Month: September 2010

Today on the Dish, Andrew came back. He asked the big questions about humility and humiliation in religion and politics and extended a hand to Ross to embrace the equality of their respective marriages.

Obama stepped up his game; we remembered the 1990s; and we read the tea leaves of today's political polls. We looked at which party might get to claim the business tax cuts and whether Obama's transportation proposal was any good. Marty Peretz weighed in on the Mosque; Chait volleyed with Conor on what makes a good opinion journalist; and the era of free lunch ended but the GOP didn't want to make a different sandwich.

The algorithm for war didn't get any easier; Afghanistan went on the back-burner; and we assessed Obama's foreign policy legacy. The history of Margaret Thatcher doesn't fit into soundbites; burning Korans could endanger troops;and Stephen Hawking thought philosophy was dead.

Gateway drugs were still a hoax; a college education made cops less violent; and anarchy might break out if corporate speak didn't exist. MHB here; FOTD here; VFYW here; and the winner for the slightly easier labor day VFYW contest #14 here. We closed the accounting book on hip religious music with some final inductees; Craigslist censored their adult services; and we took a trip to red state liquor stores. And the shark may not have been jumped, after all.

–Z.P.

Re-employed by the CIA as contractors. Not only was there no accountability. There is actual reward. Under Obama.

Mike Meno sighs:

Last week, researchers at the University of New Hampshire released yet another study discrediting the gateway theory. Their findings, based on survey data from more than 1,200 students in Florida public schools, showed that a person’s likelihood to use harder drugs has more to do with social and environmental factors than whether or not they’ve ever tried marijuana.

“There seems to be this idea that we can prevent later drug problems by making sure kids never smoke pot,” lead researcher Dr. Karen Van Gundy, associate professor of sociology at UNH, told CBS News. “But whether marijuana smokers go on to use other illicit drugs depends more on social factors like being exposed to stress and being unemployed – not so much whether they smoked a joint in the eighth grade.”

Melinda Burns sums up a new study:

Weighing in on a long-simmering dispute, a recent study for the Police Quarterly shows that officers with some college education are less likely to resort to force than those who never attend college.

The study found no difference with respect to officer education when it came to arrests or searches of suspects. But it found that in encounters with crime suspects, officers with some college education or a four-year degree resorted to using force 56 percent of the time, while officers with no college education used force 68 percent of the time.

A reader writes:

I think it's pretty clear that "jumping the shark" was written into Happy Days and turned into a cultural meme solely for use in this scene from Arrested Development (Season 2, Episode 13).

More contemporary shark-jumping here, here, and here.

Claire Berlinski is on a book tour:

A week of doing radio interviews has left me vaguely disgusted with myself. Honestly, if all you knew about Margaret Thatcher was what you'd heard me say in one of these interviews, you wouldn't know much. It's not for want of trying on my part, but there's just no time to make a serious argument this way.

Even as the words are coming out of my mouth, I'm thinking, "That doesn't really make sense if I don't explain the context; there's an obvious counter-argument; that's too simplistic." But I don't have time to elaborate, and the medium itself militates against equivocation and hesitation–you can't say, "Well, the answer is quite complicated…" 

Democracy in America looks at red-state liquor stores:

ONE OF the more interesting, though perhaps less significant, fault lines between social conservatism and economic conservatism is the peculiar issue of state liquor monopolies. There are nine states in the union where the government maintains a direct monopoly on the sale of hard liquor. These lonely outposts of American socialism are not the country's most liberal states; they're mainly conservative ones, including three of the seven most conservative states, Utah, Alabama and Idaho.

The post focuses on "one state that's becoming gradually less conservative, and may be about to give up its liquor monopoly: Virginia."

Last week one of Tyler Cowen's readers asked him why corporate-speak exists. Cowen's answer:

People disagree in corporations, often virulently, or they would disagree if enough real debates were allowed to reach the surface. The use of broad generalities, in rhetoric, masks such potential disagreements and helps maintain corporate order and authority. Since it is hard to oppose fluffy generalities in any very specific way, a common strategy is to stack everyone's opinion or points into an incoherent whole. Disagreement is then less likely to become a focal point within the corporation and warring coalitions are less likely to form. …

Real "straight talk" very often is not compatible with authority, as it breeds conflict. Do political leaders give us much real straight talk? Do CEOs in their public addresses?

It was reported last week that Stephen Hawking doesn't think God had a hand in creating the universe. Burke's Corner is staggered by a couple of Hawking's assertions:

In his failure to exercise modesty in his pursuit of scientific knowledge, Hawking makes a particularly startling claim – that "philosophy is dead". From Plato and Aristotle to Maimonides and Aquinas to Kant and Hegel, Hawking dismisses how the human mind across cultures and millennia has reflected on transcendence and humanity's place in a vast universe. Hawking's lack of humility before this endeavour is staggering. In her Absence of Mind, Marilynne Robinson rightly states that this approach to science excludes "the whole enterprise of metaphysical thought", despite metaphysical reflection being a defining characteristic of the human experience.