Year: 2013

One Way To Live A Little

In a recent address at the first annual conference of the pro-life student group Choose Life at Yale, Tristyn Bloom suggested that “the reason people continue to defend abortion is because, essentially, of existential terror: fear of what will happen when something unexpected, uninvited, unplanned bursts into our lives demanding action”:

We often hear that a problem with young people today is that we are irresponsible. We don’t have a sense of duty. We don’t have a sense of order. We’re immature. I think that the problem is actually the opposite. I think that we are pathologically terrified of risk and I think that we have this enslavement to our own ideas of respectability, our own ideas of our life plan, our commitments, our existing duties such that something as radically changing as a new life doesn’t fit in with those existing duties. To accept that life would be the irresponsible choice, and that’s the framework from which a lot of people are operating. They see themselves as accepting consequences, as responsible. They have a semblance of a moral framework and we can’t ignore that just because it’s completely the opposite of our own. And this isn’t just about whether or not you accept a child. I think that we are so enslaved to a plan, and a routine, and a vision of our lives, we can’t embrace the unsettledness, openness, flexibility, and folly it takes to have an actually pro-life culture in every instance.

Josh W., a Catholic blogger, expands on Bloom’s point:

[U]tilitarianism … has come to define propriety and social mores, at least to a certain extent… . Actions have costs, benefits and risks, and the ethical choice is one which takes that into account. Having lots of of kids, for instance, is frowned upon because it is seen as being both personally and socially irresponsible.

But this is also a vision of life that becomes progressively divorced from meaning. It’s the sort of “healthy” ho-hum bourgeoisie existence that Friedrich Nietzche had a panic over. And this is why I have a sympathy for counter-cultural sorts, weirdos and the like, even if they’re doing something I’d consider stupid or evil; because there is an acknowledgement of the enervating and sterile aspect of modernity and a desire for spontaneity. That is what makes the beatniks and hippies fascinating, because they correctly recognized the meaninglessness of the world they grew up in and reacted against it. They went for the wrong medicine and ironically wound up having bits and pieces of their own ethos assimilated back into the mainstream, but they had some awareness.

Dreher adds questions to the debate:

I hadn’t thought of the pro-life issue this way — that a culture of life can’t take root in a culture that is terrified of making a single mistake that would ostensibly ruin one’s life.

On the other hand, it can’t be denied that having a baby out of wedlock really does, in most cases, have a significant impact on the economic prospects of their mothers. What is the difference? A middle-class support system? What?

Update from a reader:

Jesus H. Christ, talk about an ivory tower. “The reason people continue to defend abortion is because, essentially, of existential terror… We can’t embrace the unsettledness, openness, flexibility, and folly it takes to have an actually pro-life culture in every instance.”

If I were just a bit more spontaneous, I’d agree that it’s the role of the state to force a person to keep something unwanted inside them! Gosh! I need to live a little! Thanks, Ms Bloom!

Pro-choice can be pro-life. Repeat that over and over, because it’s true. Pro-choice simply means that when it’s not me affected, I cannot make the decision.

Childhood Is Increasingly Precious

This embed is invalid


Katy Waldman ponders what effects increased life expectancy is having on the idea of childhood and what to anticipate “for kids when adults are living to 120 and beyond”:

Besides the likelihood that they will have lots of potential caretakers (or at least endure a borderline inhumane number of cheek pinches at Thanksgiving), they may be seen as even more rare and precious. Society will skew older. The years before puberty will represent an ever-smaller proportion of the overall lifespan. We can speculate that, for a certain income bracket, the cult of childhood will become yet cultier, the cocoons at once softer and more anxiously woven. …

But who even counts (or will count) as a “kid”?

And what happens to the limbo period between childhood and adulthood, dependence and autonomy, when time approaches the status of a renewable resource? “There’s always been a tension in American history between absolute chronological age and maturation,” says Susan A. Miller, a professor of childhood studies at Rutgers. “Age has historically been far less relevant than what someone is able to accomplish.” In the 18th century, she continues, a boy who developed quickly, growing strong and tall, was considered ready for a man’s work. A century later, before industrialization took hold, it was not uncommon for 17-year-olds to graduate from Harvard, to go west, to edit city newspapers. Now, that haziness around age versus competence seems to be going in the other direction. Modern young people are testing the limits not of how swiftly they can plunge into adulthood, but of how long they can delay it.

A Downside To Being Tall

It increases your chances of getting cancer:

Surprisingly, one major cancer risk is your height. In fact, [George] Johnson [author of The Cancer Chronicles] notes, one large study found that “every four inches over 5 feet increased cancer risk by 16 percent.” The likely reason: If you’re tall, you have more cells in your body, and thus more opportunities to get cancer when cell division goes awry. “People who are taller had more cellular divisions to produce the taller body and therefore more chance to accumulate these mutations along the way,” says Johnson. “This is not something you can do anything about.”

Additional intriguing evidence of the height-cancer relationship comes from a group of Ecuadoran villagers who suffer from Laron syndrome, a type of dwarfism. Johnson reports that “because of a mutation involving their growth hormone receptors, the tallest men are four and a half feet and the women are six inches shorter…They hardly ever get cancer or diabetes, even though they are often obese.”

Are Urbanites Really That Cosmopolitan?

Ethan Zuckerman, author of Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, argues that most city-dwellers are actually quite parochial:

Robert Putnam of Bowling Alone for years has been bemoaning how the Internet is going to separate us and how we’re losing the social fabric of mixing in public. But he’s done recent work that is much, much less discussed, because it’s really uncomfortable. He’s found that when you’re living in a city where you’re a minority, you’re probably going to hunker down. You’re probably not going to mix much with your neighbors. You’re probably going to spend a lot of time watching TV. Confronted with high degrees of cultural diversity, people, for the most part, don’t seem to step up to the challenge and meet their neighbors. In many ways, they hide from them. A lot of cities that have the highest degrees of civic participation are pretty ethnically homogenous.

I would love to be able to say, yes, cities are serendipity engines, and if you just fully embrace the city, and take advantage of all the cultural richness and diversity that’s available there, you’re going to find a way to get as much of that encounter as you get from having the Internet. But there’s no guarantee that you’re going to do it in the city.

A Tweet For November 5

Tonight is Britain’s fireworks night, when the original religious terrorist, Guido Fawkes, was foiled in his attempt to blow up Parliament. As a kid, I used to love it, only faintly aware that my peers were burning the effigy of a Catholic terrorist, and sometimes burning effigies of the Pope, even as the fireworks exploded overhead. We sometimes feel as if we in the West are somehow beyond the use of torture and terrorism in religious wars. And we are, thanks to centuries of slowly accumulating liberal values. But we were once beset by the kind of terror that now traumatizes the Shia-Sunni conflict in the Middle East. And such impulses, as we saw under Bush and Cheney, are never banished for ever.

Why Reporters Love Christie

He makes their job easier:

[Christie] certainly sounds like he’s ready to start running, and it’s safe to say the press corps would love it if he did.

That isn’t because they have any particular strong feelings about his politics. It’s because he’s great copy. You think it’d be fun taking a few months of your life to follow Bobby Jindal around Iowa while he plasters on a fake smile and tries to look interested in what farmers have to say? God, no. But with Christie, you never know what he’s going to do. He might swear. He might snap at a schoolteacher (he has a particular contempt for teachers). He might call one of his political opponents “numbnuts.”

All of which is great fun for journalists used to covering the usual walking haircuts who calculate every word that comes out of their mouths to offend the fewest number of people.

The Petroleum We Waste On Parking

Humans burn about one million barrels of oil a day searching for parking spaces, according to Greg Rucks and Laura Guevara-Stone. They propose a new approach:

Smart parking pilot programs are now being deployed in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Beijing, Shanghai, São Paulo, and the Netherlands. For example, in Los Angeles, low-power sensors and smart meters track the occupancy of parking spaces throughout the Hollywood district, one of its most congested areas. Users can access that occupancy data to determine the availability of spots and then pay for them with their mobile phones. In addition to lending convenience and environmental benefits, smart parking improves the utilization of existing parking, leading to greater revenue for parking owners. Los Angeles saw a return on its investment in smart parking within three months.

Why the time is right:

The costs of sensors and hardware-based solutions is decreasing drastically, for the first time allowing cities and companies to gather detailed new data on transportation patterns. Furthermore, with smart phones capturing more and more of the global telecommunications market in both developing and developed nations, software entrepreneurs are able to collect and analyze data and deliver insights and information to consumers in brand new ways that do not require installation of new hardware.

For example, Roadify started in 2009 as a free app that helped New York City residents find parking spaces. Users enter the address of a spot that they are about to leave or of an open spot that they happen to walk by, earning points known as Street Carma (users can later cash in that Carma to redeem rewards). Other users nearby will see that spot on the app if they search the area. The app has since expanded to cities nationwide and now provides real-time transit information about schedules, delays, accidents, and more from crowd-sourced commentary about local transit conditions.

Previous Dish on the future of parking here, here, and here.

Can Christie Complete Nationally?

Drum suspects that Christie’s personality will be a liability:

Something that seems sort of cute when it’s just Jersey—and when it’s something you vaguely hear about third hand—would sink you if you were running for president. I guarantee you that the American public will very quickly become repelled at the sight of a Jersey loudmouth bullying ordinary citizens who have the temerity to disagree with him.

So the question is, can Christie control himself? Or will he lose his temper one too many times during a grueling, sleepless primary campaign? Since “one too many times” is quite possibly “once,” my money says he doesn’t stand much of a chance.

Barro rolls his eyes:

Why do national reporters so often talk about New Jersey as if its electorate consisted entirely of Teresa Giudice and The Situation?

New Jersey is one of the best-educated, highest-income, most upscale states in the country. We don’t associate Greenwich, Conn., with loudmouths; why would we expect them to play especially well in Saddle River, N.J.? Demographically, New Jersey is basically similar to Massachusetts, but with slightly higher incomes and somewhat more racial diversity. Like New Jersey, Massachusetts has townies. But when Massachusetts politicians run for national office, reporters don’t pull out “Good Will Hunting” and fret that the local pols are “too Massachusetts” to sell nationally.

The truth is that Christie’s style is less specific to New Jersey than most people (including Christie) would have you think.

A New Jersey reader responds to our earlier post on Christie:

All of you pundits can love Chris Christie as much as you want and you can push him for president, but just remember, he is running against an absolute nobody, a sacrificial lamb who is not someone for Christie to be worried about. And yet, he started advertising against Barbara Buono the minute she became the nominee. The fact that Obama never came here to campaign for her is telling. Even the emails I get from DNC’s Organizing for America don’t mention her. They only encouraged me to vote for the raise in the minimum wage and vote Democratic down ticket.

Christie knew from the get-go that the campaign had nothing to do with Buono; he wanted to run up the numbers so that he looked better as a potential presidential candidate. But how he portrays himself doesn’t match up with who he is politically; he is anti-abortion; he is against marriage equality (I think that the only reason he is for civil unions is because in this blue state, he HAS to be); and he wants even more tax cuts for the 1% (though he will never say so out loud). My property taxes continue to rise, my homestead rebate has disappeared, the schools have worsened, and while he was great when the shore was first battered by Sandy, he’s been absent until the later days of the campaign.

Christie wants to be president. There is no question about it. And what scares me is that I know zero about his Lieutenant Governor (probably my fault). He will stay here in the Garden State until he has to leave to run. Can he be elected president? I don’t know. He is the first member of the GOP I even considered voting for in forever. But I would never vote for him for president, mostly because of the people (Koch, Ailes, Rove and others) to whom he will be beholden. But he is the closest thing to a viable candidate they have at the moment.