Month: September 2010

Kudos to Chris Wallace for exposing the deep danger the GOP represents to our fiscal future:

Money quote from Boehner:

Let’s not talk about potential solutions.

Because they have none. Look at what the Tories did in Britain: they were honest and clear and now have a mandate to do what’s necessary and can be held accountable for the results. These so-called Republicans have no such clarity, and no such courage and therefore will have no such mandate. Their only goal is partisan power and destruction of Obama.

If you care about the debt, whatever you do, don’t vote Republican. They and the recession created it. They will make it far far worse if they get back to power again.

Not so fast. The samples in the Fiorina and Paul polls are off.

Jonah Lehrer reveals what infants see and how it differs from what we see. He writes that "if attention is like a focused beam in adults, then it’s more like a glowing bulb in babies, casting a diffuse radiance across the world":

The experiment itself involved tracking the eye movements of infants between 6 and 15 months of age. The researchers used a special stimuli known as a Mooney face. … [T]he only way to see the shadowed faces is to stare straight at them – unless we pay attention the faces remain incomprehensible, just a mass of black and white splotches. In this experiment, however, the babies were able to perceive the faces even when they were located in the periphery of their visual field. (Trust me: You can’t do this.) Because their lantern was so diffuse, they were able to notice stimuli on a much vaster sensory stage.

A reader writes:

Out of a five minute video highlighting a range of issues that arise from using a poorly designed bike lane, Mr. Salmon focuses on perhaps 20 seconds of what appears to be the smallest problem. When the author of the video reviews the reasons for not using the bike lane, she shows trucks, vans and cars parked in the lane, taxis using the lane to get around traffic, pedestrians walking along and into the lane without concern, and cars turning without due care across a poorly situated bike lane. Does she mention the slower bikers? No, but Mr. Salmon decides to blow it up out of all proportion to the other more serious issues

He then compounds his ignorance by trying to draw a comparison to Northern European countries. He's obviously never cycled there (I have, spending several years working in Hanover, Germany, and biking everywhere), as he would not have made such an ignorant statement as "if you’re biking around Copenhagen, you’re going to go a lot more slowly than if you’re biking the same distance in NYC."

Bike lanes in Denmark, Holland and Germany are more than wide enough to accommodate most types/speeds of cyclists, and are usually built with enough sense and care to avoid most of the issues shown in the NYC clip. Not only is North America largely without well designed bike lanes (two painted lines in the road do not constitute a proper bike lane), it still has a largely anti-cycling culture that is well evident in the video. That will likely change over the coming decade, as some combination of carbon taxes, very volatile gas prices and further economic issues render cycling a more respected, widely acceptable form of transportation.

It's a shame that Mr. Salmon is choosing to focus his time and energy on what is essentially a non-issue, rather than all the other points raised in the video. But he seems to be building up quite a track record of ignorance on bike issues, if his prior posts are any indication.

Mary Elizabeth Williams uses the rancor over the tenth anniversay edition of a young adult novel, Speak, which features a teenage girl's rape and which has been derided as "soft pornography," to discuss the dumbing down of the term porn itself:

Is it entirely possible that someone out there reading a fictional account of a rape could become aroused? Could its descriptions therefore be used for sexual gratification, which is what porn does? Sure. But if we're going to decide that "porn" is anything capable of inciting a boner somewhere, we might as well apply it to every damn thing in the world, from the Victoria's Secret catalog to ComicCon.

Bernstein pushes back a  little against Lexington:

Is it true that "for the most part the Constitution is irrelevant to the current political design of the nation"? 

Here Lexington (for Klarman) talks about the administrative machinery of the government, but he might as well be talking of political parties, or the press, or interest groups, or the ways that the each of the Constitutional branches performs legislative, executive, and judicial tasks.  That's true. Add it all up and the actual functioning of the American political system isn't easily recognizable from a literal reading of the Constitution.  And yet…the reason that things work the way they do, with dispersed and multiplied power, and separated institutions sharing powers, and all the rest of it, is in my view fundamentally tied to Constitutional design.  For example, the fact that the American bureaucracy is more political (in the sense of partisan and electoral politics) than bureaucracies in other democracies is a direct consequence of the mixed masters the Constitution gave the "executive" branch.  So while plenty of our current institutional arrangements evolved over time, I would strong argue that the core political theory embedded in the Constitution is quite relevant to how they evolved, and the institutional arrangements detailed in that rulebook are quite relevant today.

Garrett Baer argues we need to acknowledge the realities of America's more sordid past:

American values certainly include freedom of religion, respect for the Constitution, and some modicum of comfortable tolerance, but there are a lot of other American values besides those. Racism is and has always been as American as lukewarm hamburgers. The Tea Party, of course, is defending American values, as are the Minute Men, as was the John Birch Society, as was Joe McCarthy’s Cold War witchhunt, as were the opponents of FDR who insisted that he was a Jew and called him “Jewsevelt.”

Oddly, this makes me less despairing about upsurge in bile, anger and bigotry that now stalks the land. And more disgusted by the Palinite know-nothing neurotic nationalism.

A reader dissents:

Which idea of the soul is Mr. Weisman talking about? Certainly not the one formulated by Aristotle. For Aristotle, the soul was simply the essence of what humans are made for. He said that if a knife had a soul, it would be the act of cutting. Aquinas and several Arab scholars elaborated on this concept so as to make the soul a kind of first principle of the body. Many traditions don't even consider the soul to be a single thing.

In the Jewish Kabbalah, there are at least three different levels of the soul (some add additional ones): Nefesh, Ruach, and Neshamah, which can be thought of as analogous to Freud's Id, Ego, and Superego. Similarly, Plato divided the soul into three parts: Logos, Thymos, and Eros. In fact, one word the Greeks used for soul was "psyche," from which we get the term "psychology," or "psychosis." The idea that the soul might become fractured as a result of disturbances in the body is not all that perplexing to someone who's actually studied the history of the concept.

Mr. Weisman's article is a perfect example of the arrogance of those who use science to rebut philosophical and theological concepts which they can't be bothered to actually study.

Fallen from Sascha Geddert on Vimeo.

A reader writes:

This short film is the best explanation of the nonbeliever's viewpoint I've seen. It's under just under four minutes and uses no words. When people ask me how I can be at peace without belief in god or an afterlife, now I can just show them Fallen and save myself a lot of time and effort.

"China is doing moon shots. Yes, that’s plural. When I say “moon shots” I mean big, multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing investments. China has at least four going now: one is building a network of ultramodern airports; another is building a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities; a third is in bioscience…; and, finally, Beijing just announced that it was providing $15 billion in seed money for the country’s leading auto and battery companies to create an electric car industry… Not to worry. America today also has its own multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing moon shot: fixing Afghanistan," – Tom Friedman.