The Dish

Reihan qualifies the term:

I'm perfectly happy to concede that the idea of meritocracy is "largely mythical," not least because, like all good Hayekians, I'm skeptical of the idea that we can construct a coherent metric for merit or desert; this is part of the case for decentralized markets: it reflects the pluralism of highly complex societies. The argument for decentralized markets is in large part a negative argument: while we can imagine a wide array of schemes for assigning a coherent metric for merit or desert, it is far harder to imagine a scheme that wouldn't unravel under the real-world pressures of evolving tastes, values, and perceived social needs.

A reader writes:

I've been struck by the sense of — well, futility, I guess — expressed by some of the older abuse victims in your reader comments, particularly when the abuse occurred prior to the last few decades.

My father once told me a similar story that's haunted me ever since.

While supervising oil company workers in 1950s West Texas, my father (a non-Catholic) was once approached by a male worker requesting the day off. This was unusual, and my father asked why. The man explained that a delegation of parents was going to talk to the bishop, located several towns away. The delegation — fathers, mostly — wanted to complain about a priest at their church who was molesting little children. My father gave him the day off.

Later he asked the fellow what had come of it. "He won't do anything," the man shrugged, adding: "We're just going to go to another parish."

I know Catholic priests have done much good, particularly in economically-depressed areas, but my sense is this sexual abuse issue has been going on for a very very long time.

Another writes:

At our Easter family gathering, while discussing the sex abuse scandal with my five ex-Catholic brothers and sisters, my 89 year old mom surprised us by saying my father quit being an acolyte in the thirties because of a priest hitting on him. When my Dad complained to his domineering mother about the priest, she didn't believe him. Astonishingly, my father bypassed his own mother's doubt and quit being an altar boy.

As a grown man with a family, my father still made my Episcopalian mom raise us Catholic but he never seemed that enthusiastic about the religion that he forced on his family. I was actually the most ardent Catholic and to this day, I have the most anger about Catholicism. One time, my grade school nun had me and the other kids with non-Catholic parents stand up in front of the class to tell us that we better pray because those parents would not make it to heaven. It's no small wonder that I had chronic insomnia as a child. Admittedly, I was a sensitive girl who cried easily and perhaps I took it all too seriously.

My brothers and sisters were all, meh, who cares what the nuns or priests say. I was a ripe candidate to be overpowered and manipulated by the church, thank God, my Dad was not entirely like me.

I took it seriously too. Another:

My Irish/American father and his brother were altar boys in the early 50s. When I was growing up (early 70s), my cousin Bobby and I asked our parents why we weren't altar boys. They essentially beat us that day, saying that we would NEVER be allowed to be altar boys. I think my father was even pissed when I became a 'reader' at church after I moved out of my parents' house. He was furious.

And yet, Mom and Dad and My Uncle and family would dutifully go to church every single Sunday and Holy Day. I never got to ask my father or uncle about this – but in my heart I think I know why.

(Photo illustration by Jill Greenberg.)

From Sean Carroll's second response to Sam Harris:

Let’s say that killing a seventy-year-old person (against their will) and transplanting their heart into the body of a twenty-year old patient might add more years to the young person’s life than the older person might be expected to have left. Despite the fact that a naive utility-counting would argue in favor of the operation, most people (not all) would judge that not to be moral. But what if a deadly virus threatened to wipe out all of humanity, and (somehow) the cure required killing an unwilling victim? Most people (not all) would argue that we should reluctantly take that step. (Think of how many people are in favor of involuntary conscription.) Does anyone think that empirical research, in neuroscience or anywhere else, is going to produce a quantitative answer to the question of exactly how much harm would need to be averted to justify sacrificing someone’s life? “I have scientifically proven that if we can save the life of 1,634 people, it’s morally right to sacrifice this one victim; but if it’s only 1,633, we shouldn’t do it.”

At bottom, the issue is this: there exist real moral questions that no amount of empirical research alone will help us solve.

A reader writes:

A little cited reason in support of nutritional labeling is diabetes and other conditions.  My daughter is type 1 (the more rare type that has nothing to do with obesity or lack of exercise), and she must count every carb that passes her lips.  If we don't know the carb count, then we have to go online or consult a book, or simply guess.  (Guessing can lead to loads of problems.)  Knowing that a chain must provide nutritional information (which McDonald's mercifully already does) is a wonderful convenience for people like us.  It goes beyond counting calories.  There are a myriad of healthcare conditions which require strict calorie or carbohydrate counting.  This is an unbelievably wonderful thing for all those people who will suddenly find it much more convenient and pleasant to go out to eat once in a while.  So, for us, this is not a nanny state issue.  It is daily life and has nothing to do with politics.

A reader writes:

It would also be interesting to post the view from the statue. You would be looking down on the Berkeley Pit, a gigantic open pit copper mine that swallowed much of uptown Butte, including the town that my grandmother grew up in, Meaderville, and the locally famous Columbia Gardens. They closed the mine a couple of decades ago and it subsequently turned into a large toxic lake. They need to keep hazing birds away from this environmental nightmare because coming into contact with the water kills them.

The pit is the US government's most costly hazardous waste clean-up project.

Today on the Dish we kept with the WikiLeaks controversy. Reax here. More Greenwald coverage here. Readers dissented with Andrew and offered their expert opinions here and here.

In Vatican coverage, reports of alleged abuse continued to flood in while readers continued to share their own experiences. Dreher and Andrew debated the bureaucracy of the Church, Mary Gordon defended her Catholicism, and NRO ended its silence by praising JPII.

Looking abroad, the Brown government announced the election and Massie disagreed with Andrew over Obama's Toryism. Iran rumbled with reformist activity, Avigdor Lieberman heightened his rhetoric, and TNC tackled Gettleman over his African war analysis.

In Palin talk, Andrew countered David Carr over her "authenticity," a reader backed him up, and Allahpundit proposed that she support pot.  Readers revolted over Doctorow's view of the iPad, challenged the "childless = green" argument, and discussed fast-food labeling. More CNN scrutiny here and a cannabis update here. Malkin here, End Of Gay Culture here, and guys with felines here.

POTUS got game.

— C.B.

Arguing against the conventional wisdom, Bruce Schneier writes that young people care about it:

Privacy is about control. When your health records are sold to a pharmaceutical company without your permission; when a social networking site changes your privacy settings to make what used to be visible only to your friends visible to everyone; when the NSA eavesdrops on everyone's e-mail conversations–your loss of control over that information is the issue. We may not mind sharing our personal lives and thoughts, but we want to control how, where and with whom. A privacy failure is a control failure.

Alex Massie begs David Cameron to leave him alone.

Maciek Nabrdalik is photographing Holocaust survivors. The caption on this photo:

Sabina Nawara survived three Nazi concentration camps: KL Auschwitz number 45712, KL Ravensbruck, and KL Buckenwald.

More images at the artist's website.

(Hat tip: Daniel)

Vivian Gornick reviews Michael Sandel's new book on justice. A taste:

Let’s go back to the Golden Rule. As I grew older, I saw—with a shock from which I don’t think I ever recovered—that this Rule, while excellent in theory, was not workable in practice. Transgression was alarmingly ever-present. People simply could not accord each other the “justice” of treating one another as they themselves wished to be treated. Let me revise that. Forget people. It was I who couldn’t help transgressing. With all the good will in the world, I soon came to see that I myself was a swamp of fears, fantasies, and defenses that caused me to forfeit the integrity needed to act with Golden Rule fairness toward those around me.

My temper was ungovernable; an aggravated sense of insecurity caused me, in exchange after exchange, relationship after relationship, year after year, to do exactly what the Rule said it was impermissible to do: I scorned and humiliated, I challenged and confronted, dismissed and discounted; suffered when I acted badly, but could not bring myself under control. The source of the transgression lay deep in the wounded unconscious: it commanded me. I loved many people in the abstract—felt for them, sympathized with them, romanticized them—but I could not give them the only thing that mattered: what Kant called “respect,” the one basic recognition required to bypass that fatal sense of degradation. In short, the chaos within prevented me from acting as though others were as real to me as I was to myself, although in theory they were. And here we come to a crux of the matter.

It is this—the chaos within—that is hardly ever addressed in Justice; although it is this, precisely, that is responsible for the all-important gap between practice and theory.

(Hat tip: 3QD)