Month: April 2012

Scott Shane advocates for "The Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act," which would legalize "equity crowd funding." Why it matters:

Accredited investors willing to invest in start-ups are simply too few to provide enough capital for young companies. My analysis of data from representative surveys of Americans reveals that venture capitalists and accredited business angels make equity investments in only about 15,000 businesses per year. But roughly 150,000 small companies receive informal investments every year. Thus, the vast majority of informal investment comes from unaccredited investors who cannot be solicited online but who learn about the investment opportunities through other means. Equity crowd funding will just improve the efficiency of this process. As anyone with a Facebook or Linked In account knows, allowing people to use online tools just facilitates interactions that people are undertaking anyway.

Meanwhile, Joe Brown gives up on Kickstarter itself:

We look at hundreds of products every week. Sometimes thousands. At first all of us were pretty stoked about Kickstarter, because it seemed like a genuine font of unfettered innovation—the hive mind coming up with products that we truly needed but had never even thought of before. And maybe it was. But it's not anymore. It's a sea of bad videos, bad renderings, and poorly made prototypes. Some might be good. Many are poorly made. And some are downright fraudulent, taking peoples' money without delivering the promised rewards. This has happened to me.

Joshua Gans defends the website.

Buzzfeed and the band King Missile are on the same wavelength:

A reader differs:

Andrew, please know there is no reliable scholarship that corroborates your account of Jesus's attitude during his execution. The earliest gospel, contrary to your portrayal of calm willingness, indicates that he might have believed in the apocolytpic fever of the time and believed that he was indeed the Messiah, destined to be rescued by God so he might liberate the Jewish people ("…why have you forsaken me"). Later accounts altered the account, adding the "let your will be done" and "it is done." This fits a historical pattern wherein more accurate accounts of historical events are followed by increasingly elaborated and fictional accounts to further a partisan's agenda. Christianity, even if containing moral wisdom, fits this pattern.

The love that you claim embodies the core teachings of Christ is actually more an emphasis of Paul than the historical Jesus. The latter was a firebrand who insisted that end-times were at hand, requiring total repentance and submission to the Jewish God. This was his "core teaching", as far as history goes. But even that version is speculative given the sparse nature of the historical evidence.

My interpretation of Jesus' attitude in his Passion is derived from years of contemplation on the Gospel stories. They are indeed contradictory – but I see his final cry of despair a sign of his humanity, that he, like all humans, also knew doubt and terror. Maybe Jesus was in reality a rebellious Jewish provocateur, but that is not the point of the Gospel stories. Their point is the precise opposite. Another writes:

When you talk about "the fundamental incompatibility of Christianity with human power," it's hard to take you seriously.

You do realize that Christianity only became a major religion when the Roman empire endorsed it? Seems to me that Christianity owes its success to its deliberate, centuries-long campaign to link its fortunes to those of powerful political leaders. That's not a bug; it's a feature.

It's even harder to take you seriously when you quote others talking about the "blood-drinking gods" that Christ "liberated" us from, and the "reality of a love which asks no questions about worthiness." Christ's father was possibly the most blood-soaked deity in history. Can you point out a single quote from Jesus repudiating his "father's" brutality? And since Christ's gift of salvation is denied to those who fail to accept him as their lord, it's kind of hard to paint his love as some sort of selfless gift to all humankind. To an unsaved soul like me, it seems a lot more like a tool of coercion.

I love your blog, but I wish you'd stop pretending that "Christianists" are tainting your otherwise blameless faith, and recognize that maybe the Bible itself is at the root of the problem.

Well: is it the Bible or Constantine? What's interesting about Jesus is that he claims to fulfill Jewish law but so often violates it in the furtherance of caritas. He is about love transcending law. As for the fusion of Christianity with the Roman Empire: this was a strange turn of events. But I do not believe it alters the meaning of a faith incarnated in a human being who died long, long before that happened. And, for my part, the fusion of early Christianity with such extraordinary political power was a terrible harbinger of abuses to come, including the eternal evil of anti-Semitism. Another reader:

You've read Garry Wills right?  He totally shreds the Jefferson Gospels.  There's not really much I can add because Wills' takedown is so devastating.  But I am with Wills in that I would rather have the offensive and messy Jesus than the cookie cutter cynic sage favored by Jefferson and his legacy, the Jesus Seminar. There is no political thinker I admire more than Jefferson.  But the Jefferson Gospel?  Meh.

And as a classicist, I might add that the politically correct argument that Jesus never claimed Messiahship is historically dubious.  The Jewish High Priests did not turn over cynic sages to the Romans for execution. They turned over people who threatened their authority.  What besides the claim to divinity could have provoked the crucifixion? 

I am with you in the overall thrust of your essay, especially reminding everyone of the example of St. Francis.  My main comment would be it is the divinity of Christ that offers the sharpest challenge to our corrupt and compromised institutions, especially the Church.  

I do not buy Jefferson's final Jesus, as I made plain in the piece. I admire his willingness to look deep, and try to recover a Jesus he could reconcile with what he knew to be true.

10 years ago, Robert Kagan wrote an essay making the now-infamous "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus" analogy. In a review symposium, Kagan reflects on the piece's influence – and weaknesses:

Ten years ago, when I wrote the original essay, it would not have occurred to me that anyone would be commenting on it a year later, let alone a decade later…I only wrote the essay because [Tod Lindberg of the Hoover Institution] had invited me to speak at a conference, and I had to deliver something. No doubt the other contributors will recognize the experience. Therefore from the beginning I have been acutely aware of the essay’s limitations — and have had the good fortune to have all those limitations pointed out to me frequently, in many languages, with greater or lesser kindness over the years, and now again at the scene of the crime a decade later.

Dan Drezner issues a warning:

I remember talking with Kagan when the original essay came out and blew up, and I can aver that he was just as surprised as anyone else about its impact.  Let this be a lesson for policy wonks everywhere.  Sure, most of the time when you write something it disappears into the ether, to be forgotten almost immediately.  But on occasion, serendiptity or fortuna strikes, and you've suddenly got a major essay on your hands.  Always write with that in mind — because if your essay does blow up, you better be ready, willing and able to defend every paragraph of it. 

A reader writes:

As a bike commuter, a road cyclist, and a middle-aged mom who has every intention of teaching her kids to ride and drive safely, I CRINGE when I hear someone claim that "there really are no rules for cyclists."  Hell yes there are!  In your reader's new home state of California, the vehicle code explicitly states, "A person riding a bicycle or operating a pedicab upon a highway has all the rights and is subject to all the provisions applicable to the driver of a vehicle."  (VC 21200)  That means stopping at signs and lights, signaling turns, and riding in the road, not on the sidewalk. Most if not all states have similar stipulations.

Another writes:

I live in a city that has terrible bike paths, Philadelphia.  Stop lights at seemingly every corner. Having ridden to work, I tried to follow all the traffic laws – stopping at every light, and staying off the sidewalks.  It made the ride so much worse.  The lights seem to be timed so that a car can catch a few greens in a row, but on a bike you find that you are stopped nearly all the time.  Besides the extra waiting at a light, the momentum stopping makes the ride very onerous.

Another is on the same page:

Well at least part of the bad behavior complained about is due to physics.  Stopping in a car is easy; your foot moves from the gas to the brake, then the gas again.  In a bike, all that momentum you have built up was generated by sweat, and if you've been doing it for a few miles, pain too.  A lot of the time the stop sign isn't accomplishing anything.  If you stopped, you would put your foot down, then immediately start pedaling again.  It hurts to get going again, so when stopping is a purely formalistic recognition that the law also applies to cyclists, but harms no one and has no potential to harm anyone, yeah I don't stop. 

And I'm not going to really apologize for that.  I'm having a hard time picturing these road warriors; when I'm on the road with cars, I am constantly reminded that each one of them is a two ton machine that could easily kill me, and may well be driven by someone who is texting, high, or busy applying their makeup.  It's a pretty nerve wracking experience, and I guarantee you that of all the people on the road, the cyclist is the one paying the most attention to what is going on 99 times out of a 100.  If they aren't, some Suburban is going to Gallagher their head.

I'm sure there's a lot of jerk cyclists out there because there are a lot of jerks out there, but somehow or another when a driver kills somebody because they are drunk, or rams a car because they were texting, it doesn't reflect on all drivers.  Aside from the human tendency to stereotype and prejudge, I don't see why the behavior of the douche cyclists should reflect on anyone but themselves.

Another reader:

There's been a lot of discussion about the "Idaho Stop," which allows bicyclists to treat stop signs (but not red lights) as yield signs. As a bicycle commuter with a short commute, I can either ride easily to work, doing just enough work to create a nice breeze and stay dry, or I can race there and get in sweaty and gross. I prefer mostly coasting. But stopping at every stop sign at every empty intersection makes that nearly impossible.

The Oregonian covered this when Oregon tried (and failed) to pass a bill containing this provision in 2009. This video explains this really well.

Jacob Heilbrunn questions Romney's foreign policy message: 

[F]or decades, the GOP has systematically played the patriotism card, attacking Democratic presidents as weaklings, unfit for the big time. But now the GOP has, more or less, exhausted that formula. It's returning to a prescription that led to trillion-dollar wars in the Middle East that the public loathes. Now it's champing at the bit, or pretending to champ, to attack Syria, Iran, China and who knows who else.

Anyway, Obama is already ramping up America's military presence in Asia. In essence, Obama is calling the GOP's bluff. He can pose as tough and measured—the man who took out Osama bin Laden, wound down two unpopular wars and, perhaps most important, did not launch a new one in Iran or anywhere else. Romney, by contrast, appears to be intent on depicting Obama as a wimp and seeking out a "No. 1" foe, which can evidently be Iran or China or Russia, depending on Romney's mood that week. But it won't work. 

Michael Crowley echoes: 

Obama can tout his success in Libya, drone strikes in Pakistan and the under-appreciated absence of a successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil since he was sworn in. Not to mention one of the best applause lines of all time: “Osama bin Laden is dead.” Romney has his work cut out for him.

But he can always just lie. It has worked for him so far.

Famous fresh faces:

I seem to have struck a nerve. A reader writes:

On reading The Right's Obama, I immediately recalled the following quotes:

“Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”

“I am an invisible man. 
No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: 
Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. 
I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids
- and I might even be said to possess a mind. 
I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.”

Invisible Man, of course, by Ralph Ellison.

Bill Kristol urges Romney to run a "forward-looking" campaign (i.e. more attacks on Obama’s first term). Joe Klein takes a step back: 

There was a time–the turn of the 1990s, to be precise–when the Republican Party offered solutions … In many cases, their solutions were superior to the Democratic brand–the individual mandate was, and is, superior to the then-Democratic solution of an employer mandate; cap-and-trade was a good way to handle pollutants (though not so good as a straight-up, but refundable, carbon tax); choice and market-incentives were, and are, good ways to deal with our desultory educational system. Republicans and moderate Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, came to a humane solution to an immoral welfare system (and should finish the work now, by carefully reforming Social Security disability payments). If I remember correctly, Kristol was part of that conversation.

His turning point came when he advised Republicans to oppose the Clinton health care plan on purely tactical grounds–he didn’t want Clinton to win the political victory that reform would represent. And yet, he refused to propose an alternative.

He didn’t even support the Republican alternative. He has led the GOP nihilist caucus ever since–except when it comes to warmongering, where he is an uninflected and unmitigated hawk. And so it is entirely predictable, and sad, that Kristol’s idea of a forward-looking campaign is a combination of aggression overseas and nihilism at home. I still believe a Romney win is entirely possible, if less likely, this November, but he will have a difficult time winning, and an impossible time governing, with Kristol’s cocktail of aggression overseas and nihilism at home.

Today Obama took aim at the Ryan budget:

Chait believes this will be Obama's 2012 message:

The Republican strategy has real strengths. The party’s sheer bloody-minded refusal to compromise, and its devotion to ever more radical policy agendas, has helped it to shift the terms of the debate steadily rightward. Even keeping tax rates at Clinton-era levels is now a position too left-wing for Democrats to advocate. The weakness of this strategy is that it opens you up to political attack by allowing your opponent to claim the center. That is the ground Obama has gleefully seized.

The best argument in favor from a reader:

I've never seen anybody mention the fact that Santorum's children, who didn't choose their father, share his last name and are now stuck with the repulsive second meaning through no fault of their own.

But another makes a powerful point:

It seems to me that one of the major components of bullying, cyber or not, is absent from Santorum's narrative: the disproportion of power between the bully and the bullied. Rick Santorum is not a kid being harassed by his social peers; he is a major political figure being hassled by those with far less clout and power than he has and is seeking to gain. This does not mean that I condone the way that people have gone after him online, but there seems to me to be a pretty clear difference between this behavior and classic cyber-bullying.