Month: September 2010

The Urbanophile exposes the lie:

In a very real way here, the shift to green technology has actually accelerated the move of industry offshore. So many people like to talk about “green jobs” saving the economy. But the reverse is likely to be the case. The faster we force a shift to new green tech, the faster our manufacturing base will get shipped offshore. It can be difficult to make the case to shutter a fully depreciated factory with skilled labor and fully understood operational and quality metrics in favor of a new offshore plant. But if you are starting from scratch in any case, China starts to look even more attractive. …

This is not necessarily to disparage the shift to green tech. But sustainability advocates have to face up to the fact that there are real costs and tradeoffs to be made. Sometimes you can have it all, but much of the time you don’t get to have stricter environmental policies, lower costs and more jobs. There’s a real cost, financial, industrial, and human involved.

In a eulogy to preppy culture, Ben Schwarz compares Lisa Birnbach's 1980 classic The Official Preppy Handbook to her new sequel, True Prep:

Cracked heirlooms, threadbare antique rugs, sturdy L.L. Bean boots, duct-taped Blucher moccasins, and workhorse Volvo station wagons defined OPH’s aesthetic. True Prep’s preppies, armed with BlackBerrys and iPods, wear Verdura jewelry and Prada and vintage Gucci loafers, tote Goyard and Tory Burch bags, and adorn their desks with tchotchkes from Smythson (a firm whose success, Ian Jack notes in The Guardian, has been built “on selling baubles to the impressionable rich”). … Rather than demonstrating a failure of the authors’ powers, True Prep’s imprecision actually reflects the erosion of the distinctiveness of the subculture it attempts to reveal—an erosion engendered by the progress of capitalism and the attendant triumphs of meritocracy and consumer culture.

Graeme Wood ponders the Medal of Honor and what it tells us about the nature of bravery.

Serwer explains the consequences of repealing birthright citizenship – more undocumented immigrants:

The Migration Policy Institute recently did a study that found without birthright citizenship repeal, the number of undocumented immigrants would remain relatively constant at 11 million–although there's reason to believe that number might be low, particularly in the case of an economic recovery.

They evaluated several different rubrics under which citizenship could be denied. If citizenship for a child born with either parent being undocumented is repealed, the undocumented population would rise to 24 million by 2050. If the rule applies to children born to undocumented mothers, the undocumented population rises to 19 million. If it only applies to children whose parents are both undocumented immigrants, the undocumented population rises to 16 million. But again, I think it's likely that all these estimates would be surpassed in the event of a strong economic recovery.

Lihue, Hawaii, 6.45 am

Rachel Laudan defends processed food:

If we do not understand that most people had no choice but to devote their lives to growing and cooking food, we are incapable of comprehending that modern food allows us unparalleled choices not just of diet but of what to do with our lives. If we urge the Mexican to stay at her metate, the farmer to stay at his olive press, the housewife to stay at her stove, all so that we may eat handmade tortillas, traditionally pressed olive oil, and home-cooked meals, we are assuming the mantle of the aristocrats of old.

(Hat tip: Reason)

Another day, another atrocity in Iraq:

Six car bombs detonated across Baghdad on Sunday and a suicide bomber blew up a car in nearby Fallujah, killing a total of 37 people and wounding more than 100 in the deadliest day of violence in Iraq since the United States announced the end of combat operations three weeks ago.

Says Georgiy Voloshin: "It is all too clear now that during these last 7 years in which America has been waging its unrelenting war on Iraqi insurgencies, those who lost in this ostensible battle for democracy, where democracy had never thrived, are the Iraqi people."

Matt Stopera collects 30 of the most colorful and creative signs. Another Dish fave after the jump:

The current National Review cover story against marriage equality relies almost exclusively on the idea that the "fundamental reason for marriage" is that "the sexual intercourse of men and women regularly produces children":

Same-sex marriage would introduce a new, less justifiable distinction into the law. This new version of marriage would exclude pairs of people who qualify for it in every way except for their lack of a sexual relationship. Elderly brothers who take care of each other; two friends who share a house and bills and even help raise a child after one loses a spouse: Why shouldn’t their relationships, too, be recognized by the government? The traditional conception of marriage holds that however valuable those relationships may be, the fact that they are not oriented toward procreation makes them non-marital. (Note that this is true even if those relationships involve caring for children: We do not treat a grandmother and widowed daughter raising a child together as married because their relationship is not part of an institution oriented toward procreation.)

The core argument here is that marriage is mating. They (although it reads uncannily like Robbie George to me) even use that word. They seem to believe that marriage must be regarded as essentially biological, if we are to rear children properly. In the abstract, circular, Ratzingerian world, this makes sense. In the real world, it simply cannot apply to modern life.

Leaving the countless existing gay families to one side, adoption, artificial insemination, and surrogates all regularly produce children. And there is no actual evidence that children begotten not by parental mating fare worse than those who are. There is even some research suggesting that lesbians are better parents than heterosexual couples. If your concern is children, why does the process by which a couple obtain a child matter more than the quality of that child's upbringing? Rauch demolishes the article:

The article is a mass of non sequiturs. It assumes that if marriage is “for” something—regulating procreative sex—then using it for anything else must be “against” marriage, which is like saying that if mouths are “for” eating, we mustn’t use them for talking or breathing. It claims (conjecturally) that marriage would not have arisen if not for the fact that men and women make babies, from which it concludes that society has no stake in childless marriages.

It argues that marriage, and a culture of marriage, are good and important, a point on which thoughtful gay-marriage advocates enthusiastically agree. But, of course, our whole argument is that including gays won’t stop marriage from doing the good things it now does, and will probably strengthen marriage and the marriage culture. Maybe we’re wrong. But the editorial doesn’t even bother to engage. It proceeds as if “gay marriage is bad” follows obviously from “straight marriage is good.”

That's because this is about theology, not politics. Which is increasingly what NRO conservatism is about – and a cramped, defensive, cloistered, out-dated theology at that.