The Dish

The latest from the pro-torture right.

Maybe our best decisions are not the ones we think most about:

Dijksterhuis and colleagues asked volunteers to read brief descriptions of four hypothetical cars and pick the one they’d like to buy after mulling it over for 4 minutes. The researchers made the decision far simpler than it is in real life by limiting the descriptions to just four attributes such as good gas mileage or poor legroom. One of the cars had more plusses than the others, and most participants chose this car.

But when the researchers made the decision more complex by listing 12 attributes for each car, people identified the best car only about 25% of the time – no better than chance. The real surprise came when the researchers distracted the participants with anagram puzzles for 4 minutes before asking for their choices. More than half picked the best car. The counterintuitive conclusion, Dijksterhuis says, is that complex decisions are best made without conscious attention to the problem at hand.

Just don’t tell the president. It will only encourage him.

(Photo: Carlo Allegri/Getty.)

John Edwards’ chief blogger, Amanda Jeebus Marcotte, gets started in her new job.

"Like the Whig gentry who were the Founders, I loathe populism. Most especially in the form of populist religion, i.e., the current pestiferous bible-banging evangelicals, whom I regard as organized ignorance, a menace to public health, to science, to medicine, to serious Western religion, to intellect and indeed to sanity. Evangelicalism, driven by emotion, and not creedal, is thoroughly erratic and by its nature cannot be conservative.

My conservatism is aristocratic in spirit, anti-populist and rooted in the Northeast. It is Burke brought up to date. A ‘social conservative’ in my view is not a moral authoritarian Evangelical who wants to push people around, but an American gentleman, conservative in a social sense. He has gone to a good school, maybe shops at J. Press, maybe plays tennis or golf, and drinks either Bombay or Beefeater martinis, or maybe Dewar’s on the rocks, or both," – Jeffrey Hart, one of the eminences grises of the American conservative movement (and teacher of Dinesh D’Souza). Jim Kalb comments here.

There’s nothing funnier than conservatives making jokes about their political allies torturing people, is there?

Brad DeLong and Arnold Kling have at it over FDR’s legacy. My sympathies lie with Kling.

You want to see a real celebrity interview? Here’s a real celebrity interview:

"Well, it seems that the military has gone around and fired a whole bunch of people who speak foreign languages — Farsi and Arabic, etc… For some reason, the military seems more afraid of gay people than they are against terrorists, but they’re very brave with the terrorists … If the terrorists ever got a hold of this information, they’d get a platoon of lesbians to chase us out of Baghdad," – congressman Gary Ackerman, to Condi Rice yesterday.

My favorite singer from last night gets booted out of the competition – for once getting busted for possessing weed. Yep: musicians are no longer allowed to get near the stuff. Musicians …