Month: January 2011

The Grand Mufti of Egypt:

Terrorism cannot be the outcome of any proper understanding of religion. It is rather a manifestation of the immorality of people with cruel hearts, arrogant souls, and warped logic. It is thus with great sadness and outrage that we witness the emergence of this disease in our nation with the recent bombing outside a church in Alexandria that killed tens of Egyptian citizens. There is no doubt that such barbarism needs to be denounced in the strongest of terms, and opposed at every turn.

Just as importantly, we must counter the deviant beliefs that underpin such gross transgressions.

their confused claims, terrorists are miscreants who have no legitimate connection to the pure Islamic way, whose history and orthodox doctrine are testaments to the Islamic commitment to tolerance, compassion and peace. The Quran is clear that “God has honored the children of Adam.” Islam therefore makes no distinction among races, ethnicities, or religions in its belief that all people are deserving of basic human dignity. Furthermore, Islam has laid down justice, peace and cooperation as the basic principles of interaction between religious communities, advising Muslims that the proper conduct towards those who do not show aggression towards us is to act with goodness and justice.

Matt Steinglass agrees with Megan about adoption. But he takes her to task over birth control:

It's true that birth control is reasonably widely available in American drug stores. But the rate of usage of birth control is much lower in the United States than in Western Europe and the rest of the developed world. Hence, unsurprisingly, America's rates of teen pregnancy and unwanted pregnancy are much higher than in most other developed countries, as is America's rate of abortion. Rachael Phelps had a pretty great photo essay about this in Slate back in October. The average age of sexual debut in America and Europe, she noted, is the same: 17. But America's teen pregnancy rate is three to six times higher than Western European rates. And our abortion rate is  about three times as high as that of Germany or the Netherlands and about double that of France. Ms Phelps describes how European public-health campaigns encouraging contraceptive use dovetail with national attitudes towards sexuality that treat it as less of a dangerous conflagration and more of a natural part of development.

Douthat sees a silver lining:

The [GOP] pledge to cut $100 billion was always more of a symbolic sop to the Tea Parties than a real step toward fiscal discipline. The question for the new Republican majority has always been whether it will make any serious progress on entitlement reform and tax reform, not whether it will find inevitably-marginal ways to trim discretionary spending. You can’t have fiscal responsibility if you keep entitlements, tax expenditures and defense spending off the table, and the fact that these realities have been exposed in the very first week of G.O.P. control, thanks to the peculiarities of the fiscal calendar, is probably good news for fiscal conservatism. The sooner we get certain fond illusions out of the way, the better.

A reader writes:

I tried to resist Angry Birds for so long. But when you wrote about it being a mental colonic I thought – "Hey! I need one of those." And I figured if Aaron let you play during a blog break it couldn't be too bad. Holy shit, I am hooked now. I just spent so long playing on the can my leg went numb.

That can happen. I think it's the chortling of the piggies when you lose that drives the impulse to play again. And again. And again. And the sheer enthusiastic malevolence of the birds. Evil canaries that speed toward their target: well, what's not to love?

Clancy Martin used to be in the jewelry business, and he'd often lie about the quality of the diamond he was selling. His trick:

If you want to be an expert deceiver, master the art of self-deception. People will believe you when they see that you yourself are deeply convinced. It sounds difficult to do, but in fact it's easy — we are already experts at lying to ourselves. We believe just what we want to believe. And the customer will help in this process, because she or he wants the diamond — where else can I get such a good deal on such a high-quality stone? — to be of a certain size and quality. At the same time, he or she does not want to pay the price that the actual diamond, were it what you claimed it to be, would cost. The transaction is a collaboration of lies and self-deceptions.

(Hat tip: Kottke)

Julian Sanchez thinks so:

We can point out sexist remarks or attitudes without getting derailed by pointless discussion of whether a particular person “is a sexist.” It even sounds a bit weird to pose the question as though it were a simple matter of “yes” or “no,” with the world neatly divided into sexists and non-sexists. Rather, we all get that, the culture being what it is, basically decent people—and occasionally even level-seven gender studies Jedi—will have imbibed unexamined sexist presuppositions or adopted mistaken empirical beliefs about gender differences. 

This is, presumably, because for all that our society may have historically denied women full equality, even at its worst it stopped short of denying their humanity. “Racism” is associated, in its practical consequences, with a system of violence and repression so irredeemably evil that we want to think of it not as a species of error, but as something so monstrously “other” that it creates a chasm between those contaminated by it and those free of its influence.

Thoreau agrees but examines the downside to removing "the 'nuclear' aspect from the word 'racist.'”

The NYT follows the Dish. But they don't have Dish readers.

Jeffrey Leonard's proposes eliminating all energy subsidies:

If President Obama wants to set us on a path to a sustainable energy future—and a green one, too—he should propose a very simple solution to the current mess: eliminate all energy subsidies. Yes, eliminate them all—for oil, coal, gas, nuclear, ethanol, even for wind and solar. It will be better for national security, the balance of payments, the budget deficit, and even, believe it or not, the environment. Indeed, because wind, solar, and other green energy sources get only the tiniest sliver of the overall subsidy pie, they’ll have a competitive advantage in the long term if all subsidies, including the huge ones for fossil fuels, are eliminated. And with anti-pork Tea Partiers loose in Washington and deficit cutting in the air, it’s not as politically inconceivable as you might think.

Blumenthal says we should mostly ignore horse race polls this early in the cycle:

Since 1988, only a small fraction of the public has paid close attention to first phase of the presidential campaign — less than 20 percent from 1988 to 2004, roughly 20 percent during 2007 — but public engagement jumps significantly after the Iowa caucuses and typically continues to grow until "Super Tuesday" in February or March.

Another very critical facet of phase two: The number of viable candidates typically shrinks to just one or two and awareness and recognition of those candidates grows significantly. The increased engagement and narrowing of the field makes for considerable volatility in national horse race polls. 

Today on the Dish, Andrew assessed Israel's chokehold on Gaza via a Wikileaks cable. We featured more fallout from CPAC's acceptance of gays, which some blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood. The recession changed us (the graph edition), and Andrew and Allahpundit weren't buying the Republicans on fiscal reform, or on healthcare reform either for that matter. Mitch Daniels feared for the deficit, George Will endorsed a Palin presidency implicitly, and Kinsley suggested parents get another vote depending on how many kids they have, to undermine the power of the elderly. We parsed the Prop 8 future with reax from around the web, and Douthat thought Obama was right to weigh in on the power of second chances, for Michael Vick. Larison didn't accept the tea partiers as Jeffersonians, and unemployment means the US now has a reservoir of labor for growth not dissimilar to China's, while Drezner insisted the US is still number one. Bernstein predicted a good year for Obama, considering what looks to be a major jobs surge, and Boehner didn't promise much, in a good way.

Limbaugh missed a football game and thought of the Donner Party, and these two girls whooped ass on our immigration policy's fence. It takes a certain someone (an economist) to make $11,000 per monthly column, and Felix Salmon saw American plutocrats as the Russian oligarchs of the financial industry. Lisa Margonelli worried about $3.07 a gallon, and HIV prevention groups ramped up their circumcision tour across Swaziland. Nyhan pleaded for term limits on columnists like Gail Collins, Serwer and Jennifer Rubin duked it out over the New Black Panther Party controversy, and the religious unaffiliated were underrepresented in Congress. A homeless man with a voice of gold gets a leg up in the internet age, and Andrew weighed the loss of older cultures against a new SUV. Readers added to the chorus on adoption, and shared some more psychedelic flashbashbacks, and Andrew threw in his two cents here. Women laughed alone with salad, and a fun PSA on wrapping up "gifts" hit the right notes.

Chart of the day here, Hewitt award here, Yglesias award here, 2010 in cartoons here, FOTD here, VFYW here, and MHB here.

–Z.P.