Month: March 2012

Liberals and conservatives disagree:

When I asked whether faith in God was important to financial success, liberals and conservatives divide more sharply than in attributing success to any other cause.  While 57% of conservatives say faith is at least somewhat important, only 23% of liberals say the same. Moreover, 25% of conservatives say faith is very important to success, but only 8% of liberals.  And in the biggest divide, while 44% of liberals will say that faith is "not important at all" to financial success, only 8% of conservatives will say the same. 

Jonathan Mirsky grapples with an extremely popular Chinese reality show, which was taken off the air last year. In the show, a prim and often staid Ding Yu interviews prisoners on death row, sometimes minutes before their execution: 

For the actual interviews, after Ding Yu has her face made up and her hair styled, her subjects are dragged before her handcuffed and manacled. She usually smiles throughout the program, occasionally reminding the condemned that they had done a terrible thing and asking them how they feel about it. All except one trembles, collapses, weeps, and apologizes. One program, about a man who killed a child kidnapped for ransom, makes Ding Yu weep—she says this happened twice in four years. During the interview she puts a finger to her moist eyes and then examine the finger. She tells him, "Everybody should hate you." He agrees.

A PBS documentary on the subject is forthcoming. Xeni Jardin recently discussed it: 

Exactly how many prisoners are executed each year in China? No one seems to know, but the number is estimated to be in the thousands. According to a 2011 Amnesty International report, China is number one in kill count among nations that use capital punishment. The USA is also in the top five, but with a 2010 count of 46 executions—a long way off from the top contender. Regarding China's use of the death penalty, Amnesty reports that "Thousands are believed to be executed every year," but "Authorities remain highly secretive about its use."

(Screenshot of Ding Yu via Jardin) 

Michael Ignatieff has a theory about American foreign policy:

Law … constrains power, and the United States, like any great power, is likely to support a law-bound international order only if it ties up the power of its competitors more than it constrains its own. Other great powers have subscribed to this realist calculus in advancing international law. America is exceptional in combining standard great-power realism with extravagant idealism about the country’s redemptive role in creating international order. Since Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the US has promoted universal legal norms and the institutions to enforce them, while seeking by hook or by crook to exempt American citizens, especially soldiers, from their actual application.

Janet Reitman dives into the fraternity culture at Dartmouth College. According to one former frat boy, pledges were required to "swim in a kiddie pool of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen and rotten food products; eat omelets made of vomit; chug cups of vinegar, which in one case caused a pledge to vomit blood; drink beer poured down fellow pledges' ass cracks… among other abuses":

Within the Ivy League, Dartmouth is considered the most "corporate" of the schools, with a reputation for sending graduates to Wall Street and the upper echelons of the corporate world. Statistics show that roughly a quarter of each graduating class find jobs in finance and business – a figure many students consider low, given Dartmouth's prominent ties to its Wall Street alumni, who often come back to campus to recruit. "I've been at our house when a senior partner from a financial-services firm and a chief recruiter from someplace like Bain are standing around drinking with us as we haze our pledges," says senior Nathan Gusdorf.

Roger Scruton is on a similar skeptical page as Hilary Bok:

When we endeavour to understand persons through the half-formed theories of neuroscience we are tempted to pass over their distinctive features in silence, or else to attribute them to some brain-shaped homunculus inside. For we understand people by facing them, by arguing with them, by understanding their reasons, aspirations and plans. All of that involves another language, and another conceptual scheme, from those deployed in the biological sciences. We do not understand brains by facing them, for they have no face.

Today on the Dish, Andrew wondered if America was on the road to post-Obamacare single payer while we detailed the specific path down that route, noted the somewhat circumscribed role of the mandate, guessed at whether the Medicad expansion would get thrown out by SCOTUS, cautioned against seeing the Constitution in black-and-white, developed a timeline for hearing the Court's decision, compared Obama's fight with the Court to Bush's, and forecasted the negative consequences of the mandate's defeat for Obama's reelection campaign. Rubio endorsed Romney (but looked like a terrible Veep choice), Mitt's approval rating remained abysmal, foreign policy wasn't the presumptive nominee's strong suit, he gaffed again, Dems faced severe challenges in the Congressional elections, and pink balls freaked out Santorum.

Andrew also dipped his toe in on Trayvon Martin (follow-up here), expressed some optimism for the Arab Spring, worried about signs of an impending Iran war, and picked out one nuggest suggesting war wasn't over. Iran seemed fundamentally different from the Soviets, #Kony2012 rose on the backs of teenage Southern girls, drone attacks declined, and robots definitely could jump. One reader labelled the Trayvon case "like the Duke lacrosse scandal but worse," American politics rewarded the old at the young's expense, Congress killed Bowles-Simpson, and Obama's scandals were lame. Atheist proliferation terrified Christianists but non-believers lacked an organized community with which to push back. We put up a preliminary response on the football question, continued the catcalling discussion, checked Hollywood's math, and praised "low-end innovation." Virologists advanced, "dude" changed, and the "Conservative Teen" photos wowed. Yglesias Nominee here, Quotes for the Day here and here, Cool Ad here, FOTD here, VFYW here, and MHB here.

– Z.B.

Peter Bergen and Jennifer Rowland try to explain why the US drone campaign in Pakistan appears to be tapering off:

According to senior U.S. counterterrorism officials, al Qaeda's leadership bench has been so thinned by the drone campaign that there are only two real leaders of the organization left: bin Laden's successor as overall leader of the group, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Abu Yahya al-Libi. This raises an interesting question: Maybe one of the reasons that the drone campaign has eased off in the past several months is that the CIA has begun to run out of real targets?

How Obama's brush with the Supreme Court compares to Bush's:

If the Court does end up striking down the mandate, this will be the second consecutive presidency in which the Supreme Court imposed significant limits on the primary agenda of the sitting President in ways that were unexpected based on precedents at the time the President acted. Last time around, it was President Bush and the War on Terror.

The President relied on precedents like Johnson v. Eisentrager in setting up Gitmo. But when the Court was called on to review this key aspect of the President’s strategy for the War on Terror, the Court maneuvered around Eisentrager and imposed new limits on the executive branch in cases like Rasul v. Bush and Boumediene v. Bush. The President’s opponents heralded the Court’s new decisions as the restoration of the rule of law and the application of profound constitutional principle. Meanwhile, the President’s allies condemned the decisions as the products of unbridled judicial activism from a political court. If the mandate gets struck down, we’ll get a replay with the politics reversed. Just substitute Obama for Bush, health care reform for the War on Terror, the individual mandate for Gitmo, and Wickard for Eisentrager.

“I use the term ‘love’ as something that comes from my heart. . . . I fell in love with Mitt Romney,” - Dixie Cannon, one of the "Romney superfans" profiled in the WaPo feature on the elusive creatures.

Tibetan activist gestures after being detained following a protest near the Taj Palace Hotel, venue for the BRICS Summit in New Delhi on March 29, 2012. The Tibetan exile who set himself on fire on March 26 in New Delhi died two days later and police detained at least 100 other activists protesting against Chinese President Hu Jintao's arrival in the city. Since early 2011, at least 29 Tibetans, many of them Buddhist monks and nuns, are reported to have set themselves on fire in Tibetan-inhabited areas of China to protest against Chinese rule. By Manan Vatsyayana AFP/Getty Images)