Month: June 2011

A reader writes:

We naturally want to fill in the blanks in these scenarios, and I think this one is easy. Why did they go extinct? In the time case, a billion years seems like ample time for something out of our control to happen. In the space case, it seems plausible that extinction was the result of the rapid expansion caused by us. If you mentally devise different answers, I think it is easy to make the space case seem more admirable.

Another points out a potential flaw with Hanson and Grace's scenario: "The history of evolution teaches us that the population of species that remains in one place and does not diversify or learn to adapt to different climates will die much, much sooner than the species that expands as far and fast as it can."

Heidi the cross-eyed opossum is presented to the press at the Leipzig Zoo on June 9, 2011 in Leipzig, Germany. On July 1, the zoo will open the 20,000m2 "Gondwanaland Tropical Experience World" – a near-natural home for 300 exotic animals and more than 17,000 tropical plants. Heidi will be one of its inhabitants. By Marco Prosch/Getty Images.

Room For Debate hashes out Mubarak's trial. Nathan Brown's thoughts:

[T]he arrest and prosecution of Mubarak and several members of his family has become something of a proxy for a struggle between the revolutionary coalition and the military junta. While relations between army generals and street leaders are still correct — and both sides anxious to avoid a full confrontation — nerves are fraying. The revolutionaries are still uncertain that their movement has triumphed and they remain very suspicious of any attempts to postpone their demands. They can still rally supporters around the issue of serving justice to old regime figures and have thus used it to goad a dawdling military leadership into action.

Tik Root suspects that the trial "be a uniting force" for Egypt in the short run but that "Egypt faces so many other potentially divisive challenges that the effects of the trial are likely to fade."

Douthat is disappointed by Pawlenty's economic "plan":

Whereas Ryan actually took the entitlement bull by the horns, Pawlenty seems to use his supply-side growth projections as a substitute for Medicare reform instead of adding them on as gravy. Reading it, you would think that the Bush economy was a huge, roaring success, since Pawlenty has little to say about the pocketbook issues that helped elect Barack Obama in the first place (wage stagnation, health care costs, etc.). And reading the excited reception that the speech is getting from movement organs, it’s clear that a great many conservatives have learned next to nothing from the trends that turned them out of office just a few short years ago.

(Hat tip: Adam Serwer)

Jamie Holmes finds evidence that poverty drains self-control reserves, which makes escaping poverty all the more difficult:

[I]f you have enough money, deciding whether to buy the soap only requires considering whether you want it, not what you might have to give up to get it. Many of the tradeoff decisions that the poor have to make every day are onerous and depressing: whether to pay rent or buy food; to buy medicine or winter clothes; to pay for school materials or loan money to a relative. These choices are weighty, and just thinking about them seems to exact a mental cost.

Cynthia Haven dismantles the phrase:

I suspect the phrase “take responsibility for” is actually a journalists’ invention, and people like Weiner picked it up from the media, rather than his heartfelt intentions.As George Orwell said in “Politics and the English Language,” this one could be “killed by the jeers of a few journalists.” I call out to journalists everywhere to jeer this phrase out of existence – unless it really means taking responsibility, the way I “took responsibility” for, say, raising a child, by paying for her upbringing, nursing her through illness,  attending back-to-school days, and preparing dinner every night.

(Image adapted from the Tumblr this isn't happiness, via ffffound)

A reader writes:

There's an important difference between a rope salesman selling a random – unbeknownst to him – suicidal man a rope, and said salesman selling his suicidal friend a rope. Any doctor who knows enough of a patient to prescribe them a lethal drug or dosage can't claim to have no moral culpability in the outcome. There is a reason enabler is a bad word.

Another writes:

I cannot be the first person to extend this analogy, but if Douthat thinks a doctor is a murderer for handing over a prescription for a lethal dose of morphine, does he think the gun seller is also a murderer for selling the depressed person a gun? I highly doubt it. The morals of the Christian right never quite seem to reach into the NRA’s backyard.

My father in law recently died after a five year struggle with Alzheimer’s Disease. Hospice staff was wonderful when the end came; they eased his pain, and ours. My mother has a particularly evil form of the disease and my father is in agony over her condition. He is terrified for her and for him – we talked about hospice last night. We also talked about the need for people in every state to have the option for assisted suicide. My dad is a conservative Republican.

Ta-Nehisi's first column for the NYT, on the new X-Men flick, is well worth a read. The thesis:

“First Class” proves itself not merely an incredible film, but an incredible work of American historical fiction. Here is a period piece for our postracial times — in the era of Ella Baker and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the most powerful adversaries of spectacular apartheid are a team of enlightened white dudes.

TNC follows up at this blog:

I'm not arguing that X-Men should have been "about" the Civil Rights Movement, or that black characters should be immortal. The appropriate comparison for me is Mad Men. The show is about an exclusively white world, but it is never blind to race. I can't think of only one "racial" story-line, and I am fine with that. But race is always there, in the subtext, in the side comments, in the jobs which black people work. I'm struggling to say this because I think these debates often devolve into a call for tokenism. But tokenism isn't awareness and I would hate for anyone to think I'm arguing for that.

Adam Serwer seconds TNC:

[S]o much of our conversation on race is motivated less by a search for justice than by a desire to exonerate ourselves from our own history, and creating our own alternate realities in which we are better than we actually were helps us do that.

Yglesias reads the film differently and sees Magneto as the hero. Ezra Klein differs.

(Hat tip: LikeCool)