Month: February 2014

Matt Walsh explains why:

We commonly view living together as a logical step before marriage, but it isn’t. It’s something some people do, but it isn’t a step to marriage. Your marriage is defined by the commitment you make to the other person — not by the bathroom or mortgage you share. Living with someone is not a “warm up” for marriage or a “try out” period, precisely because it lacks the essential, definitive characteristic of that permanent commitment. You can’t comfortably transition into an eternal vow. You make it, and then it’s made. Period.

Dreher nods along:

This sounds familiar, because it’s a lot like the path Julie and I followed.

We met one weekend in the autumn of 1996, when I was visiting Austin. We fell instantly, and hard. I was living in Fort Lauderdale, she was finishing college in Austin. Our courtship, such as it was, became mostly a matter of letters and phone calls. Owing to the expense of plane tickets, we saw each other maybe once a month, but usually less frequently. After four months, we became engaged, but waited most of that year for Julie to finish college before we married. Our honeymoon was the longest continuous period of time we had spent in each other’s company since we met.

But it worked, and worked brilliantly, because the answers we held in our hearts were the same as Matt Walsh and his wife held in their hearts. You cannot know in advance what will await you in the wild unknown country of marriage. All you can know — and it’s a matter of intuition as much as anything else — is that you want to have that adventure with the one you love.

Duncan McCargo explores some of the deeper currents motivating Thailand’s ongoing political crisis. Among them is “the growing political chasm that separates greater Bangkok and the country’s south from its less affluent but more populous regions in the north and northeast”:

Because of Thailand’s hidden “caste system” — which is linked to popular Buddhist notions that the poor deserve their lower status because of accumulated demerits from previous lives — Bangkokians typically have a profoundly paternalistic view of the masses. [Former PM] Thaksin [Shinawatra]’s populist, can-do message, the stuff of self-help books, resonated deeply with many voters in the north and northeast. The leaders of the current anti-government protests — many of whom come from Bangkok — constantly deride these voters as ignorant and susceptible to electoral manipulation and vote-buying. Worse still, these anti-government protesters accuse pro-Thaksin voters of disloyalty to the Thai nation and the monarchy. On Jan. 26, I heard one rally speaker declare that those who had taken part in advance voting did not really love Thailand, and were probably in fact Cambodians casting fake ballots.

Meanwhile, current PM Yingluck Shinawatra, Thaksin’s sister, is facing corruption charges and more violent protests, raising the odds that the crisis will come-8 to a head:

There’s still a possibility of a Yingluck ouster that doesn’t involve once again tearing up the Thai constitution. In a major step toward impeachment, the kingdom’s National Anti-Corruption Commission said on Tuesday it has enough evidence to charge Yingluck with graft associated with her ill-fated program to buy rice from farmers at above-market prices. Thailand has spent 689 billion baht ($21.2 billion) on the program, resulting in rice that the government cannot sell. The stockpile now weighs 14.7 million tons, compared with just 6.1 million tons in 2010.

The opposition has long denounced the rice program as an ill-disguised scheme to reward Yingluck voters in rural areas, and the anti-corruption commission now alleges that graft took place at all stages of the program. Yingluck did nothing to stop it, the commission claims, “which shows that she was negligent in her duty or corrupt and abused her power under the constitution, which may be a cause for impeachment.”

Previous Dish on Thailand here.

(Photo: A policeman observes a demonstration by anti-government protestors in Bangkok on February 14, 2014. Thousands of riot police were deployed in the Thai capital on February 14 to clear areas occupied for weeks by opposition protesters seeking to force Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra from office. By Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images)

Jamelle Bouie argues that African-American pols running for statewide office are “much better off in the GOP,” at least strategically: 

I wrote about this at length a few years ago, but in short, if you are a black lawmaker in the House, or the black mayor of a city – the kinds of people who tend to run for statewide office, in other words –odds are overwhelming that you serve a “majority-minority” constituency in a heavily Democratic area. This leads to a few things: First – even if you live in a largely liberal state – you’re considerably to the left of the median voter in your state. Think John Lewis in Georgia, or Bobby Scott in Virginia for examples of this.

Second, you’re likely to lead or represent a low-income area, which makes it harder to raise money for a statewide bid, on account of a smaller fundraising base. And finally, most majority-minority districts, or cities, are located in larger states, where – by definition – there’s more competition for statewide office. Either one of these alone is surmountable for a skilled and ambitious politician. But together, they present a huge barrier to advancement for African American lawmakers who are looking to statewide office …

Insofar that they exist, black Republican lawmakers don’t have these problems. Most likely, they’re representing middle-class to affluent white constituencies, placing them closer to the median voter, statewide, and giving them a healthy base for fundraising. And, judging from Scott in South Carolina, Shannon in Oklahoma, and Mia Love in Utah – who is likely to win her bid for a House seat this year—they seem to emerge in small, highly partisan states where the pool of candidates isn’t as deep, and inter-party competition is less fierce.

A study of Internet trolls finds that they are often Machiavellian sadists:

The research, conducted by Erin Buckels of the University of Manitoba and two colleagues, sought to directly investigate whether people who engage in trolling are characterized by personality traits that fall in the so-called “Dark Tetrad”: Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), psychopathy (the lack of remorse and empathy), and sadism (pleasure in the suffering of others).

It is hard to underplay the results: The study found correlations, sometimes quite significant, between these traits and trolling behavior. What’s more, it also found a relationship between all Dark Tetrad traits (except for narcissism) and the overall time that an individual spent, per day, commenting on the internet.

Digby chimes in:

If you are a person who has spent any time online over the past few years, this is self-evident. There is little doubt that internet trolls, whether in comment sections or on twitter or forums, are psychopaths of some form or another. What’s always interested me more than that obvious observation is how otherwise normal people sometimes turn into such trolls when they feel marginalized or misunderstood. For some it’s clearly a very short trip from being a regular person just mixing it up for entertainment and becoming an internet terrorist. For others the journey is more circuitous. But I suspect that many of us could get in touch with an inner Dark Tetrad given enough time crawling around the fetid fever swamps of internet argument. I’ve seen it happen.

Robert Gordon’s new paper casts doubt on our impending technological utopia:

This time Gordon  takes aim at the so-called techno-optimists, such as the authors of the new book “The Second Machine Age,” [Erik Brynjolffson and Andrew McAfee,] who claim that technological growth is accelerating.

Gordon disagrees, saying that we shouldn’t expect technology to dramatically improve economic performance over the coming half-century. In fact, he argues that the productivity slowdown began long ago, in essence because the wide availability of computers or cell phones still is not nearly as transformative for society as electricity or cars have been.

While real U.S. gross domestic product grew at an average of 2 percent pear year, Gordon estimates the pace will be much slower over the next 50 years. That’s because the economy faces four key headwinds: the retirement of the baby boomer generation; stagnating educational attainment; inequality; and rising national debt. Together, he argues, these trends will deplete — and have already begun to deplete — the pool of educated workers with higher incomes to spend, dampening growth.

Cowen agrees with much of what Gordon says but criticizes the paper’s short-sightedness:

There is a key passage on p.26: “My forecast of 1.3 percent annual total-economy productivity growth in the future does not require any foresight beyond suggesting that the past 40 years are a more relevant benchmark of feasible productivity growth than the 80 years of before 1972.”  Fair enough, but how about looking at the last 120 years or last 120,000 years for that matter?  The overall pattern is lots of pauses, followed by eventual new bursts of progress.  That’s no proof of a future subsequent burst of progress, but so far history is not on the side of the long-term tech pessimists.  It may be on the side of the short-term tech pessimists, at least for a while.

Drum is less charitable:

This is an embarrassingly bad argument. I can somehow imagine a circa-1870 version of Gordon arguing that all this folderol about electricity is ridiculous. Why, we’ve been studying electricity for over a century, and what do we have to show for it? Some clunky batteries, the telegraph, a few arc lamps with limited use, and a steady supply of techno-optimist inventors who keep telling us that any day now they’ll invent a practical generator that will replace steam engines and change the world. Don’t believe it, folks.

Yglesias points out that predicting the technological future is a fool’s errand:

[M]ore computing power will be added during the next two-to-three-year doubling cycle than has been added in the entire history of computing. And then that’s going to happen again. Unless you think about it in the correct exponential terms, you’re going to massively underrate the likely gains in the future. As it happens, I agree with Gordon that self-checkout technology is not incredibly promising but that’s because it addresses an uninteresting problem. What if you could automate grocery delivery? Or what if “the Internet of things” let you just put a bunch of stuff in your bag, walk out of the store, and then automatically have the cost tallied up and charged to your credit card? That’d be cool.

Matthew Klein compares Gordon’s vision of the future with that of the “techno-optimists”. His bottom line:

It’s hard to make the case that the ability to share the results of personality quizzes on social networks is a significant boon to humanity, but only a fool would deny the potential of driverless cars to improve the lives of commuters, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of lives that might be saved from traffic accidents.

The truth is that no matter who is right, growth of a few percent in gross domestic product each year can produce amazing progress after enough years. Instead of worrying about these long-run issues, which may never materialize, maybe we should ask our economists to focus on the problems that need fixing today.

Meanwhile, Freddie deBoer takes on Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s optimism about the rise of the machines:

Millions of people now have a printing press, reference library, school, and computer all at their fingertips. The number of them who do the things that the authors of this piece want people to do fits comfortably in a rounding error. When books ceased to be hand-copied by monks in monasteries, books stopped being the purview of the aristocratic and clerical elite, and yet most of the world’s population remained illiterate for hundreds of years. When televisions became ubiquitous, people wrote breathless pieces arguing that they would give all students the same skills as those taught in the most expensive schools, and yet the vast inequalities in our education system only deepened. And since I was in high school, we’ve been cramming internet-enabled computers into our places of learning, and arguing against evidence that the inevitable result would be the rapid democratization of knowledge and creation. We have seen nothing of the kind, and we have no satisfactory reason to believe that this will change in the coming days ahead. It’s great that you can go on Wikipedia and use it write your own blog. Most people are not doing even that, and that is a far cry from the absurd revolutionary utopianism of this piece and hundreds more like it.

Previous Dish on Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s book here and here.