Category: The Dish

Scotland Stays, Ctd

Clive Crook contends that last week’s vote “settles nothing”:

Here’s the problem. If the nationalists had won, they’d have started a risky, costly transition, but the final destination would have been clear. The unionists’ victory avoids that short-term pain but prolongs the constitutional uncertainty indefinitely. Cameron might wish things were “settled,” but they aren’t. The demand for independence isn’t going away. When you consider the apocalyptic predictions of the No campaign, the Yes campaign’s transparent dishonesty (on taxes and spending) and incoherence (on the currency), the threats of Scottish businesses to move south, and the rock-solid consensus outside Scotland that leaving the union would be a tragic error, 45 percent support for independence suggests a certain resilience.

Larison agrees that the conflict is not yet over:

As we have already seen, instead of settling anything the referendum has produced new promises of devolution for Scotland and increased demands in England for significant changes to the current system. The former probably can’t or won’t be honored, since they were made on the fly without the consent of the rest of the U.K., and that will eventually mean another referendum. In that case, unionists won’t be able to make credible offers of greater devolution, and that would make it more difficult to avert independence later on.

But Keating begs to differ:

I suspect British politics will return to normal fairly quickly. Some have also predicted that the independence movement isn’t quite done yet, and that there’s potential for a Quebec-style “neverendum” in which independence becomes a perennial debate. But with the aftermath of the euro crisis and an unpopular Conservative government in power in London, this was probably the best opportunity available for Alex Salmond’s Scottish National Party. The independence advocates took their best shot, missed, and probably won’t get another one as good for a while.

Meanwhile, John Cassidy notes that “As Salmond and the ‘Scottish question’ recede from the headlines, the ‘English question’ could well replace them.” Crook explains:

Recall that the Scots, despite having their own parliament in Edinburgh, currently enjoy the bizarre privilege of sending Scottish members of parliament to Westminster to vote on English-only matters (not to mention a fiscal bonus called the Barnett formula, which underwrites higher public spending in Scotland). Because Scotland leans to the left, this arrangement has been vital in maintaining the strength of the Labour Party in the south. You’ll be shocked to learn that it was a Labour government (led by Tony Blair, born and educated in Scotland, and Gordon Brown, a Scot representing a Scottish constituency) that enacted it.

A new round of devolution, with Tories in charge in London, opens this Pandora’s box. To meet the demands of English conservatives, Cameron has said that the rest of the U.K. must now get devolution, too –English votes on English policies. The prospect is a constitutional restructuring almost as radical as the one implied by full independence for Scotland.

The question is already splitting the parties:

On Friday morning, the No victory in Scotland’s independence referendum just hours old, David Cameron stood before 10 Downing Street and set a trap for the opposition. The new powers pledged to Edinburgh during the campaign would be transferred on the promised, fast timetable, he confirmed. On the same timetable, he added (in a barb reportedly devised over curry with George Osborne the night before), William Hague would work on plans for English-only votes on English matters. …

So far Labour has brushed aside the proposal. It is self-interested, cynical and drawn up on the back of a fag packet, party figures avow, rightly pointing out that there had been no agreement to link new Scottish devolution to solving the English question. In an interview with Andrew Marr this morning Ed Miliband countered that it would be hard to separate parts of legislation only affecting England from those affecting the rest of Britain, and that EVEL would create two classes of MPs. He wants a constitutional convention, a longer, more exhaustive and more bottom-up process than the constitutional supermarket-sweep proposed by Mr Cameron, one also encompassing devolution to city and regional authorities within England.

These points are all entirely valid. But they risk making Labour look as self-interested as the Conservatives. And the question is not likely to go away. According to the British Social Attitudes and Future of England surveys, the proportion of voters “strongly” supporting EVEL rose from 18 percent in 2000 to 55 percent in 2012. The imminent transfer of new powers (particularly tax-raising ones) to Holyrood will only accentuate that trend.

Zooming out, political scientist Graeme Robertson suggests that “the key lesson from the Scottish referendum is something that scholars have long known but that citizens and politicians often seem to miss – allegiance to states is highly malleable and can be quickly changed by events, even in an old country like Scotland.”

The Climate Change No Shows

On Tuesday, world leaders will meet to discuss climate change. A while back, Michael Bechtel and Kenneth Scheve did a survey “to find out what features of an agreement were important to the public.” The results:

But it’s hard to reach such a deal when some big names aren’t attending this week’s climate summit:

Notably, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are skipping the event. In empirical terms, it’s hard to think of two more important leaders in the world right now: Together they lead more than 2.5 billion people, more than a third of the world’s population.

And the two countries are not only the first and second most populous countries on Earth; research shows they also were the first- and third-biggest producers of carbon dioxide emissions (the United States holds the No. 2 spot). That figure can only partly be explained away by their huge populations: One study showed that per capita emissions from China recently surpassed that of the European Union, and India is predicted to follow suit in five years.

Alden Meyer downplays the absences:

Take China: Just recently, Chinese leaders announced that a national carbon emissions trading program would begin in 2016, building on the experience gained through the seven regional programs now underway. While China remains the world’s largest emitter, the nation’s emissions intensity, which is the amount of emissions produced for each unit of GDP growth, has declined. And just last week, China’s State Council put forward the draft version of a new law to crack down on air pollution from coal burning, which severely affects Chinese citizens’ health. China will be represented at the New York Summit next week by Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, who will be the most senior Chinese official to attend a climate talk since the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference. He is expected to elaborate on China’s plans to put limits on its consumption of coal, which is the source of some 80 percent of the country’s carbon emissions.

Dave Roberts agrees that the changes to China’s coal policy could be a “a Big F’in Deal.” But India is another story. Rebecca Leber explains:

Several recent comments made by [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi suggest little commitment to global warming, by implying it is a natural phenonemon. “We should also ask is this climate change or have we changed. We have battled against nature. That is why we should live with nature rather than battle it,” Modi said, in a departure from stronger remarks on climate action Indian officials made in 2011.

Regardless, Bloomberg View’s editors hope that some good will come from the meeting:

A particular focus will be cities, which produce 70 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Many have set their own targets for cutting them and have announced specific measures to that end. In some cases, they’re aiming to improve on the targets set by their respective national governments. (Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, and the UN’s special envoy for cities and climate change.)

The point isn’t to reduce the costs of carbon pollution in their neighborhoods: A ton of carbon released in one place does the same harm to the planet, climate-wise, as a ton released anywhere else. Rather, it’s to show that stronger measures are no great burden. Cities can take them in stride.

Applying Science To Style

Gary Stephen Ross deems Steven Pinker’s new book The Sense of Style as “a manual worthy of a place on a shelf just below Fowler’s Modern English Usage and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.” He appreciates Pinker’s book for its “painstaking dissection of the many ways in which language both serves and fails us”:

It’s fascinating to learn the science that underlies the stylistic techniques good writers seem to intuit—for example, a list is most easily grasped if the bulkiest item comes at the end (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ; or The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle; or Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!). “Light-before-heavy is one of the oldest principles in linguistics,” Pinker writes, “having been discovered in the fourth century BCE by the Sanskrit grammarian Pānini.” Why? Because the mind must hold the early items in suspension before incorporating the final one, and it’s easier to retain simple things than more complex elements.

John Preston is less taken with Pinker’s analysis, scoffing, “it becomes increasingly clear that Pinker doesn’t have anything new to say, and that anyone who follows his example is far more likely to end up writing waffle and bilge than War and Peace“:

If you had to boil down Pinker’s advice into two main points, they would be: “Keep it snappy” and “Keep it simple”. Unfortunately, he proves wholly incapable of abiding by his own rules. Rather, he’s a colossal windbag, never using three words when 35 can be rammed into the breach, and frequently writing sentences so tortuous that they seem to be eating themselves. He even manages to define what a coherent text is in a way that made my eyeballs rotate in opposite directions: “A coherent text is one in which the reader always knows which coherence relation holds between one sentence and the next.”

Got that? All right then, try this: “In fact, coherence extends beyond individual sentences and also applies to entire branches in the discourse tree (in other words, to items in an essay outline).” I may be excessively picky here, but I can’t help feeling that the phrase “in other words” doesn’t belong in a sentence about the virtues of coherence.

Carrion Comfort

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The ancestors of flesh-eating carrion beetles like the one above offer, according to new research, the “earliest evidence of parental care,” dating back to 125 million years ago. The beetles were not only “exceptional parents, but they also represent the oldest known example of active parenting on the planet”:

Finding traces of exceptional parenting in the fossil record is exceedingly difficult. In this case, the team managed it by studying fossils from China and Myanmar. The fossils showed that ancient beetles from the Early Cretaceous possessed special bodily structures close to those modern beetles possess that allow them to communicate with their young. Additionally, an amber fossil they uncovered caught the beetle parents in action, showing “elaborate biparental care and defense of small vertebrate carcasses for their larvae.”

The researchers also note that several types of modern carrion beetles are endangered:

The American burying beetle, for example, is down to fewer than 1,000 individuals that live east of the Mississippi River. Even the most experienced parents in the world can’t shield their babies from the ill-effects of human-driven habitat fragmentation, it seems.

(Photo of hairy burying beetle by Laszlo Ilyes)

Left Cold By Coffee?

A new study suggests heavy coffee-drinkers “find it more difficult to identify and describe their own emotions”:

“Alexithymia” – Greek for “no words for feelings” – is the psychological terminology for an inability to put ones emotions into words. [Researcher Michael] Lyvers et al did a survey study of 106 university students and found that alexithymia was correlated with the amount of caffeine consumed per day…. Lyvers et al say that

Alexithymics reported consuming nearly twice as much caffeine per day on average compared to non-alexithymic controls or those with borderline alexithymia.

As to why this is the case, the authors speculate that

Perhaps those with alexithymia consume caffeine more heavily than non-alexithymics in an attempt to optimize inherently low arousal levels.

Reviewing the results, Neuroskeptic stays true to his nom de plume:

My concern here is that because this is a self-report questionnaire, the [Toronto Alexithymia Scale] is measuring worries over alexithymia as opposed to alexithymia per se. Moreover, I notice that in Lyver’s dataset, the TAS was quite strongly correlated with self-reported anxiety, apathy, dis-inhibition and executive dysfunction. So I’d say that it’s plausible that all of these self-report scores are reflecting some basic ‘tendency to give negative answers on questionnaires’ which might reflect neuroticism, low self-esteem or (if you prefer) just realism.

An Actual War On Women, Ctd

Ariel Ahram goes deep in exploring ISIS’s use of sexual violence, arguing that it represents “as much an undertaking in state-making as in war-making”:

The power to control or manipulate sexual and ethnic identity is a key component of all state power. In the Middle East, the regulation of sexual relations is often used as a means to create or reinforce ethno-sectarian boundaries.

In the 19th century the Ottoman authorities prohibited marriage between Shi’i men and Sunni women in the provinces of Iraq for fear that Shi’i Iranians were gaining a demographic foothold in the region. Since Islamic law privileges male prerogative over children, the move was meant to block the propagation of Shi’ism within the Ottoman domain. Marriage of Shi’i women to Sunni men was still permitted, since the children of such a union were deemed Sunni. Saddam Hussein took similar measures in the 1970s and 1980s. In late 1970s, in the immediate wake of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the government moved to deport some 40,000 people deemed to be of “Iranian” (i.e., Shi’i) origins.  Thousands of families were interned in prison or prison camps for months, where they were subject to rape and torture, before being transported to the border. …

ISIS’s violence is a heinous crime of war, but also represents a particular form of statecraft. At first glance, it might appear that these practices, though justified by selective interpretations of Islamic law, serve only to satisfy prurient sexual urges. Much like its manipulation of water and oil resources, though, ISIS’s use of sexual and ethnic violence has both ancient and modern antecedents. By selectively reinforcing, creating, and severing ties of kinship, these violent practices can affect bonds of loyalty and obedience far more substantially than the simple distribution of resource rents.

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

So we have early results from the coalition to “ultimately destroy” ISIS.

The Islamic State jihadist organization has recruited more than 6,000 new fighters since America began targeting the group with air strikes last month, according to the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. At least 1,300 of the new recruits are said to be foreigners, who have joined IS from outside the swathes of Syria and Iraq that it controls … The bulk of the foreign fighters who have signed up in the past six weeks are aged between 15 and 20-years-old and have never been involved in a conflict before, according to Abdurrahman Saleh, a spokesman for the Islam Army, part of the Islamic Front rebel group.

And the beat goes on …

This weekend, we aired the Christianity of U2; the debate over the role of religion in modern terrorism; the real touchstone of conservatism – “the good in the present“; why disabled men pay for prostitutes; and a post on William James with the title: The Varieties Of Stoner Experience. Plus: a poetic defense of New York City – “you don’t refuse to breathe do you” – and the entrancing beauty of smoke plumes. And if you ever wondered how a Buddhist writes a novel with a single narrator, wonder no further.

The most popular posts of the weekend were Smartphone Sex; followed by a post that seemed to touch a collective Dish nerve – The Offense Industry On Offense.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 20 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts and polos for sale here. A loyal reader writes:

I started reading you on September 11, 2001, and I doubt I have missed a day since then. I’d read your stuff in the New York Times and knew who you were. You were outstanding on 9/11 and thereafter. Congratulations on inventing blogging. I rarely agree with you now, but you are still a must read … no matter what Krugman said!

“Rarely agree with you now” is a bit of an understatement, as our near and dear reader fills the in-tray with invective on a daily basis. We compiled some of it here:

Shameless shill … …that would be you….celebrating…in dishonest terms, of course….the health care disaster….”the government helping the working poor”…meaning, as always, forced re-distribution….well, duh!!….the “government” can always “help” whatever targeted group the bien-pensants wish to benefit, can’t they…with MY money….that’s always the left’s claim as they accrue power and wealth to their New Class selves….at the same time exhibiting and expressing utter contempt for the intended beneficiaries…”clingers”, remember? “tea-baggers” with obviously false consciousness failing to recognize the beneficence of their saviours…as that CNN bitch openly expressed it contemptuously… Oh, yeah…the Hope and Change thing, too….what a crock!…what liars!…what hypocrites, shameless dissemblers!

All are welcome at the Dish – right, left, and everywhere in between and beyond. Over the years, we’ve gladdened and pissed off almost everyone.

See you in the morning.

When Edgar Allan Poe Looked Beyond The Stars

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Eliza Strickland revisits his long prose-poem about the origins and fate of the universe, Eureka, which includes “a spookily intuitive description of the Big Bang theory more than 70 years before astrophysicists came up with the idea”:  

Scientists who have read Eureka in the decades since have justly called attention to errors in other parts of Poe’s cosmology, and many consider his Big Bang notion to be nothing more than a lucky guess. But a few give Poe credit for a creative leap that contemporaneous astronomers were unable to make. Alberto Cappi is an Italian astronomer who studies galactic clusters and the structure of the universe, and who has taken an interest in Eureka. “It’s surprising that Poe arrived at his dynamically evolving universe, because there was no observational or theoretical evidence suggesting such a possibility,” Cappi wrote in an email. “No astronomer in Poe’s day could imagine a non-static universe.”

Perhaps the astronomers of Poe’s day didn’t have his motivation. Eureka goes on to propose that all the scattered and blown-apart atoms of the universe are now rushing together again, compelled by their “appetite for oneness.” In the due course of ages, he says, the “bright stars will become blended,” and all matter will merge in a final embrace. Poe, the bereft widower, seems to take comfort in this promise of reunification, perhaps dreaming of being reunified with his love. Many of today’s cosmologists predict a quite different fate for us all: an ever-continuing expansion, with all matter spread out in an increasingly diffuse and featureless Universe. The macabre Poe, rather than the romantic one, might have found that conclusion appropriate.

(Photo by John Lemieux)

The Greatest Known Unknown

In the midst of an interview discussing how we argue about God, Keith DeRose asserts that “neither theists nor atheists know whether God exists”:

It was about God, wasn’t it, that Kant famously wrote “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith”? Whatever it does or doesn’t do for faith, my denial of knowledge here makes room for reasonable views on both sides of the question of whether God exists.

I don’t think the arguments for either theism or atheism lead to knowledge of their conclusions. But there are arguments on both sides from premises that someone might reasonably judge to be plausible. If you find it quite probable that God does not exist, I think it’s perfectly possible that you are reasonable to think as you do. But this doesn’t mean that someone who thinks it is likely that God does exist can’t likewise be reasonable in holding that position.

To know that God does (or doesn’t) exist, you have to show that there are no arguments for atheism (or for theism) that a reasonable person could find plausible. But to support that claim you would have to have better critiques of all those arguments than I’ve ever seen. In my view, it’s more likely those who claim to know whether God exists — whether theists or atheists — are just blowing smoke.