“If Israel goes much further down the road I think it’s on and becomes more of a theocratic, totalitarian-style state, how could the liberal-minded American Jew support that?” – Jeffrey Goldberg, in a new profile of the writer by Paul Starobin.
Year: 2013
No One Wants To See Your Wang In Public
Except maybe Conor Friedersdorf, who criticizes San Francisco’s impending ban on public nudity:
Talk to someone who has been to a nude beach, or read the Yelp reviews for spas where people are naked together, and you’ll keep coming across comments like this one:
Odd as it may sound, it’s really refreshing to spend an hour being naked amongst other naked women. I don’t spend a lot of time looking at nude female bodies aside from my own, so it’s a nice reminder that we’re all essentially the same, yet unique. By the time I leave, I’ve seen so much variety that I don’t even care that I have a mole on my butt.
Americans are bombarded with images of semi-clothed people all the time. It just happens that they’re all beautiful actors and actresses, magazine cover girls, television underwear models, and porn stars. The average person sees lots of naked bodies, but very little real variety. While that may be more aesthetically pleasant, it skewers our notion of what a normal human body looks like.
What’s funny about this to me is how quickly you can adjust. In Germany, for example, nude sunbathing in public parks is perfectly acceptable (on the three or four days a year the sun shines). When I first stumbled upon it, I was a little startled. Then almost immediately I was bored. Maybe it’s because I’m gay and am used to seeing other dudes naked and not getting all Saudi about it. But nude women? After a few, er unfamiliar sights, I went along with the general crowd and forgot about it soon enough.
One thing I love about America is that you can go shopping in San Francisco starkers and can’t get a drink in some rural counties. Anyone who wants to homogenize this country even a little more than is inevitable in the great American churn … has too much time on their hands. Leave the wangs alone. And learn to look elsewhere.
(Photo by Flickr user Torbakhopper)
The Gitmo Farce
A brief insight into one of Lindsey Graham’s greatest achievements: the Kafkaesque mockery of due process and judicial fairness that is now the trial of al Qaeda terror suspects. The judge does not even control the microphones:
Some unknown person in another room was, and was apparently able to turn the audio off or on, or, for all anyone knew, pipe in the soundtrack to “Zero Dark Thirty.” Judge Pohl, who is also an Army colonel, was confused and angry.
“If some external body is turning the commission off under their own view of what things ought to be, with no reasonable explanation because I—there is no classification on it, then we are going to have a little meeting about who turns that light on or off,” the judge said.
It was just the CIA doing all they can to protect themselves from being exposed as war criminals, in a “democracy” where torture has now become more acceptable than ever.
The GOP Needs A New Boogeyman
Ramesh Ponnuru wants Republicans to largely ignore Obama:
Republicans can and should continue to stand for their principles on the many occasions when they conflict with Obama’s. What they shouldn’t do is conceive of their near-term political task as winning a series of confrontations with the president. Because they’re unlikely to win very often. Obama has inherent advantages in political debates with more than 200 House Republicans, and his re-election will only strengthen his hand, at least for now. The Republicans are better off sidelining Obama to the extent they can and fighting congressional Democrats — or, better yet, getting congressional Democrats to fight one another.
Stats For General Consumption
Evelyn Lamb wonders how to convey the results of complex scientific studies to the public:
Statistics are used and misused all over newspapers, magazines, and the Internet. And they’re necessary. Without them, science papers can’t accurately describe the size of an effect or the probability that it was due purely to chance, and reporters can’t let people know what a new study means. How can we, as bloggers, reporters, and editors, increase the quality of statistics reporting in the media? And what should the media consumer look out for when reading these stories?
Frank Swain points to the efforts of the “BenchPress project, which aims to develop science and statistical training for journalists”:
A common attitude within the science community seems to be that journalists reporting on science stories ought to be able to substitute risk factors and odds ratios as easily as epidemiologists do. That’s a facile argument to make, but journalists are also the least equipped to do this, both in terms of time and ability. It is important, however, that journalists understand how influential this kind of reframing can be, and how it can take control of the reporting line if left unbridled. …
As part of the [BenchPress] project, I’ve developed a network of a dozen volunteer speakers who regularly visit schools and newsrooms across the country to help future potential communicators and journalists get to grips with numbers. The passion of the volunteers—all working scientists—helps ensure that both junior and more senior journalists produce science news stories that are as robust and accurate as possible.
(Cartoon and mouseover text from XKCD)
Moral Perversity In David Mamet, Ctd
A reader writes:
In your post about Mamet’s article, you reference Detroit being at the top of many crime lists. You know why? Because they’ve cut cops, that’s why. They now operate “virtual” precincts where actual physical police precincts are closed between 4:00pm and 8:00am. Only 2,731 new police officers were sworn in back in 2012, down from 4,001 in 2002. That’s a cut of almost one-third. Mamet is right in this regards about Detroit: “the police do not exist to protect the individual.” Because they barely have any cops left.
Another quips, “Mamet isn’t considered a great fiction writer for no reason.” Another:
I’ve found when people talk about Chicago and Washington, D.C., as justifications for more relaxed gun laws, they are missing the larger picture. While Chicago has many problems with crime and violence, the second largest city in Illinois, Aurora, has similar gun restrictions and in 2012 had zero homicides. So, more guns (or even fewer guns) doesn’t begin to be the answer. Guns are just a symptom of a larger ill that cannot be reigned in by force or threat.
Another:
I was a prosecutor in New Jersey, which at the time had among the strictest gun laws in the country. Guns used in crimes were routinely traced and in most instances did not come from gun shops or people’s houses in the region; the majority came from southern states along the I-95 corridor.
Cool Ad Watch
Andrew Beaujon describes an ambitious new campaign:
Chicago’s WBEZ wants its listeners to make more listeners. The agency Xi Chicago designed the $400,000 “2032 Membership Drive,” which “inspires interesting people to hook up with interesting people and make more interesting people, thereby creating the next generation of listeners.” … [T]he ads will appear in print, online, at train platforms and bus stops, on taxis and T-shirts, with these taglines:
– Do it. For Chicago.
– We want listeners tomorrow. Go make babies today.
– Hey Interesting People, get a room already. And then put a crib in it.
– To anyone NOT currently running a virtual farm: GoMakeBabies.com
– You’re an interesting person. Pass it on. Like, literally. Through your DNA.
Yglesias Award Nominee
“While I have the greatest respect for a great many of you, the days where I can in good conscience remain silent about the issues that set me apart from the rest of FReeperdom have past. For clarity, or perhaps catharsis, I’m not entirely certain which, I’ll lay them out on the table an call the ZOT™ down upon myself.
The racism: I just can’t handle it anymore. FR has become increasingly racist since President Obama took office, and enforcement has dropped. Now, not a single crime can be reported with an “amish” comment, and I’ve yet to see a post express embarrassment or shame when lo and behold sometimes the perpetrators turned out to be lily white.
Homosexuality: FR is on the wrong side of history on this one, and I’ll just leave it at that.
Mostly though, it’s the hate. More and more posts reference violent solutions to political disagreements. Some subtly couched, others make no pretense. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if I read in the morning paper that a FReeper murdered a federal bureaucrat or a federal judge,” – long-time Free Republic poster Melas, in his farewell “opus”.
Know hope.
Foreign Fast Food, Ctd
A reader quotes another:
“But there is not a single place in New York that serves a Croque McDo.” I would point out that there’s not a single place in New York that serves real French brie. Because of US customs laws, unpasteurized French cheese isn’t available in the US. Here, if you buy brie and leave it out for a couple of days, it looks the same. If you buy brie in France and leave it out for a couple of days, it looks much fuzzier.
Another sends the above video:
I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but here is a Pizza Hut commercial from 1997 featuring Gorbachev. It’s interesting how the expansion of this (at the time) quintessential eatery is associated with debates on the post-Soviet future of Russia. It’s also interesting how it became a marketing tactic.
Equal Haircuts For All?
Jonathan Evans mediates a debate going on in Denmark:
You see, the Danes fancy themselves especially advanced when it comes to matters of gender equality, and the country’s Board of Equal Treatment recently found that salons and barber shops charging different prices for men’s and women’s cuts are violating Danish law. The hairdressers and barbers, for their part, argue that the disparity is completely reasonable, because it tends to take longer to cut and style women’s hair. Some have suggested charging different rates for long, medium, and short hair as a fix, but others say that’s too open to interpretation.
We say, why not charge according to the total amount of time the cut takes?
The Dish 