Month: April 2012

During a speech at a high school journalism convention, Dan Savage attacked anti-gay Biblical literalism, which caused some Christian students to walk out:

The right, predictably, flipped its shit. Savage apologizes for name-calling but holds his ground otherwise:

I was not attacking the faith in which I was raised. I was attacking the argument that gay people must be discriminated against—and anti-bullying programs that address anti-gay bullying should be blocked (or exceptions should be made for bullying "motivated by faith")—because it says right there in the Bible that being gay is wrong. Yet the same people who make that claim choose to ignore what the Bible has to say about a great deal else. I did not attack Christianity. I attacked hypocrisy. My remarks can only be read as an attack on all Christians if you believe that all Christians are hypocrites. Which I don't believe.

The case must be made about the inconsistent way that Christianists read the Bible to tilt it focus entirely on gays. But the case against the hypocritical, selective reading of the Bible is so strong that it undermines it to use the term "bullshit". Using logic – as Dan also did – always wins in civil rights struggles. In the end. Dan's actually quite nuanced feelings about the Catholicism he grew up in can be found here.

David Sessions considers Douthat's prescription for returning the US to its former greatness:

Underlying his argument is a kind of American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States’ success has had at least something to do with its religiosity, and that its religiosity has had played a central role in keeping it on track as a society—that it needs some kind of orthodox, metaphysically energized Christianity, which implies judgment, to keep society’s excesses in check.

But this is obviously not true: almost every advanced Western nation besides the U.S. is predominantly secular, and all of them have lower abortion rates, lower teen pregnancy rates, and lower divorce rates than we do. But, as Douthat has said explicitly, the ways they accomplish these things—sex education, contraception, legalized abortion, policies supporting unmarried cohabiting parents—are not things he believes a Christian can accept.  So he’s choosing a view of America—that religion is socially necessary—and excluding policy options that don’t accept that premise. And here’s the kicker: he makes this choice even if those policies he can’t accept are more likely to be more effective in ameliorating the real-world problems he is concerned about, and even if the policies his religion prefers have to exclude people in ways that just aren’t acceptable to modern liberal society.

Alan Jacobs seeks out the source of Christianity's decline:

If you’re a Christian, it’s tempting to say (drawing on the Perfidious-Mainstream-Media account) that we were forced into these subaltern modes by the relentless hostility of the cultural elites. That’s a very comforting narrative: we get to cast ourselves as the persecuted minority, and who can resist that temptation? Ross is offering a less consoling explanation: that Christians lost their cultural influence in large part because they lost their connection to historic orthodoxy, preferring comfortably flaccid theologies — of the Right and the Left — that were pretty much indistinguishable from what most religiously indifferent Americans believed anyway.

So for those readers especially hostile to Ross’s account, I have a queston: Are you sure it’s not because he’s telling you something you don’t want to hear? — That if you have a marginal place in American culture, the situation may be largely your own fault?

Previous discussion of Ross' new book here, here, here and here.

A new theory suggests that the annoying affliction actually protects us:

[H]ated allergic symptoms keep unhealthy environmental irritants out of the body, [immunobiologist Ruslan] Medzhitov posits. "How do you defend against something you inhale that you don't want? You make mucus. You make a runny nose, you sneeze, you cough, and so forth. Or if it's on your skin, by inducing itching, you avoid it or you try to remove it by scratching it," he explains. Likewise, if you've ingested something allergenic, your body might react with vomiting.

Update from a reader, who warns:

Not to be too picky, but you show what looks like a cat sticking its nose into a tulip – this is not a good thing, since tulips are poisonous to cats. Alas, many (most?) flowers are poisonous to cats, a fact we learned when we, who like plants and flowers, got cats (and got rid of the plants and flowers). You can check this out on ASPCA’s website.

But to be more specific:

The toxic portion of this plant is the actual bulb, which can cause drooling, central nervous system depression, gastrointestinal irritation, cardiac issues and convulsions.

Hamilton Nolan seethes over Saturday night's spectacle:

Do you know who knows that the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner is a shameful display of whoredom that makes the "average American" vomit in disgust, or, more likely, simply continue to disregard the findings of any ostensibly neutral journalistic outlet in favor of their own ideology of choice, because they have a fully solidified belief that the "mainstream media" is little more than a bunch of ball-lapping lapdogs to whoever's in power? Everyone.

Don't forget beard-lapping lapdogs. Exum echoes Nolan and others:

[W]hat really set me off was the constant use of the phrase "nerd prom" — usually by the attendants themselves — to describe the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. Teenagers go to proms — not grown men and women. This is part of a broader pattern I see in Washington — a pattern which includes cupcake stores, kickball leagues, and adults dressing up on Halloween (to amuse themselves, not children) — whereby ostensibly grown people adopt the rituals of childhood.

Cupcakes are now out of bounds as well? But yes, the whole thing is very silly and kinda corrupting. But unlike the silliness and corruption that goes on every day in this town, it's pretty much transparent. And you get to hang with Leon Wieseltier.

One moment worth treasuring from Saturday night:

I was in the room and could barely see a single hand go up. These wealthy, largely white, power-mongers take their pot-use for granted, and yet young black and Latino youths and countless middle class pot-smokers have their entire lives ruined by an insane policy to combat a drug less toxic and less socially damaging than alcohol.

When Prohibition ends, what will history say of that generation in power?

“Don’t worry about keeping things calm with Pakistan. Worry about getting out,” – Barack Obama, insisting on an escape route for the Seal Team Six to get out of the country in their Osama bin Laden raid.

Anyone who doubts that this was Obama's own decision and risk should read David Corn's tick-tock.

Australia's Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations doesn't even need to hear what his prime minister says before agreeing with it:

Neetzan Zimmerman helps out:

For the record, Gillard told reporters she believes Slipper should be reinstated in accordance with "a clear set of precedents where people have continued to function in their office while the subjects of civil matters."

Follow Tyler Cowen‘s work at Marginal Revolution, and buy his new book, An Economist Gets Lunch. Cowen has taken some flack for his anti-foodie take on agribusiness. An excerpt from his book:

For all the lofty rhetoric about “locavores” and “slow food,” this food snobbery is pessimistic, paternalistic, and most of all it is anti-innovation. Neither the consumer nor the businessperson is trusted to innovate; there is a false nostalgia for primitive agriculture, based on limited transportation and the arduous conversion of raw materials into comestible commodities. Rarely is it admitted, much less emphasized, that cheap, quick food — including its embodiment through our sometimes obnoxious agribusiness corporations — is the single most important advance in human history.

Tim Carman rebuts Cowen’s claim that food snobs are “anti-innovation”:

Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m not just talking about chefs and their ubiquitous circulators and vacuum sealers, either. I’m talking about Local Ocean in upstate New York, a massive indoor fish farm that specializes in “zero-discharge 100% recirculating aquaculture system.” I’m talking about the Vertical Farm, the forward-thinking idea to transform urban areas into indoor farms. I’m talking about solar farms that are working to reduce their reliance on fossils fuels. Food snobs can, and do, embrace all these.

In fact, these are the ideas and people who will help feed the planet’s billions of inhabitants in the years to come, not the large agricultural companies that continue to rely on systems that deplete topsoil, pollute waterways and require vast amounts of water and energy to produce meat and vegetables. These systems are not sustainable, and Tyler Cowen knows it.

But Adam Ozimek defends Cowen’s unusual approach to the economics of food:

For example, if you live in an area where it takes a lot of energy and resources to grow food — like the desert — the most environmentally friendly way may be to grow it somewhere else and ship it. An apple grown locally may be refrigerated for months, which consumes a lot of energy, whereas it may be both fresher and better for the environment to grow it elsewhere and ship it in from afar by boat. He also defends genetically modified crops as the likely cures to the biggest food problem we have today, which is not obesity but malnutrition.

But Cowen is not an apologist, and he doesn’t argue that we can just deregulate our way to a better food system. In fact he has many words of support for policies and values often supported by progressives. To help improve both the long-term budget gap and the growing environmental problem, he advocates ending subsidies for big agriculture, and argues for a carbon tax. In addition, he believes that meat should be “taxed” for environmental reasons, and that one easy way to do this is to enforce more strict animal welfare laws.

Video archive here.

Apparently, Jamie Kirchick needs a foil.