we have evolved, and that is how America will survive. We are all in this together.

But what about the people in those cars? They don't breathe that air. They don't think of the feelings of the kids on the mural. They don't like those kids in the school. It's not as if they have reasons. They simply hate. Why would they do that? What have they shut down inside? Why do they resent the rights of others? Our rights must come first before our fears. And our rights are their rights, whoever "they" are.

Kinsley weighs risks:

Leonhardt says (borrowing with credit from Robert N. Stavins, a Harvard economist) that we tend to underestimate risks that are hard to imagine and overestimate risks that are easy to imagine.  It is the first problem that worries Leonhardt…

My worry is the opposite of Leonhardt’s. It seems to me that in America, at least, we are much more prone to the second type of error: overestimating small risks of large disasters—and underestimating, by comparison, the smaller, everyday risks of life. Leonhardt himself provides the clearest example: people who, after 9/11, decided to drive rather than fly on long trips. In the next year there was no new terrorist attack on airplanes, but deaths in traffic accidents went up because more people were driving. That was like buying insurance against asteroids. Or, to take a more tendentious example, it’s like nuclear power. For a generation we’ve gone without it to protect ourselves from a catastrophic risk, only to find that perhaps this was a mistake because, without enough reflection, we were increasing the risk of a somewhat smaller catastrophe like the one in the Gulf.

Gallup looks at migration wishes:

If all of the adults worldwide who tell Gallup they would like to move to another country actually did so, the United States could see a net population gain of 60%. Several other developed countries, such as Singapore, however, could be even more overwhelmed with migrants because of their smaller relative current population. Mexico, on the other hand, could potentially see net population losses as high as 15%.

Greg Scoblete sees a strategic advantage:

The ability to attract immigrants is not all good, of course, but it does speak to the country's capacity to regenerate itself and stave off a decline in population. America's two major great power rivals – China and Russia – can boast of no such attraction.

Buttonwood searches for consensus:

Last week, we launched our economics channel with a debate on whether inflation or deflation is the greater threat. Scroll through the contributions and you will discover either that "Tough deflationary times lie ahead" or that "Eventual inflation is inevitable".  Since this is the central question of economic policy at the moment, such a discordance of views is rather disturbing; much is made of the debate on global warming but the scientific consensus is overwhelmingly on one side on that issue. On economics, governments are being forced to choose in matters of fiscal austerity, where the debate is almost 50-50.