Month: September 2010

Dan Ariely paid four essay mills to test their quality. Even those unscrupulous enough to use them should get their money back.

Larison bats clean-up:

If one insists on psychoanalyzing Obama instead of just looking at his actual policies and public statements, it would be a lot more productive to think about how Obama made himself into the accommodating, establishmentarian, conventional politician and monogamous family man he is as a complete repudiation of his father’s life and political failures. People who insist on trying to see Obama as a left-wing radical, closeted or otherwise, will simply be chasing after ghosts and making themselves look inexcusably foolish in the process.

Genius!

A crowd-sourced site.

Ta-Nehisi is reading histories of the Civil War era:

The problem with rage is that it’s a conversation-stopper, it forecloses all other questions. I am resolved on the nature of the Confederate cause. I would no sooner now debate the primary cause of the Civil War, then I would debate roundness of the Earth. And still in all, I am filled with questions. Chief among them, how does any human being in the 19th century come to endorse mass slaughter for the cause of raising a republic built on slavery?

To answer such a question, it is not enough to understand cause of the Civil War. A debate over the meaning of the Confederate Flag is almost beside the point. You have to remove the cloak of the partisan, and assume the garb of the thespian. Instead of  prosecuting the Confederate perspective, you have to interrogate it, and ultimately assume it. In no small measure, to understand them, you must become them. For me to seriously consider the words of the slave-holder, which is to say the mind of the slave-holder, for me to see them as human beings, as full and as complicated as anyone else I know, a strange transcendence is requested. I am losing my earned, righteous skin. I know that beef is our birthright, that all our grievance is just.  But for want of seeing more, I am compelled to let it go.

A reader writes:

Hitting that milestone … what I think of as my Beatles' birthday … will anyone still love me? Should I care, as long as I've learned to love myself, respect my achievements and to forgive myself for my imperfections (those that are not born of small-mindedness, at any rate)? Well, more love is always better, of course … especially from those who don't mind the grey in my hair. All the time I was growing up, I felt so unlucky — about my family, our circumstances, what little I had and all the things I lacked, all the prizes I never won, all the friends I never managed to make …

and now here I am, understanding at last that all that luck I thought I was missing was really just held in reserve for the larger things in life: to carve out a notional space that I'm comfortable in, and a physical space that — in these times, particularly — I'm incredibly fortunate to have. Those friends I didn't make in high school? Well, they likely wouldn't still be my friends now anyway, so much time and distance having intervened … instead I have the friends of my here and now, those I've known for 30 years and those I've known for just 3 years … and they seem entirely sufficient to my needs. But, again: more love is always better, and there's always room for another friend in this life.

The weather is changing here … big breezes at sundown blow away the clouds and humidity, leaving a fresh feeling to the air on your skin … and it lasts until dawn, when it's a joy just to be able to walk outside … and so I'm outside a lot, daylight and dark … and that's where I think about all this: What are the chances that my specific collection of atoms should have been allowed to coalesce into a being constructed not only to support thought but also self-awareness? A being capable of apprehending the beauty all around and concluding that the apprehending of it is probably the point of being here at all … I think if you are religious in the general sense, you probably perceive this as a form of worship — the apprehension of and thankfulness for all that beauty which is experienced as a divine gift … I may not call it that, but I think I appreciate it in much the same way: through sheer wonder and gratitude.

Megan tries for optimism:

Recessions can actually be good for some firms, even start-ups (or at the very least, can leave their founders with few viable alternatives). General Electric was just getting going during the Panic of 1893. Hewlett and Packard started their business during the Great Depression. The 1974–75 recession gave us Microsoft, and the 1980 slowdown birthed CNN. All of these companies revolutionized their industries, and the American economy.

Joseph Schumpeter’s process of “creative destruction”—the cycle of company birth and death that constantly renews the economy—happens fastest at the small-business level, where the competitors are most numerous and the pressures are most intense. And the firms that survive, whether by investing in better equipment, as Marlin has done, or by streamlining their internal costs, will make the economy stronger when we emerge from this mess.

There are several revealing clips from her speech Thursday in Kentucky here. If you doubt that Palin is a religious figure rather than a political one, click through a few of them. And if you wonder what is the key to her religious appeal, the blogger's summary of the speech is helpful:

God, Trig, God, God, Trig, lamestream media, Trig, God.

Afraid of even Fox:

She also canceled on Bob Schieffer. All I can say – and it isn't with much hope – is that O'Donnell's media strategy may help more people see why Palin endorsed her. And that in turn will help the media refuse to keep letting a front-runner for a party's nomination get away with no real press accountability. Maybe O'Donnell will finally break the Palin spell.