Author: Andrew Sullivan

Steven Shapin has an article on the surprising amount of ink, pixels, and events used to mark Darwin's 200th birthday last year.  Douthat summarizes:

Shapin’s own explanations for all this Darwiniana include the new atheism’s recent “crusade against rampant religiosity,” the desire to recruit the great naturalist as a patron saint for the anti-global warming cause, intra-academic battles over evolutionary theory, and (most importantly, perhaps) Darwin’s status as the rare great scientist who was also personally admirable, even by the exacting standards of modern political correctness.

The sneering tone from Ross seems disappointing to me. Notice how the smears accumulate for one of the most revolutionary and influential thinkers of the past two hundred years:

It’s a clear-eyed and wide-ranging tour of what “Darwinism” means today — at once an unchallenged scientific paradigm and a wildly contentious theory of everything; a Church militant warring against creationists and fundamentalists and a debating society of squabbling professors; a touchstone for the literary intelligentsia and a source of secularist kitsch.

A commenter at Immoral Minority, an Alaskan blog, digs up a newspaper clipping online:

So I visit the link that LoveAndKnishesFromBrooklyn provided, which comes from the "Neighbors" section of the ADN on July 7, 1984, and I read the following: Awards for the various competitions will be provided by the new Miss Wasilla, Katrina Mueller, at 6 p.m. at the Mat-su Resort Pavilion.

We already know that Palin did not win the Miss Congeniality in that contest either, as her Wiki profile claimed. In the fictional Going Rogue, Palin says she did win the Miss Wasilla contest – but doesn't specify what year, although every other source says 1984.

I'm not adding this to the "odd lies" roster until all the facts are totally clear. It's beyond trivial. But it's important to keep track of the insane amount of times Palin has just made stuff up. It helps establish a pattern of deceit that helps us assess her other fantastic claims.

Update: IM has now established that Sarah Palin was Miss Wasilla 1983, and a third runner up for Miss Alaska in 1984.

Bonus pick of Palin wearing some sort of beauty pageant crown after the jump:

Kerry Howley reviews Barbara Ehrenreich’s book attacking positive thinking:

It’s no surprise that I was first told to smile while sitting in a church pew. The world of positivity is one of preachers, sacred books, incantations, revival meetings, and mystical teachings, all emanating from the idea that happy thoughts have the power to transform the physical world. For some people, sometimes, this fulfills a real need. But in the absence of critics like Ehrenreich, we run the risk of passively absorbing this dogma as it seeps into our lives, gently diminishing the sense that some circumstances really are beyond our control. Positivity is a secular religion. Sometimes it takes a village atheist to remind us that we can choose not to believe.

I don’t share Ehrenreich’s lefty politics, but I agree about the hideous cult of self-esteem:

Self-esteem isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

In fact, as a brief recounting of Bob Torricelli’s career would usefully illustrate, it can be a huge part of the problem. New research has found that self-esteem can be just as high among D students, drunk drivers and former Presidents from Arkansas as it is among Nobel laureates, nuns and New York City fire fighters. In fact, according to research performed by Brad Bushman of Iowa State University and Roy Baumeister of Case Western Reserve University, people with high self-esteem can engage in far more antisocial behavior than those with low self-worth. “I think we had a great deal of optimism that high self-esteem would cause all sorts of positive consequences and that if we raised self-esteem, people would do better in life,” Baumeister told the Times. “Mostly, the data have not borne that out.”

Racists, street thugs and school bullies all polled high on the self-esteem charts. And you can see why. If you think you’re God’s gift, you’re particularly offended if other people don’t treat you that way. So you lash out or commit crimes or cut ethical corners to reassert your pre-eminence. After all, who are your moral inferiors to suggest that you could be doing something, er, wrong? What do they know?

Ambers, who appears to have curled up in bed for the frigid weekend with a copy of "Game Change", reveals a few more choice nuggets:

Clinton senior strategist Mark Penn boasted to his staff how many times he managed to say "cocaine" on that famous Hardball segment (page 163).

Hillary Clinton was initially pleased when her New Hampshire campaign chairman, Billy Shaheen, mentioned Obama's previous use of drugs (page 161): 

"Hillary's reaction to Shaheen's remarks was, 'Good for him!' Followed by 'Let's push it out.'  Her aides violently disagreed, seeing what Shaheen had said as a PR disaster. Grudgingly, Clinton acquiesced to disowning Shaheen's comments. But she wasn't going to cut him loose. Why should Billy have to fall on his sword for invoking something that had been fair game in every recent election?"

Those of us who were super-vigilant about the Clintons' capacity for dirty politics were … totally right.

Paul Varnell finds silver-linings in aging:

The intensity of your sexual desire somewhat diminishes. Cephalus in Plato's Republic remarks that he is finally free of "the tyranny of Venus." I understand what he means. This does not mean that sexual desire completely vanishes but that its claims seem less urgent and more under control. Most older men will understand this intuitively. Younger people who may evaluate themselves by the strength of their libido will just have to learn it—and they will come to realize it is a blessing.

Chait's "basic view is that the Islamic world today is not unlike the Christian world before the enlightenment":

It is a culture where notions of liberalism and religious tolerance are largely foreign — where even the most liberal mass movement that can be found, the Green movement in Iran, has to make its case in religious terms in order to have any chance at legitimacy. I would not blame the mass of Muslims for al Qaeda's terrorism any more than I'd blame the average medieval Christian for the Crusades. Still, an illiberal, non-secular culture like this is far more capable of producing, or even merely accepting, violence against non-believers qua non-believers.

A lot of liberals have an unfortunate tendency to brand as racist any analysis that holds one culture above another. But there's nothing inherently racial in believing that the illiberal culture that dominates the Muslim world is a key source of the problem, just as it wouldn't be racial make a sweeping indictment of pre-Enlightenment European culture.

A reader writes:

When FDR was elected in 1933, he moved to the White House and Eleanor moved to 20 East 9th Street in Manhattan.  A plaque on the building says she lived there until 1942.  She then moved to an apartment house on Washington Square West (I forget the number, but I can walk over and find it if you would like me to do so).  A plaque on that building says she lived there until something like 1949.  Eleanor had her girlfriend in New York and Franklin had his girlfriend in Washington and on his vacations.  Nobody reported any of this, not even when FDR died in his girlfriend's presence.  People were cool in the 1940s.

Now, Tiger Woods, Clinton, the Edwardses, etc. are big stories.  Why should anyone care?

The Daily Galaxy labels this their top post of 2009:

[Stephen Hawking said that] "At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information."

But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledge that we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, and particularly, Hawking points out, over the last three hundred.

"I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race," Hawking said.

I noted Katie Roiphe's contrast of the carnality of the 20th century's Great Male Novelists (eg Philip Roth) and their contemporary counterparts (eg Jonathan Safran Foer) last week. Ross offers some historical context to her argument:

This strikes me as very perceptive, even if I’m a bit disappointed that the phrase “emo boy” didn’t find it’s way into Roiphe’s putdown of the modern young male novelist.

I wonder, though, if what she describes as the “puritanical” streak in contemporary fiction — an artifact of what Roiphe describes, elsewhere in the essay, as our “more conservative time” — has more to do with the exhaustion of the transgressive impulse than with any real return to the kind of moral-aesthetic strictures that a Roth or an Updike helped to overthrow. A jaded and self-conscious caution about the transformative possibilities of sex, after all, isn’t really the same thing as a revived puritanism — and what’s more, I think, it doesn’t provide anything like the same opportunities for would-be literary adventurers looking for something to push off against. Updike wouldn’t have been Updike, for instance, if he had started out as a novelist in the age of Lady Gaga and streaming online pornography.

At some point, even in my darker moments, I always believed that the odd lies of this farcical candidate would get to be addressed by the GOP itself. The Dish kept a record. Perhaps now the full story will finally come out.

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