Author: Andrew Sullivan

TNC posts an editorial related to this picture and continues the thread:

The incident at the St. Lawrence Hotel [mentioned in the editorial] refers to how some of the liberated slave children were originally taken for white and given lodging. When their identity was discovered they were summarily tossed out. I think that incident, as I've written before,  underscores why the notion that a beige America is a some kind of civil rights strategy is naive. Racism creates races where there are none.

I'm also struck by how the abolitionists took this moment to put the horrors of slavery on full display. There is an interesting symmetry between this and how the Civil Rights Movement used propaganda and spectacle to fully expose segregation to a generally indifferent white nation. It's easy to turn away from segregation, in theory, when it's a he said/she said fight over the exact nature of the institution. But when you see police-dogs attacking children, when you see water-hoses unleashed on people for marching, when you see Emmett Till's open casket, and no one prosecuted, the horror is brought home in a specific way.

Greg Ip glances sideways at the recovery:

Yes, the economy is recovering, as everyone save the nihilists expected. However, the debate ought to be about the strength, not the fact, of the recovery. At the risk of gross oversimplification, the debate is this: do we follow the strong recovery model (the “V”) which holds that deep recessions are followed by strong recoveries, or the weak recovery model (the “U”) that holds that recessions caused by financial crises are followed by weak recoveries? I have long been in the latter camp. In fact, I describe my forecast as “reverse square root”, sort of a cross between a V and U (credit to George Soros for the term): an early cyclical rebound followed by muted growth. I’m still there.

Stock market chart from Doug Short.

Henry Farrell ponders the British debate:

If the debate has significant long term consequences for public opinion, as Rachman argues (perhaps from hope as much as rigorous analysis) then this would diverge from the findings of US political scientists, who argue that the effects of presidential debates on public opinion are moderate at best. Such divergence might be a bit embarrassing for me – I made a strong version of the ‘they don’t matter’ argument to a bunch of politically interested Brits at dinner a couple of weeks ago. But it would be intellectually pretty interesting.

He goes on to speculate that America's strong two party system may make debates less important.

Bernstein caps off the discussion:

Obviously, everyone has sources they trust more, sources they are somewhat suspicious of, and sources they dismiss.  What Sanchez is talking about is a group of people who all agree on which sources are to be trusted — and who have narrowed it down to a fraction of all the information out there, a fraction which is both closed and small and suspicious of any outside sources.  He's actually not talking at all about ideology or issue positions; he's talking about staying in touch with reality, which as Andrew Sullivan reminds us (quoting Orwell) "needs a constant struggle." 

Sanchez, Millman, and Friedersdorf are struggling.  Jonah Goldberg doesn't seem to see the point of it.

Larison believes this closure isn't new:

[T]here has been an intensification in cocooning and forgetting as conservatives are now able to receive and exchange information in an almost parallel universe. In this universe, as Henninger’s column in The Wall Street Journal reminded me yet again this morning, Obama originally never intended to increase the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, when in the real world he had pledged to do this many times. When viewed from the parallel universe, Obama’s decision on Afghanistan is a surprise and a change, because it does not agree with the cartoon fantasy of Obama’s foreign policy that movement conservatives and their allies have constructed for themselves. This happens all the time, and not only are these mistakes never corrected, but the people who make them on a regular basis enjoy great success within the confines of the movement. This is not a “closing” of something that was once open, but the normal operation of an ideological movement.

A journalist's guide to firearms. And, via Schneier, guns that look like toys.

From an upcoming LA exhibit by Jeff Antebi to benefit the recovery effort in Haiti. More photos here.

Casey Pugh is directing an open-sourced effort to recreate A New Hope by soliciting 472 fans to contribute their own 15 second clips. Trailer here. First major scene, "The Escape," here.

A reader writes:

On Friedersdorf's premise: "Let’s assume,  for the sake of argument,  a case where a detainee who was water-boarded gave up information that he would’ve otherwise withheld."

It strikes me that most of scenarios like this fail because in fact no real life case will be like that.  A better one.  Let's say we have a terrorist detainee and we want to know the names of his accomplices.  In such a circumstance we won't know, surely, how many accomplices he has.  So once the waterboarding starts, we won't know to stop after we learn five names or ten. The whole logic of the exercise is to extract all the names: so we won't stop until we believe that he's got no more to give.  But by definition some of the names will be innocent men whose names are offered to stop the torture and others will be minor figures who know nothing.

And this, it seems to me, is the internal flaw of the pro-torture argument.  It's easy to conjure up fantasy-situations that define when torture should begin.  It's impossible to define how it should end and what should be done with the information that it produces.