Month: June 2010

The above ad comes from Carly Fiorina, a Republican running for Senate in California. Andrew Exum watches and sighs:

First Carly Fiorina dismisses climate change as "the weather". Then she pokes fun at Barbara Boxer for thinking climate change might be a national security issue. Ugh. Look, we can have a debate about whether or not climate change is man-made or whether or not it is reversible, I guess, but things like polar ice caps melting and creating new sea lanes is most certainly a national security issue. I cannot wait to watch Parthemore or Rogers tee off on this ad, but I will pre-empt them both by directing you to our Natural Security page, their awesome blog, and the two most recent (and excellent) CNAS reports (here and here) on the impact climate change will have on the security environment and U.S. policy.

Von At Obsidian Wings corrects Scott Johnson.

Avent tells the drivers what's good for them.

Yglesias predicts:

I think retirees are going to prove to be the killer app of digital content creation. It’s just that at the moment relatively few retired people are all that comfortable with digital media. Ten, twenty, thirty years from now that’ll be very different. Obviously someone who’s affiliated with a larger institution will always have certain advantages over an amateur, and the blogosphere gives heavy advantages to early adopters, but I think a lot is going to continue to change on the internet as demographic change continues.

Me too. The basic truth is that amateurs are often as good as professionals in journalism, which requires simply basic skills, integrity and practice. In the end, newspapers will be super-advertizing vehicles, searching for the best existing blogs out there and aggregating them. In a way, that's already the Dish model. The sources come to you.

Laura Vanderkam vouches for telecommuting:

It turns out that not all work hours are the same. The BYU researchers calculated a “break point,” that is, the point where 25 percent of workers reported that work was interfering with family life. Among people who have to log all their hours in an office during certain times, this break point happened at 38 hours. Since many full-time workers log 40-45 hours per week, this means a lot of people are feeling conflict.

If you give employees some flexibility about their schedules, though, and give them the option to work some of the time from home, the break point doesn’t hit until 57 hours. That’s 19 more hours per week — 50 percent more than the office-only workers, and the equivalent of 2.5 full days.

Now that is a lot of time. And the crazy thing is, you probably won’t have to pay people more either for these additional 2.5 days that are on the table.

And less traffic and fewer cars.

(Hat tip: Elizabeth Nolan Brown)

Sady Doyle provides context for Caitlin Flanagan's case against the hook-up culture:

Hooking up may leave girls unsatisfied and lonely. It may include experiences that are, in Flanagan's words, "frightening, embarrassing, uncomfortable at best, painful at worst." But assuming that these experiences are all consensual—I trust Flanagan wouldn't qualify date rape as a "hook-up," however grim her language may be—we can't know that they are "hurting" girls in any measureable way. Here is what we do know to be hurting girls in a measureable way, however: Their boyfriends.

According to a 2005 survey on teen dating abuse, 13 percent of girls who have been in relationships—girls, that is to say, who have had boyfriends—report being "physically hurt or hit." A startling one in four said that their boyfriends had pressured them to have sex they didn't want. Twenty-six percent reported recurring, and severe, verbal abuse in their relationships. And then, there's this, from a no less august source than the U.S. Department of Justice: "Young women between the ages of 16 and 24 in dating relationships experience the highest rate of domestic violence and sexual assault." The highest. What was that about Boyfriend Stories again?

Ben Carlson has an interview with Nick Carr:

The danger for the young is never developing the mental facility for contemplative thought, whether deep reading or being able to follow a single argument over a long stretch. I worry that we’re training children to be distracted, to confuse getting access to information with intelligence.There seems to be a redefinition of our idea of intelligence itself that is emerging. The emphasis is on how quickly you can find information, rather than what you do with it, how deeply you think about it, and how you weave it into the knowledge you already have.

Carr rounds up reaction to his new book, including an review by Jonah Lehrer:

While Carr tries to ground his argument in the details of modern neuroscience, his most powerful points have nothing do with our plastic cortex. Instead, “The Shallows” is most successful when Carr sticks to cultural criticism, as he documents the losses that accompany the arrival of new technologies. The rise of the written text led to the decline of oral poetry; the invention of movable type wiped out the market for illuminated manuscripts; the television show obliterated the radio play (if hardly radio itself). Similarly, numerous surveys suggest that the Internet has diminished our interest in reading books. Carr quotes Wallace Stevens’s poem “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” in which stillness allows the reader to “become a book.” The incessant noise of the Internet, Carr concludes, has turned the difficult text into an obsolete relic.

And a counter argument by Clay Shirky:

The past was not as golden, nor is the present as tawdry, as the pessimists suggest, but the only thing really worth arguing about is the future. It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity. We are now witnessing the rapid stress of older institutions accompanied by the slow and fitful development of cultural alternatives. Just as required education was a response to print, using the Internet well will require new cultural institutions as well, not just new technologies.

Yglesias looks for a deeper lesson in the Army's arrest of a young intelligence analyst accused of leaking the Wikileaks footage:

An alternative investigation might focus not on who leaked classified video of a U.S. military operations, but on the question of why that sort of video should be classified. Certainly I can see why the Army might have preferred to keep it under wraps—in the eyes of many it reflected poorly on their conduct—but it hardly contained operational military secrets. In general, we expect things undertaken by America’s public servants in America’s name on America’s dime to be matters of public record. The security services have, however, largely managed to leverage the legitimate need for some level of operational secrecy into a fairly broad exemption of themselves from this basic principle.

And this is why whistle-blowers matter. That video, in any case, was very illuminating. By disseminating it,  real debate became possible, and many persuasively added perspectives that helped put it in context. It helped me understand the kind of things that war entails, the random events, and sudden decisions that can lead to legitimate self-defense or, in a second, a war crime. I believe that democracies benefit from such revelations. It's what separates us from authoritarian regimes. These soldiers, after all, are operating in our name. Without divulging real secrets, we have a right to know. Because without knowing, we cannot make the decisions about war and peace that an informed public has to make.