Month: September 2011

A slew of movie spoilers in the above supercut. Josh Rothman summarizes a new study showing that people enjoy stories more when the ending is revealed beforehand:

Suspense, the researchers speculate, might be overrated (and may not even be that pleasurable); moreover, if you know the ending in advance, you can concentrate on appreciating a story's "aesthetic qualities." It's even possible, they write, that "spoilers enhance enjoyment by actually increasing tension. Knowing the ending of Oeidpus Rex may increase the pleasurable tension caused by the disparity in knowledge between the omniscient reader and the character marching to his doom."

Larison dismisses the hype:

On social issues, Christie has started positioning himself as a newly-converted pro-lifer in the finest tradition of Romney-like pandering. His position on marriage is not going to satisfy some social conservatives, but by itself it is not going to make him unacceptable to most primary voters. The main problem for Christie is that he hasn’t been in office very long, and he hasn’t done very much so far. It simply doesn’t make sense for him to enter the 2012 race.

The Republican primary is likely to be shorter than you think.

Yes and no:

 In 48 of the 50 states, you can’t be convicted under and sentenced to jail for recording on-duty police officers, at least under wiretapping laws. And even in the two states where that’s still plausible, it’s unlikely. But until police officers start facing real consequences for disregarding the law, you can still be harassed, arrested, have your files or camera destroyed, and even spend a night or two in jail while you wait for the charges to be dropped.

A reader sends the above video and writes:

I can't help but pass on Fred Rogers' extraordinary acceptance speech receiving a lifetime achievement Emmy Award in 1997.  Notice the momentary tittering in the audience when Mr. Rogers says he'll watch the time, while they all observe ten seconds of silence.  The tittering very quickly disappears, and a profound sense of contemplation fills the room.  In his quiet, gentle manner, he commands everyone's attention, and directs it AWAY from himself; directs it inwardly and compels each person there to actually reflect on a meaningful aspect of their lives.  I can't quite describe how magical and moving this is to me. It was a gift he blessed with, applicable to both children and adults, and he applied it, tirelessly, throughout his entire career. Enjoy the clip, if you haven't seen it already.

Another writes:

As long as this thread is developing, may I add that when my kids were watching "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood", if I weren't in the room with them I'd always keep an ear out for the fabulous Johnny Costa, who never played the closing theme the same way twice.  Mr. Rogers gave us the best live music on television, bar none.  And what a great day job for a jazz musician!

I also got a huge kick out of the interactions of the frightening Lady Elaine Fairchild and the passive-aggressive Daniel Tiger.  There was something there for adults with imagination and a sense of humor, both of which I believe Fred Rogers had in spades. It's his confident love of humanity, however, that leaves me in awe.

Another:

What's really remarkable about that Mr. Rogers video is seeing a United States Senator actually open to the arguments in testimony during a Senate hearing. When was the last time you saw that happen? These days everything in a hearing is prearranged, from the testimony to the prejudices of the legislators. No one is convinced of anything.

Another:

Thanks for the posts on Mr. Rogers.  I needed a calming influence from a Christian man. Also, Wiki says Mr. Rogers was a member of the More Light Presbyterian group, which was way ahead of its time on the issue of inclusion of gays and lesbians in the body of Christ.  "I like you just the way you are."

Another:

Diane Rehm's last interview with Fred Rogers is a must-listen.  In December 2002, he said he loved to play the piano when he felt sad.  He said he had just played for a long time the other night.  When Diane asked him why he was sad, he just said, "I had a stomachache."

Three months later, he died of stomach cancer.

Apparently, failure to forsee seismic events means a manslaughter charge in L'Aquila, Italy:

The seven Italians essentially face criminal charges for failing to predict the earthquake — even though pinpointing the time, location and strength of a future earthquake in the short term remains, by scientific consensus, technically impossible.

The indictments have drawn global condemnation. The American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), both in Washington DC, issued statements in support of the Italian defendants. … The view from L'Aquila, however, is quite different. Prosecutors and the families of victims alike say that the trial has nothing to do with the ability to predict earthquakes, and everything to do with the failure of government-appointed scientists serving on an advisory panel to adequately evaluate, and then communicate, the potential risk to the local population.

A reader writes:

We shouldn't even be asking the question about the relative productivity of organic farming until we've addressed the extravagant wastefulness of consuming animal-based foods rather than plants. (By most accounts, it takes from two to ten pounds of corn to produce a single pound of meat.) If you truly want to minimize the resources that go into your diet, then eat plant-centered meals and buy your food from your local farmer's market. This is food that, for the most part, would not even be grown in the absence of local demand. It's therefore a bad-faith argument that eating local, organic food is somehow depriving poor people of their share of the earth's resources.

Another writes:

In response to Charles Kenny, the right metric to think about agriculture isn't some binary "organic vs. industrial" conflict, but rather "small vs. large."

As Bill McKibben has argued in Deep Economy, small farms produce more food per acre while large farms produce more food per dollar. The reason, of course, is oil; we've substituted human labor with mechanical labor on those "efficient" farms in the US and the West compared to those in Africa, and thanks to the era of cheap oil and farm subsidies, we've grown accustomed to having "cheap milk" at $2/gallon.

Kenny is making a case for GMO foods and against organic methods, but the model he's advocating for is fundamentally based (even if he doesn't mention it) on a radical expansion of fossil fuels to grow crops in these areas. If diesel is already $4/gallon in the US, and thus increasing food prices (corn and oil being the two greatest ingredients in our food economy), then what happens when we start converting the Third World to our First World large-scale practicies? Providing for fair trade, eliminating subsidies and tariffs, and promoting conservation of soil and water should be the focus of our efforts in the Third World, not GMO foods and mechanization. Those things would allow farmers to avoid the growth and debt trap of expanding their farm, only to find out they need expensive machinery, fertilizer and pesticides to service their farm land, and thus spiraling down into being farm managers instead of farmers. Which is exactly what's happened in the US.

Update from a reader:

If your reader thinks milk is $2 a gallon, s/he hasn't bought milk in the last few years. Right now the price at Hy-Vee, a Midwestern chain of grocery stores, is about $4.45. Costco is $3.35. Even Trader Joe's is $3.19.

Answers.com says $3.50 is the average.

Today on the Dish, DADT officially ended and we watched as a gay serviceman finally came out to his dad. Massie credited British secularism with their embrace of marriage equality, readers insisted that out-lesbian sports stars aren't the same as male versions, and we awaited gay marriage on prime time. Andrew defended Obama from David Brooks' real beef with the GOP, and Focus on the Family downsized because the right has already absorbed all of its skewed ideology. Andrew backed Greenwald's horror at a system where torture isn't enough punishment for some and Georgia may be about to execute an innocent man.

The good Eagle Scout Perry edged out Romney but we kept our eyes on Palin, while the mainstream media continued to dismiss McGinniss' book, even though the anonymity was completely necessary. Jennifer Rubin drooled over the idea of a Chris Christie candidacy, Super PACS buy access to candidates, and even Honore de Balzac understood that newspapers have become political party weapons. Tax reform offers long-term benefits, poverty indicators don't tell us enough about how many people are really struggling, and emotional arguments have to wreak havoc with expectations. A reader took issue with our limited quote from Rep. Fleming about his $400k, and we parsed whether a "Buffett tax" on the wealthy would even bring in that much revenue. Daniel McCarthy sussed out the tensions between empire and conservatism and Julian Sanchez reconciled religious faith with our desire to believe in the fictions.

On the UN- Palestinian front, Chait diagnosed Jewish Republicans with an overdeveloped sense of black anti-Semitism, Beinart told American Zionists they were going to regret this missed opportunity, and a Palestinian shared what it's like to fight the Israeli settlements. Abbas Milani posed questions to Iran at the UN, and terrorists don't have nukes because they're actually hard to make even if the directions are on the internet. Veiled women in France were essentially put under house arrest, and the FBI trained the military to go after Islam's holy texts and clerics.

Andrew relished his dead-tree reading, not everyone in the world counts continents in the same way, and specialization matters less in the Information Age. Today's international politics resemble surfing more than chess, and R&B beats country music, proving that sex sells. Fredrick the Great made his troops drink beer instead of coffee, high rates of disease correlate with autocracy, and a sex strike brought peace to the Phillippines.

Chart of the day here, MHB here, FOTD here, VFYW here and contest winner #68 here.

–Z.P.

Julian Sanchez, inspired by Jonathan Rée, posits the idea:

Fundamentalists of every sect are, pretty much by definition, strongly committed to the literal truth of all of their scripture. But the garden variety “believer,” I suspect, may often be more accurately thought of as a “suspension-of-disbeliever.” (Somewhere in the back of my head is that CollegeHumor video about religion as a species of fanboyism.) When you think about the actual functions that religious narratives serve in people’s lives, literal truth or falsity is often rather beside the point, and yet suspension of disbelief is a necessary condition of immersion in the story.

On this view, Richard Dawkins is a little like that guy who keeps pointing out that all the ways superhero physics don’t really make sense. (Wouldn’t characters with “super strength” would really need super speed as well to do stuff like punching through concrete? Shouldn’t Cyclops be propelled backwards when he unleashes those concussive eye beams?”) It’s not annoying because we literally believed the stories, but because our enjoyment depends on our not attending too explicitly to their unreality. People can, on one level, be powerfully committed to the idea that Han Solo shot first, dammit—while on another being perfectly aware that, really, nobody shot anybody, and it’s actually just Harrison Ford and a dude in a green rubber suit with some laser effects added in post production.

Maybe.