Month: August 2010

by Patrick Appel

Adam Ozimek questions Jim Manzi's understanding of consensus. Karl Smith narrows the debate:

I listed myself as a stimulus skeptic but I wasn’t at all skeptical about the stimulating powers of government spending. I was skeptical as to whether that was the ideal course of action. That skepticism was as much rooted in my understanding of American political dynamics and my own tolerance for risk as in any scientific claims about macroeconomics.

That has to be always kept in mind. Economists will disagree on policy even when we have no disagreement over economics. We have different policy preferences based on our different assessments on non-economic factors and at the end of the day because we have different tastes for government action.

If you can get 90% of economists to agree on anything, that’s quite a feat.

by Patrick Appel

R.M. at DiA praises Richard Just's new article:

As Mr Just says, history will not look kindly on Mr Obama when the question of gay marriage is settled. He compares the president's position on the issue to Woodrow Wilson's "slippery" stance in the debate over woman's suffrage—a debate he tried to avoid by defining suffrage as a local issue. Sound familiar? Like Wilson, Mr Obama seems unwilling to get out in front of his party or the public on gay marriage. It's the politically safe move. Even if a slim majority does now support gay marriage, it is not a priority for most, so why upset the very vocal, well-organised opponents? Still, it must be difficult for the president's supporters to gloss over his cynicism and ignore the realisation that, for all the elevated oratory, there's a lot more John Kerry and Bill Clinton in Mr Obama than they'd like to think. Thankfully, soon that cynicism will not only seem shameful, but politically naive.

Steinglass defends the president:

What would have been the actual political consequences of a decision by Barack Obama to come out in favour of gay marriage in the past year and a half? I don't think there can be any doubt that such a move would have re-politicised an issue that, remarkably, has become steadily less partisan in recent years. Presidents can't simply speak their minds. For presidents, words are political actions. A president who voices an opinion without considering the political consequences is acting irresponsibly. Presidents' voiced opinions about social justice are very sharply constrained by whether voicing those opinions is likely to advance their visions of social justice at that political moment. And that means that presidents' spoken views on such questions may lag far behind the pace of progressive opinion, and may become much less progressive when they are in power than they were before they were elected.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Omar writes:

…your average Muslim American, objectively speaking, is simply not going to view the free, unqualified exercise of their religion as some sort frolicsome elitist conceit far removed from the rights and privileges commonly enjoyed by their neighbors and colleagues of other faiths.  Whether you’re an immigrant Pakistani cab driver living in Queens, or an Egyptian-American MBA holder dwelling in the West Village, you’re simply not going to view the building of a mosque anywhere as some sort of cosmopolitanizing act of defiance against the confessional status quo of this country, but rather as an integrative act of engagement with that right.  Most Muslims in this country have not been compelled to be viewed their religious identity in such cosmopolitanizing terms until now.

In this debate, we are unconcerned with coastal elites

because, even here on the coasts, there is nothing particularly elite about most of us anyway.  This debate has really brought to the fore the depth of antipathy that lies beneath the surface.  Time and time again, I hear tell that this is simply a “matter of respect”, but implicit in this statement is the firm belief that a different (much lower and more flimsy) standard of respect must be accorded Muslims because of 9/11.  It has been painful , watching pretty much the entirety of red America, and a good part of the blue, turn on you so summarily and on such a specious basis.  It shouldn’t be about elites.  It just shouldn’t. 

Josh writes:

I grew up in a working class neighborhood, went to an Ivy League school, went into politics, became incredibly disillusioned, and am now raising a family and following politics only as a hobby.  Other than a great education and nice salary, I don’t consider myself part of an “elite”, and I don’t think anyone else would consider me part of any elite (unless income were the only criteria) because outside of my immediate friends and family my thoughts and ideas have no impact on anyone.  Nonetheless, I feel exactly like your business student in terms of not feeling represented by the “elites”.  The right is dominated by a media machine that preys upon people’s fears and ignorance to increase or maintain its ratings.  The left is dominated by a bunch of baby boomers with calcified opinions and they are just as happy as the right to use these false conflicts to gin up support.  Those in power enjoy this racket because it keeps all of them in their positions – shame on all of us who don’t simply ignore all of them and hold them to account for all of the times they’ve been wrong, or created false conflicts simply to increase fundraising or ratings. 

Despite our “elites” failing in every area of importance – politics, banking, media etc. – there is no accountability for these rank failures.  My lack of enthusiasm for Obama is based on the fact that I, and others of my (Gen X) generation, was really hoping Obama would break through all of this and “say goodbye to all that”, but instead he sort of fed into the worst aspects of our failed elite institutions and has enabled them to remain in power despite their objective failures.  He, like Elena Kagan, seems a little too taken with the elites of our society. 

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

A good example of the genre would be “If You Find Yourself Caught in Love” by Belle & Sebastian.  You’d be hard-pressed to argue that they aren’t indie hipster darlings, and lead singer Stuart Murdoch is a pretty devout Christian.  He rarely makes direct religious statements in his songs (there are lots of sidelong references), but this song is pretty straightforward. It doesn’t get much more Christian Hipster-y than the lyric, "If you find yourself caught in love/say a prayer to the man above/You should thank Him for every day you pass/you should thank Him for saving your sorry ass."

Stuart spoke about his faith with the Guardian in 2004:

"I'm not actually a Christian with a capital C," he says. "I'm still asking questions. But I had this time when I found myself singing all these old hymns in my kitchen and I couldn't work out why I was doing it. Then one Sunday morning I got up, looked at my watch, and thought, 'I wonder if I could make it to a church service?' It was so welcoming. It just felt like you were coming home. Twelve years later, I've never left."

Although he has now reluctantly given up his job as church caretaker, he still sings in the choir every Sunday, which has done more to broaden the congregation's demographic spread than any evangelist could dream of.

(Bonus tracks: Daniel Radosh, author of Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture, made a playlist of "10 great Christian rock songs. Really."  Listen to them here.)

by Patrick Appel

Chait says that the Park 51 debate matters for two reasons:

The first is that this drama is laying down a marker about the place of Muslims in American society. The question is whether they should be presumed to be terrorists unless proven otherwise — hence the constant, suspicious demands to find out where the money behind the putatively innocent project is coming from — or whether they should be afforded the same general presumption of innocence enjoyed by other religions. The second question is about laying the groundwork for Republican foreign policy for the next GOP presidential administration.

Bernstein won't relent.

Suva, Fiji, 11.51 am

by Chris Bodenner

As if the bedbug epidemic in New York wasn't bad enough by itself:

In a report released by the Socionomics Institute, researchers found strong correlations between falling stock prices and epidemics, both of which they say are brought about by a trend toward negative social mood. With financial markets in decline, Alan Hall, a leading researcher at the Georgia-based think tank, says bedbugs are just the beginning, "The list of epidemics in the news quietly continues to grow. Chronic kidney disease, Alzheimers, obesity, sexually-transmitted diseases, heart disease, meningitis, diabetes, cholera, Lyme disease and measles are all described by doctors as current epidemics." As mood grows fearful, stress rises and stocks plunge, the risk of disease increases. Hall says, "It's widely believed that epidemics make people fearful…but the data shows that fearful people are more susceptible to epidemics."

And I just happened to move back to Brooklyn this month and need to find a mattress.  (Though it seems I'm not even safe in theaters.)

by Patrick Appel

Will Wilkinson broadens the debate:

Whenever a libertarian concedes the utility of regulation meant to reduce the negative external effects of economic activity, you can be sure a purer strain of libertarian will arrive on the scene to shout down the idea that regulation ever makes sense. Likewise, whenever a pragmatic progressive such as Mr Yglesias observes that regulation is very often the means by which privilege protects itself, more thoroughly ideological progressives will pop up to defend almost any particular measure, as if admitting that some regulations make things worse is tantamount to conceding that none make things better. 

I suspect that at least part of the resistance to Mr Yglesias' anti-licensing arguments stem from the observation that these arguments have been most often set forth by libertarians as part of a larger agenda to establish the overall illegitimacy of state-imposed limits on economic liberty.

by Chris Bodenner

Copyranter isn't a fan:

Because you can't contract the HIV virus by hugging. Now, if Huggy Bear had turned into Humpy Bear, well then, that would have been scary.