by David Frum
Rush Limbaugh has at last found a buyer for his New York apartment, although for $2.5 mn less than the original asking price. The Wall Street Journal has the details. The photos, if you have not seen them, are well worth the look … and for Rush's sake, I hope the French are wrong that his style is the man himself.
by David Frum
Here's more from the young blogger Alex Knepper whom the folks at NewsRealBlog published for months … but fired as a sex pervert and all-around lying maniac after he offered a post criticizing Ann Coulter. You can see just the kind of dangerous fiend he is too …
Russell Kirk aptly described ideology as a drug. Meditate on that. Ideology, in the classical conservative worldview, is something that provides a person with a comfortable, affixed set of dogma that serves itself, rather than the interests of the individual and his community. Traditional conservatives, skeptical that anyone can really remake society from on high, want to pierce through these absolute claims, not come up with their own. Those who want to examine their beliefs ought to act as Socrates did, asking questions even about those beliefs that are taken as axiomatic.
Edmund Burke lambasted Thomas Paine’s incredible pretensions that we can “start the world anew.” We can’t make the world anew. We can’t remake society from on high. We can’t fix the troubles of the human condition with a bullet-point agenda.
Knepper makes a favorable reference to an old essay of mine about Russell Kirk. Those interested can read that essay on the New Criterion site, here.
by Patrick Appel
Will Saletan is made sick by the the world of competitive eating:
Ten years ago, the record at the Nathan's contest was 25 hot dogs. Now it's 68, and Chestnut claims to have forced down 72 in a practice session.
He later strains his argument by connecting the pastime to pornography.
by Patrick Appel
Jonah Lehrer highlights a new study finding that mice with toys in their cages were better able to fight off cancer:
There is something spooky about this new link between nice cages and reduced tumor growth. Cancer, after all, is just stupid cells run amok. It is life at its most mechanical, nothing but a genetic mistake. And yet, the presence of toys in a cage can dramatically alter the course of the disease, making it harder for cancerous cells to take root and slowing their growth once they do. A slight chemical tweak in the cortex has ripple effects throughout the flesh.
It strikes me that we need a new metaphor for the interactions of the brain and body. They aren't simply connected via some pipes and tubes. They are emulsified together, so hopelessly intertwined that everything that happens in one affects the other. Holism is the rule.
by Patrick Appel
Talbot reads up on the DOMA case:
Which status quo did the Justice Department lawyers mean? If they were talking about marriage itself, well, yes, heterosexual marriage was the status quo in 1996 [when DOMA passed]. But if they were talking about marriage law, the status quo there was for “the federal government to recognize for federal purposes, any marriage declared valid according to state law.” States ruled. The federal government had to recognize even a marriage that no other states would allow—like one uniting a fourteen-year-old boy and a thirteen-year-old girl, which was permitted nowhere but New Hampshire.
Argentine marriage equality ad via Savage.
by Patrick Appel
The WSJ profiles adults with limited palates. Jackson Kuhl nods:
We all have likes and dislikes; I don’t care how much of a delicacy they are in Cambodia — I ain’t eating a tarantula. Still, experience with my son taught me that, as the article suggests, picky eating is a neurosis. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in both cases, the appetites of my guy and the pediatrician’s son expanded at the same age when kids demonstrate greater self-awareness and personal responsibility. Becoming more confident, they realize they have some control of their environment and new foods are no longer as strange or anxiety-inducing. The stakes aren’t as high as they once believed. They recognize a meal is a finite experience and that if there’s some broccoli on the plate, they can just eat and be done with it because dinner will soon be over.
I’m not as judgmental as some people around here about vegetarians (I lean paleo in my diet, which is just another kind of self-selection), but I do think some of the extreme types, like vegans, are adult picky eaters who wrap their neuroses in an ideological flag.
There is some truth in that. Vegetarians are often people who never much liked meat in the first place. There are certainly formerly meat-loving vegetarians, but moral arguments are more compelling the less you like what you are giving up. Veganism doesn't work the same way; none of us inherently dislike all animal products.
by David Frum
… also most most needed in these hard times: AgainstDumb.com
by Patrick Appel
Friedersdorf notes Bill Kristol's peace-offering to the tea parties:
It is darkly amusing that he opens his strangely hollow outreach to the Tea Party movement with a quotation from Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father its typical adherent would most abhor.
Inside the Tea Party movement, there is much annoyance — some of it justified — about the treatment received at the hands of media elites. I submit that Mr. Kristol's latest is as striking an example you'll find of treating Tea Partiers as if they're naive idiots. Our leading, unrepentant advocate for "national greatness conservatism" is doing his best to co-opt a fundamentally small government movement that has had enough of "bold efforts" by federal legislators, and he's so confident that criticizing President Obama is sufficient to forge this alliance that he trots out as prelude the most brazen principled advocate for a powerful, far-reaching, supreme federal government in American history.
Poulos pushes back.
by Patrick Appel
Digby reflects on this article:
It turns out that our brains are designed to create "cognitive shortcuts" to cope with the rush of information which I'm guessing is more important than ever in this new age. I'm also guessing one of these "cognitive shortcuts" is trusting in certain tribal identification and shared "worldview" to make things easier to sort out, which is why things are getting hyperpartisan and polarized in this time of information overload. (And sadly, one of the effects of that would be more confirmation of whatever bad information exists within the group.) So politics becomes a dogfight in which the battle is not just between ideas, but between the facts themselves.
by Chris Bodenner
A reader writes:
I came of age in an era when, as a friend put it, "everyone was supposed to sleep with everyone, and did." (The infamous "sixties," though for me it was offset into the seventies.) In the midst of all that pressure, ignorance, and confusion, I fell into a long-term relationship that we (a young man and I) defined as "open." We also defined me as being immature, ignoble, and unpleasant for being jealous and possessive. There were a couple of decades where I was, a lot of the time, in shredding pain over the openness of the relationship. (Yes, I'm a slow learner.)
Eventually that relationship ended, or at least radically changed. It will never totally end, because before we were done we had had two children together — now grown, and the light of my life. I had one more major love relationship that started out as "open" (I was by that time the prophetess of non-monogamy, full of "reasons" and justifications) and ended when, among other things like the separation of continents, I was finally able to claim the right to have monogamy or no relationship at all.
It has been fascinating reading all the responses to the "Evolutionary Case Against Monogamy" idea. I could write a book, but in the meantime I have two main comments in reaction:
1. If we are to have a more nuanced understanding of the urge toward non-monogamy, I would like to request the converse as well. I suspect it is just as deeply embedded in human nature — and like all qualities and characteristics, more deeply embedded in some of us than in others — to want our partners to be monogamous, and to be in pain when they are not. I could say that I wish I had grown up to be able to claim my own reality much sooner, but then I wouldn't have had my kids.
2. When I finally got out of my second and last major non-monogamous relationship, one of the things that finally gave me the clarity to do it was the realization that if anything was worse than sexual non-monogamy, it was non-monogamy of decision-making. That was the deeper basis of the pain I had been in all those years. I had agreed to non-monogamy, but I did not — unlike some of your readers — have the clarity or understanding to ask for an agreement about the primacy of one relationship over all the others in terms of making decisions about the relationship(s). I found myself in a situation where decisions that affected my life profoundly were being made by other people, and that's when I finally got out for good.
As for your readers who wrote about making a success of having one primary, decision-makingly monogamous relationship with some sexual non-monogamy thrown in — well, more power to them. I hope it keeps working out for them.
The Dish 