Month: June 2011

Joshua Knobe goes in search of it. He uses the example of Mark Pierpont – an ex-gay devotee – to make a broader point:

People’s ordinary understanding of the true self appears to involve a kind of value judgment, a judgment about what sorts of lives are really worth living. So people will tend to arrive at different judgments regarding the nature of Pierpont’s self depending on whether they think that a homosexual lifestyle truly is a valuable one.

Noah Millman's two cents:

I would wager anything that, from Mark Pierpont’s perspective, the “real” him is the one in conflict. That’s what makes his situation tragic. The desires don’t come from the devil and the repression doesn’t come from society. They both come from him.

Will Wilkinson goes in another direction:

Our broadly political commitments reverberate even in our judgments about the metaphysics of the self. The authentic self is the ideologically-validated self. This may help explain the widespread tendency to see those with whom we fundamentally disagree as victims of "false consciousness". We cannot help but suspect that they are in the grip of some kind of illusion, while we are clear-eyed and at home in the world as it is. Our ideological opposites are not only at war with truth, but alienated from their true selves.

T-Paw says he's a truth-teller:

But Pawlenty's economic plan, presented yesterday, is to enact tax cuts three times larger than Bush's. When one realizes that he is regarded as one of the more serious candidates, one wonders if the Republican degeneracy is actually intensifying. In this period of massive debt, Pawlenty's position is to gut revenues even more – and balance them with spending cuts that could never overcome massive public resistance. Is it still GOP orthodoxy that the answer to any economic problem – even a collapse in federal revenue – is cutting taxes? The mind reels. Look: you simply cannot be in favor of debt reduction and massive tax cuts – on top of Bush's bankrupting decade – at the same time. And if you think simply cutting taxes works miracles, what happened in the last decade? Even before the implosion, growth rates were mediocre.

Ezra Klein compares Pawlenty's straight-talk rhetoric to the reality:

Pawlenty promised that substantially cutting taxes would increase economic growth by 150 percent and reduce the deficit by 40 percent. Some hard truth. Next you'll deliver the bad news that if I stop paying my mortgage, my income will grow twice as fast, the bank will pay off half my loan and I'll be able to use the savings to redo my kitchen. Or perhaps you'll sit me down to explain the bad news that eating more pie will stimulate my metabolism and help me lose weight.

Jonathan Cohn:

He's proposing to sustain economic growth at 5 percent for a decade, something not even Clinton or Reagan came even close to doing, and radically reduce tax rates in ways that will–wait for it–radically raise revenues. As my colleague Jonathan Chait puts it, the plan is "your basic supply-side pixie dust plan, sprinkling massive windfall gains on the rich, not bothering to make the numbers add up and assuming implausibly high economic benefits will result."

Kevin Drum:

The pander quotient in Pawlenty's speech is just off the charts. It's less a speech than a series of Reagan-era applause lines bulked up on steroids and then stitched together for public consumption.

Hold your gold:

Ed Rollins, [Bachmann's campaign manager] in his appearance Tuesday on Fox News Radio’s “Kilmeade and Friends,” seemed to telegraph the direction of her campaign. “Sarah has not been serious over the last couple of years,” he said. “She got the vice presidential thing handed to her, she didn’t go to work in the sense of trying to gain more substance, she gave up her governorship.” “Michele Bachmann and others [have] worked hard,” he said. “She has been a leader of the Tea Party which is a very important element here, she has been an attorney, she has done important things with family values.”

Then the kicker:

A second top Bachmann ally — who spoke on the condition of anonymity — said Bachmann is well-positioned to take on Palin in the Iowa caucuses. “The view in Iowa is that she’s unstable,” said the aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “When she resigned her position as governor that whole event seemed odd, and people in Iowa saw that.”

In the last two days, some leading old-school conservatives – Thatcher's coterie and Rollins' crew have described Palin as "nuts" and "unstable."

Know hope.

Nate Silver thinks his sane moderate conservatism makes him a no-no for the reactionary populism now defining the GOP. The core problem:

Expressing support for Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus package, endorsing an individual mandate for health insurance, and securing Utah’s participation in a regional cap-and-trade program. Mr. Hunstman also holds a moderate position on gay marriage, having endorsed civil unions for same-sex couples. And he served as President Obama’s ambassador to China.

This would make him an accomplished pragmatic conservative in any other Western country. In America, in the GOP today, he's a commie.

After all, it’s a federal duty:

A. Barton Hinkle points out the obvious:

Trying to solve the problem of addiction through incarceration is like trying to get rid of a cockroach infestation by turning on the lights. The temporary solution doesn’t address the underlying problem, which requires treatment. Sometimes locking a user up doesn’t even interrupt his using. Do a Google search on smuggling drugs into prison for an education on that front. If prohibition can’t keep narcotics out of prison cells, it won’t keep them out of playgrounds and office parks.

Robin Hanson and Katja Grace pose an interesting question:

Consider two possible civilizations, stretched either across time or space:

•Time: A mere hundred thousand people live sustainably for a billion generations before finally going extinct.
•Space: A trillion people spread across a thousand planets live for only a hundred generations, then go extinct

Even though both civilizations support the same total number of lives, most observers probably find the time-stretched civilization more admirable and morally worthy. It is “sustainable,” and in “harmony” with its environment. The space-stretched civilization, in contrast, seems “aggressively” expanding and risks being an obese “repugnant conclusion” scenario. Why?

Ed Kilgores considers Mitt's business bona fides:

While Romney’s business background endears him to pro-Republican business elites, it’s worth noting that such a personal history has rarely been a boon to Republican candidates in the past. Despite the GOP’s ancient pedigree as the party of business, being a successful corporate or entrepreneurial figure has never been treated as a prerequisite for a presidential nomination. With the arguable exception of George H.W. Bush, whose early adventures in the Texas oil industry were a less than prominent feature in his resume, there hasn’t been a Republican presidential nominee known mainly for his business experience since Wendell Willkie in 1940.

Kilgore believes a bad economy won't help Romney get the nomination.

Chris Keeler agrees with Josh Landis that Syria is headed toward civil war:

As [Landis] notes, increased violence will inevitably lead to more defections from the Syrian army, yet it is highly unlikely that the Syrian military will experience a vast loss of manpower, equipment and knowledge as happened in Libya. The cohesiveness of the Syrian army will force any armed insurrection in Syria to rely on the amateur fighting knowledge of civilians as well as basic weaponry that can be smuggled into the country.

Moreover, the Libyan rebels quickly were able to establish Benghazi as a rebel base and temporary center of leadership in the country. Control of [Libya's second-largest city] provided the opposition with a logistical center and safe area, but also demonstrated the demographic unity of the opposition. … The opposition in Syria, on the other hand, does not have control of any cities or areas of the country and remain in a state of general geographic disunity. The two largest cities in Syria, Aleppo and Damascus, have experienced nearly no unrest, demonstrating the disconnect from the predominantly rural and poor protesters and the content urban upper class that has benefitted from the Assad rule.

Balko points to a new incident of police misconduct:

Miami Beach police did their best to destroy a citizen video that shows them shooting a man to death in a hail of bullets Memorial Day. First, police pointed their guns at the man who shot the video, according to a Miami Herald interview with the videographer. Then they ordered the man and his girlfriend out the car and threw them down to the ground, yelling “you want to be fucking paparazzi?” Then they snatched the cell phone from his hand and slammed it to the ground before stomping on it.

Regarding the man's next move, Balko nods, "Hiding the SIM card in his mouth was a ballsy move." Above is the footage from that SIM card.

(Video hat tip: TDW)