Here's where we are in the neoconservative view of the Afghanistan war, now the longest in American history. Boot:
We just need to give it a little time.
If the war can’t be quickly won in Afghanistan, it won’t be quickly lost there, either. And in fact it can be won, though it will take some time.
The question is: can you imagine any feasible scenario in Afghanistan in the next decade in which either pundit would urge withdrawal? I can't.
Bundle runs the numbers:
The average American spends 72 minutes per day in transit….It's also a lot of money. The average household spent $5,477 on gas and auto expenses last year, according to Bundle data, an amount which accounts for about 14.5 percent of daily spending.* That's more than we spend on groceries or utilities, and more than we spend on travel, entertainment, clothes and shoes, and hobbies — combined.
…*Bundle's spending data does not include mortgage or rent.
(Hat tip: Flowing Data)
Vaughan Bell touts a fascinating study:
We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected.
But some are taking the collective impact a little far: divorce ceremonies.
Returning to one of his favorite subjects, Mark Perry colorfully illustrates how much cheaper electronics have become in the last fifty years.
Sam Biddle, an unemployed class of 2010 Philosophy major in NYC, is having a rough go of it:
At what point do I stop checking Craigslist? Why is there an ad for "MYSTERY SHOPPING" in the "writing/editing jobs" category? How much is their purported “nominal compensation”? A ten dollar per diem? A bag of buttons? A punch in the throat? “THIS IS NOT A FREE MEAL!," the ad warns. Well, then. Forget it! Why does this company leave the ‘i’ in ‘iNC’ uncapitalized? Perhaps this is some sort of test—for a prospective mystery shopper-slash-editor? What other horrors can I spot? I wonder if the person who wrote “boutique mystery shopping company seeks strong writers” felt as sad writing that as I do reading it.
Sounds like he should shop at Ross.
Drum hops on the thread:
Did adults abandon movies because movies got juvenile? Or did movies get juvenile because adults abanonded them? I've never come to a firm conclusion about this myself, but I suspect it's more the latter. As a social experience — for dates, for hanging out with your friends, for getting out of the house — movies are as good as they've ever been. And that's a big part of what kids want out of their pastimes. But adults? They mostly just want to relax with a bit of good entertainment, and they have a whole lot of other options for that these days. Options that, from an adult point of view, are generally superior.
Jonah Lehrer notes Watson’s flaws. The computer is slow on the buzzer:
Those players on Jeopardy are able to ring the buzzer before they can actually articulate the answer. All they have is a feeling, and that feeling is enough. These feelings of knowing illustrate the power of our emotions. The first thing to note is that these feelings are often extremely accurate…The second important feature of these feelings of knowing is their speed. As Thompson makes clear, it’s the speed of these inexplicable hunches that allow the human contestants to defeat Watson…
The larger point is that we won’t get a genuinely “human” version of artificial intelligence (not to mention more energy efficient computers) until our computers start to run emotion-like algorithms.
Video via Niraj Chokshi.
Yglesias ignores the drama over whether McChrystal will retain his job:
The policy question here is more important than the fate of one man. The military can easily continue to pursue a McChrystal-style strategy on both the Afghan and US media fronts under different leadership. The more important question facing the White House is how they feel about that [strategy].
Today on the Dish, General McChrystal's comments created a firestorm in the blogosphere. Even Kristol felt he should resign. Andrew's take here and here. Stephen Biddle looked on the bright side of Afghanistan and the Texas GOP went off the deep end. BP took its PR to Twitter, the Big Picture took stock of the spill, and another worst case scenario emerged. We chronicled another odd lie.
In assorted coverage, Saletan studied the blood ban for gays, Adam Serwer antagonized the GOP over Faisal Shahzad's guilty plea, Plumer preferred climate change legislation over EPA intervention, Chris Good looked ahead on Prop 8, Steinglass suggested decriminalization over legalization, and Friedersdorf praised Continetti for having the courage to say that Roosevelt wasn't a fascist dictator.
In other commentary, Jonah Lehrer disagreed with Clay Shirky over cultural consumption, Steven Zeitchik noted a surge of kid movies, a Dish reader cheered them on, and cancer survivor Ananda Shankar Jayant shared her love for dancing. Readers continued the discussion on public executions and others contributed to the fall of the fourth estate. Seth Masket wondered why the right hates soccer. Incredible goal here.
Von Hoffman award here and cool ad here. Ex-gay hathos here, Haggard's tweets here, and Colbert bait here. MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here. The latest winner of the VFYW contest here.
— C.B.
Jay Rosen encourages reporters to be more transparent, against "using opacity as a tool of power," for accountability in government, and against demagoguery. Ambinder asks how these guidelines are supposed to function in real life:
Tonight, I'm learning a lot about the back end of how the Rolling Stone article about Gen. McChrystal came to be written. I could share everything I know immediately, thus satisfying the transparency and anti-opacity principles, but in order to figure out who ought to be held accountable and why, I'm going to have to use that information to gather other information and then make an informed decision.
There's no doubt that I will NOT able to identify, by name, all of the sources I've spoken to. I will always do my best to relate to the reader the biases of the sources, but if my goal is to explain to people what's really happening, and I think that IS my goal, then I'm going to have to … well… sacrifice at least one of the principles (opacity) for another (accountability).
Earlier thoughts here.
The Dish 