Month: January 2012

Emma Sky surveys the post-American landscape:

Would you recommend people to visit Iraq, Iraqi friends ask me? Oh yes, I assure them — foreigners will have the holiday of a lifetime in Iraq. And I will be back year after year — for the richness of the culture, the warmth of the people, the beauty of the landscape. To sit on the ground sharing food from the same plates as complete strangers, to be greeted with generosity and gifts on every occasion, to share jokes as with old friends, to hear such tales of resilience. This is how Iraq should be defined — not by the depravity of violence that inflicts it. But unfortunately, Iraq's politicians are once more playing on people's fears and taking the country to the brink of a sectarian conflict that this time might not be contained within the country's borders.

Bill Gardner is OK with smoker discrimination:

Smoking is a vice that benefits no one. It's not a candidate for a lifestyle choice that we want to protect through employment laws.

Paul Kelleher counters.

(Photo: People smoke cigarettes outside of an office building in New York City. By Spencer Platt/Getty Images.)

Brian Leiter defends the staid Marxist line:

If 75% of the wealth of the richest one-tenth of 1% of American society were immediately expropriated, there would be no need to discuss cuts to spending that affects the well-being of the vast majority. This is a democracy, why isn’t this a major topic of public debate? Why aren’t the national media full of debates between defenders of the right of the Koch brothers to keep their billions and advocates for seizing the majority of their fortune to meet human needs? One only needs to read Marx to know the answer.

Will Willkinson screams:

The reason Leiter's proposal to "expropriate" or "seize" wealth on a monumental scale is not presently a hot debate topic is not that Charles and David Koch have somehow kept the subject off "Up with Chris Hayes." And it's not that the tender-headed liberal "moralists" have lulled the 99% into scrupling to loot Tim Tebow's bank account. The reason is that it is well understood by intelligent, well-informed people that Leiter's is a disastrously stupid idea inconsistent with the sort of social order that does meet human needs reliably and well. 

Nationally Fox News has Romney at 40 percent. Gallup has him at 37 percent. Doug Mataconis analyzes the trend:

[I]t does appear that conservatives are beginning, perhaps still reluctantly, to accept the fact that Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee for President. Even if he were to stumble in South Carolina, he is the only candidate capable of competing in Florida and beyond. More importantly, as the Fox poll shows, the Republican selectorate is (finally) starting to turn its attention to the question of electability, and on that score Romney is winning hands down. 

Yes, but. This race is won by delegates in state primaries and caucuses. South Carolina can still change an awful lot.

Chait imagines:

If Romney had won his last presidential campaign, he probably would have implemented something like the Affordable Care Act. He would have sold his party on its more conservative character by pointing out that, unlike Masscare, this one includes Medicare cuts and a wide array of reforms to limit Medicare waste in the future. (In other words, just what Obama did.)

Megan Garber contemplates some new technology:

However strange (and, okay, kind of creepy) it might seem to have the phrases "personal computer" and "knowing glance" in the same sentence, the alternative — personal devices that aren't as fully personal as they could be — is worse. Because, as resistant as we can be, culturally, to new technologies (the telephone will erode our privacy! The moving picture will destroy sociability!), we tend to come around to prefer intimacy over distance in the devices that help us navigate the world.

Eye control – and, in fact, voice control (and, in fact, gestural control like the Kinect) – appeal in theory because they're the logical extension of that intimacy. They suggest what might happen when we bypass the middlemachine — the keyboard, the mouse, the touchscreen — and communicate with our computers through the parts of ourselves that, poetry and experience tell us, are the most honest and obvious manifestations of Who We Are.

(Video via Jose Vilches)

Amartya Sen considers what Hume would have to say about human connectedness and global justice. Geoffrey Cameron thinks, despite renewed nationalism in several important countries, that humanity is coming together:

[W]e remain irreversibly conscious of the oneness of humanity, by virtue of our personal experience and the reach of media and commerce, and we still cannot ignore its implications for global justice. Hume saw this dawing consciousness some 250 years ago.

I'll be on Hardball tonight discussing my cover-story on Obama. Also: live-blogging the critical South Carolina debate tonight.

Byron York put it best:

Huntsman's problem was that, whatever his position on some key issues, he sent out political and cultural signals that screamed NPR, and not Fox News, that screamed liberal, and not conservative. Even though conservatives agreed with Huntsman on many things, they instinctively sensed he wasn't their guy.

And what does that mean? It means he thought gay people's relationships deserved recognition if not civil marriage; that climate change was real, with the question being what to do about it, if anything; that evolution was not something still up for serious debate. These are culturally and religiously anathema to the current GOP, for purely tribal reasons. Not because these things aren't true, but purely because Democrats or liberals and the vast majority of educated human beings take them for granted.

What you see in the rejection of Huntsman is the Republican body rejecting a sanity transplant. Based on unreason and hatred of the other half of America. It's irrational and degenerate. But it's what they have, sadly, become.

But that doesn't excuse Huntsman's dreadful campaign. It was so tone-deaf from the get-go, you almost missed Romney. I wish the dude well; he was, in the end, the man the Dish endorsed, after the Ron Paul newsletters made him simply too tainted. But I fear he did not do much to advance his future by this sad performance. The Republicans await their Cameron. But for now, they are so consumed with cultural loathing, they cannot see anything that clearly.