Month: August 2012

After comparing present-day wealth, health, and education rates with those of 1961, Charles Kenny thinks many "developing" countries have graduated to the next stage:

Italy's annual income per capita in 1961, according to the late economic historian Angus Maddison, was $6,373. That's less than the average 2008 incomes in Brazil, China, Malaysia, Mexico, Russia, and Thailand (measured in constant dollars). And Italy, mind you, was twice as rich as Portugal was in 1961…. [T]he average Brazilian or Chinese today lives longer than the average Brit or American did in 1961…. So perhaps we should ditch the "developing" label we often slap on countries like Brazil, China, and Russia. In historical terms, we'd call them something else: rich.

This means they should pony up, Kenny argues:

Brazil, China, India, and Russia combined gave away somewhere less than $6.4 billion in foreign assistance in 2010. By contrast, Canada alone gave $5.2 billion, France gave $14.4 billion, and the United States gave more than twice that. And if you take low-end estimates of the combined aid outflow from Brazil, China, and India in 2009, they're still considerably smaller than the aid those same countries collectively received.

(Photo: Fireworks light up the sky as paramilitary policemen stand guard during the Opening Ceremony for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games on August 8, 2008 in Beijing, China. By China Photos/Getty Images)

"This isn't a call to stop writing stories about what the Jonah Lehrer thing means. But I have a vision for what happens to us when we carve out the hard human parts of our stories' subjects. Attached to our scalpel is a bar that connects to a smaller scalpel poised against our own flesh. Like one of Kafka's machines, every time we slice someone, it slices us in the same place but not quite as deep and so quickly you hardly feel it. This may just be the nature of the journalism mechanism, but I worry most of us don't even know when we're bleeding," – Alexis Madrigal.

A reader writes:

As a female athlete, I agree heartily with the reader disagreeing with the sex appeal study. My sport is competitive sailing, which at many levels (including the Olympics and college) is co-ed; men and women compete together. So, I've thought a lot about the differences between male and female athletes and how we are treated. 

Yes, there is a lot of sexism in athletics (as in pretty much any other field). But I and many of my peers (I am 27) believe strongly in a new version of feminism: one which says we can succeed and look great doing it, no apology necessary. The key is in how we measure our own success – to not rely on or be celebrated for only on our physical attributes, but first and foremost for our accomplishments. I believe that is what the Olympics represents. It's true there are a lot of gorgeous people competing (men and women alike!), but more importantly they are the current peak of human physical performance, and every time the games display more and more impossible feats.

I seems to me that this "sex appeal" conversation has parallels to the Sheryl Sandberg vs. Anne-Marie Slaughter debate.

The huge gains made by the women's lib movement should certainly be honored, but at the same time the attitude of that classic feminism has led to stigma against celebrating womanhood. Women showing more skin get more screen time? Great. I love that two of the most iconic and popular sports from both the summer and winter games are women's events: gymnastics and figure skating. Until this week, a woman held the record for most Olympic medals. We get to watch powerful, skilled men practically every day of the year in professional sports (often in Spandex, I might add). But during the Olympics, we get to revel in the female body – not for the big boobs, but for its grace and athleticism. Maybe we should go back to playing all Olympic sports in the nude.

As for television ratings, sailing has been in the Olympics since the first modern games in 1896. But how much screen time do we get? Almost none. Probably even less than fencing. Most people don't know sailing is in the Olympics at all. Even serious sailors agree that it is a pretty boring sport for spectators; an extremely complex sport that requires a lot of background knowledge. It's true most sailors at the highest level probably aren't wearing only bikinis (though plenty do in warm weather competition), but I suspect that's not the driving force behind our lack of media coverage.

Another writes:

Your reader brought up the US Women's soccer team, which is an interesting case study of this very question because the team has openly, and obviously, gay athletes. The way that stars Alex Morgan and Hope Solo, who are attractive in the straight world, are treated in the media compared to stars Abby Wambach and Megan Rapinoe, who are attractive in the queer world, is very different. It is Alex Morgan in the SI swimsuit edition, not Abby Wambach. I can't decide which is more offensive – that Alex Morgan gets attention because she is hot and not first and foremost because she is an amazing athlete or that Abby Wambach gets attention because she is an amazing athlete and not because she is hot.

It does seem like a female athlete who is not attractive by straight world standards has to be even more amazing of an athlete to get attention. But if you read the comments under US Women's soccer YouTube, videos you will find that they are being objectified by straight men and queer women alike. We all like to see hot athletes.

Don't forget the siblings.

Obama's chances of winning the electoral college just hit an all-time high in Nate Silver's model.

Some worrying evidence that the Obama administration may be slipping:

The 2011 FBI primer recommends that FBI agents ask the detaining authority to isolate a detainee "several days before you begin interrogation" as well as during the "multi-session, multi-day [interrogation] process." The primer also repeatedly cites and encourages FBI interrogators to read the 1963 CIA KUBARK manual, a highly controversial document long disavowed and disparaged for its promotion of severe prisoner abuse, including through the use of isolation. Even the KUBARK manual explicitly recognizes the use of isolation in interrogation as a "coercive technique" with profound psychological effects, such as hallucinations and delusions.

The use of isolation as described in the 2011 FBI primer would appear to violate FBI policy.

Houston rapper Slim Thug just released "How to Survive in a Recession," a guide to personal finance that's getting some good reviews. Andrew Shulman highlights some themes:

“How to Survive the Recession” is, as it sounds, a financial manifesto, and it begins with a list of “twenty-five financial rules to live by.” Among them: “Never have a Bentley with a Benz salary;” “never buy a house with unnecessary space;” and “every time you get a stack, put it up and live off the extra change.” …He also explains the importance of understanding the tax system—“Say you got a million dollar check; dudes think they actually got a million dollars. You got to pay damn near half of it to taxes. Know your taxes and math.” The basic theme of his book is that even successful people should live practically and within their means. As the rapper writes, “I always say if you can’t buy it THREE times over, you can’t afford it.”

"Aly Raisman gave us the greatest display of Jewish-American gymnastics since Kerri Strug," – David Brooks.

After he destroyed Iraq, he took to painting.

Ryan Lizza's profile of Paul Ryan in the latest New Yorker is worth a gander. Money quote:

When I pointed out to Ryan that government spending programs were at the heart of his home town’s recovery, he didn’t disagree. But he insisted that he has been misunderstood. "Obama is trying to paint us as a caricature," he said. "As if we’re some bizarre individualists who are hardcore libertarians. It’s a false dichotomy and intellectually lazy." He added, "Of course we believe in government. We think government should do what it does really well, but that it has limits, and obviously within those limits are things like infrastructure, interstate highways, and airports."

But independent assessments make clear that Ryan’s budget plan, in order to achieve its goals, would drastically reduce the parts of the budget that fund exactly the kinds of projects and research now helping Janesville.

Jonathan Bernstein still thinks Lizza went too easy on his subject:

Lizza reports that Ryan and other Republicans successfully sold the Ryan plan as the "only solution" to avert fiscal armageddon. But Ryan’s budget doesn’t do that — it isn’t any kind of solution to budget deficits at all — unless it does what its own numbers inescapably say it will do and completely eliminates the entire federal government except for the military, Social Security, and health programs. If he really does, contrary to what his budget says, want to keep "infrastructure, interstate highways, and airports" along with veterans’ programs, the FBI, the border patrol, and all the other things that the federal government does now — well, then the deficits remain. And that’s not to mention that Ryan and Mitt Romney also support an entirely unrealistic tax "reform" plan that amounts to huge, specified tax rate cuts that would help the rich and vague, unspecified plans to end many tax credits and deductions, something that’s very unlikely to actually happen since those provisions are extremely popular.

Dish takedown of that tax plan here. Pete Spiliakos begs to differ, seeing the profile as a "masterpiece of subtle liberal partisanship" (Lizza's specialty, in fact) due to several factual elisions:

Nowhere in the article do you learn that the most recent version of the Ryan budget spends just as much on Medicare as does President Obama’s proposal, and retains Fee For Service Medicare for those who want to use their premium support to pay for that option.  If I thought that Lizza was being at all intellectually honest, I’d find it strange that Lizza would mention the most recent Ryan budget’s changes to Medicaid while not listing its changes to Medicare.  Lizza also doesn’t note that premium support payments are to be adjusted for health status.  None of this qualifies as lying of course.  It is just leaving out relevant facts so that New Yorker readers will have a maximally hostile view of the Ryan budget while walking away from the article feeling well informed.

In related news, Krugman and Yglesias recently called out Ryan for saying that we need to raise the federal funds rate by a point to increase liquidity. Here's Krugman:

I don’t even know where to start with this…. [Ryan] obviously doesn’t know [that] the Fed funds rate basically equals the return on federal paper, so that raising that rate would make banks more, not less, likely to stay with that federal paper. I’m sure someone will try to come up with a reason why Ryan is being smart here, but the truth is that he’s stone-cold ignorant.

A recent example of Ryan's priorities: he voted against defense cuts.

Previous looks at his fiscal fantasies here, here, here and here. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty.

Here's a fascinating thread on a vital topic for Catholics: how does the act of torture render it more grave a sin than many others?

My argument that torture, as an anti-liturgy of absolute power which attacks the body of Christ itself, should be met with excommunication is by no means an argument for the use of excommunication in general for other types of sin. This is torture, not theft or masturbation. If accepted, my argument would limit excommunication, to keep it from being used in the service of right-wing ecclesiastical politics. Furthermore, formal excommunication is not the only key to the church's visibility. It is not so much a solution as a recognition that something has gone terribly wrong.

And when the Pope came to America and shook the hand of a president who authorized torture, he was betraying the victims. Just as he betrayed the victims of sexual abuse. The Catholic silence on this, compared with, say, making contraceptives available under Obamacare, seems to me to be very eloquent about the collapse of the hierarchy's moral standing.