Month: September 2011

A reveler looks on during the West Indian-American Day Parade September 5, 2011 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. By Mario Tama/Getty Images.

A college student contemplates the dim job prospects he and his peers face:

Our generation is, for the most part, one that hasn’t ever had to get its hands dirty or do what some people call, "honest work." It might be heartbreaking, yes, it might be depressing and demeaning, yes. But to a certain degree, it humbles us and whether we like it or not, helps us realize how much better we have it than someone like Kotar from Ghana, or the cab driver who picks you up from the restaurant where you have just dropped his nightly after-tax wages on drinks. Some may even argue that it educates us for the jerks and horrible bosses we will inevitably encounter even in sought-after careers. It’s good to learn early how to deal with these people.  And it is strengthens us by humbling us.

That being said, it remains to be seen if humility will help us pay our student debt.

Reacting to Rick Perry's New Deal heterodoxy, Paul Waldman reflects on the GOP's faux intellectualism:

Are Republican politicians just more interested in ideas? Not exactly. What they’re interested in is big, sweeping ideas. Not technocratic fixes, not proposals for a new agency, but ideas that upend the bases of how we think about politics and what we consider reasonable and insane.

Jonathan Bernstein complicates Waldman's notion of "ideas":

No, what Republicans are getting from these books aren’t ideas. What they’re getting are talking points to justify their prior policy preferences. Don’t like stimulus? That’s okay; FDR caused the Depression. Don’t like regulations? That’s okay; Wilson was a fascist. When Republicans do care about policy, they don’t turn to those types of books; they turn to actual ideas. That’s the story, more or less (and for better or worse), of neo-conservative foreign policy during the Bush years.

Toronto, Canada, 8.27 am

How do we make predictions more valuable?

A new model of analysis must replace the old: one that is at once more modest and more adventurous. Modesty pertains to prediction and probability. We should give up the illusion that human events are like the orbit of Halley’s comet, and accept them as complex, historical, and brimming with group and individual intentions:  understandable, if at all, from within their own internal logic, their narratives of themselves, their character. Adventure pertains to the nature of complex systems, which force the analyst to abandon tableaux vivant prophetic productions and become a rider on the open range of improbability, tracking the sources of change.

Erica Grieder likewise mulls the benefits and limits of crystal ball reading. And Robin Hanson endorses personal prediction markets.

Casey Plett, an MTF transgendered person, contemplates pronouns:

A few times, even I slip up and refer to myself as he in the third person, which feels rotten. (I’m the one most used to calling myself he, I have verbal muscle memory too.) I go home to Oregon and he is abundant, it gets harder to hear. I change my driver’s license and my American passport, and I spend long, long minutes staring at the new Fs. I dislike looking at the Ms my Canadian passport and birth certificates—which I can’t change because I haven’t had surgery—and these markers suddenly don’t feel bureaucratic or meaningless at all.

A reader writes:

Here's a luvverly London MHB for you. (I want a 99er really badly after watching it.) Welcome back, Andrew – I hope you don't ever feel poorly again.

Joe Solmonese, HRC's president, is stepping down. Stephen H. Miller hopes new leadership will steer HRC in another direction:

My criticisms of HRC have dwelt on its becoming too much of a strategic arm of the Democratic party. I’ll just note that it would be nice if the HRC board would consider the possibility that come January 2013, the U.S. might have a Republican president and a Republican Senate and House. It would be useful to have an HRC head who had some ability to understand and make the conservative-libertarian argument for gay equality, rather than a hard core progressive Democratic partisan. But the chances of that happening are meager.

Agreed. It's generational – a generation or two older than Solmonese, who was picked by the ageing board because he would never seriously deviate from the Democratic party machine they know and love. There's nothing to be done here, though. The GOP has thoroughly marginalized gay conservatives, and the gay Dems are careerists, not looking to rock the boat, just to get a safe, dry seat on it. I look forward to the twentieth anniversary of the HRC's head sending out emails breathlessly promising the passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. One day …

Ron Paul attacks the Texas governor from the right:

The gist:

The ad, a six-figure buy running in Iowa and New Hampshire, cites Paul’s early support of Ronald Reagan’s presidential candidacy (“they called him ‘extreme’ and ‘unelectable,’ it says of Reagan, a reminder designed to assuage doubts about Paul’s electoral viability) and casts the 12-term GOP congressman as Reagan’s ideological heir.

Doug Mataconis points out that Paul quit the GOP in 1988 to run for president as a Libertarian. At that time, Paul reportedly said, "I want to totally disassociate myself from the Reagan Administration."