The Dish

Friedersdorf's free advice:

In the effort to end the War on Drugs, I think the fiscal angle is powerful and insufficiently exploited. If social liberals and libertarians can win fiscal conservatives to their side, it may be a tipping point.

"I don’t think we’ve suffered at all from an intelligence standpoint," – Michael Sulick, director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, on the banning of waterboarding.

Here's a truly conservative understanding of change – its inevitability, its concurring sense of loss, a polity's need to adapt and integrate it. Notice that it isn't reactionary; notice that it flees from abstractions; notice that it sees the grand actions of high politics as inextricable from the shifts among the "little platoons" that truly make up society. Notice the embrace of evolution over revolution. Yes, this is a liberal Democrat in name. But in actuality, he is so far away from these crude pieces of shorthand:

"America evolves, and sometimes those evolutions are painful. People don't progress in a straight line. Countries don't progress in a straight line. So there's enormous excitement and interest around the election of an African-American President. It's inevitable that there's going to be some backlash, potentially, to what that means—not in a crudely racist way, necessarily. But it signifies change, in the same way that immigration signifies change, in the same way that a shift from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy signifies change, in the same way that the Internet signifies change and terrorism signifies change. And so I think that nobody should have ever been under the illusion—certainly I wasn't, and I was very explicit about this when I campaigned—that by virtue of my election, suddenly race problems would be solved or conversely that the American people would want to spend all their time talking about race. I think it signifies progress, but the progress preceded the election. The progress facilitated the

election.

The progress has to do with the day-to-day interactions of people who are working together and going to church together and teaching their kids to treat everybody equally and fairly. All those little interactions that are taking place across the country add up to a more just, more tolerant, society. But that's an ongoing process. It's one that requires each of us, every day, to try to expand our sense of understanding. And there are going to be folks who don't want to promote that understanding because they're afraid of the future. They don't like that evolution. They think, in some fashion, that it will disadvantage them or, in some sense, diminishes the past. I tend to be fairly forgiving about the anxiety that people feel about change because I think, if you're human, you recognize that in yourself."

Wikileaks provides the proof of what looks to me like a clear war-crime:

But these days, Michael, not belonging is a virtue.

Scott Horton tries to see the way forward in Afghanistan with Karzai as leader. Not easy. Skeptics of the case for intervention are not exactly being disproved by events, are they? Maybe failure is the only way for Obama to do what we must do eventually: leave.

Nick Carr predicts:

[T]he model of book reading (and hence book writing) the iPad promotes seems fated, in time, to become the dominant one. The book itself, in this model, becomes an app, a multihypermediated experience to click through rather than a simple sequence of pages to read through. To compete with the iPad, the current top-selling e-reader, Amazon's Kindle, will no doubt be adding more bells and whistles to its suddenly tired-seeming interface.

This may indeed happen and it may indeed change the way "books" are "read". But I remain convinced that there is a singular experience – of devoting time to read a writer's sustained and crafted words of more than, say, 50,000 words – that cannot be supplanted by anything else. Maybe this solitary absorption of another's words will become the activity of a precious few. But anyone seeking wisdom or learning over knowledge and entertainment will still look for it. And treasure it.

Tech-guru Cory Doctorow doesn't like the iPad:

[C]learly there's a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there's also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can't open it, you don't own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better.

The way you improve your iPad isn't to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn't a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it's a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

Image of the iPad's secret internal structure via Buzzfeed.

Sean Carroll counters Sam Harris:

Attempts to derive…[values from facts] are like attempts to reach an odd number by adding together even numbers. If someone claims that they’ve done it, you don’t have to check their math; you know that they’ve made a mistake.

Sam responds to his critics:

Carroll encourages us to just admit that a universal conception of human values is a pipe dream. Thereafter, those of us who want to make life on earth better, or at least not worse, can happily collaborate, knowing all the while that we are seeking to further our merely provincial, culturally constructed notions of moral goodness. Once we have our values in hand, and cease to worry about their relationship to the Truth, science can help us get what we want out of life. 

There are many things wrong with this approach. The deepest problem is that it strikes me as patently mistaken about the nature of reality and about what we can reasonably mean by words like “good,” “bad,” “right,” and “wrong.” In fact, I believe that we can know, through reason alone, that consciousness is the only intelligible domain of value. What’s the alternative? Imagine some genius comes forward and says, “I have found a source of value/morality that has absolutely nothing to do with the (actual or potential) experience of conscious beings.” Take a moment to think about what this claim actually means. Here’s the problem: whatever this person has found cannot, by definition, be of interest to anyone (in this life or in any other). Put this thing in a box, and what you have in that box is—again, by definition—the least interesting thing in the universe.

The Onion has the latest.