Steven Pinker is interviewed by Sam Harris, on Sam's increasingly lively blog. It's a great read. This, in particular, was reassuring to me:
It’s an interesting question—almost a philosophical question—whether a single kook with a nuke, or a small number of fanatics with other weapons of mass destruction, would count as displacing the world from its historical trend toward pacifism, if the vast majority of the world were appalled by the destruction and continued its pacific trajectory. A large number of deaths from a single renegade perpetrator would be a misleading indicator of the state of the world. But more to the point, I don’t think that it’s inevitable, or even particularly likely, that a terrorist group will get its hands on a loose nuke or build a garage nuke, nor that it would engineer an epidemic-scale pathogen.
The larger role of the protests, should they continue, ought to be to reestablish the terms of the political debate. Historically, liberalism best succeeds when compared against a radical alternative. In the thirties and sixties, fear of extremism and mob violence made business elites eager to accept liberal compromise designed to preserve the system. Since 2009, the question of how to respond to the economy has been framed as a debate between meliorative liberalism and vicious reaction. In this climate, Wall Street has been howling about Obama’s mild verbal scolding of the industry, his plans to impose some measure of regulation upon it, and ever-so-slightly raise the tax levels of the very rich.
Greenwald is skeptical. I feel both Cartman-like aversion and a worrying exhilaration. I didn't realize I hated these bankers even more than these hippies. But it took the hippies to bring it out in me. I can't help hoping they upset a few of the bastards.
(Image of a sign at Occupy Wall Street via Flickr user David Shankbone.)
The [Supreme Council for the Armed Forces (SCAF)] may have every intention of manipulating the process to hold onto power, but that doesn't mean that they will be able to do so. Their consistent pattern of blundering and over-reaching, and then backing down in the face of public outrage, do not suggest that Egypt is being ruled by a masterful, unstoppable super-genius. Egypt's creative, restless and impatient political public should not be sidetracked by side battles or take their bait. If they want a transition to real democracy, now is the time to push hard to make sure that the elections deliver it.
In late July, Chris Christie had to be hospitalized for asthma. He took a helicopter to his son's baseball game and had the state police drive him the 100 yards to the stadium. That clip alone will be used in all kinds of ads as evidence that he's not physically fit. Running for president, much less being president, is extremely strenuous. (Look at the toll that it's taken on our hardworking and very fit current president.) Christie has only been in office a short time and a fair amount of that time has been spent out of state, and I don't think his current job tests him nearly as much as being president. I would be very concerned that his stamina is not up to the job.
Asthma is a different, if related, issue to weight. I've had it chronically my entire life. Only after my bronchial scare last February, did I fully get it back under control. Should it bar someone from the presidency? No more than obesity should. My point was not that it should but that it does, whether we like it or not. David Gibson proposes a thought experiment:
Let's imagine (yes, we're pushing all sorts of buttons here) that Chris Christie were gay.
Would these same critics be insisting that he do everything he could to change his orientation? Or would they be highlighting the studies showing that homosexuality is in great measure about genetics? … Teasing out the moral distinctions in when and how much we are responsible for in our behavior is America's national pastime, and has been, for right and left, since the days of the Pilgrims. Conservatives tend to emphasize personal responsibility for most everything, and liberals tend to find an explanation — an excuse, some say — for most everything. Except perhaps for the weight of their political opponents?
I'm afraid I don't see sexual orientation as a health issue. HIV could be – although we have almost no examples of public officials being open about HIV infection. Countering me, Seth Masket marshalls evidence that there is no electoral penalty for overweight male politicans (but there is for women). More generally:
[T]he idea that candidates have to "look presidential" is highly problematic, giving sanction to all sorts of bigotry. It's hard to separate "looking presidential" from "looking like the presidents we've already had," which leads to some uncomfortable areas. It wasn't too long ago that a sizable chunk of Americans wouldn't have found an African American "presidential" looking. No doubt many feel that way about women today. And Jews. And short people. And people with disabilities. Would that ultimately affect many people's votes? My guess is that it would be hard to find a measurable "presidential-looking" effect that moves votes beyond the major influences we can detect (economic growth/recession, war/peace, extremism/moderation). But maybe there is such an effect. Should we cater to it?
I have to say I'm struck by the data presented by John Sides. I couldn't care less about how fat a politician is – but I do care that a politician is as candid and straightforward as Christie is in the video above. But maybe I have mistakenly misjudged my fellows. One more reader:
As someone who works in advertising and spent 10 years in LA making commercials, I believe the Christie weight issue is a prime example of Washington insider "group think." They are judging him by what they have seen in person which the vast majority of Americans will never do. The vast majority of people will only see Christie on TV or YouTube and while he looks big, he carries it well. In fact, when you combine his size and his attitude, he comes off as a tough talking John Goodman, in my opinion. The type of guy that was an interior lineman on the high school football team and got bigger as he aged. America is filled with these types of guys.
More importantly, what are the people who see him in person going to say? One in four of them are going to be obese, as will anyone that they would be talking with. The furthest it will ever go outside the Beltway is, "He sure is a big boy."
Paul Waldman's view of Cain's relationship to the GOP:
A big part of his job is to show the world, just by his presence, that conservatives aren’t racists. But that means buying into the prevailing conservative narrative on race, which says that anti-black racism is a thing of the past, and the only racism that exists anymore is racism directed at white people. And the critical corollary is that there is no more vile kind of racism than white people being falsely accused of racism.
And on the "Niggerhead" fooferaw, Cain just violated a core tenet of the Tea Party. Maybe he's the next to fall from favor. But I'll bet you he gets much more attention at the next debate.
More than 400 entries for this week's contest, one of our most popular yet. A reader writes:
Okay, so I think that this VFYW is from Paris, in the far west of the city, along the Boulevards des Marechaux by the Square Alexandre et Rene Parodi, just down from the Place de la Porte Mailot. But that's a pretty random guess.
Another writes:
I am guessing this is somewhere around Parc de Ville, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg. My first impression is that this is in Europe and the architecture looks French. It is continental Europe because they are driving on the right side of the road. Based on the cars parked on the street, it is a fairly wealthy country. The license plates resemble Luxembourg's. I was unable to find a matching location after a brief search on Google maps so I am going for somewhere around the Parc de Ville.
Another:
This looks like a photo taken near the Warandepark (Park of Brussels) near the the Royal Palace. The U.S. Embassy and many other large embassies are located near here, so I'll say this is shot taken somewhere on Place des Palais (Paleizenplein). I spent a day in Brussels this past summer on my way in back-and-forth between Paris and Brussels. The highlight of the trip was a day in Ypres, where four large battles during WWI were fought. I found the Belgians super friendly, almost the anti-French. Seeing Menin Gate, where 50,000 some odd names of the missing are etched in stone, is moving.
Another:
For the first time I had the feeling I knew the location as soon as I caught a glimpse of the photo: The Circus in Bath, England. I even knew I had once taken a photo there:
But then logic took over. No, the English cars drive (and park) the other way around. In addition, Bath had paved The Circus – no cobblestones anymore. No bushes and parking at the centre of the Cirucs. Bummer. Sorry, no idea. Must be a country where people drive on the right side of the road. Maybe the Channel Islands or Normandy. But I have to stop procrastinating now.
Another:
This is the outer circle road south of Regent's Park in London. If I'm thinking right it's the southwest corner on the other side of the boating lake. If you took that street to the right it would take you down to Baker Street tube station. I did a semester at Regent's College, in the park itself, and used to walk that road every day to the Underground.
Another:
I've enjoyed traveling the world through VFYW, which also happens to be my favorite mental health break at the office.
This is my first attempt at trying to guess the location. I think this location is in Glasgow, Scotland, a beautiful city that I visited this summer. The yellow license plates, the steering wheel on the "wrong-right" side on the black car, and the "sandstone" type building construction; all reminds me of Glasgow. This location does not look far from the Kelvin grove museum, somewhere between Sauchiehall and Great Western roads near the University of Glasgow.
Correct country. Another:
It's in one of the many loops of Edinburgh's New Town. I was just there for a vacation with my wife, and we stayed about a half mile away. I confirmed it with the taller tree in the middle of the frame, which you can find on Google Maps and the interesting street lamp. I'd try to find the exact window, but I just got off work at Kandahar Air Field, and I'm exhausted. I work with a couple Scots, and I'll be sure to show them tomorrow.
Another:
Clever photo! It's on a circular street with a park in the middle. So you drive yourself mad walking in circles trying to find the exact spot of the photo. Well I think I got it: 12 Moray Place. First window on the right (when facing the building).
Another:
In case you haven't been told already: Moray is pronounced "Murry". And the side street in your picture is Doune Terrace, which is named for the Moray family seat in Doune.
Another:
Normally I don't stand a chance at this contest, but this week, you chose a view that couldn't be easier for me. Although I live in the US now, I studied architecture at the University of Edinburgh, and the view is clearly of Moray Place, in Edinburgh's Georgian New Town.
Another:
What's most amazing – apart from the fact that I immediately recognised the town and the rough location – is that the same two cars were parked outside when I checked the address in Google Street View.
Another:
Please accept my apologies for the terseness of my earlier, rushed email. Please find attached an image indicating the window from which I think the photo was taken. The photo immediately reminded me of Edinburgh. I was there years ago as a student on summer vacation. Somehow I got invited to a university graduation party and I came across perhaps this very road while stumbling drunk back to my B&B. I remember the spot well as I had the need to jump the fence to relieve myself amongst the trees.
Another:
This is 12 Moray Place in Edinburgh, Scotland, a country I was proud to call my home for almost two years of my life. I have written to you before about the adventurous course my life has taken since I was forced to make the difficult choice between living with the Scottish woman who is the love of my life or staying in America, my former home, which does not let me and others like me in same-sex binational couples sponsor our partners for immigration. I chose to leave America, where my professional training as a doctor is recognized, and moved to Scotland so that I could share my life with the one I love.
I spent one year studying for a masters degree at the University of Edinburgh, and I walked or drove on this street on many occasions! After completing my degree, I worked briefly as a locums (part-time) trainee doctor in Scotland, but it was hard because in order to remain in the UK, I would have had to re-train for years to achieve the fully qualified status I had obtained years earlier in the US. While I miss Scotland terribly, I am happy to say that my partner and I are now living in Canada, one of the only countries that recognizes both our relationship and my professional training! What's more, because her family is in Scotland, I will still have the great pleasure of visiting there for many years to come!
Another:
I don't have many solid reasons why I should win a tie-break; actually, this is my first time entering. But, in case coincidence counts for anything, I am Andrew's younger, straighter doppelgänger: Studying at Harvard, undergrad at Oxford, and grew up in East Grinstead – well, Forest Row, but what's a couple of miles of Ashdown Forest between friends?
Another:
I initially thought the photo was taken somewhere in the UK. Then I remembered the color of the buildings from my visit to Edinburgh thirty years ago. Sure enough, with a little looking and a little luck, I stumbled upon Moray Place. With some further Google Earth help, I identified the building – the only one in that part of Moray Place with a split window that seemed obvious from the photo. By the way, there is also an oil painting entitled, "12. Moray Place" by Peter Brown:
Another:
This street in Edinburgh is quite the hidden jewel, hidden jasp, might I say. It was the great 15th century Scots poet Robert Henryson, who, though he was in his time associated with the University at Glasgow, has a substantial body of his surviving works archived at the University at Edinburgh. He made this memorable rendition of the fable of the Cock and the Jewel into Middle Scots:
O gentill iasp o rich & nobill thing, thowch I the fynd, thow ganyss nocht for me; thow art a iowell for a lord or king; it wer pite thow suld in this myddyng be beriit thus amang this muk & mold and thow so fair & worth so mekill gold
I fancy myself plucking a jasp of a coffee table book out of the dungheap of Google Maps, where I have spent my not so mickle free time this weekend.
Another:
Shallow Grave! That's what I first thought of when I saw this picture. The opening scene of the Danny Boyle movie Shallow Grave has the camera flying through streets that look quite similar to this. The movie was filmed in both Glasgow and Edinburgh, and I had a brief sidetrack looking at Glasgow.
Another:
In 1987 I was an 18-year-old guy who moved to Glasgow to go to to the University. I had to get as far away from my family and the Deep South as I could. While there I met and had a little fling with a young student at the University of Edinburgh. He had come to a debate at the Glasgow University Union one evening, where I met him, and then I made the trip over to Edinburgh (a cheap train ticket at the time) to see him in Edinburgh a few times. I think his name was Chris. It was so many years ago and the whole thing only lasted two or three weeks. It was all very exciting and scary at the same time because it was my first time to actually see someone and not just hookup and then flee. Anyway, he lived near this circle of Georgian buildings in Edinburgh. When I first saw the picture I thought it was Park Circus in Glasgow, at the top of Kelvingrove Park, where I lived at the time. But this picture isn't from Glasgow. Google street view convinced me it wasn't Park Circus. And then I remembered Chris (?) and his flat in Edinburgh. That was it. This is Moray Place. I moved home at the end of that year and enrolled in a boring state university in the US, a decision I've regretted ever since. It was an amazing time and an amazing place, though. I wonder what ever became of him.
Another:
I think this is Moray Place in Edinburgh. I recognized it because when I was there for the theatre festival years ago, there was a cruisy park near there. Lots of guys playing around in the dark late at night. The festival brings artists and theater lovers from all over the world, and it was like the United Nations of group sex out there when the bars closed.
Another:
Some close friends of mine (before decamping to the countryside to raise children) lived on this street, on the other side of the gardens visible in the left of the original image, so lots of good times had there. The gardens are private, and residents pay a nominal fee to get a key; I remember prepping lots of home baking for an open-gate garden party one time, as well as many furtive late-night excursions for a smoke. I live in Leith, which anyone familiar with Edinburgh will confirm is significantly less well-heeled than the New Town address shown here. But you well know that you get your readers from all over!
On to the exact location:
I've been a huge fan of the VFYW contest from the beginning, and reading the results has always brought some cheer and worldliness to my Tuesday lunchtime. But never before have I had any luck in guessing (as I think I have this week). I can only assume that this week's contest was incredibly easy, and that you will have an onslaught of correct guesses!
When I saw you post this week's entry, I thought immediately of the distinctive Georgian architecture of the UK's crescents and squares. Searching London and Bath via Google Maps yielded nothing that seemed like a good fit, but a Google image search led me to an apartment rental posting in Edinburgh advertising that city's unique concentration of Georgian architecture. Google Maps then led me to Moray Place, which seemed to have the right geometry:
The foreground sidewalk geometry suggests that the building from which the photo was taken is on an inside corner, narrowing it down to the ground floor of #11 or #12 Moray Place. The proximity to the lamppost suggests that it is taken from the rightmost window. Only #12 has a vertical mullion down the center of the window, making it the likely candidate.
So so close. From the submitter of the photo:
The address is 11 Moray Place, in the New Town area of Edinburgh, Scotland. It was taken from the ground floor, with the camera pointing due west, across the northern part of the circle of Moray Place. On the right you can see the junction with Doune Terrace. On the image below it's the window just to the left of the green door (entrance to no. 10), so I suppose that people might also guess 10 Moray Place. A friend used to live in this apartment, which is in a great location in the centre of the city, so when visiting home (I'm an expat Scot living in Belgium) we used to abuse his hospitality quite a bit. He's since moved out and is on a 7-month meander through Latin America, last spotted in the Chiapas region of Mexico.
About a dozen readers correctly answered 11 Moray, including two previous contest winners, but only one got a difficult window from a previous contest without securing a book yet:
Taken from 11 Moray Place, looking west around the circle, from the second window to the right of the door in the picture below. The B&B there looks to be lovely. I’ve never been to Edinburgh, and can’t tell any gripping stories about it, but there were surprisingly few circles in Britain with cobblestones, this parking pattern, and this style of architecture. Google Earth scans of London, Brighton, and Bath came up empty, and Edinburgh was next on the list.
Congrats, and thanks to everyone for the great emails – we make a point to read all of them. One more excellent entry:
I got a nice thrill when I scrolled down to see this week’s VFYW – finally, somewhere I recognise! How could I not? Edinburgh is my home town, and this photo made me realise how much I miss the beauty and the grandeur of the place, now that I live elsewhere. Moray Place is a stunning, circular street in Edinburgh’s New Town. It’s possibly my favourite part of Edinburgh, a mix of genteel Georgian charm and stately Scottish style. The area breathes history, from the micro to the macro. If you look closely, you’ll see blocked up windows on the corner house to the right of the vertical window frame, a legacy of the window tax that afflicted Scotland, England and France in the 18th and 19th century (and no, I have no idea what business it is of the government to tax windows, but there you go).
The New Town itself was built to the north of the city’s castle (and Old Town) in the mid 18th century, and was designed by a 26-year old architect named James Craig. It is mostly a simple grid pattern, in contrast to the complicated alleys, wynds, closes and back streets of the Old Town, which straddles the volcanic Castle Rock and by the 1760s had become over crowded and disease-ridden. The rich moved to the New Town, a more fitting backdrop to the Scottish Enlightenment, while the poor stayed in the Old. The Nor Loch between the Old and New Town was drained, and in the 1850s Princes Street Gardens and Waverley railway station were built in its place – Waverley was named after the famous Walter Scott novel, and is the only station in the world to be named after a work of fiction. The Old and New Towns were together designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995.
I know I sound like I’m employed by the Edinburgh tourist board (honestly, I’m not), but I just love Auld Reekie. I recommend a visit, especially for the huge Scots Diaspora that now resides in the USA; I’m sure plenty of your readers in the USA have a connection to Edinburgh or Scotland. The weather may be wet and cold nearly all the time, but it is a stunning place to live.
It's possible, of course, that the administration decided that … there is no political strategy right now that wil lead to a serious agreement on jobs spending with Cantor and his members. It's possible that everything is going exactly according to the administration's plan and they're putting the finishing touches on a Truman-like campaign against a do-nothing, block-everything Congress. But if so, that's quite a statement about how much help the American people can expect from the federal government in the face of a weakening economy and a possible double-dip recession.
To me, from the zero GOP votes for the first stimulus, the last three years have been an exercize in calculated, cynical, partisan destruction. The Republicans greeted a Democratic president eager to reach to conservatives as a Jihadist Marxist they would try to destroy at all costs. They've stuck with the message through thick and thin.
Right now, the obvious strategy for emerging from the economic soup is short-term stimulus combined with a Grand Bargain on spending and taxes for long-term fiscal retrenchment. But this would improve the economy in the next year and so hurt Republican chances to regain the White House and Senate. Hence its evaporation. It is far more important for the GOP that Obama lose his job than that more Americans should save theirs' – even if it means voting against proposals they have endorsed in the past. For a decade, the Grand Bargain concept was taken seriously by both sides. Then after Obama's election, the GOP decided to go for broke on keeping revenues deeply depressed, while offering politically impossible proposals to end Medicare as an entitlement or abolish social security. And short term, it worked.
Long term, once voters really assess the choice next year? I'm not so sure. The only thing I'm sure of is that it is almost entirely up to Obama. His party is incapable of persuading anyone of anything.
It's getting sharper, but it's not going to appease many GOP primary voters:
Jonathan Last grounds the debate with some much needed numbers:
It turns out that of the 1.8 million students enrolled in Texas higher-ed, only 16,476 students are illegals (the state refers to these kids as "affidavit students"). Of those, 12,028 go to two-year community colleges. For the most part these schools have noncompetitive admissions and hardly any out-of-state students. A vanishingly small number go to the state's competitive flagship schools: The University of Texas has 612 of them; A&M has 362. Romney's fretting about a "$100,000 discount" being given to illegal immigrants is something like an argument for abortion rights centered around rape and incest.
The Dish 