Month: May 2012

Not much, according to Philip Gourevitch:

Inevitably, there has been speculation in the press that the Houla massacre will be a "game changer"—the pivotal outrage that will propel international military action against Assad. The Washington Post editorial page, for instance, has been boosting the idea of a NATO air war in Syria for a while now. What the paper’s argument boils down to is: it worked in Libya, so why treat Syria differently? That Assad must go, as Obama has said repeatedly, is not in dispute. But the Syria hawks don’t even bother to describe who or what should replace him. In fact, as I write in this week’s Comment in The New Yorker, Syria presents, in every particular, a completely different predicament than Libya did. Given the terrible tangles of domestic, regional, and geo-strategic politics at stake, the more pertinent reference is the cautionary example of Afghanistan.

Earlier roundup of commentary and imagery from this weekend's massacre here.

(Hat tip: digby)

Not looking good in the latest PPP poll. He'll likely lose both of his home states this fall.

A yo-yo motiontracking remix that gets increasingly cooler:

(Hat tip: Nerdcore)

Kornacki's imagines Romney's intra party opposition:

[President Romney] would be under immense pressure from the right to support and implement their agenda, no matter how politically toxic it is. If Romney were to balk at doing so, or seek some major compromise with Democrats, or simply be seen as not pushing hard enough, he’d be inviting a conservative revolt – and Rand Paul would be a logical figure to lead it.

"If there is an argument for why the Quran is so good, please bring it forward. I’ve read the Quran several times and it’s not that good. In fact, it’s conspicuously bad as a moral map, and a spiritual map. You can wander blindfolded into a Barnes & Noble, and the first book you pick off the shelf will have more wisdom than the Quran. The Quran is uniquely barren of wisdom relevant to the 21st century. It’s got a few good lines about patience and generosity, and the rest is just vilification of the infidel," – Sam Harris. Can any readers counter?

Helena, Montana, 9 am

Over the weekend, Douthat argued that the Internet has "created a cultural revolution more than an economic one." Ryan Avent counters:

[T]he web is a general-purpose technology, like electricity. Maybe some people imagined that the arrival of the web would launch an internet economy in which we all worked for internet companies producing internet. That's akin to a belief that the development of electricity should have given rise to an electricity era in which we all worked for electrical companies making electricity. Of course, there were big, successful electrical companies, just as there are big, successful internet companies; Google, the best example, is a hugely profitable, enormously valuable firm that employs tens of thousands of people. But the web, like electricity, is mostly a means to make the rest of the economy vastly more productive. 

Yglesias echoes:

[W]hat really makes Apple the great internet age commercial success story is that it sells complements to the virtual goods available on the Internet. The iPad is a lovely piece of software engineering and industrial design, but if the web sucked it would be a much less useful product.

The trouble with making the rest of the economy "more productive" is, of course, that it means higher levels of unemployment. What the web has done to the music, publishing and journalism business has been very very productive. So productive that the economic models behind all of them are now dead, along with the jobs countless people enjoyed because of such models. Yes, I'm an enthusiast for new media, etc, and wouldn't have started this blog twelve years ago if I weren't. But watching the industry I worked in collapse around me, and noting how online advertizing still hasn't made the crucial leap to resurrect it, I worry.

In a 1924 Science and Invention article, Hugo Gernsback surveyed the scientific ways to test whether a marriage would succeed. One was the smell test (seen above). Matt Novak finds the nervous disorder test more disturbing:

The nervous disorder test is perhaps the most amusing in that it imagines a man (let’s call him Professor Sixshooter) delivering a surprise gunshot in the air. The “nervous reaction” of both people is recorded on tape and if they both are too startled “marriage should not take place.” I don’t know about you, but I’d be a little uneasy if my partner wasn’t startled at the sound of a gunshot.

I'm a big believer in the smell test myself. Hence my longtime rule for dating someone: no deoderant, no clipping any hair anywhere.