The Dish

A reader writes:

I appreciate that you’re strongly supporting the Tories in this election, but your coverage to date is so spectacularly one-sided.

Relying on Alex Massie to complement your own posts is rather akin to giving The Daily Telegraph carte blanche over the Dish. It isn’t very informative to posters outside the UK, nevermind those who are actually living here (including me). Given Johann Hari is not only a superb journalist, but a friend of yours and someone who you’ve repeatedly linked to on other subjects. Perhaps you might want to give his commentary equal billing where the general election is concerned?

“You can’t polish a turd” as a perfect summary of the Tory case against Labour is not only not the real issue, but on the balance of facts not necessarily true. There’s the genuine consideration that levels of crime in all recorded categories in the UK are the lowest in decades. There’s the genuine consideration that waiting list times in the NHS are at the lowest since record-keeping began. There’s the genuine consideration that Labour has signed some of the most family-friendly legislation on record, that they introduced civil partnerships, and that they, for the first time in history, provided everyone with the right to guaranteed paid holiday.

There’s the minimum wage (which the Tories opposed). There’s the abolition of section 28 (which the Tories opposed). There’s the fact that, according to many economists, the steps the Labour government took (opposed by the Tories) helped the UK out of recession. There’s the longest period of low inflation since the 1960s. There’s the Good Friday agreement and the Northern Ireland peace process.

Now, I certainly haven’t made my mind up about who I’m going to vote for, but I’ve probably provided more information about some of the genuine achievements of the Labour government in one paragraph than you have in the last couple of weeks. So, if you actually want to inform your readers about the UK election, rather than simply repeating the point ad infinitum that you hope the Tories win, I suggest you start doing it properly, and now, rather than using stupid political gags which benefit no-one.

Another:

Labour in Britain still have a bit of hope; the Mythbusters proved that it is actually possible to "polish a turd."

Hannity does the prepping. But this is truth: 10,000 people showed up in Minnesota in April to celebrate the two heroines of the GOP base. Who else in the GOP can get that kind of crowd and unleash that kind of energy? My view remains that Sarah Palin is the one to beat for the GOP nomination in 2012. And that is perhaps the most alarming fact in American – and global – politics today.

Nike uses the voice of Tiger's dead father to get past the scandal and get back to selling stuff:

Hans Küng focuses on one of the more obvious and most fixable causes of the Church’s sex abuse problem:

Of course, celibacy is not solely responsible for these crimes. But it is the most important structural expression of the Catholic hierarchy’s inhibitions with regard to sexuality, evident also in its attitude toward birth control and other questions. In fact, a glance at the New Testament shows that although Jesus and Paul led celibate lives, they left others complete freedom to do so or not. Based on the gospel, clerical celibacy can be advocated only as a freely-chosen calling (charisma), not as a compulsory rule for everyone. Paul decisively contradicted those contemporaries who were of the opinion that “it is good for a man not to touch a woman.” As he wrote, “to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband” (1 Corinthians 7: 1-2).

A reader writes:

Thanks for publishing these. I feel more Catholic knowing we are fighting this.

Here's my story: In 1967, when I was 9, my devoutly Catholic family moved from a small Midwestern town to a small Massachusetts town. In the new town, on top of the culture shock of going from the plains to the coast, I felt a palpable tension in the working class parish that also had a convent and parochial school. Many of my classmates at St. Mary's school attended Mass at "St. Evan's" in the next town. St. Evan's was everything St. Mary's was not; it was newly built and progressive, and the St. Mary's parishioners seemed to resent it as if it were a rebuke. I thought it was because our parish was dying, and maybe it was. I always wished we could go to St. Evan's because our priests were either old and cranky, young and weird (the guy with the red silk-lined cape stood out), or wonderful and transferred soon, over the howls of the parishioners.

Years later I opened a Newsweek magazine and read the caption under a photograph of a man standing on some church steps. The church was St. Mary's and the story was about the sexual abuse of children in the parish by a priest named Father P. The time-frame of this abuse was the 1960's prior to 1967. I sadly realized the older siblings of some of my classmates must have been his victims. I wondered if it explained St. Evan's.

One of my dearest classmates at St. Mary's had been Billy, the youngest of

a large Catholic family, and a fellow outsider.

One of Billy's older brothers died in a car crash in the summer of 1968. Another brother went to Vietnam and came back with drug problems. The third brother had legal problems before he was out of high school. Billy and I connected immediately and the nuns, bless their hearts, always seated us next to each other, a fact we stupidly attributed to their naivete. We lost touch after high school but in the early 90's I contacted Billy in Thailand (he had changed his name at least twice by then, and had not lived in the U.S. for years) .

I asked Billy about Fr. P and was shocked to learn it had been the sexual abuse of one of his surviving brothers, and the brave coming forward of his parents, that had broken open the whole thing. Billy suspected that the brother who had died (in a drunken accident while trying to jump a bridge abutment) had also been abused and was suicidal as a result. The family, and possibly the parish, was destroyed by this priest. I would have said at one time that sexual abuse by priests did not touch my life, but I know my childhood was drenched in it.

I grieve for the stories I don't know and the loved ones who I'll never know about who may have been abused and traumatized.

Credit cards have been shown to make us spend more. Ryan Sager argues that this isn't the full story:

Every person’s financial situation and mind works differently. For some people, doing many more of their transactions in cash (or check — you have to have some way to pay bills) would be a huge improvement. If you shop a lot recreationally, for instance, this could slow you down. For some people, just using a debit card could be the answer. For me and other people who like a lot of control and data and feedback…a solution like credit cards plus something like… Mint.com is a good answer.

The key, as in so many things, is a high degree of self knowledge, a willingness to experiment and track results, and the information to understand what biases might be driving your behavior.

Duncan Trussell narrates the history of Nikola Tesla and the alternating current. Also starring John C. Reilly and Crispin Glover:

A reader writes:

I had a similar experience as your reader's. The Episcopal church I go to in Upstate NY got word of sexual abuse by a rector who had left the parish almost 20 years ago. For six months they investigated secretly and found more who were abused. They invited the entire parish to an emergency meeting to tell us what happened before we found out in the papers. It was a sad meeting, of course. Many of us worried out-loud if our parish would recover.

The abuser was banned from the church. The parish instituted more awareness programs. People didn’t leave the parish in droves. Here’s hoping that the Pope will start trusting Catholics with internal secrets.

Another writes:

Here is an even more relevant story from the Episcopal Church. A brief summary:

While Charles Bennison was a young rector of a parish in California in the 1970s, his brother John, a seminarian who was working as the youth minister in the same parish, was having sex with several parishioners, including a 14-year-old girl. Eventually, John left the parish and the priesthood (yes, he was ordained anyway!). Although Charles knew of this scandal, however, he said nothing to the police about the 14-year-old.

In 1998, Charles becomes bishop of Pennsylvania, but the story gets out about his brother and his shenanigans. Charles’s failure to contact the police at the time causes a furor in 2006. The result: Charles Bennison is officially brought up on charges by the church hierarchy and deposed. Bennison is appealing the sentence, but this is a prime example of a church taking responsibility by firing one its bishops.

Richard Thaler, co-author of Nudge, defends soft paternalism against Whitman:

If libertarian paternalism creates a slope risk then real paternalism must generate a “cliff” risk. But have we seen this in history? In America we started as Puritans but moved away from it. When Prohibition was passed into law it did not lead to a slew of other paternalistic interventions. On the contrary, once society got to see prohibition in action, the law was eventually repealed. Is there any evidence of a paternalistic slide? The only example Whitman gives is smoking, where there certainly has been a progression of increasingly intrusive laws passed. But there are several problems with this example. First, most of the anti-smoking laws are based on externalities, not paternalism. People do not want to fly, eat, or work in smoke-filled environments. Indeed, many smokers favor such laws. Note that while smoking bans are not nudges, they are shoves, even these shoves do not seem to have led to a batch of similar crackdowns in other domains. I have not seen any municipality institute a ban on loud talking in restaurants, for example, though come to think of it…

David Brooks points to an article on parents spending more time with their children. There's an education gap, i.e. before "1995, mothers spent on average 12 hours a week with their children. By 2007, that number had leapt to 21.2 for college-educated moms and 15.9 hours for those with less education." He asks:

I was fascinated by how parental time correlates to education. Is it possible that college-educated parents are spending more time passing down their advantages than other parents? Could it be that the rich replicate themselves by dint of hard work and parental attention, on top of all the other less worthy advantages?

Uncomfortable questions.

Gail Collins replies:

[T]here was lots of other interesting information in that article. One point was that the mothers get more time to spend with their children by doing less housework and cooking. However the fathers get it by spending less time at work.

I’ve read other studies that suggest the younger generation of well-trained professionals is less willing than their parents to devote endless hours to their careers — they want a more balanced life when it comes to work, family and recreation. If that’s true the rich aren’t going to keep their hardest-worker honors for very long. And their poorer brethren can go back to feeling morally superior.