Month: January 2011

As a commentary on biotechnology and sustainability, Miriam Simun makes cheese from human breastmilk she purchased online. Presenting City Funk:

The human-goat blend – light on the goat, heavy on the human – is soft and spreadable, imparting a complex funk somewhere in between butter, yellow taxi cabs and wafting wavers of street cart smells.

(Hat tip: Edith Zimmerman)

Andrew Gelman defends the most basic one:

If your vote is decisive, it will make a difference for 300 million people. If you think your preferred candidate could bring the equivalent of a $50 improvement in the quality of life to the average American–not an implausible hope, given the size of the Federal budget and the impact of decisions in foreign policy, health, the courts, and other areas–you're now buying a $1.5 billion lottery ticket. With this payoff, a 1 in 10 million chance of being decisive isn't bad odds.

The Dish has touched on this subject before.

A man believed to have been tortured is pushed in his wheelchair by demonstrators during a protest on January 21, 2011 in Tunis, Tunisia. Tunisians have begun three days of mourning in respect of the people who died during the 'Jasmine Revolution' to oust president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who fled the country a week ago. By Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.

GOP strategists Myra Adams and Mark McKinnon are betting that Obama will win re-election. Among their reasons:

Forty percent of Americans now see the president as a moderate. That’s up 10 percentage points from a year ago. More importantly, 44 percent of independents now call Obama a moderate, up from 28 percent a year ago. If congressional Republicans are viewed as strident and over-reaching, Obama will be well positioned as a moderating force—with or without any Clintonian triangulation.

Adam Serwer builds off Exum's thoughts:

The reason why Republicans want to entirely defund USAID but avoid touching a hair on the defense budget is that they see every single matter of foreign affairs as a nail, and so they don't understand why we should be spending money on anything other than hammers.

Larison, not a big fan of foreign policy hammers, takes issue with labeling aid a part of defense:

Republicans didn’t vote to cut defense. To claim that they support “defense” cuts because they want to de-fund USAID is to abuse the phrase “defense spending” even more than hawks already do. The RSC supported cutting foreign aid spending because they don’t think of most foreign aid as having any importance for national security policies, and to the extent that they acknowledge that foreign aid funding is directed to Afghanistan and Pakistan they would probably point to this as one of the problems with “Af-Pak” policy.

A reader writes:

I feel compelled to respond to your reader's critique of the Calvin & Hobbes/Fight Club connection, in which the reader claimed a) that Hobbes was essentially independent from Calvin, whereas Tyler is totally dependent on Jack, and b) that Hobbes was the voice of reason, whereas Tyler is not.

To answer the first, is Hobbes truly independent of Calvin? Superficially, he is obviously not: he is part of Calvin's imagination. Watterson treated Hobbes as a totally separate and unique character from Calvin, but he did so because he wanted to present the world the way Calvin sees it. To Calvin, Hobbes is a totally separate entity, so that's how the audience sees Hobbes. But in reality (within the strip, that is), Hobbes is "just" a stuffed tiger. The parallels to Jack and Tyler are therefore obvious. For the first 3/4s of the movie, Tyler is presented to the audience as a totally separate entity from Jack, because that is how Jack sees him. Tyler never actually exists, but the audience believes he does because Tyler believes it. Hobbes and Tyler are both presented to the audience as separate characters, when in fact they are simply part of Calvin and Jack.

The only significant difference is that after the reveal in Fight Club, the movie accepts the "reality" that Tyler is part of Jack. But in Calvin & Hobbes, the strip never accepts the "reality" that Hobbes is part of Calvin. Even when other characters are shown to believe that Hobbes is just a stuffed tiger, Hobbes stays real and separate for Calvin and the audience. The presentation of Hobbes/Tyler varies, but their true nature stays the same.

As for the second point: it's worth noting that the premise here is that Calvin buried Hobbes deep in his psyche when he reached adolescence. So Tyler is Hobbes after he's stewed in Calvin's subconscious for a decade. It's safe to assume that this process will twist and distort Hobbes; he'll still be the voice of reason, but it'll be a twisted form of reason. And in Fight Club, Tyler is still entirely rational; he doesn't change Jack by threatening him or scaring him; he changes Jack by appealing to his mind and presenting evidence that makes Jack think about the world in a different way. We may recognize that Tyler's brand of logic is twisted and nihilistic, but he's still presenting it to Jack as rational and true; he's appealing to Jack's mind. Take Hobbes, bury him in the dark for 10 years with the snippets of Nietzsche that Calvin/Jack read in college, and voila! Tyler Durden.

One last possibility: what if Calvin is the personality that had to be buried, and that eventually bubbled up as Tyler? What if, when forced (probably by his father, it should be noted) to discard the Hobbes illusion, the Hobbes personality stayed on the surface and grew up into Jack, while Calvin was buried and stewed until it became Tyler?

Another writes:

The difference from the Fight Club setup is that Tyler represents some sort of id (want) to the other Jack's ego (can) and superego (should), while the "real" character in the comic strip, because he is a small energetic child, is the id to Hobbes' ego and superego. It's Hobbes who usually understands the real-world danger of rocketing down a hill on a sled at uncontrolled speed. And it's Hobbes who understands the broader social repercussions of Calvin's schemes. In some ways, I think Hobbes foreshadows the older adolescent/adult that Calvin will become. Hobbes often seems smitten with Susie Derkins, who Calvin hates so much he must kind of like her. Hobbes reassures us that Calvin won't turn into a juvenile delinquent – he'll turn into Hobbes.

Since my kids discovered our old Calvin & Hobbes collections, the strip has been on my mind more than it had been for years.

A final reader's thoughts:

I think your reader is mistaken to say that Hobbes isn't controlled or limited by Calvin's imagination.  I think to really understand the identity of Hobbes, you need to place him in the proper context of an intelligent, immature and precocious six year old.  If Tyler Durden is a projection of all the qualities that Jack wants to be, Hobbes is a projection of the qualities of emerging maturity that Calvin resists and therefore projects on to an imagined other. 

Where Calvin is impulsive and unconstrained, Hobbes is temperate and wise.  Where Calvin is ego-centric, imagining himself as a character of unparalleled importance in the world, Hobbes shows acceptance and contentment with normal life.  Where Calvin hates girls and forms a club to publicly express his hatred of girls as loudly as he can, Hobbes is openly sexual – meaning that Hobbes can act on the quasi-romantic feelings that Calvin has for Susie that Calvin can only express through teasing and harassment.

Therefore I don't think it's true that Hobbes is "smarter" than Calvin; I would say that Hobbes represents Calvin's emerging wisdom that Calvin understands, but is not yet willing to incorporate into his own persona.  That is, I think the best way to understand the conversations between Calvin and Hobbes about God, gender, morality, and so on is as a visual way of presenting the interior conversations of a single individual.  Watterson himself clearly values solitude, nature, and personal meditations on profound subjects; I suspect that the personas of Calvin and Hobbes ultimately grow out of two different kind of voices that he has in his head when he goes walking through the woods, or tobogganing through the snow.

For other superfans of the series, don't miss the Calvin and Hobbes search engine, created by Michael "Bing" Yingling. (If you have trouble reading the above comic, go here.)

Will Wilkinson reflects on the resilient differences:

…Most liberals remain pretty hostile to these common libertarian ideas:

• Democracy sucks.
• Unions hurt more than they help.
• Campaign spending is political speech.
• Economic inequality does not undermine democracy or democracy’s role in establishing and protecting equal liberty.
• Economic rights are as important as political and civil rights, and should be just as vigilantly protected, even if  that leads to huge inequalities, which do not, by the way, threaten democracy or the value of political and civil rights.
• Taxation is coercive but imprisoning the guy who nicked your lawn gnome isn’t.

He concludes that "some of these ideas are correct, some incorrect," and that "together they amount to a towering impediment to joyous liberal-libertarian comity."

Prompted by Jared Loughner's crimes, Room For Debate asks who does, and who should, qualify for an insanity plea. Here's Dr. Beatriz Luna, "the director of the Laboratory of Neurocognitive Development, where she uses neuroimaging methods to understand the development of voluntary control":

Jared Loughner’s criminal act appears to have involved careful planning that required voluntary and well-thought out steps. However, the aim of this planned behavior may reflect a disordered, diseased state. Neuroimaging studies could show that such a criminal engages brain systems to support voluntary acts in a similar way as the normal population. However they could also show abnormalities in brain processes that support the ability to have empathy and control over anger, or show that reported hallucinations recruit brain processes that support real sensory experiences. Although such a person would be able to operate in a voluntary planned manner, their acts would reflect brain abnormalities that contribute to their urge to commit crimes.

Should such a disorder be an excuse for their voluntary behavior? Probably not, but it might provide extenuating circumstances that could influence sentencing. 

Allahpundit defends T-Paw's tepid book sales. Ben Smith partially agrees:

Pawlenty has done a really excellent job of setting mid-to-low expectations — for crowds, money, sales, charisma — and modestly exceeding them, a kind of dexterity that will serve him will in primary season — for a while. At some point, though, one stops grading on a curve.