Month: August 2010

Balko talks to law enforcement officials who favor charging and imprisoning citizens for recording encounters with police. Previous Dish coverage of this trend here.

Austin Bramwell uses the words of a radical anarchist to argue that open borders are untenable if we're to preserve society in its current form.

Lewis McCrary draws parallels:

Suddenly it seems so appropriate that Facebook was invented on a college campus. The more one reflects on it, the more the Facebook experience resembles what goes on in the hallways of college dormitories at universities everywhere: personal boundaries are reduced, many try on new slightly new personas every other week, and late-night bull sessions abound (leading to bleary-eyed mornings that also happen after too many late nights on Facebook). Like Facebook, in college we all had a “wall,” which enabled us to present ourselves to new “friends”—mostly through cheap posters purchased the first week of classes. We even had those little note boards on our doors where passers-by, even if only of casual acquaintance, could leave messages for all to see. Today, those non-digital forms of social networking all seem so 1999.

A reader writes:

The real issue with the 90,000 odd documents Wikileaks posted is not who is a journalist or not.  As the mother of a disabled Iraq combat veteran, I have some strong opinions about the media's complicity in the lead up to the war.  It was the mainstream media's mediocre coverage of the war during my Marine son's two tours – the initial invasion and later a tour in Ramadi – that led me to the wonderful and informative world of alternative media sites, even yours.  The real issue of the Wikileaks site is that it does, as Assange claims, reveal a picture of war completely unavailable through most US media.  It reveals a glimpse of the horror my child experienced and participated in, and that his family now lives with, that simply is not available to the average reader of daily newspapers with so-called 'journalistic cred'.

Moynihan can wrinkle his nose all he wants but I for one appreciate knowing the real world and only wish my son had known it sooner.

Another writes:

Defining the term journalist is like shooting at a moving target nowadays.

I can remember not so long ago when bloggers were derided as non-journalists. And yet here you are and many others, recognized for your contributions in the distribution of important information. Just because you and your peers may have arrived at your current occupation from the traditional (mainstream) media does not preclude that another individual may be approaching another form of news distribution from an entirely different tangent – say that of a hacker. In fact, such a person can only help light a fire under the asses of typical journos who are so quick to dismiss Assange.

Another:

I have to sort of agree with Yglesias on the whole Wikileaks/journalism debate; does it really matter? Whether Julian Assange is a journalist or not is a matter solely of definition – definitions which are chosen and biased based on personal experiences and worldview. Someone who considers journalism a good thing and is negative towards Assange for some reason is obviously going to try to deny him a place in whatever circle they draw to include journalists.

Today on the Dish, Fox News' Mr Gutfeld promised Cordoba Mosque a new neighbor– a gay bar that Andrew named this. Ben Smith gathered the 2012 candidate reactions to the Mosque, Gawker rocked out to the worst Anti-Manhattan Mosque anthem, and Andrew feared for the worst.

A top cadet at West Point resigned over DADT; blowback on Ross' column continued; and Andrew and a reader agreed: names mean something, and sometimes they mean more than politics. Asian-Americans outmarried, a Florida candidate offended, and we debated tax cuts, the budget and accountability here, here, and here. Gates whittled the military down but images of maimed Afghan children reminded us of the moral dilemma we're in. On the ground, Spencer Ackerman doesn't think we're leaving anytime soon.

For your philosophy fix, Andrew sketched the Oakeshott-Strauss divide between modernity and a past that will never return, and reconciled how he can support Reagan in the 1980s and Obama today.

Andrew's Bravo debut ended up on the cutting room floor, but he rejoiced over this kind of reader email. Other readers waxed realistic about weddings, your FOTD here, MHB here, VFYW here and contest #10 winner here.

And of course, we dissected the Palin eye-roll. Our readers reamed her, we discovered the not-so drag queen theater teacher only directed Hedwig, and Conservatives4Palin.com admitted words don't mean anything, anyways. She might be allowed to go fishing, though.

— Z.P.

Tim Lee reflects on the country's impressive growth:

China is going through roughly the same phase of technological development that the Western world passed through in the first half of the 20th century: the country has mastered the basics of industrialization and are reaping huge gains from economies of scale and a more educated workforce. The engineers and bureaucrats who are organizing ever-more-impressive feats of industrial production have, like their Western counterparts of a century ago, convinced themselves that a society can be planned in the same manner that a factory floor can be.

This is unlikely to be any more true in China than it was in the West; it turns out that people don’t like being treated like interchangeable cogs in a vast machine. But as in the West, it will take a while for ordinary people to figure out how to organize themselves to effectively resist these schemes.

The NYT has an interesting companion piece on China's approach to energy efficiency. Fallows introduces a new Atlantic.com correspondent, Damien Ma, who will mainly cover environmental news – "arguably the very most important category of news for China's own future prospects and for its impact on the rest of the world."

Professor Matt Might crafted a visual guide for his students.

John Sides counters Fallows:

I doubt that presidents, Senators, interest groups, and others would suddenly stop caring as much if justices served only 6 or 8 or 12 years. A lot of the divisiveness stems from party polarization in Congress, which is not likely to go away anytime soon. Under term limits, I would foresee an increasing number of equally divisive Court battles. Indeed, they might become even more divisive because leaders would know exactly when vacancies would arise, making them even more a dominant consideration in campaigns.

Andrew Gelman nods on that point but disagrees with Sides on several others. Bernstein jumps in:

As I said in the earlier post, what bothers me the most about the current system is the arbitrary aspect: if Justices are fairly partisan (which is fine with me), then I'm not really sure that there's any decent justification for the random distribution of deaths and retirements across presidencies.  Of course, basically this is all just good August speculation; given that in practical terms reform is basically off the table, since it would require a Constitutional amendment, and that's not going to happen.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has banned movie ads displaying guns:

While the official poster for the film [The Other Guys] features a maniacal Ferrell and the menacing Wahlberg sailing through the air, guns drawn, the version in Muni stations features Ferrell brandishing a vial of pepper spray and Wahlberg relying upon his bare fists. This is not a coincidence.

Eugene Volokh finds the policy unconstitutional.