The Dish

Robin Hanson defines it:

“Tolerance” is a feel-good buzzword in our society, but I fear people have forgotten what it means.  Many folks are proud of their “tolerance” for gays, working women, Tibetan monks in cute orange outfits, or blacks sitting at the front of the bus.  But what they really mean is that they consider such things to be completely appropriate parts of their society, and are not bothered by them in the slightest.  That, however, isn’t “tolerance.”

“Tolerance” is where you tolerate things that actually bother you.  Things that make you go “ick”, or that conflict with strong intuitions on proper behavior.  Once upon a time, the idea of gay sex made most folks quite uncomfortable, and yet many of those folks still advocated tolerance for gay sex.  Their argument was not that gay sex isn’t icky, but that a broad society should be reluctant to ban apparently victimless activities merely because many find them icky.

Alex Tabarrok moves the football a few more yards down the field.

David Bentley Hart wants atheists to engage the "most sophisticated forms" of the "belief he or she rejects." Drum objects:

Hart would like us to believe that anyone who hasn't spent years meditating on Aquinas and Nietzsche isn't worth engaging with, but walk into any Christian church in America — or the world — and you'll find it full of people who understand God much the same way Hitchens and Dawkins do, not the way Hart does. That's the reality of the religious experience for the vast majority of believers. To call a foul on those who want to engage with this experience — with the world as it is, rather than with Hart's abstract graduate seminar version of the world — is to insist that nonbelievers forfeit the game without even taking the field.

Look: human nature being what it is, most religious people will be a dreadful example of the best version of faith you can find. Drum permits what Hitch's book was: a grand guignol of anti-clerical, fish-barrel-shooting. It's easy; it's way fun; mockery of inarticulate believers has made my friend, Bill Maher, lotsa money. But it's largely missing the real intellectual task by fighting a straw man, rather than a real and living and intelligent faith. Part of that is the fault of believers. We've done a lousy job of delineating a living faith for modernity. 

But I think that's changing. As it must, if we are to take this debate forward.

Yglesias fears that financial reform, unlike HCR, won't get the due diligence it needs:

[T]here’s no real consensus among reputable analysts about what should be done. Is the existence of big banks a problem, or does Canada’s stable and highly concentrated banking system prove that it’s a red herring? Should we fix the ratings agencies by regulating them more stringently, or do we need to deregulate and increase competition? What should happen to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Given that we need to limit leverage, how much should we limit it before we start adversely impacting growth? The bill substantially punts on these questions, either not addressing them at all or else merely instructing regulators to come up with an answer.

Yes, it matters, as the latest data shows. Betapolitics:

Inflation rose from 3% in February to 3.4%. The Retail Price Index rose to 4.4%. The consequence of this is that most of us are becoming poorer. The British economy only grew by 0.2%, making it unlikely that there will be many inflation-matching pay rises in the near future. None of this may be as televisually exciting as exploding volcanoes or beautiful Liberals but when it comes to deciding elections I am with Bill Clinton; “It’s the economy stupid”. 

All of which makes the Thursday debate on economics David Cameron's best chance to grab a clearer lead. I'll be live-blogging for the third time.

Steven Berlin Johnson has a long and rewarding reflection on the swiftly growing power of micro-information in the digital age:

The overall increase in textual productivity may be the single most important fact about the Web’s growth over the past fifteen years. Think about it this way: let’s say it’s 1995, and you are cultivating a page of “hot links” to interesting discoveries on the Web. You find an article about a Columbia journalism lecture and you link to it on your page. The information value you have created is useful exclusively to two groups: people interested in journalism who happen to visit your page, and the people maintaining the Columbia page, who benefit from the increased traffic. Fast forward to 2010, and you check-in at Foursquare for this lecture tonight, and tweet a link to a description of the talk. What happens to that information?

For starters, it goes out to friends of yours, and into your twitter feed, and into Google’s index. The geo-data embedded in the link alerts local businesses who can offer your promotions through foursquare; the link to the talk helps Google build its index of the web, which then attracts advertisers interested in your location or the topic of journalism itself. Because that tiny little snippet of information is free to make new connections, by checking in here you are helping your friends figure out what to do tonight; you’re helping the Journalism school in promoting this venue; you’re helping the bar across Broadway attract more customers, you’re helping Google organize the web; you’re helping people searching google for information about journalism; you’re helping journalism schools advertising on Google to attract new students. Not bad for 140 characters.

Copyranter comments:

Absolutely gruesome, but effective? Previously, we've seen a bloody cellphone visual used in a bloody awful texting and driving PSA. This is the first time I've seen the safety message aimed—not at the blabbing driver—but at the enabling talkee. The campaign is via India for the Bangalore Traffic Police by Mumbai ad agency the Mudra Group.

TNC finds Henry Louis Gates's op-ed against reparations very odd:

From my perspective, the most interesting and provocative modern questions around America's racial dilemma, like any societal dilemma, do not necessitate blame. To put it differently, I am not concerned about gender equality because I think I'm to blame thousands of years of sexism, I'm concerned about  gender equality because it matches my moral center. Blame is irrelevant. In the context of race, the question isn't "Who is to blame for the Middle Passage, slavery, and Jim Crow?" it's "What, tangibly, can we do to counter its generational effects?" 

Michael Wolff is worried.

A reader writes:

I've been a long time reader and fan of the blog.  I was catching up today and was surprised to find how thoroughly the 201 episode had been blocked from the web.  Interestingly, I had no problems accessing the episode in China.  It can be found on tudou.com, the Chinese version of Youtube.  Simply search "south park s14 e6," or this link should work.  Perhaps the US could take more civil liberties lessons from China than we would ever care to admit.