The Dish

Budapest, Hungary, 3.41 pm

Mark Oppenheimer of Mother Jones profiles an Atlantic alum:

And so we know at least three things about Ross Douthat—the devoutly Catholic, anti-porn, pro-abstinence, pro-life prodigy of punditry. First, he's not always sure that he's right. Second, he has gay friends. Third, he cares what they think. Which is consistent with what I have learned in conversations with Douthat, his parents, and many of his friends and colleagues, and in reading nearly everything he has ever published. His comfort with complexity, and with those who disagree with him—along with his somewhat unconventional upbringing, his unorthodox ideas on abortion law, and his embrace of both popular culture and highbrow literature—make him a surprising conservative writer.

Only if you take 'conservatism' to reflect the current melange of populism, fundamentalism, ideology and an unrestrained love of power. Ross' conservatism is in the Buckley lineage. He may be the last one left.

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I want to post again the full Q and A yesterday between Obama and the Republican leadership. It felt so good to watch and listen because it finally brought us a conversation – rather than a shouting match over a canyon. So much of American politics is debate conducted at a distance, through ads or soundbites or various talking points that never actually engage one another in debate. Reared in the British debate tradition – I debated through high-school and college, becoming President of the Oxford Union in 1983 – this has always felt to me like the biggest drawback of the American system.

The point of debate is to clarify things, to find where the real points of disagreement are, and to assess them in that context of actual alternatives. All last year we had a rather wonkish debate going on about the details of health insurance reform – how to insure 40 million people without breaking the bank, how to expand insurance with the cooperation of insurance and drug companies, how to curtail costs, how to pay for it, etc. I don't blame people for finding their eyes glazing over. Mine tend to as well. And I don't blame people for watching the sausage-making in Washington and feeling nauseated.

But the Dish forced me to grapple with these arguments and to subject my knee-jerk resistance to this topic to yield to a deeper understanding of how crucial it is for our fiscal future – and our moral present. Your emails brought home to me the desperation out there – not of the idle or irresponsible, but of those who had done all they could to take care of themselves and were rendered indigent or sick or terrified for no fault of their own. Finding a way to get insurance against the exigencies of human life, of which illness is a prime example, is not socialism. It's insurance. it also helps labor mobility, reduces crippling anxiety, and is fundamentally humane. Hayek again:

Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision.

Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state's helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong… Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make the provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken," – The Road To Serfdom (Chapter 9).

This argument seems to have been lost on many of my more rigid libertarian friends out there.

But outside this reasoned debate, we had people and politicians and charlatans like Beck and Levin and Limbaugh turning understandable anxieties about this process into hysteria and hyperbole and panic. The reaction was so severe on the tea-party right that it seemed simply impossible to counter. You can't reason people out of total hysteria or utter contradiction: "Get the government out of Medicare!"

But here are the obvious facts. The president wants to find a way to get private insurance to 40 million people who don't have it, but can turn up in emergency rooms in desperation, cost far more than if they'd had preventive care, and keep pushing up costs for everyone else. The Republicans have no such plans. From the NYT's fact-check today:

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the Republican bill would extend insurance coverage to about 3 million people by 2019, while leaving about 52 million uninsured (PDF). (Find the original Prescriptions blog post on the cost analysis of the House Republicans’ bill here.)

The House Democrats’ bill, by contrast, would extend health benefits to roughly 36 million people over the same time period, leaving about 18 million uninsured (PDF), according to the budget office. The cost of the insurance coverage provisions in the House Democrats’ bill was about $1.05 trillion over 10 years, according to the budget office, while the cost of coverage provisions in the Republicans’ bill would be just $61 billion.

Republican leaders had said all along that expanding health insurance coverage was not a main goal of their bill, because they viewed it as unaffordable. Instead, they had focused on narrowly tailoring their bill to reduce health care costs.

So if you want to insure 40 million people, back the president. If you want to continue the current system's failure to do so, back the GOP. I like the idea of the GOP's HSAs, but when you look at the details, you see that they cannot even come close to helping the actual uninsured to get insurance. As for the notion of just ending the obvious cruelties and anxieties of the current system, the only way to do that without insurance companies drastically increasing premiums, and forcing more people to lose insurance, is a mandate to bring as many people into the system as possible, to ensure that the most vulnerable are helped out by many more.

As for cost controls, the Senate bill has as many pilot schemes and considered options to make a serious start on that. Nothing is assured. Which is why this is the beginning of a process not the end. If we stop examining these cost controls and ensuring they are maintained, if we do not monitor the Congress to ensure that Medicare cuts are real, then the GOP skepticism is warranted. But to say that none of this could ever work is not conservative or empirical, it's nihilist and ideological.

I really do beg my conservative and libertarian friends to look at this problem pragmatically and not ideologically. We have a very serious public policy problem. No one doubts that. We have a new president with an historic opportunity to enact a bill that is right in the center of serious policy debates. And yet the GOP response has been to try and make it his "Waterloo" for primarily partisan political reasons. 

I also beg my liberal and independent readers to think about this some more and increase pressure on their congressmen and Senators to get this done. Now, while we still can.

Greg Lukianoff examines the enduring pattern of censorship on college campuses, beginning with this egregious example:

In 2007 a student working his way through college was found guilty of racial harassment for reading a book in public. Some of his co-workers had been offended by the book’s cover, which included pictures of men in white robes and peaked hoods along with the tome’s title, Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The student desperately explained that it was an ordinary history book, not a racist tract, and that it in fact celebrated the defeat of the Klan in a 1924 street fight. Nonetheless, the school, without even bothering to hold a hearing, found the student guilty of “openly reading [a] book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject.”

Just this week, a school district in California barred dictionaries from the classroom after a parent complained about a child reading the definition of "oral sex". And in Texas, the state board of education accidentally banned a popular children's book, among others, due to confusion over the author's name. For good measure, a county in Virginia just withdrew an unbowdlerized edition of Anne Franks' diary because of homoerotic themes.

Amanda Ripley tries to answer the question in the current Atlantic. A sizable excerpt:

Great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’ When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.” Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing.

Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.

But when Farr took his findings to teachers, they wanted more. “They’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah. Give me the concrete actions. What does this mean for a lesson plan?’” So Farr and his colleagues made lists of specific teacher actions that fell under the high-level principles they had identified. For example, one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake.

(Video hat tip: TED)

Ryan Avent has an interesting theory:

When housing costs are high, high productivity workers will opt in because they know that their skills will allow them to earn enough to justify the higher housing costs. And firms may want to locate in a particular area because high housing costs will sort the local labour market for them — they don’t have to do as much work to hire a talented worker.

This topic, naturally, has stimulated quite a response. A reader writes:

Your reader wrote: "The main sin is that masturbation (with minuscule exception) involves fantasy which is a distortion or absence of reality. In other words, it is a lie." Interestingly, this was just the sort objection that clergy had to plays in the Middle Ages and in Shakespeare and Jonson's days, namely that acting or any kind of playing pretend was a distortion of reality and a lie. The idea your reader is gesturing at makes a certain kind of sense, but it is simply not applied consistently, and no one would want it to be.

I have heard such arguments before, and while they make sense from a certain perspective, this is a place where taking a more pragmatic moral stance would better serve all those humans who have to live with such moral strictures. Having grown up in an Evangelical Christian church, I have spent way too many years of my life hung up on sexuality, including masturbation.

Telling teenagers in particular that both premarital sex and masturbation are sin, while providing no outlet for their proverbial raging hormones other than the delayed gratification of an ill-prepared prepared rush into marriage in their early twenties, sets an impossible and unhealthy standard. I can remember actually hoping for nocturnal emissions which were the only unconscious, and therefore sinless, form of sexual enjoyment. It is a wonder people manage to become healthy adults after an upbringing like that.

Well, most don't. Look at the Catholic priesthood for what happens to those who take these strictures more seriously than others. Another writes:

Allow me to weigh in briefly. I would like to be utterly tactless. No person, especially, one who is self declared 'person of faith' is going to lecture me about fantasy and lies.

Another:

The real objection the Church has isn't that you are indulging in a lie. It is that you are indulging. The pleasure of any sexual activity, solo or otherwise, is a very inconvenient reality for the Church. One that priests are no better at denying themselves of than the rest of us. As much as the rational side of us might want to define sex as a utilitarian function, used only for procreation, no amount of scholarship can change the fact that it's fun, that it feels good. That, at its best, it is ecstatic. Certainly not the kind of thing you want people engaging in if you're trying to get them to forget about this world and focus on the next one.

On a personal note, my first wife, raised Catholic, had a great deal of guilt and anxiety about sex, and we had a truly awful sex life. Masturbation, although at times something of an indulgent vice, was also an activity I credit with keeping me somewhat sane through a highly frustrating time of my life, sexually speaking.

I can think of some Irish priests that maybe should have done a little more fantasizing and masturbating. Maybe not a long term answer, and certainly less fulfilling on so many levels than good sex mutually shared. But surely better that than preying on acolytes.

A reader writes:

I loved the View from Your Recession email from the gardening software developer. I too put in a garden this year, and bought a chest freezer and froze part of my harvest, as well as dabbling a little in pickling (with mixed results; I’ve got a lot to learn). He’s right; it’s incredibly fulfilling to garden, and to generally have more of a hand in the food you eat.

I learned you can freeze tomatoes whole and, months later, just pop them into stews and soups. I always feel absurdly glad and proud when I do this, but why not? Growing our own food is a key accomplishment of the human race, and connecting to that feels great. We’re eating better AND cheaper, and will definitely keep it going even when the economy perks up.

In the current issue of the Atlantic, Caitlan Flanagan has a much different take on the subject – that gardening in California public schools is undermining education standards. Money quote:

If this patronizing agenda were promulgated in the Jim Crow South by a white man who was espousing a sharecropping curriculum for African American students, we would see it for what it is: a way of bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might become troublesome if they actually got an education.

Today on the Dish we homed in on the president's speech at the GOP retreat. Reax here. In other news, the GDP went up, people were kidnapping kids in Haiti, Iran fiddled with its flag, Rudy went off the rails again, the "ACORN pimp" spoke out, and California decided to vote on pot.

On the Super Bowl abortion ad, Amy Davidson, Jan Crawford, TNC, Andrew, and a reader sounded off. Nathaniel Franks and Drum discussed DADT, Ezra and Drum tackled Rahm's repositioning on healthcare, Larison and Weigel exposed the GOP's cynicism on spending, and Clive Crook and Andrew went back and forth over Obama's inheritance. Several people dissented over the Alito uproar. The masturbation thread continued here and here.

— C.B.

A reader writes:

I'd like to throw my two cents against one of the points made by Nathaniel Frank:

" -wasted thousands of essential personnel, including Arabic speakers, and filled those slots with ex-convicts and drug abusers"

As a former Arabic linguist in the Air Force, this statement is not only misleading, but it's disingenuous. Arabic speakers in the various branches of the U.S. Military, by the nature of the jobs they are performing, are required to hold one of the most sensitive security clearances granted within the intelligence community. Ex-convicts and drug abusers might get a job as a cook or supply clerk, but they are automatically disqualified from any positions with security clearances.

This is where the actual tragedy is with DADT and its effect on Arabic speakers in the military: it's not that they are being replaced by ex-convicts and drug abusers, it's that they are being replaced by no one. Also, ironically, they are able to walk out of the service right into a contracting job making six figures working for one of the Department of Defense's private contractors who are forbidden to discriminate based on sexual orientation. I'm 100% behind getting rid of DADT as soon as possible, however, I think that Mr. Frank's point plays fast and loose with the truth and is counterproductive to a cause which already has more than enough good sense behind it anyways.