Month: April 2011

Suzanne Merkelson and Joshua Keating catalog other countries' strict fashion codes:

Since 1990, Bhutanese have been required by law to follow the official national dress code, known as Driglam Namzha, in public. For men, that involves a knee-length robe known as a gho. For women, it's a type of ankle-length kimono called a kira. Those caught wearing anything else can be subject to a $3.30 fine, which amounts to three days' wages.

(Image source)

Mark Seddon lauds the UN intervention in the Ivory Coast crisis, which is approaching an end game after the arrest of Gbagbo:

‘Responsibility to Protect’ or ‘R2P’ as it is known did not of course emanate as a doctrine from Ban ki moon’s first term. But its practical implementation is most certainly coming to be most closely associated with this quietly determined, and more confident, Secretary General. The UN is no longer being seen as a sometimes dallying, hand ringing bystander to the abuse of human rights but as an active leader in stopping it. … This is the UN and the Secretary General, at their active best, confident in their mission and clear about their responsibilities. How refreshing.

(Photo: Ivory Coast strongman Laurent Gbagbo and his wife Simone sit on a bed at the Hotel du Golf in Abidjan after their arrest on April 11, 2011. Ivory Coast leader Alassane Ouattara's forces, backed by French and UN troops, captured his besieged rival Laurent Gbagbo in Abidjan today at the climax of a deadly five-month crisis. Gbagbo, who has held power since 2000 and stubbornly refused to admit defeat in November's presidential election, was detained and taken to his rival's temporary hotel headquarters, with his wife Simone and son Michel. STR/AFP/Getty Images)

Today on the Dish, Andrew tried to reconcile the Sophie's choices of healthcare rationing, and suggested harnessing the power of the consumer. The political tides turned, Trump tied with Huck, giving Ed Morrissey flashbacks to Perot, but Andrew thought a Trump-Bachmann just might be crazy enough to change the GOP. Andrew weighed in on whether Palin is done for, and rehashed the Trig birther question with a new academic paper. Andrew remembered England's war memorials, and pinpointed the incoherence of fusing Rand's ideology with Christianism. 

Pete Davis acknowledged the risks of Obama tackling the budget, Andrew parsed Obama's approval of Simpson-Bowles, and Stephen Colbert roasted Jon Kyl. Berlusconi ramped up the crazy, and Scott Morgan reprimanded legislators who joke about medical marijuana. Kevin Sablan unraveled the facts behind Facebook Likes, David Runciman tracked down the world's tax havens, and America is better equipped to deal with high gas prices. Freddie DeBoer defended James Joyce, pot allergies exist, and the Sassy Gay Friend talked sense into The Giving Tree. Priscilla Gilman celebrated the small things, Andrew relished being the fun uncle, and thanked readers for their warm welcome to the country.

Attack ad of the day here, reax here, creepy ad watch here, cool ad watch here, Yglesias award here, FOTD here, MHB here, VFYW here, and VFYW contest winner #45 here.

–Z.P.

No huge surprise that the Brits and French are disappointed in NATO's strict interpretation of UN Resolution 1973. Even less surprise that hotheads like John McCain will keep on carping that we did not unilaterally intervene much earlier (as if that's gonna help anyone at this point). But it seems to me that Obama, having made this decision, should insist on patience for it to work. He's trying a half-war, combined with sanctions and diplomatic isolation. So far it has done nothing to resolve the civil war except freezing it in place. But as a strategy, it inherently requires time to work – like the incremental but relentless isolation of Iran. And since the alternative is either to abort the mission or escalate it into a second Iraq, Obama's patient minimalism is the best option we now have.

He needs to keep his nerve on this. And we just have to wait.

(Photo: A Libyan rebel rests outside a destroyed house near the western gate in the town of Ajdabiya, on April 12, 2011. An official of the rebel Transitional National Council says that some 10,000 people have already been killed by forces loyal to leader Moamer Kadhafi. By Marwan Naamani/AFP/Getty Images)

Daniel Stone reports on a depressing study by the American Red Cross that "found that a surprising majority—almost 60 percent—of American teenagers thought things like water-boarding or sleep deprivation are sometimes acceptable":

More than half also approved of killing captured enemies in cases where the enemy had killed Americans. When asked about the reverse, 41 percent thought it was permissible for American troops to be tortured overseas. In all cases, young people showed themselves to be significantly more in favor of torture than older adults. … [T]he generational tip-toe back from humanitarian legal norms may say more about a nation increasingly removed from the costs of war. “For young people,” says Harvard’s [law professor  Lawrence] Tribe, “to put themselves in place of a soldier is a level of empathy that most people simply don’t have anymore."

And one should never discount the messages sent by our political leadership. One party wanted to embrace torture as a virtue; the other ended it without much fanfare and refused to prosecute war criminals if they were American. Those who have come of age in this era have gotten the message.

Mark Blumenthal throws cold water on the reality star's poll numbers:

[I]s Trump really a frontrunner? The answer appears to be no, if only because Republican preferences at this point are so bunched up and tenuous. The 2012 GOP presidential nomination race lacks a dominant leader and polls show no consistent rank in voter preferences among the three to five best known candidates. 

A reader writes:

The ultimate problem with Ayn Rand is that she became her own villain.  This is because she needed to justify her every action through her philosophy, including her need to bang Nathaniel Branden while her husband not only accepted the infidelity, but remained monogamous himself.  

This is the reason why her characters in Atlas Shrugged behave in such inhuman ways. Dagny just drops Hank Reardan, whom she had been having a torrid love affair with, because John Galt is so much smarter and better than him.  She tells him as much. And Hank is not only supposed to accept this betrayal without feeling the least bit sad or upset about it, but he's supposed to totally understand and still remain friends with Dagny. He'd be the jerk if there was any weirdness or jealousy.  

Of course this is completely ridiculous.

No human, especially one who has embraced their ego and selfishness, is going to just go, "Oh, you've found someone better than me.  Well, hope we can still be friends.  I'm so happy for you."  But she needed to idealize this sort of inhuman behavior so she could guilt her husband into accepting his cuckolding.  

So Atlas Shrugged is, at heart, an attempt to use objectivist philosophy to convince her husband to behave selflessly.  Which is just about the worst possible thing you can do in the Ayn Rand moral universe.  Atlas Shrugged is a deeply dishonest book that, at heart, is the deep perversion of its own philosophy.  It's this contradiction that is one of the deep flaws at the heart of Objectivism.  

Another one is that for a philosopher that idealized independent thinking, Rand sure behaved like a pretty standard cult leader. 

I don't think that Atlas Shrugged can be reduced in this way to a mere venting of personal issues. It stands on its own – and remains a well-read book. Reason also interviewed Branden's wife, Barbara:

Arguably, no two people were closer to Ayn Rand than Barbara and Nathaniel Branden, whom Rand once named as her "intellectual heir." Indeed, when the Brandens married in 1953, the author served as bridesmaid (Rand had also urged the pair to wed).

A decade later, the Brandens would collaborate on the first biography of Rand, Who Is Ayn Rand? In 1986, Barbara published a second biography, The Passion of Ayn Rand, which eventually was made into an award-winning Showtime movie starring Helen Mirren. 

Despite the ruinous and controversial romantic affair between Rand and Nathaniel Branden and her eventual ouster from Rand's inner circle, Barbara still feels fondly for the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. As Branden, now 80, recalls in this Reason.tv interview, "I felt like she's answering questions that I've been looking for answers for, and nobody's been giving me any sort of answer until now."

"Obama has produced his birth certificate. There were announcements that ran in two contemporaneous Hawaiian newspapers at the time. The head of the Hawaiian medical records has announced, 'I have seen the long form you all want.' I don't know why the long form is considered more credible than the short form. They're both from the same office. The State Department accepts the short form or as we call it, the birth certificate," – Ann Coulter to Sean Hannity.

It says something, doesn't it, that Coulter is now the voice of reason in the GOP.

Anti-government Yemenis women pray during a demonstration in Sanaa on April 9, 2011 as protesters kept up the heat on President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Deaths mounted in the flashpoint city of Taez, even as a dissident general denied aiming to replace the Yemeni leader. By Mohammed Huwais/AFP/Getty Images.

A Washington legislator has "proposed a joke amendment requiring the state to reimburse medical marijuana patients for pizza they eat while legally high." Scott Morgan isn't amused:

I will grant you that marijuana is interesting, important, intensely popular, and worth discussing at great length for any number of reasons, and yes there are some funny things to be said about it too. But there is nothing funny about legislative efforts to reform marijuana policy to better serve the public, and particularly the seriously ill. If the thought of passing a new medical marijuana law gives you the urge to make jokes, you are behaving like a child, not a leader.

I take Morgan's point. Core individual freedom and critical medical research are not easily understood by references to Pineapple Express. On the other hand, the cultural propensity to giggle at every reference to marijuana is baked deep. It's revealing, isn't it, that no one jokes as much about, say, cocaine or heroin or meth. Because somewhere in our consciousness, we know that cannabis is essentially harmless.