Month: August 2012

Every season, the coverage seems to narrow. This year, no network will be carrying Ann Romney’s speech next Monday. CNN will. The Dish, of course, will be live-blogging every night.

Frum agrees with Ferguson that China’s rise is a threat:

If living standards mattered most, then Denmark would be a superpower. A China that becomes richer in aggregate than the U.S. will exert new global sway—and make this planet a less congenial place for those who cherish liberal democratic values. … The prospect of the U.S. as number 2 is a threat and challenge. So long as China remains a repressive authoritarian oligarchy, the prospect of a world reordered to meet Chinese imperatives is an ugly one.

The premise behind this is that freedom requires a superpower to enforce it. But it’s one of the great contradictions of neoconservatism that its real founder is Rousseau, not Burke. It was Rousseau who argued that people must be forced to be free, a paradox he seemed to savor but the neocons do not see. In fact, the desire for freedom springs from within, filtered through history and culture and accident. The US did not force the people of Egypt to be free; which is why their revolution has a chance of succeeding. The US did try to force Iraq to be free, which is why I remain profoundly skeptical of that country’s “democratic future.” And China is not Mao’s China. It is not powered by nineteenth century delusions, but by 21st Century economics. And so an almost completely China-dependent Burma has nonetheless moved toward democracy even as China’s power waxes, as it must.  This is not to say that handling China’s rise is not one of the most pressing issues we face – and it will be as hard as managing Germany’s rise in the nineteenth century. But this is not a return to the past, however much Romney needs it to be. Greg Scoblete explains:

By all means the U.S. should take China seriously – more seriously than it has to date. As far as potential challenges to global stability goes, the territorial disputes in Asia are arguably more dangerous than an Iranian nuclear weapon. But we’re not facing a Cold War style contest for global supremacy. Acting otherwise is not conducive to clear-headed thinking about what the U.S. does next.

Larison sides with Scoblete:

The world wouldn’t be reordered to meet “Chinese imperatives” because most of the world would not accept Chinese “leadership.” The main error that hegemonists make is in asserting that U.S. hegemony has to be replaced by another state’s hegemony. In fact, the existence of a single global hegemon is extremely abnormal and cannot be sustained over the long term. 

Further thoughts from yours truly here.

In 2010, Bering touched on similar questions about how to know whether a child will be gay:

In looking carefully at the childhoods of now-gay adults, researchers are finding an intriguing set of early behavioral indicators that homosexuals seem to have in common. And, curiously enough, the age-old homophobic fears of parents seem to have some genuine predictive currency. In their technical writings, researchers in this area simply refer to pint-sized prospective gays and lesbians as “prehomosexual.” This term isn’t perfect—it manages to achieve both an uncomfortable air of biological determinism and clinical interventionism simultaneously. But it is, at least, probably fairly accurate.

Previous videos of Jesse here, here and here. “Ask Anything” archive here.

Razib Kahn breaks down public opinion on abortion and rape. Note that no demographic group, not even biblical literalists or the extremely conservative, breaks fifty percent in denying abortion to rape victims:

How did a major political party adopt a policy position that is so so so far out of the mainstream? One word: fundamentalism.

Stephen Walt asks:

You’d think this would be a moment where at least one or two artists would be writing political songs and attracting a huge audience, and maybe even using their art to inspire political change. But I get little sense that contemporary musicians are shaping political attitudes or behavior as they might have in earlier eras.

Galupo's take:

When you think of the attitude-shaping influence of acts like Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, and the cast of Glee, there’s an identifiable connective thread between them: an ethos of self-acceptance and tolerance, and a hatred of bullying. They are apolitical if by politics you mean wars or elections — but not so in a moral or communitarian sense.

The hole gets deeper in the Ferguson brouhaha. Krugman piles on:

For what it’s worth, in this case I don’t think we’re looking at a blatant attempt to mislead; I suspect that we’re just looking at raw ignorance.

Meanwhile, Dan Drezner (note to Niall: no lefty) fisks the foreign policy section – which I hope to do myself soon:

My verdict: the foreign policy section isn't as bad as the domestic policy section of Ferguson's article, but it's still sloppy.  Ferguson makes a lot of lazy assertions without backing them up with facts.  Some of the facts he uses are a bad fit for the arguments he's trying to make.  And he values similar data points differently depending on whether they support his argument or not. 

There are some good critiques that can be made of the Obama administration's foreign policy, and Ferguson skirts close to some of them.  But Romney supporters can do better. 

Another powerful anecdote:

Brittney Leon and Terri-Ann Simonelli have a domestic partnership, which under Nevada state law grants couples all the same rights as married couples. When Leon checked into the hospital last month because of complications in her pregnancy, the admissions officer told Simonelli she would have to secure power of attorney to be with her partner. Leon ended up losing her baby, and Simonelli had to rely on the doctor for updates, spending long stretches of time without news on her partner’s condition and the fate of her family.

And something important happened yesterday. The GOP effectively proved that its concern is not “protecting” civil marriage, but keeping gays permanently marginalized and vulnerable in our relationships. They officially oppose even civil unions for gay couples. So next time someone argues that the Christianist right is not anti-gay, just pro-marriage, ask him why he opposes civil unions as well.

The answer is fundamentalism, not social policy.

Alexandria, Virginia, 12 pm

John Quiggin mulls the disconnects between generations:

The group of people born in a given period, say a year or a decade, is called a cohort. Members of a cohort have things in common because they have shared common experiences through their lives. But, at any given point in time, when members of the cohort are at some particular age, they share things in common with the experience of earlier and later generations when they were at the same age.

Most of the time, age effects are more important than cohort effects. The primary schoolers of the 1960s were very like the primary schoolers of today and, of course, totally different from the middle-aged parents they have become. The grandparents of today are more like their own grandparents than the bodgies and widgies they may have been in the 1950s.

The same applies to the standard rhetoric that one age group applies to another. For example, Mark Davis in Ganglands quotes various baby-boomer pundits denouncing the younger generation as ‘slackers’ and dole bludgers’. In the 1970s, precisely the same thing was being said about the younger members of the boomer cohort, then in their late teens and early twenties.