Month: January 2013

A reader writes:

As a daily reader of yours since 2008, I signed up for your site the day I found out – you should have asked earlier. There has been a lot of talk recently about the GOP subverting the traditional electoral college process. I agree that it’s a repugnant attempt to stay relevant by a dying breed (in those particular states). However, I believe that if these states are able to split the presidential electoral vote totals by congressional district, it would come back to haunt them.

Think about how state-wide elections are run right now in Pennsylvania.

Continue reading The Gerrymandering Old Party, Ctd

Michael Moore agrees with me on Zero Dark Thirty. For a very similar reason:

Does the artist have a responsibility for the ignorance of the person watching the art? I don’t want to have to dumb down my work for the people who won’t get it. I want to put it out there and the people who get it, get it.

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Kevin Drum thinks Jindal is already running for 2016. He takes Jindal seriously:

Will the media continue to tout Jindal as a “breath of fresh air” for the Republican Party? Or will they eventually catch on that he basically wants to turn the entire country into Louisiana? We’ll have to wait and see. But I think Jindal has more crossover appeal than a lot of pundits think. He’s got obvious appeal to the tea party base, which loves his hardnosed conservatism and really loves the idea of proving that they’re not racists by voting for a hardnosed conservative who’s also a dark-skinned son of Indian parents. (Take that, liberals!) And the press will, as usual, be wowed by the idea of a hardnosed conservative who has a high IQ and can discuss policy issues intelligently. The fact that Jindal is singing the same old tired song, and merely wrapping it in a thin fog of policy wonkishness, will take a while to sink in.

Allahpundit says it’s “all about brand-building right now for the 2016 field”:

Continue reading The Beginning Of The Horserace

Despite being “a fan of just about any alternative to the automobile,” Felix Salmonwonders if self-driving cars might change his mind:

[T]he more developed a country becomes, the more expensive and time-consuming any new rail line will be. And if you’re looking out say 20 years, there’s a pretty strong case to be made that the kind of efficiency that we can get today only on rail lines will in future be available on roads as well — with significantly greater comfort and convenience for passengers.

He finds that this optimism presents a dilemma:

We’re not in a self-driving-car utopia yet, and the transportation problems we have are both real and solvable using rail. So do we use the tools we have, or do we wait and hope that future technology will solve our problems in a more efficient way?

Previous Dish on the self-driving car here, here and here.

While rebutting the argument that women shouldn’t serve in combat roles because “men will instinctively try to protect [them],” Elspeth Reeve uncovers an interesting statistic:

[A] major part of military training is getting men and women to reverse the normal human instinct to, when things blow up all around you, get the hell out of there instead of do the fighting the military paid for. … In addition to the instinct of “not wanting to get shot at,” there’s also the instinct one might call “don’t kill people.” As Scientific American‘s John Horgan explained in 2010, “Surveys of WWII infantrymen carried out by U.S. Army Brig. Gen. S.L.A. Marshall found that only 15 to 20 percent had fired their weapons in combat, even when ordered to do so.” Marshall argued that the average Joe had “an inner and usually unrealized resistance towards killing a fellow man” and would avoid it if at all possible. In On Killing, Dave Grossman, a former Army lieutenant colonel and West Point psychology professor, wrote that Marshall’s findings were backed up by reports from World War I, the Civil War, and other wars.

Update from a reader:

You should note that S.L.A. Marshall’s work remains extremely controversial. Indeed, many would say it has been totally debunked.

Continue reading Hardwired Pacifism

The British government has just published their bill for full equality, exempting the established Church of England from being required to conduct the ceremonies. Other faith traditions can do as they wish – from a full embrace (the Quakers) to the coldest of shoulders (the Catholic hierarchy). Parliament could vote as early as February 5. Even though the Tory right may not vote with their prime minister, support is so solid among Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs as well as many Tories that passage is looking likely. I think America’s closest Anglophone ally permitting marriage for all – led by a Conservative prime minister – will have an impact here.

Cass Sunstein defines it as the idea that “if the U.S. acts on its own, it will impose costs on the American people without seriously addressing the climate problem.” He then makes the case that it should guide policymaking rather than discouraging it:

No sensible person thinks that the U.S. should spend billions of dollars to achieve small greenhouse-gas reductions. Some imaginable initiatives should be rejected because they would cost too much and deliver too little. At the same time, the U.S. should not overlook opportunities to produce significant emissions reductions at justifiable expense. Recent regulations have easily passed that test. Future initiatives should be embraced when they do so as well.

Those who make the Sophisticated Objection are correct to emphasize that to limit the risks of climate change, many nations will be required to act. But unilateral action should not be avoided for that reason. On the contrary, pragmatic steps by the planet’s most important nation are likely to help spur action by others — and to lead to technological advances that will ultimately be in the interest of the world as a whole.

Reihan offers some qualified support:

Continue reading “The Sophisticated Objection” To Emissions Reductions

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A reader writes:

I really appreciate that you’ve been airing this debate about vegan ethics.  I think some context might be helpful. As of 2002, about 9.5 billion non-human animals died annually in food production in the United States. By comparison, about 218 million were killed by hunters and trappers, in animal shelters, in biomedical research, product testing, dissection and fur farms, combined (pdf). I don’t have up-to-date numbers or numbers for wild animals affected by human behavior, but I think that this data gives folks a sense of the scale of the factory farming problem. Put simple, about 95% of non-human animals killed by humans are killed for food. Rhys Southan may be right that veganism will not end humans’ domination over other animals, but I do think it’s important to point out that merely by boycotting factory farmed food you can avoid participating in the vast, vast majority of the killing.

Another:

Ugh. I’m not a vegan, but this whole collection of arguments drives me insane.

Continue reading Vegan Ethics, Ctd

A gay actor writes:

This is totally true. My friends in high school would always ask me to mimic other people because I was so freakishly observant.  But as I’ve gotten older I’ve found it’s become a problem. Always watching everything from the outside and picking it apart results in me being very self conscious in social situations, like I’m always assuming everyone is doing that to me. At a recent wedding, for example, I was deeply terrified to give a best man speech even though I’m an actor and have performed on stage countless times. It’s not just shyness; it’s more a hyper-awareness of how each person in a room is gonna perceive me. I wish I could just turn that off. One could argue this is the reason I drink as much as I do, which is slightly troubling.

Another reader:

Straight guy here, been teaching fiction writing for about 20 years now. One of the things that I’ve noticed over the years is that gay and lesbian students seem to mature earlier as writers than straight students do.

Continue reading The Gay Bullshit Detector, Ctd