by Belle Waring on January 8, 2012
Did Ron Paul vote for MLK day, as Andrew Sullivan (quoting Chuck Todd) suggested in his debate live-blogging? “9.40 pm. Chuck Todd notes that Ron Paul voted for the MLK national holiday. Gingrich voted against. I find the notion that Ron Paul is a racist to be preposterous.”
Sadly, No!
Ta-Nehisi Coates thoughtfully quotes some Ron Paul newsletters so you don’t have to read them:
Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.
Hate Whitey Day is actually one of my favorite holidays. It doesn’t have all the pressure to be perfect, like Christmas, or everybody getting along, like Thanksgiving. Just white people cowering in their houses/retreating to their heavily armed compounds in rural Oklahoma while America’s non-white population runs riot, more or less totally burning shit down. And the clean-up and re-building costs always add a bump to the January jobs report, as Matthew Yglesias has noted.
The question of whether Ron Paul’s having voted for MLK day would bring about the state of mind in which one would find the charge of racism against Mr. Paul “preposterous” is left as an exercise for the reader.
P.S. The real Sadly, No!
by John Holbo on December 21, 2011
I’d like the survey the CT commentariat about their ebook reading habits, and toss out a few ideas. I’ve made the shift this year. I now read more new books on my iPad than on paper. I also read a lot of comics on the iPad, mostly courtesy of the Comixology app. But let’s start with plain old mostly word productions. [click to continue…]
by Belle Waring on December 20, 2011
Katha Pollit on Hitchens (yes, yes, I’ll stop now). She doesn’t hold her fire. Via Lindsay Beyerstein
Update of sorts: there are lots of high-functioning alcoholics in the world. They manage to keep it together for a long time. When do they come to AA? When they’re 65. What was it like for his family to have to deal with him dying as an active alcoholic? I’ve seen it and it isn’t pretty.
by Belle Waring on December 13, 2011
This excellent article from Mother Jones’ Beth Schwartzapfel details how a guilty rapist tried repeatedly to confess to a crime of which another man had been convicted, only to succeed after the innocent man had died. The ensuing exoneration was so complete that then-Governor Rick Perry had to issue a pardon to the dead man, not something Texas governors are generally inclined to do. Rick Perry’s faith in Texas’ system, however, remains serenely unshaken.
A string of devastating stories has put Texas justice, in particular, under a cloud. In addition to Cole’s postmortem exoneration and the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, chronicled in The New Yorker in 2009, there is also the case of Anthony Graves, who served 18 years for a gruesome murder while the true killer confessed again and again. Graves was finally freed in 2010 following a Texas Monthly exposé.
Cole, Willingham, and Graves were all convicted under prior Texas governors. But Perry has done little to improve the state’s criminal-justice system, which has almost a million people in its grip. In 2001, he vetoed a bill banning the execution of the mentally disabled. In 2003, he cut the prison system’s budget by $230 million, slashing education programs, drug treatment, and food; when an independent auditor warned that was untenable, Perry cut the auditor’s office too. In 2007, his administration backed a bill making some child sex offenders eligible for the death penalty. While Perry has signed legislative reforms covering eyewitness identification and access to DNA testing, the system still offers scant options for the many people imprisoned for crimes they did not commit.
Radley Balko’s blog The Agitator remains an indispensable source of information on cases like these, as well as the uncountable cases in which the War on [Some People Who Use Some Kinds] of Drugs* has metastasized into a cancer that gets untrained local law enforcement rolling out in surplus military gear to perform ill-advised and pointless SWAT-style raids. (With tanks. No, really.) And shoot everybody’s dog when they get there. And maybe their grandmother. Seriously, don’t read the blog if you don’t want to hear about the cops shooting someone’s dog every goddamn day. His recent coverage of the OWS movement has been…how shall I say this…not all I would have hoped from a lover of liberty, but no one’s obliged to agree with me all the time, and it’s not as though it’s rendered the blog unreadable or something.
*Courtesy of Lawyers, Guns and Money. Like Sadly No!, we are aware of all internet traditions.
by Brian on December 8, 2011
Eric Schwitzgebel has “a fascinating post”:http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2011/12/baby-boom-philosophy-bust.html about how little influence baby boomers have had in philosophy. He uses a nice objective measure; looking at which philosophers are most cited in the “Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy”:http://plato.stanford.edu. He finds that of the 25 most cited philosophers, 15 were born between 1931 and 1945, and just 2 were born between 1946 and 1960.
[click to continue…]
by Henry Farrell on December 7, 2011
Tom Bartlett describes the efforts of two psychologists to publish replication results for an article, which had purported to show that people could use ESP to predict whether they would be shown erotic pictures in the future. The replication found no observable effect, but (according to the authors’ account of it)had a difficult time finding a publisher.
bq. Here’s the story: we sent the paper to the journal that Bem published his paper in, and they said ‘no, we don’t ever accept straight replication attempts’. We then tried another couple of journals, who said the same thing. We then sent it to the _British Journal of Psychology,_ who sent it out for review. For whatever reason (and they have apologised, to their credit), it was quite badly delayed in their review process, and they took many months to get back to us.
bq. When they did get back to us, there were two reviews, one very positive, urging publication, and one quite negative. This latter review didn’t find any problems in our methodology or writeup itself, but suggested that, since the three of us (Richard Wiseman, Chris French and I) are all skeptical of ESP, we might have unconsciously influenced the results using our own psychic powers. … Anyway, the BJP editor agreed with the second reviewer, and said that he’d only accept our paper if we ran a fourth experiment where we got a believer to run all the participants, to control for these experimenter effects. We thought that was a bit silly, and said that to the editor, but he didn’t change his mind. We don’t think doing another replication with a believer at the helm is the right thing to do … [the] experimental paradigms were designed so that most of the work is done by a computer and the experimenter has very little to do (this was explicitly because of his concerns about possible experimenter effects).
Although the Bartlett piece doesn’t make this suggestion, I can’t help wondering whether the reviewer was one of the authors of the original piece. Myself, I’ve had a couple of interesting interactions with editors over the years, but nothing that even comes close to matching this. I suppose you could make an argument that if you think that psychic powers are plausible subjects of investigation, you have to account for the possibility of compromising psychic effects, but the potential for abuse (e.g through claims about ever-more speculative ways in which the experiment could be compromised) is obvious.
by Henry Farrell on November 26, 2011
bq. And so, in yet another triumph, the market mechanism has allocated a scarce resource, viz., the turkey, to its most efficient use, viz., being turned into artificial shit. What makes this the most efficient use of the scarce resource? Why, simply that it goes to the user who will pay the highest price for it.
“More here from Cosma”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/841.html.
by John Holbo on September 25, 2011
No, I’m not thinking about our Daniel. I’m working up to a proper follow-up to my conservative cognitive dissonance posts. This isn’t really it, alas, but it’s a start.
It makes no sense for conservatives like Jim Geraghty to express this sort of concern about the booing of Stephen Hill at the GOP debate. (Hill is, as you probably know, the gay soldier who asked about DADT):
Rereading the transcript of last night’s debate, I am struck that Rick Santorum did not thank Stephen Hill, a gay soldier in the U.S. Army currently in Iraq, for his service. Nor did anyone else on that stage.
Whatever you think of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” or homosexuality, Hill is risking his life on behalf of his country.
And for sure it doesn’t make sense for Santorum himself to have responded to subsequent questions about the booing, like so: [click to continue…]
by John Q on September 8, 2011
As rediscovered by Salvor Hardin, in Foundation by Isaac Asimov:
“A horse having a wolf as a powerful and dangerous enemy lived in constant fear of his life. Being driven to desperation, it occurred to him to seek a strong ally. Whereupon he approached a man, and offered an alliance, pointing out that the wolf was likewise an enemy of the man. The man accepted the partnership at once and offered to kill the wolf immediately, if his new partner would only co-operate by placing his greater speed at the man’s disposal. The horse was willing, and allowed the man to place bridle and saddle upon him. The man mounted, hunted down the wolf, and killed him.
“The horse, joyful and relieved, thanked the man, and said: ‘Now that our enemy is dead, remove your bridle and saddle and restore my freedom.’
“Whereupon the man laughed loudly and replied, ‘The hell you say. Giddy-ap, Dobbin,’ and applied the spurs with a will.”
Further reading from the ACLU (via Glenn Greenwald).
by Michael Bérubé on September 3, 2011
[Now updated for clarity and symbolic reasons!]
I can see from the comments on <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2011/09/02/romney-and-obama/”>John’s post below</a> that there is some confusion out there about the way the American political system works. Specifically, there seems to be some serious misunderstanding of the dynamics of national elections in the US. So let me try to clear this up once and for all.
You are welcome.
Basically, post-Watergate America works like this. It’s what you might call a “twelve-step” program.
[click to continue…]
by John Holbo on September 3, 2011
Brief thoughts about that Bill Keller op-ed on candidates’ religions, and the kerfuffle that kicked up. But only by way of kicking off in the direction of what’s really going on here. The religion stuff needs a more general frame.
Keller is just being reasonable. If candidates say ‘my faith is a private matter and all that need concern the voters is how I will conduct myself in office,’ fine. But if candidates play up faith, for political advantage; if they announce that their religious views and values inform their political views and policy proposals, then obviously that makes religion fair game. Because in politics, your politics has to be fair game. Keller’s critics suggest that arriving at any such conclusion is tantamount to proposing something like a religious test for public office. Or worse! It’s an attempt to ban Christians from public life! But no. He’s only ruling out one or another of a couple possible norms that are so absurd that no one would ever advocate them explicitly. That you can’t fault politicians for concealing their policy objectives, so long as the politicians favor the policy on religious grounds. Or that you can’t fault politicians’ policy proposals, period, so long as they advocate the policy on religious grounds. Something like that. That’s nuts, so Keller is just being reasonable.
But, like I said, I don’t think this is the right way to think about this issue. For one thing, it misses that the religious case is just a special case of a more general phenomenon. Let me switch over to a question Kevin Drum asked last week: why do Republicans get a free pass? He’s absolutely right that they do. [click to continue…]
by Henry Farrell on August 11, 2011
Matt Yglesias “notes Tim Lee’s editing rule”:http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/08/11/293442/breakfast-links-august-11-2011/ that you should never use the prefix ‘cyber’ unless you’re William Gibson. A cyber-rule aptly illustrated in the cyber-breach by “this particular cyber-contribution to cyber-knowledge”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/opinion/23iht-edbremmer23.html from Ian Bremmer and Parag Khanna.
bq. Cyberteeth bared
bq. 2010 was the year that removed all doubt that cybersecurity is now a geopolitical problem. … Yet WikiLeaks was far from the only big cyberstory in 2010. … We also learned that cyberattacks are no longer simply a weapon for petty criminals and teenagers. …In fact, WikiLeaks showed that a cyber-villain can prove just as elusive and decentralized as Al Qaeda. … Julian Assange, will probably have many days in court. If he is prosecuted in the United States, some will cast him as the world’s first cybermartyr. … will defend that freedom with more acts of cyberrevenge. … In the past, corporate willingness to provide the U.S. government with sensitive data hasn’t been hugely consequential for these firms, because they didn’t yet face a powerful cyberenemy capable of launching sophisticated attacks.
In fairness to the authors, they can’t be blamed for the “Cyberteeth” headline, which one can only imagine was a subtle act of revenge by whichever poor misfortunate bastard of a sub-editor had the grim task of polishing this cyberturd. The rest is all theirs though.
by John Holbo on August 7, 2011
This one goes with the others. (Having posted two, it would be more strange not to post a third.)
In other news, I notice that Erick Erickson has some difficulty with the is/ought distinction. He reasons that, since Republicans in fact will not raise taxes under any circumstances, it follows that one can’t fault Republicans for not raising taxes. That would be like blaming the rain for raining. Or something. A nice illustration of the advantages and disadvantages of extreme intransigence for political life, perhaps.
by Henry Farrell on July 15, 2011
Rupert does his first post-crisis interview, with “the Wall Street Journal”:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304521304576446261304709284.html, naturally.
bq. In an interview, Mr. Murdoch said News Corp. has handled the crisis “extremely well in every way possible,” making just “minor mistakes.”
Indeed – News Corporation has done a quite wonderful job handling the mess – with a few, notably rare exceptions.
Should anyone be interested I did a “Bloggingheads”:http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/37406 yesterday with Felix Salmon on the Murdoch scandal and a few related topics (this in turn led to a couple of talking-heads type appearances on BBC channels today, but I really can’t think I said anything in my allotted 90 second slots that’s surprising enough to be worth hunting down).
by John Holbo on July 11, 2011
Alex Tabbarok has written an odd post, whose reasoning, were it sound, would seem to license the following inference. Since, as Bastiat says, “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else,” John Cleese’s fatal mistake in this debate is to admit the existence of Roman aqueducts. (That really puts him on an ontological slippery slope to sanitation and education and all manner of entification.)
But seriously. I guess I can see arguing that tax credits aren’t, per se, social programs – but aren’t they social engineering, hmmm yes? (Wouldn’t it follow that they couldn’t be faulted for being the latter, if they can’t be credited with being the former?) But I find it hard to see how 529 plans could, strictly speaking, fail of bare existence. (If you think otherwise, I’ve got a Pentagon you might like to levitate.) Arguing that if something didn’t exist, the private sector could take up the slack is one thing. But arguing that because you could – oh, say, hire a private protection outfit – that therefore the police actually don’t exist … ?
Finally, I have a feeling that Tabarrok would not, if caught in another mood, express a preference for a tax code pockmarked with various and sundry breaks, giveaways and loopholes over one lacking these features, commonly regarded as unlovely by economists. But since Tabarrok’s stated position is now that such things are rightly regarded as precious islands of civil freedom, in a socialist sea of serfdom … oh I give up.