Author: Andrew Sullivan

Jennifer Senior's NyMag article has revived the never-ending debate about children and happiness. KJ Dell'Antonia, mother of four, adds her two cents:

Tom Gilovich, a psychologist at Cornell famous for a study showing that people regret things they haven't done more than things they have, asks "Should you value moment-to-moment happiness more than retrospective evaluations of your life?” He says he doesn't know the answer, but maybe the question is the answer. If you can keep a sense of the way you'll feel about the comically difficult moments as you go about the truly crazy days—the nights when multiple children are sick in their beds or the moment when you look over your Fourth of July and realize that one of your children has literally eaten nothing but candy from morning until night—then those times of epic lunacy hold the seeds of their own pleasure. If parenting is hard in part because we make it hard, then we can make it easier. We can let some things go, and we can look at other things differently, and we can hold on to one bittersweet thought: someday we'll look back on all of this and laugh.

Noah Millman asks Yglesias to square his economic views with his environmental positions.

This would be funny if it weren't so sad:

Iran has unveiled haircuts that according to officials are in line with Iranian and Islamic principles. The new haircut models approved by Iran's Culture Ministry are aimed at preventing haircuts deemed "Western" among Iranian youth.

Ezra Klein searches for a weak spot in Manzi's latest argument against a carbon tax:

Even if Manzi is right that the costs [from global warming] are manageable into 2100 — a century, after all, is a long time for a human, but not for the atmosphere — what does that do to our descendants who have to deal with a scorching planet between 2100 and 2200? And then into 2300, and then 2400?

I think Manzi's answer is that technology will save us by then. And maybe he's right. But maybe he's not. And if he's not, then we've let the problem become unimaginably bad for our descendants. If you bet on technology and you're wrong, it's not like we've got another of these planets waiting in the back somewhere.

Joe Klein wants to make the public sector less attractive:

It is time to revise the public pension system. There aren't so many high-paying manufacturing jobs anymore; the relative security of government work doesn't need to be augmented by ridiculously obstruse procedures for firing incompetents or by 20-year pension packages. A nice 401k, with healthy matching funds, should be sufficient.

Lindsay Beyerstein joins the debate about prenatal dex and lesbianism:

If you wanted to be a crackpot about it, you could just as easily argue that dex is a conspiracy to turn boys gay. Prenatal dex makes male rats more receptive to being mounted by other males. Some studies have shown that maternal stress during pregnancy predisposes male offspring to homosexuality. Some researchers think this effect could be caused by steroids like dex. Dreger and Dan Savage may not know the literature, but you can be sure that endocrinologists are well aware of these theories.

John Murphy reviews Sex at Dawn:

[The authors] don’t dispense pat predictions about how “a more relaxed and tolerant approach to fidelity” might play out….Ryan and Jethá compare the slow advances granted to gay rights and same-sex marriage. Ryan and Jethá realize the odds against such tolerance attained by advocates of “free love”, however ethically conceived by those daringly liberated.

Eric Michael Johnson also levels judgment. Several readers have found this line of argument wanting. A reader writes:

I was amused by this item, particularly by the suggestion that tolerance of sexual infidelity might actually strengthen relationships.  My experience, admittedly narrow, suggests that this is untrue.

The speculation that women may be less tolerant of infidelity (or more likely to be faithful)  because they have been culturally punished for it for so long is interesting.  However, it is also possible that women are less tolerant because they have been physically harmed by it.  The stories of women who have contracted syphillis from unfaithful husbands are plentiful, and with the modern array of STDs women have all the more reason to hope and expect that their partners will eschew the occasional fling with someone else–whether male or female.  

Another adds:

If someone really wants to make a genetic argument, we should look at the great apes. Lo and behold, they have a completely different sexual norm. An alpha male has a harem of females. Perhaps women should just accept their role in life; it's in our genes. The real argument seems to be that genetics, even if they're meaningful, are nowhere near the whole story. Are we to believe that birds distinguish making love to one another from a random fling?

Greenwald defends Nazi comparisons:

The very notion that a major 20th Century event like German aggression is off-limits in political discussions is both arbitrary and anti-intellectual in the extreme.  There simply are instances where such comparisons uniquely illuminate important truths:  recall, for example, Andrew Sullivan's consequential discovery of the stark similarities between the Bush/Cheney and Gestapo "enhanced interrogation" documents, both in terms of approved tactics and "justifications."  To demand that German crimes be treated as sacred and unmentionable is to deprive our discourse of critical truths.

But this prohibition is even more odious than that.  A primary point of the Nuremberg Trials was to seize on the extraordinary horror of what the Germans did in order to set forth general principles to be applied not only to the individual war criminals before the tribunal, but more important, to all countries in the future. 

Brink Lindsey demolishes AEI President Arthur Brooks's new book:

Brooks' book isn't about policy; it's about ideology and how to engage in politics. And it is, I'm sorry to say, a thoroughly wrongheaded way to approach these questions. The attempt to turn economic policy disputes into a populist cultural crusade rests on deep-seated confusion about the nature of those disputes and how best to effect constructive policy change. Brooks’ key move is to cast our “free enterprise system” as an instance of American exceptionalism — in contrast to the social democracy of Europe and other advanced nations. Thus, economic policy becomes fodder for cultural politics: Supporters of free markets are defending a unique and precious American heritage, while members of the “30 percent coalition” have thrown in with the foreigners — worst of all, with effete, decadent Europeans.

Why this is utterly off-base:

Plenty of European countries have markets about as free as those in the land of the free. Look at the ratings provided by the annual Economic Freedom of the World report, co-published by the Cato Institute. On four broad categories of economic freedom — legal structure and security of property rights; access to sound money; freedom to trade internationally; and regulation — the United States was slightly “freer” than Sweden, the United Kingdom, Austria, Finland, and Switzerland. Meanwhile, Ireland, the Netherlands and, by a wide margin, Denmark were found to have freer markets. Note that the two highest scorers have two of the biggest welfare states in the world — which just goes to show that blurring issues of regulation and redistribution, as Brooks tries to do, leads to intellectual confusion.

I think what Arthur is doing is trying to reset to the 1980s as if the 1990s and the 2000s had never happened. This is a classic piece of abstract ideology, not political engagement with reality.