Category: The Dish

From Margaret Talbot’s 2002 piece against tinkering with sex selection:

The real trouble with sex selection goes beyond sex discrimination. The real trouble is that it allows us, for the first time, to use a medical procedure to select or reject a child on the basis of a characteristic that has nothing to do with life and death, that is not in any sense of the word pathological, that cannot possibly be construed as sparing a child any pain and suffering. It might sound harmless enough, maybe even kind of cute—this impulse to pick and choose, pink or blue. But if we allow people to select a child’s sex, then there really is no barrier to picking embryos—or, ultimately, genetically programming children—based on any whim, any faddish notion of what constitutes superior stock. This time the old and overused accusation would actually be true: we would be playing God—and none too well, in all likelihood, given how little we really know about what makes individual human beings the way they are. A world in which people (wealthy people, anyway) can custom-design human beings unhampered by law or social sanction is not a dystopian sci-fi fantasy any longer but a realistic scenario. It is not a world most of us would want to live in.

It’s certainly not a world I’d want to live in. But I do, don’t I?

Shoes are bad for you. There’s proof.

Michael Crowley on Barack and Iraq:

The truth is Obama has no secret plan for Iraq. Interviews with nearly two dozen foreign policy and military experts, as well as Obama’s campaign advisers, and a close review of Obama’s own statements on Iraq, suggest something more nuanced. What he is offering is a basic vision of withdrawal with muddy particulars, one his advisers are still formulating and one that, if he is elected, is destined to meet an even muddier reality on the ground. Obama has set a clear direction for U.S. policy in Iraq: He wants us out of Iraq; but he’s not willing to do it at any cost–even if it means dashing the hopes of some of his more fervent and naïve supporters. And, when it comes to Iraq, whatever the merits of Obama’s withdrawal plan may be, "Yes, We Can" might ultimately yield to "No, we can’t."

A reader writes:

How can you claim that McCain, in stating a truthful quote made by a member of Hamas regarding how he would prefer Obama to win the election, is somehow the same as associating Obama with Wright?

The successful prosecution of Islamic extremists around the world is, for many people in this country, a very important issue.

And, for many McCain supporters such as myself, it is the most significant reason why we back McCain over either alternative – particularly Obama.  When those very people whom we believe to be our enemies speaks in a positive way about Obama, how is this not relevant?  Is it not reasonable to infer that they believe that Obama, as president, will do more to advance their interests than John McCain or Hillary Clinton would?  And if they think that, then maybe, just maybe, we ought to take that as a sign of the type of signals Obama is currently sending to the heart the extreme Islam, and ask ourselves whether or not this is the message America ought to convey.

If you think that this is how the next president OUGHT to handle our confrontation with Islamic extremists and terrorists in general, mainly that appeasement and discourse is the most likely path to lead to global reconciliation or at least a peaceful resolution of the conflicts that currently exist, then make that argument and stand by it.  Or maybe you believe that members of Hamas are not truly our enemy at all.  Either way, don’t beat around the bush if this is the case.

Frankly, I don’t think that you believe either of those things.  You just don’t like the idea of people associating Obama with terrorists in any way whatsoever, and it makes your blood boil – this much is obvious.  The "Obama-is-a-muslim" meme has you freaked out, and so when you hear this you immediately associate the two.  But try, if you can, to take the claim as it was said, rather than imputing your own fears upon the statement.  If it had been some other enemy of the United States and not an Islamic extremist from Hamas, would you believe the attack to have been so "bad?"  And why?

My response is simply that honorable campaigns do not allow foreign agents, especially terrorist organizations, to insert themselves into American presidential politics. No respectable foreign governments do such a thing; and the gambits of al Qaeda, Hamas, or any other grouping to play one candidate against another should in general be ignored, not exploited.

It is, of course, a perfectly legitimate campaign issue to fight over what US policy should be toward Hamas. Are there circumstances in which we should negotiate with them? How coherent is American foreign policy when it rests on a belief that democracy should spread in the Arab world, but refuses to recognize one of the very few governments that does have some democratic legitimacy? Are we right to see Hamas as an extension of Iranian power? Etc. But you can make these arguments and talk about these issues without resorting to canards such as "the terrorists want my opponent to win." It’s a lame and cheap shot. And beneath McCain.

From Dana Gioia’s 1991 article:

…the poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon. Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward. Reputations are made and rewards distributed within the poetry subculture. To adapt Russell Jacoby’s definition of contemporary academic renown from The Last Intellectuals, a "famous" poet now means someone famous only to other poets. But there are enough poets to make that local fame relatively meaningful. Not long ago, "only poets read poetry" was meant as damning criticism. Now it is a proven marketing strategy.

Continued here.

Sinai, Egypt, 8 am.

From the Obama website, some political geography:

"On many issues, Conservatives have more in common with ideological liberals than we do with the business interests that come to Washington looking for a handout. Our goal should be to persuade the Left — to use clear failures we agree on, like ethanol — to demonstrate that Big Business will always come to Washington for handouts until Washington stops giving them altogether. Each new handout is the next ethanol, the next sugar — and once you’ve started giving a handout, it never ends," – David Freddoso, NRO.

A reader writes:

I don’t know what’s causing you to abandon your conservatism of doubt, but there’s no doubt that’s what you’re doing. Take, for instance, this unilluminating piece of credulity:

He obviously does care about working class voters, white and black. Why else would an Ivy League educated lawyer return to Chicago to work as a community organizer for the urban poor?

As an earlier, less starstruck, Andrew might have said, "please." This is a classic case of theoretical under-determination. Why might Obama have returned to work as an organizer in a community that became his earliest constituency? Sure, it could be because he "cares about working class voters, white and black." But it also could be because the precinct in which he worked was optimally suited to elect him, a left-wing black, to political office.

Or because community organizers have the time to write books. Or because he figured an intelligent community organizer could easily make the leap to influential local academic. Or, for that matter, because his wife made him do it.

See, what distinguishes a "conservative of doubt" from a hack is his doubt: his refusal to accept the rosiest picture, his acknowledging that politicians invariably act out ulterior motives, and that the ones who should be vetted most closely are those who seem most lily-white. Is the conservative of doubt realistic? No, he doubts — he is skeptical — but he understands that political errors are most likely to be avoided when the question is not, say, "who is best suited to lead this country?" but, rather, "who is the least worst suited?" This perspective does not preclude him from making optimistic inferences from the evidence; a conservative of doubt can still judge that Obama would be a thoughtful, even-keeled president, or that John McCain is an honorable man, but the onus is on Obama to be extra-thoughtful, and McCain to be extra-scrupulous.

That’s why the foregoing excerpt belies your low ‘c’ conservatism. The evidence from which you infer that Obama cares about the white and black urban poor supports many other hypotheses, all of which attribute to Obama a less virtuous character. The conservative of doubt would provisionally accept any one of these before he endorsed the hypothesis you settled on.

This is a plausible explanation. But my point was made in reference to the assertion, without evidence, that Obama does not care about working class folks. And Clinton did not argue that Obama’s record in this respect was merely careerism. He implied total unconcern. At some point, you cannot surrender to total cynicism about people in public life. But I take the point that I need to remind myself of the need for skepticism toward a candidate I have come to admire. I will merely remind my reader that so far, my support for Obama has been in the context of the Democratic primary.

Professor Daniel Dennett argues it is:

If religion isn’t the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress, what is? Perhaps alcohol, or television, or addictive video games. But although each of these scourges – mixed blessings, in fact – has the power to overwhelm our best judgment and cloud our critical faculties, religion has a feature of that none of them can boast: it doesn’t just disable, it honours the disability. People are revered for their capacity to live in a dream world, to shield their minds from factual knowledge and make the major decisions of their lives by consulting voices in their heads that they call forth by rituals designed to intoxicate them.

While Lord Winston argues it isn’t:

The problem is that scientists now too frequently believe we have the answers to these questions, and hence the mysteries of life. But, oddly, the more we use science to explore nature, the more we find things we do not understand and cannot explain. In reality, both religion and science are expressions of man’s uncertainty. Perhaps the paradox is that certainty, whether it be in science or religion, is dangerous. The danger of Dennett’s relatively gentle brand of certainty is that it increases polarisation in our society. With inflexible positions on both sides, certainty surely is the biggest threat to rationality, and to science.