Category: The Dish

Ramesh explains. Intriguing, if not persuasive. Ramesh assumes that Giuliani’s poor showing in early states won’t affect his support in later ones. That’s a big assumption.

The shoeblogger finds some other, less distressing fashion objects designed by Mr Blahnik. Pity they’re paddock boots.

Not that hard: a contest!

John Cole:

"Screw it. Maybe I am guilty after all, and if I push the issue Bush won’t be around to get me off the hook again."

Oliver Willis coins a new word:

"Hewitt": (verb) To spin furiously to the right contrary to objective facts and data to the point of absurdity. Example: George Bush hewitted all over his presidency when he declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq.

The way he suddenly uses a noun as a verb – "He childed as I fathered" – or a noun as an adjective – "Kingdomed Achilles in commotion rages" – creates all sorts of impressions on the mind. So a neuroscientist conducted an experiment:

While the Shakespearian functional shift was semantically integrated with ease, it triggered a syntactic re-evaluation process likely to raise attention and give more weight to the sentence as a whole.

Shakespeare is stretching us; he is opening up the possibility of further peaks, new potential pathways or developments. Our findings show how Shakespeare created dramatic effects by implicitly taking advantage of the relative independence – at the neural level – of semantics and syntax in sentence comprehension. It is as though he is a pianist using one hand to keep the background melody going, whilst simultaneously the other pushes towards ever more complex variations and syncopations.

I knew all that already. It’s still cool to see it demonstrated.

Or are you just happy to see me? A flirt-bot computer has been unleashed online in Russia. It wants your money, under the guise of love:

The artificial intelligence of CyberLover’s automated chats is good enough that victims have a tough time distinguishing the "bot" from a real potential suitor, PC Tools said. The software can work quickly too, establishing up to 10 relationships in 30 minutes, PC Tools said. It compiles a report on every person it meets complete with name, contact information, and photos.

(Hat tip: Regina Lynn.)

His thesis is radical – that the Industrial Revolution came about because the capitalist virtues of the upper and upper-middle class in England were passed on through families, and these families for a while out-bred the lower classes who were more susceptible to disease. But it doesn’t depend on Darwinian evolution, Tim Worstall argues. It’s not a triumph of genes as such; it’s a triumph of transmitted and inherited culture:

We believe this about our society now: that attitudes, mindsets, extended networks, are indeed transmitted across the generations, not via Darwinian evolution, but in a way that can best be described as Lamarckian. The inheritance by the next generation of characteristics acquired by the previous one.

So we all already actually agree that Clark’s mechanism is indeed a possible one (I personally regard it, now that’s he’s written the book to explain it, as obvious, but as I didn’t see it before I read the book perhaps not that obvious.): all he needs to really prove is that the people who were transmitting the petit- and not so petit- bourgeois cultural values were indeed outbreeding those who didn’t and the basic argument seems secure. Those bourgeois cultural values were indeed spreading through society via an evolutionary mechanism, just that of Lamarck, not Darwin.

JPod’s remarkable aptitude – out of all those available – to succeed NPod as Commentary editor is explained by Lamarck not Darwin.

For many liberals, it’s better than the reality. But no one can deny that Huckabee’s spend-like-Jesus bleeding heart Christianism has some appeal to the left, as it obviously should:

A lot of us non-Christian liberals have been wondering for some time when if ever the elements of Christian ethics that don’t relate to sex were going to rear their heads in the Christian political mobilization. In an era where regular churchgoers are the main electoral prop of the party of aggressive war and institutionalized torture, we’re still a long way from that moment. But Huckabee’s rhetoric on a few key points seems to nod in the direction of the possibility of something better. It’d take someone else — someone better-informed , with a better grasp of policy and without the record of setting serial rapists free — to actually deliver on that promise, but I think there’s no denying that it’s promising.

What Matt means, in large part, is redistributionism. And that’s what I fear.

… and a political philosophy graduate student, but I found this parody of an attack ad on Immanuel Kant hilarious:

Hat tip: Crooked Timber.