The Dish

Augusta, Georgia, 12 pm

James Sturm is unplugging from the internet for four months. Nick Carr's response:

Disconnection is the new counterculture.

Does taking weekends off count?

See you Monday morning.

(Image: lol comics)

Jonathan Klick sees another danger of soft paternalism:

The more we protect individuals from making decisions (good or bad), the less willing they will be to invest in decisionmaking capacities.  A few years ago, I was bemused when I spoke at an orientation session for new law students, finding that a third of the room was filled with their parents.  This feeling eventually turned to despair when I discovered this is a fairly ubiquitous phenomenon.  By coddling their children (setting up default rules in such a way to protect them from their failure to make a good decision, so to speak), it seems, today’s helicopter parents have actually stunted their children’s development.  You may think I am exaggerating the costs of this… but there is at least some evidence of this coddling leading to negative long term consequences.  Apparently a number of firms report that entry-level candidates are now bringing their parents to job interviews and letting mom negotiate their benefits for them.

Will Wilkinson says Chait has misunderstood him:

I predict Democrats will become somewhat more receptive to arguments that certain less centralized, more market-oriented policies do a better job of achieving liberal goals than do the more heavily centralized, technocratic policies favored by current Democratic opinion elites. This kind of increased openness to fresh thinking is especially likely if there is an organized effort to articulate a moderate libertarian philosophy in terms attractive to liberals, which is precisely what Brink Lindsey and I are in the process of doing.

Good luck to them. Neo-neo-liberalism?

A detainee is interrogated by Afghan policemen at a US Marine base for 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines in Marjah, Helmand province, on April 7, 2010. A single Afghan man was arrested by US Marines near the site where a roadside bomb blew up early in the morning, with a false Pakistan passport, two different Afghan identification cards, some wires wrapped on a few batteries, an old rifle and pamphlets of Taliban activities in Marjah. By Maurcio Lima/AFP/Getty Images.

Ed Yong looks at the connection between genes and behavior. Vaughan's framing:

As it became possible to identify individual genes, and more importantly, as automated 'gene chip' technology made this economical, studies began looking at differences between groups of people distinguished by simply having different versions of the same gene.

The idea is to see how a single gene influences behaviour, but because the gene and the everyday effect are so distant (it's like trying to detect the effect of a day of farm weather on the flavour of your lunch) the story often gets mangled in the retelling.

Ezra Klein's grand theory of the media:

[B]ecause news stories move so much faster and opinion is so much louder, there's actually more demand for media that explains what those fast-moving stories are actually about. This is a need that is going largely unmet. Both the Economist and NPR are imperfect products, but that's fundamentally what they're doing. It's not quite newsgathering, and it's not straight opinion, though there's occasionally opinion in there. It's analysis. It's how to understand the stuff that other people are reporting and opining.

A reader writes:

While the noun syzygos in Philippians 4:3 can be either masculine or feminine, and can therefore in the right context refer to either a male or female marriage partner, the form of the adjective "true" that modifies syzygos–as in "true syzygos"–is unambiguously masculine. This probably means that syzygos ought to be translated as something like "comrade." Alternatively, Syzygos could be understood as a man's name. Either way, the word does not denote Paul's wife. This does not, of course, solve the problem of whether or not Paul was unmarried and/or celibate. But it does mean that Philippians 4:3 does not count as evidence that Paul was married.

Another writes:

I thought you'd be interested in this excerpt from John Meier's well regarded book, A Marginal Jew (page 118):

…one wonders whether there is any connection between the celibate lifestyle of Jesus and his absolutist view on divorce. I remember with a smile how, after discussing the possible celibacy of Jesus during a lecture at the University of California, San Diego, the wife of my professor-host told me that the best proof that Jesus was celibate was that he totally forbade divorce – something no married man would have ever done.

This may at first seem just a joke, but I invite the reader to reflect on the different approaches to divorce in the Catholic and Protestant churches and to ponder whether there is a correlation between the legal status of divorce and the marital status of the hierarchy in the discipline of each group. Celibate Catholic bishops and priests teach the Catholic laity that divorce is not permitted, while mostly married Protestant clergy – though certainly not happy with the high divorce rate – generally do allow divorce and remarriage in their churches.

Gordon Brown dumps a Scotland MP candidate for making a series of offensive comments via Twitter. Paul Waugh:

Surely jokes about slavery, insulting voters as 'chavs' and "ugly old boots" makes life politically impossible? [Stuart] MacLennan also describes pensioners as "coffin dodgers". His Twitter account has now been suspended, but these screen shots tell the tale.

I find this sad, of course. When our only representatives have never hooked up online, never made an unseemly joke on her Facebook page, never told a dirty joke, never allowed for an occasional diversion into political incorrectness, we will have the faceless, humorless, scripted, alien governing class we deserve.