Month: September 2010

Today on the Dish, Andrew shared Beinart and Goldblog's regret for what Israel should have done, instead of failing to extend the settlment freeze. Homocon misstepped with Coulter's off-color jokes, Andrew Sprung predicted Obama would be the transformative president he promised to be and Andrew agreed. Stephen Colbert wasn't joking about his Catholic faith and defending "the least of his brothers."

Gideon Levy tried to rehumanize the plight of Palestinians in Israel, Ahmadinejad clowned around, living with HIV in Haiti meant hiding the truth, and Joe Klein informed Obama most civilians won't mind if he dials back in Afghanistan.

Paladino continued to ride the horse of race-baiting, Boehner didn't want to talk about fiscal solutions, and Larison envisioned a Romney run. Exum tried to play gotcha with Andrew on double standards for the military but, like the AEI after Gordon Adams was done with them, was shot down. Torture was still redacted in the New York Times, drug czar Bill Bennett conflated hedonism with healing, but polling on Prop 19 improved. Bernstein asserted the constitution's primacy in our politics today, and Congress wanted to curb liberties on every communication device possible.

Urban planning insulted people's living rooms, Mary Elizabeth Williams saw porn everywhere, and a reader and bicyclist rebelled against Felix Salmon's read on road rage. Yglesias relished aiming low, Dan's project spread, and VFYW here, MHB here, Map of the Day here, FOTD here, academic beard migrations here, and reader reactions to the Read On feature here. Lehrer let us see the world through infants' eyes, and Katherine Dalton learned everything she need to know from living in a small town.

–Z.P.

 

Katherine Dalton learned everything she knows about civility from living in a small town:

Don’t honk unless it’s friendly.  And for goodness’ sake don’t honk at the Ford stopped interminably at the town’s lone traffic light.  It’s bound to be Miss Carrie, age 82, deciding whether or not she needs to go the bank (right), or straight on home to start dinner (left).  What’s your hurry anyway?  Honk and make her jump and you’ll feel guilty for a month.  Also the older men seated on the courthouse bench will catch you at it.

Watch the witticisms, because everybody’s related.  Chances are the ex-magistrate so deserving of a good lambaste is your eager listener’s third cousin.  If you’re talking to one of your favorite ladies from church, you can be sure there’s a relation. Speaking of tactlessness, if you put your foot in it at the deacons’ meeting (where all deliberations are confidential), be ready to spend the next two years living it down …

If there are cars at the funeral home, and there’s no message on your answering machine, call and find out who it is.  Odds are three to two it’s somebody you know, or his uncle.  And keep your suit pressed, because you will be at the funeral home a lot—so much so that your city friends won’t begin to understand it.  But no man is an island in a little place.

Malcolm Gladwell argues that the role medium plays in activism is overblown:

From a project on stereotype mapping, Europe according to gay men:

  

(Hat tip: Joe My God)

Robin Hanson lists "signs that your opinions function more to signal loyalty and ability than to estimate truth":

You find it hard to be enthusiastic for something until you know that others oppose it.

You have little interest in getting clear on what exactly is the position being argued.

Realizing that a topic is important and neglected doesn’t make you much interested.

You have little interest in digging to bigger topics behind commonly argued topics.

You are less interested in a topic when you don’t foresee being able to talk about it.

You are uncomfortable taking a position near the middle of the opinion distribution.

You are uncomfortable taking a position of high uncertainty about who is right.

You care far more about current nearby events than similar distant or past/future events.

You find it easy to conclude that those who disagree with you are insincere or stupid.

You are reluctant to change your publicly stated positions in response to new info.

You are reluctant to agree a rival’s claim, even if you had no prior opinion on the topic.

You are reluctant to take a position that raises the status of rivals.

There are more.

Mike Meno passes along the the good news:

With only about five weeks left until Election Day, a new Field Poll of likely voters shows California’s Proposition 19 leading 49 to 42 percent, fueled by large majorities of voters younger than 40 and those who live in the San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles metropolitan areas. That’s an extremely promising increase from the last Field Poll taken in June, which showed the initiative losing 48 to 44.

Chris Good has more:

Prop. 19 looked unlikely, or at least borderline, until yesterday.

Lisa Armstrong profiles Noel Paul, a gay 29-year-old former New Yorker living with HIV in Haiti. He is forced to hide his illness and sexuality:

In the three years since he discovered he was HIV positive, Paul has had to take antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) twice a day. It was at first a challenge keeping his illness hidden from his family and others living in the schoolyard, because there was nowhere to store the boxes of medicine. Recognizing that it would be difficult for people living in the tent cities to hide their HIV status from others, some of the aid organizations operating in Port au Prince now dispense ARVs in clear plastic bags. But people still ask Paul why he has to down several pills — two in the morning, three at night — like clockwork.

It makes people defensive:

Whenever we talk about urban form, people hear us making judgments about their homes.  I can stand in front of a group of citizens and talk about how a certain kind of development pattern implies certain consequences for transit, and thus for sustainability, and thus for civilization.  As we talk, it may appear that we’re having a thoughtful and educational discussion about good and bad design.  But some people in the audience have chosen to make their homes in the very development pattern that I’m describing, and to those people, I’m saying that their home is good or bad.  Once you hear that, you’re likely to have a strong emotional reaction that makes you deaf to rational argument.  On some level, consciously or unconsciously, you’re going to feel as though I’d walked into your own livingroom and told you that your decor is not just ugly but a threat to civilization. 

Strangely, Matt Feeney's thoughts on the new Arcade Fire album are tangentially related.

From phdcomics.com.