Solid As It Ever Was

Julian Sanchez, who began this latest round of the free will debate, feels that Dish readers are in error:

[O]rdinary decisionmaking does not seem like other kinds of “unfree” action—doing something by reflex or under hypnosis, maybe. Also, we’re no more directly aware of the neural underpinnings of our decisionmaking than we are of, say, our sensory processing. And of course, we aren’t aware of what the results of our deliberation will be in advance—otherwise, why deliberate?—so they will be necessarily “open ended” in that sense. But to call these things an “illusion of free will” just seems like a mistake.

It is as if someone had told me for the first time about subatomic theory, and I mused that I nevertheless have this illusion of a solid desk chair, when after all, it is really these clouds of quarks and whatnot. And this would be silly: The parameters of “solid” and “desk chair” are given by ordinary life, and within those bounds the chair is exactly as solid as it ever was. A theory about the microstructure of the chair could notbe in conflict with, or prove “illusory,” my ordinary perceptions,  because they were not perceptions of the microstructure in the first place.

The same goes for claims that we “act as if” we are free, or “cannot help talking as though” we were free. 

Dishness, A View

Patrick Appel:

The Dish is trying to become a go-to place for intelligent debate online, to suck the marrow out of the hive mind of the blogosphere.

Trying is the operative word. And it's work:

I get up around 8 am, check Memeorandum, and skim new items in my RSS reader until about 10 am. As I’m reading, I open around fifty posts in tabs for closer inspection. I then read through those tabs, delete most of them, and draft the best. According to Google Reader, I have 1,086 blogs in my RSS reader and have read 16,070 posts in the last 30 days. This is down from a high of about 32,000 posts during the height of the election. 

GOP Regrets

Douthat does a health care reform pre-mortem:

In the end, when the history of the health care debate is written, I don’t think any of the choices that G.O.P. lawmakers made this year will loom particularly large. The choices that they made, or didn’t make, across the last fifteen years are what made all the difference. Between the defeat of Clintoncare and the election of Barack Obama, the Republicans had plenty of chances to take ownership of the health care issue and pass a significant reform along more free-market, cost-effective lines. They didn’t. The system deteriorated on their watch instead. And now they’re reaping the consequences.

That seems a pretty fair assessment to me although it doesn't absolve the GOP of abdicating all responsibility this year to place country before party. By that, I mean constructively engaging the process to improve the result rather than total oppositionism and partisanship. But that is also a function of the past many years as the GOP put Rovianism before any coherent governing philosophy and culture war before any real attempt to innovate policy or better understand government.

The View From Your Recession: Checking Back In

We thought it might be a useful way to check in anecdotally with the impact of the recession if we went back and emailed various readers who sent in their personal "views from the recession" this past year. Here's an update from the ten-year veteran of TV scriptwriting who was considering a jump to law school because of the industry's bleak environment. His friend was laid off in the writers' strike and hadn't been able to find work for over a year, so he was close to offering his friend temporary quarters with him and his girlfriend. The original post is here. The reader writes:

I began searching for work in the legal field in earnest to get away from my demanding job and my abusive boss. After things deteriorated with my boss and he started to insult me on a nearly daily basis I decided to dedicate myself to studying for the LSAT full time. Luckily I was able to arrange being laid off so I was able to collect unemployment. On my last day my boss called me a "fucking moron" for an obviously innocent (and small) mistake. Unable to say anything back and put my unemployment at risk I bit my tongue and pressed on to bigger and hopefully better things. Scared as heck that I was now unemployed in a worsening job market, I pressed on and spent 6 hours a day studying for the LSAT for the next three months, got my results and have now applied to a lot of law schools.

I also proposed to my girlfriend and have begun a lot of big picture planning for our lives together. It's disorienting, even as a 30-something to be making choices that will affect your life for literally decades.

Maybe i'm just a kid at heart but I feel these decisions are so big they can't possibly be mine to make. In the next 8 months we will plan, pay for and execute a wedding, sell our condo, buy two new cars, move, I'll start law school and my fiancee will start a new job. Stress isn't so much an occurrence as it is our environment.

Further complicating matters is the fact that I will be taking on six figures of debt and graduating into an unknowable job market as an older first year lawyer.

 It's no small stress that I may be in a worse position in 4 years than I am currently (and as many a law advisor has told me, the legal job market is "in flux"). My only counter-move to this has been to strongly consider doing a dual degree JD/MBA program in the hopes that the extra year of schooling will help my marketability (at the cost of another year out of the job market as well as adding to the pile of debt). After the holidays if I can scrape enough money together I plan on trying to learn a foreign language (something that's been very difficult with my dyslexia) in the hopes that that too will help my marketability when i enter the job market. We'll see if there is a happy ending here. I plan on being a dedicated husband and a good provider. I just hope that my current all-in bet isn't something that we'll regret for a long long time. Knowing that money is the number one stress for relationships it's hard not to feel that the bet on law school isn't more than just a bet on a career path.

As for my friend, the job market never seemed to turn around for him. He attempted to transition into a career with solar energy companies but the work just wasn't there yet (and he had no experience). Things got progressively worse and he ended up not moving in with me. Instead he sold a lot of his possessions, elected to return to the mid-west and move in with his parents. I know this isn't the end of his story and I hope that he'll be able to get everything together for himself and attack life and the job market again after some time to reflect and collect himself. As someone who's had to move in with his parents after he'd long since considered himself established I know how difficult living with your parents can be on your sense of pride and purpose. I hope that in his private moments he sees the hope and possibility that still exists for him and he doesn't allow his current situation to erode his pride and fervor that he attacks life with.

Sadly he is not the only close friend who is going through a difficult time right now. The best news I've heard any of my friends getting in the past 6 months was a friend of mine with two children under the age of 3, a hefty mortgage and a stay at home wife who was laid off unexpectedly from his law firm 4 months ago who just found work this past week. The news made me so happy I teared up. I haven't been that happy (aside from my engagement) in a long time.

What Krugman Cannot Say

Well, he can say it but he has to withdraw it. Here's an odd sentence from the NYT's op-edder today:

Management wants me to make it clear that in my last column I wasn’t endorsing inappropriate threats against Mr. Lieberman.

Here's presumably what he's referring to:

A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy.

There is no "inappropriate threat" to Lieberman the person here. Just an endorsement, self-consciously hyperbolic, of attacking his public image. Did Lieberman complain?

Fact-Checking Going Rogue Update

It is indeed hard to fact-check a work of fiction, but since the McCain campaign never vetted her and Harper Collins never edited her, someone's gotta do it:

Former Gov. Sarah Palin, who has had a rocky relationship with the state's capital city, says in her book there were some ugly threats made against her daughters while they were attending Juneau schools. Those threats reportedly caused daughter Willow Palin to be removed from the Juneau School District…

So let's check in with reality, shall we?

Former Juneau School District Superintendent Peggy Cowan was superintendent during the period in question and said she never heard of such concerns.

"That was never reported to my office," she said. "I am completely confident that I never heard that."

Cowan was contacted in Barrow, where she is now the superintendent at the North Slope Borough School District.

Had a report been made to Juneau schools, Cowan said she would have worked with the principals at the schools to determine how seriously the threats should be taken and how to ensure the safety of the children.

Juneau Police Chief Greg Browning similarly said his department has no record of ever being alerted to such threats.

His department's school resource officers are in Juneau schools daily, and would likely have been alerted to such threats, had they been made, he said.

The Alaska State Troopers provide a security detail for Palin, but trooper spokeswoman Megan Peters said the first they heard about the allegation was from Palin's book.

Depressing Christmas Songs, Ctd

A reader writes:

Okay, for sheer yule pathos it’s hard to deny this little chestnut a place on your mantle of Christmas depression. Judy Garland singing “After the Holidays” on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Watching this force of nature near her booze-soaked end pleading to an imaginary lover who’s about to bolt is a bummer on so many levels. The weepy piano tinkling at 1:58 with Judy mock reflecting on Christmases past make this the perfect viewing companion to your fourth straight-up glass of Christmas cheer in an empty room poorly illuminated by a dehydrated tree covered in lights you got at WalMart.

Supergay too. Sometimes I suspect Christmas is really a plot to advance the supergay. The kitsch, the artifice, the collective lie of good will, the power of superficiality, the naked materialism: it’s all some super-ironic super-gay joke on all of us, right? Just don’t tell Bill O’Reilly.