The Dish

Some deliciously disturbing shots to get you in the Halloween spirit.

Caleb Crain writes an open letter in response to Mark Greif's On Repressive Sentimentalism:

[Y]ou imply that marriage is a surrender of sexual liberty. I don't think that's accurate. Marriage is Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell standing side by side in the closing scene of His Girl Friday, nattering on with the same jollity when handcuffed to each other as when not handcuffed. Marriage is indifference to handcuffs. There are always opportunities to escape. The strange discovery that makes marriage possible is that one has the liberty not to—the liberty to make the same choice, day after day—and that one happens to want to make a consistent choice. It is a paradox, at least.

Will one happen to want to make the same choice forever? Maybe not. Separation and divorce are always possible, in our world, and maybe they give marriage its poignancy. The possibility of separation proves that no two people stay chained to each other unless they want to. It even seems to be the case that people who want to stay chained to each other sometimes can't manage to. It is at any rate an error to think that marriage is a surrender of liberty. It is an exercise of it.

Julian Sanchez outlines a cognitive bias:

Nietzsche wrote at length about the tendency to define the good as whatever is opposed by some hated other. Unfortunately, he called it “slave morality”—a term I’m not going to touch with a ten-foot pole in the current climate—and only some of what he says about it is really applicable in our context, so I’ll use “oppositional morality” instead. Whatever natural instincts we have toward this kind of binary in-group/out-group thinking are probably exacerbated by a political system that ultimately pushes people to pick one of two viable teams, even though this is a poor fit for the variety of worldviews and interests in a large and diverse population. Otherwise incoherent coalitions are bound together by each defining themselves, somewhat circularly, as the negative of the other.

Scott Adams wonders how much punditry is an act:

I enjoy sampling the content from the far left as well as the far right. When I listen to Limbaugh, I generally have two reactions:

1. I don’t agree with the viewpoint expressed.
2. This man is an entertainment genius.

Talk show hosts have no legal or ethical obligation to do anything but entertain.

And judging by their successes, Limbaugh and Beck are brilliant at their jobs. I find it mind boggling that anyone believes a TV talk host is expressing his own true views.

You could make a case that the things Limbaugh and Beck say influences the gullible masses in ways that are not helpful to society. But that’s probably true of every pundit, left or right. It’s a price of free speech.

Do you think that Limbaugh and Beck have the same views in private as they spray into the entertainmentsphere?

Tony Woodlief asks for economic book recommendations from the left:

The maddening thing about reading Hayek is that I come away thinking, “If only leftists had a proper understanding of economics and society, they would stop their infernal meddling and let people be about the business of living productive lives.”

Then I think that perhaps I’m being just as muddle-headed as I think leftists are. Admittedly, I was a leftist before I read any economics, but maybe I read the wrong kind. Maybe there’s some whole other set of thinking and philosophy out there that will bring a right-thinking person to a leftist point of view.

This got me wondering what books thoughtful leftists and small-c conservatives/small-l libertarians might recommend to one another.

Megan and her commenters take a shot at answering the question.

The Freakonomics sequel is taking some heat for questionable analysis, especially for their writing on climate change. Here's Bradford Plumer:

In just a few dozen pages, Dubner and Levitt manage to repeat the myth that the scientific consensus in the 1970s predicted global cooling (quite untrue), imply that climatologists are unaware of the existence of water vapor (no, they're quite aware), and traffic in the elementary misconception that CO2 hasn't historically driven temperature increases (RealClimate has a good article to help with their confusion). The sad thing is that Dubner and Levitt aren't even engaging in sophisticated climate-skepticism here—there's just a basic unwillingness to gain even a passing acquaintance with the topic. You hardly need to be an award-winning economist to do that.

What's more, as Joe Romm reports, the main scientist that Levitt and Dubner actually interviewed, Ken Caldeira, says they've completely twisted and mischaracterized his views—a glaring bit of journalistic malfeasance. And, as Matt Yglesias points out, one of Dubner and Levitt's arguments rests on the (demonstrably wrong) premise that solar panels are always black. Now, as a journalist, I'm all in favor of having people write about things they're not an expert in—and mistakes do happen—but this is a little absurd.

Stephen J. Dubner addresses the Freakonomics chapter on global warming here but doesn't respond to any of the substantive critiques.

Today on the Dish, Andrew assessed Obama's strategic mind here and here. Steve Coll and Andrew address what the president is confronting in Afghanistan, Julian Sanchez took down the Washington Times over its gay paranoia, and Pareene pwned Hiatt.

Some bizarre balloon-boy footage here and here. Beck's bizarreness continued, with reader reactions here and here.  Creepiness on the far right covered here and here. Palin's chances in the 2012 primary looked good, but, blessedly, her growing unfavorables will stop her (particularly when compared to Obama's).

Our Camo Closet series on DADT continued, and Andrew squeezed in some dog blogging.

— C.B.

A reader writes:

When we were deep in Iraq—say, 2007—there were a lot of folks trying to draw an analogy to Vietnam. I was never particularly comfortable with that one; it didn’t seem apt. But in Afghanistan, it seems *completely* apt. Mountains instead of jungles, but the same unrest in the population; the same difficulties in having a standing fight in which U.S. Military superiority works to our advantage; the same prospect of basically endless war. So what I’m wondering is, if we just up and leave, what’s the problem? Al Qaeda? No; if they are “forced out” of Afghanistan, they’ll just decamp to Pakistan. Or Uzbekhistan, or Syria, or basically anyplace else.

They’re not an army or militia; they’re a terrorist group. We can’t simultaneously force them out of all the countries on Earth; this is not a military operation. They may have laughed at Kerry in 2004 when he pointed that out, but he was right. The sooner our fearless leaders recognize that and pull our chestnuts out of that fire, the better off we’ll be.

Hubris is one of the signs of Imperial collapse. Don’t any of these clowns read history?

Actress Lindsay Lohan at Beverly Hills Municipal Court on October 16, 2009 in Beverly Hills, California. By Nick Ut-Pool/Getty Images.

Sometimes the shrill accusations of being a leftist turncoat rattle me a little. And then I realize I'm not alone:

Increasingly, British Tories wonder what has happened to their American relatives. It’s as if your favorite cousin had a nervous breakdown, found religion, and became an evangelist for an apocalyptic cult prophesying the imminent end of the world as we know and love it.

The scale of this trans-Atlantic distancing was revealed by a survey last year that found that 48 percent of prospective Tory MPs supported Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Tellingly, the Republicans invited to speak at Conservative Party conferences in recent years—Arnold Schwarzenegger and John McCain—are the kind most despised by many grassroots conservatives in the United States.

Beck’s brand of conservatism could scarcely be more alien to a Brit. Its startling popularity in the United States would once have been an underground phenomenon; now, thanks to satellite television, the issues and attitudes that animate the conservative base can be seen, in all their gruesome glory, across the world.