"Does Society Encourage Genital Assault Against Men?"

Dr. Helen asked that question in this column from last year. She said:

[N]o one notices or cares about violence against men’s genitals, except to poke fun of those men who are kicked or hit in the balls. People even make fun of men whose penises are severed, as in the case of John Wayne Bobbitt. . . . I often see shows where a man is kicked in the groin and this is often depicted as funny or “no big deal.” Imagine the uproar if a women were punched in the breast on a television show. It is unthinkable.

Now that another one of those stories is in the news, people are going to be talking about genital assault in a way that would be unimaginable if the gender roles were reversed. Why is that?

How to give a compliment that sticks around

Back in college, a friend of mine who was studying theatre mentioned that when he would see a play, he'd make a point afterwards to compliment the actors on details about their performance, instead of just saying, "Great show!" or "Good job!" By expressing an original thought, you demonstrate your sincerity. And your feedback is more likely to be remembered.

Here are a couple compliments I've recently gotten from friends, which will stick with me because of their originality:

"I wish I could put your sense of reason in a bottle and serve it to people."

"Never have I seen someone so opinionated try so hard to diffuse his own opinions."

It took me a while to be sure the latter comment was even a compliment.

Is the death penalty "racist"?

The New York Times printed an op-ed yesterday with the headline:

Death Penalty, Still Racist and Arbitrary.

The piece begins:

LAST week was the 35th anniversary of the return of the American death penalty. It remains as racist and as random as ever.

Several years after the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, a University of Iowa law professor, David C. Baldus (who died last month), along with two colleagues, published a study examining more than 2,000 homicides that took place in Georgia beginning in 1972. They found that black defendants were 1.7 times more likely to receive the death penalty than white defendants and that murderers of white victims were 4.3 times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who killed blacks.

I don't think there's much question about that latter point. But the biggest concern about whether the death penalty is racist would not seem to be about the race of the homicide victim.

Rather, when people call the death penalty "racist," the suggestion is that a defendant who's black is more likely to be executed than a defendant who's white, if all factors other than race are essentially the same.

Is that true?

The New York Times itself published an article (in 2008) that took a much more balanced and fact-based look at this issue:

About 1,100 people have been executed in the United States in the last three decades. Harris County, Tex., which includes Houston, accounts for more than 100 of those executions. . . .

A new study to be published in The Houston Law Review this fall has found two sorts of racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty there, one commonplace and one surprising.

The unexceptional finding is that defendants who kill whites are more likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill blacks. More than 20 studies around the nation have come to similar conclusions.

But the new study also detected a more straightforward disparity. It found that the race of the defendant by itself plays a major role in explaining who is sentenced to death.

It has never been conclusively proven that, all else being equal, blacks are more likely to be sentenced to death than whites in the three decades since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Many experts, including some opposed to the death penalty, have said that evidence of that sort of direct discrimination is spotty and equivocal.

But the author of the new study, Scott Phillips, a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Denver, found a robust relationship between race and the likelihood of being sentenced to death even after the race of the victim and other factors were held constant.

His statistics have profound implications. For every 100 black defendants and 100 white defendants indicted for capital murder in Harris County, Professor Phillips found that an average of 12 white defendants and 17 black ones would be sent to death row. In other words, Professor Phillips wrote, “five black defendants would be sentenced to the ultimate sanction because of race.”

Scott Durfee, the general counsel for the Harris County district attorney’s office, rejected Professor Phillips’s conclusions and said that district attorneys there had long taken steps to insulate themselves from knowing the race of defendants and victims as they decided whether to seek the death penalty.

“To the extent Professor Phillips indicates otherwise, all we can say is that you would have to look at each individual case,” Mr. Durfee said. “If you do that, I’m fairly sure that you would see that the decision was rational and reasonable.”

Indeed, the raw numbers support Mr. Durfee.

John B. Holmes Jr., the district attorney in the years Professor Phillips studied, 1992 to 1999, asked for the death sentence against 27 percent of the white defendants, 25 percent of the Hispanic defendants and 25 percent of the black defendants.

I agree with Durfee's statement that you'd need to look at the merits of each case. Phillips did purport to do exactly that, as the Times explained:

Professor Phillips said that the numbers suggesting evenhandedness in seeking the death penalty did not tell the whole story. Once the kinds of murders committed by black defendants were taken into consideration — terrible, to be sure, but on average less heinous, less apt to involve vulnerable victims and brutality, and less often committed by an adult — “the bar appears to have been set lower for pursuing death against black defendants,” Professor Phillips concluded.

Professor Phillips wrote about percentages and not particular cases, but his data suggest that black defendants were overrepresented in cases involving shootings during robberies, while white defendants were more likely to have committed murders during rapes and kidnappings and to have beaten, stabbed or choked their victims.

When the nature of the crime is taken into account, Professor Phillips wrote, “the odds of a death trial are 1.75 times higher against black defendants than white defendants.” Harris County juries corrected for that disparity to an extent, so that the odds of a death sentence for black defendants after trial dropped to 1.49.

Jon Sorensen, a professor of justice studies at Prairie View A&M University in Texas, said he was suspicious of Professor Phillips’s methodology.

“It’s bizarre,” Professor Sorensen said. “It starts out with no evidence of racism. Then he controls for stuff.”

Moreover, Professor Sorensen said, Professor Phillips failed to take account of other significant factors, including the socioeconomic status of the victims.

Again, I just don't know see how you could ever draw a firm conclusion about any of this without looking at the specifics of each case. And even if any researcher had time to do that, they'd need to apply their personal opinions to weigh how bad the different crimes were. But there's no reason to trust even the most fastidious and impartial researcher to do this, since they could only make these judgments by looking at a cold, paper record of a case. A judge and jury in each case are uniquely well-positioned to make judgments about whether a defendant is guilty and how bad the defendant's specific actions were. You can never fully step into the judge's or jury's shoes.

As one example, we're told that black defendants are more likely than white defendants to kill during "robberies." That might sound like a relatively drab category of crime, in contrast with the white defendants, who are described in a way that sounds viscerally reprehensible: they "were more likely to have committed murders during rapes and kidnappings and to have beaten, stabbed or choked their victims." But one could easily imagine a robbery being quite brutal. Off-hand, I have no idea if "robberies" are generally worse than, say "kidnappings."

And remember, the severity of a crime is just one of many factors that can be relevant in sentencing. As the Houston Chronicle reported in a 2010 article about another research paper by Phillips:

District Attorney Pat Lykos, who has been in office for little more than a year, declined to comment on Phillips' conclusions about the past administration. She said under her leadership, a victim's race or ethnicity or education level would play no part in determining whether to seek the death penalty against an accused killer.

If the slain victim was single, that also would not play a role in the decision, but if the victim was married, the impact of the death on their family would be considered, Lykos said. If the victim had a criminal record and whether that was considered would depend on the facts surrounding their death, she said.

Factors that are considered in whether to seek the death penalty, Lykos said, include the victim's age and vulnerability, the number of victims killed, the brutality of the offense, whether the accused killer and victim had any prior relationship, the defendant's criminal record and life history, and the effect the crime had on society.

The 2008 article shows that the New York Times is capable of setting a high standard for itself in conveying these nuances about the limits of our ability to make a sweeping judgment about thousands of unique cases. Yesterday's op-ed shows that the Times is willing to let this complexity get simplified and filtered.

Aphorisms on the limits of knowledge by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

From his recent book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms:

It is much harder to write a book review for a book you've read than for a book you haven't read. . . . (49)

Today, we mostly face the choice between those who write clearly about a subject they don't understand and those who write poorly about a subject they don't understand. . . . (50)

Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from people's heads. (58)

(Taleb is probably best known for his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, and he's also written highly technical works on human error — for instance, this paper on the error rates of error rates.)

Egg producers and the Humane Society of the United States . . .

. . . have stopped their "squawking."

"'The industry moving from saying anything goes to saying there should be legal limits at the federal level is an enormous difference.'"

Why are powerful men so likely to cheat on their wives?

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, on Huffington Post, argues:

The biggest mistake we make in determining why powerful men cheat is to believe they're looking for sex. If it's sex they're after they have wives who can cater to their needs. No, these men are looking for something else entirely: validation. Men cheat not out of a sense of entitlement but out of a sense of insecurity. . . .

What makes men slowly climb the ladder of success is a desire to prove they're a somebody. They want to be and feel important. . . . It is not the promise of their potential that drives them, but the fear of being a nonentity. . . .

And that's why these men turn to women to make them feel good about themselves. They want to feel desirable. They seek to silence the inner voices that taunt them as to their own insignificance. Because of its power, sex has a unique capacity to make insecure men feel -- however fleetingly -- like they're special. Having women desire them makes them feel desirable.

Amy Alkon (the "Advice Goddess") says: "Oh, please." Rabbi Boteach "doesn't get it":

They take sex because it's there, in variety, because they can. Because it would be fun to have a little strange, and the little strange is right there bending over sweeping up a broken glass, and seems willing, and Maria is nowhere to be seen. . . .

Regarding the evolved male preference for sexual variety, as the late Margo Wilson and her husband and partner Martin Daly pointed out: Sperm are cheap; eggs are expensive.

I don't see why there needs to be a polarized debate about whether men commit adultery because they want sex. Of course they want sex. But even if Alkon's evolutionary-psychology explanation is right, that alone isn't a reason to dismiss other explanations like Rabbi Boteach's.

Robert Wright explained why in his book The Moral Animal. First, here's his explanation of why men (more than women) become increasingly likely to cheat as they get older and more successful:

As a marriage progresses, the temptation to desert should—in the average case—shift toward the man. The reason isn't, as people sometimes assume, that the Darwinian costs of marital breakup are greater for the woman. True, if she has a young child and her marriage dissolves, that child may suffer—whether because she can't find a husband willing to commit to a woman with another man's child, or because she finds one who neglects or mistreats the child. But, in Darwinian terms, this cost is borne equally by the deserting husband; the child who thus suffers is his child too, after all.

The big difference between men and women comes, rather, on the benefits side of the desertion ledger. What can each partner gain from a breakup in the way of future reproductive payoff? The husband can, in principle, find an eighteen-year-old woman with twenty-five years of reproduction ahead. The wife . . . cannot possibly find a mate who will give her twenty-five years worth of reproductive potential. This difference in outside opportunity is negligible at first, when both husband and wife are young. But as they age, it grows. . . .

A poor, low-status husband may not have a chance to desert and may, indeed, provide his wife with reason to desert, especially if she has no children and can thus find another mate readily. A husband who rises in status and wealth, on the other hand, will thus strengthen his incentive to desert while weakening his wife's. (87)

Now, here's Wright on why the ev-psych explanation isn't mutually exclusive with other psychological explanations:

Objections to this sort of analysis are predictable: "But people leave marriages for emotional reasons. They don't add up the number of their children and pull out their calculators. Men are driven away by dull, nagging wives, or by the profound soul-searching of a mid-life crisis. Women are driven out by abusive or indifferent husbands, or lured away by a sensitive, caring man."

All true. But . . . emotions are just evolution's executioners. Beneath all the thoughts and feelings and temperamental differences that marriage counselors spend their time sensitively assessing are the stratagems of the genes—cold, hard equations composed of simple variables: social status, age of spouse, number of children, their ages, outside opportunities, and so on. Is the wife really duller and more nagging than she was twenty years ago? Possibly, but it's also possible that the husband's tolerance for nagging has dropped now that she's forty-five and has no reproductive future. And the promotion he just got which has already drawn some admiring glances from a young woman at work, hasn't helped. (88)

Ronald Reagan on foreign policy

Was he a "dove"?

Life imitates Seinfeld

"NY motorcyclist dies on ride protesting helmet law," the Associated Press reports:

Police say a motorcyclist participating in a protest ride against helmet laws in upstate New York died after he flipped over the bike's handlebars and hit his head on the pavement.

The accident happened Saturday afternoon in the town of Onondaga, in central New York near Syracuse.

State troopers tell The Post-Standard of Syracuse that 55-year-old Philip A. Contos of Parish, N.Y., was driving a 1983 Harley Davidson with a group of bikers who were protesting helmet laws by not wearing helmets.

Troopers say Contos hit his brakes and the motorcycle fishtailed. The bike spun out of control, and Contos toppled over the handlebars. He was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Troopers say Contos would have likely survived if he had been wearing a helmet.

Talking to little girls without talking about looks

Some good advice and thoughts. "Not once did we discuss clothes or hair or bodies or who was pretty. It's surprising how hard it is to stay away from those topics with little girls, but I'm stubborn."

Do tax cuts "pay for themselves" by increasing government revenues?

Nope, argues Bruce Bartlett — who was an economic policy advisor to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

But that hasn't stopped Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty from using this idea to justify his economic plan, relying on statistical claims that, as Bartlett explains, are "completely untrue."

Bartlett also clears up the association people often make between Reagan and the "pay for themselves" idea:

[N]o one in the Reagan administration ever claimed that his 1981 tax cut would pay for itself or that it did. Reagan economists Bill Niskanen and Martin Anderson have written extensively on this oft-repeated myth. Conservative economist Lawrence Lindsey made a thorough effort to calculate the feedback effect in his 1990 book, The Growth Experiment. He concluded that the behavioral and macroeconomic effects of the 1981 tax cut, resulting from both supply-side and demand-side effects, recouped about a third of the static revenue loss.

As you'll see if you click the link, Bartlett similarly debunks Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's claim that George W. Bush's tax cuts increased revenues.

"What we’re about to do is redefine what the American family is."

"And that’s a good thing. The world around us evolves."

Does conforming to traditional gender roles lead to better or worse sex?

Better.

Or, worse.

(Both abstracts are from the blog Barking up the Wrong Tree.)

The second article says (here's the whole thing as a PDF; I've omitted the citations to make it more readable):

We propose that men and women who invest in gender norms are more likely to base self-esteem on others’ approval and thus feel less sexual autonomy and consequently experience less sexual satisfaction. . . .

Research on gender roles typically focuses on how adherence to gender norms is problematic for women’s mental health, academic performance, and subjective sexual experiences. Restrictive gender norms, which undermine women’s power, competence, and agency, help account for women’s higher rates of depression, poorer standardized scores, and higher discontent with sex. However, the argument that gender roles are more problematic for women than for men contrasts with evidence that investment in gender norms is a risk factor for both men and women. We argue that although gender roles per se may be more problematic for women than for men, investment in gender norms (i.e., feeling pressure to conform to gender norms) is equally problematic for women and men. With regard to gender roles, the expectation that women should be subservient and cater to their partners affords women less autonomy in their intimate relationships with men. In addition however, both men and women who invest in gender norms may be vulnerable to diminished autonomy because they feel pressure to conform and base their self-esteem on what other people think of them. . . .

We argue that both men and women who invest in gender conformity feel as though they need to meet these ideals to gain others’ approval. Although preliminary evidence suggests that those who invest in gender normativity feel better about themselves when they are engaged in gender-normative activities, our results suggest that elevated affect and self-esteem could be a short-term boost related to feeling as though one has others’ approval. Previous research suggests that boosts and drops in self-esteem related to succeeding and failing at contingencies of self-worth are related to increases in symptoms of depression over time. . . .

Unfortunately, there is no easy answer to the question of whether women and men should conform to gender norms. On one hand, research suggests that women and men may gain others’ approval or at the very least avoid others’ disapproval or negative evaluations if they follow gender norms. On the other hand, men and women who feel compelled to follow norms may sacrifice their own needs and desires, which can prevent the development of satisfying and authentic intimate relationships with others.

What does a drowning person look like?

Completely different from what our culture trains us to expect.

Is "I Only Have Eyes for You" (the Flamingos version) the best song ever?

While at a cafe in the West Village the other day, I posted this status to Facebook:

John Althouse Cohen is at 'sNice, where they're playing pop songs from the '50s and '60s. Runaround Sue, You Can't Hurry Love, I Only Have Eyes for You, Signed Sealed Delivered, etc. Such overwhelmingly great music. Why can't they make top 40 songs like this anymore?

When I got home, I looked up one of the songs on YouTube:



I almost regret finding this, since I've been watching it compulsively over and over. It might not be the best song ever, but it's at least in the running.

Conservatives criticize Republicans' "growth"-based economic policy.

Kevin Williamson writes in the National Review:

If we had the ability to know in advance how much growth particular economic policies would produce — or even whether they would produce growth at all — then we would never have a recession. We would always be at the sweet spot of maximum real growth. But we are limited and fallible creatures, and right-wing political macroeconomic management is no more reliable, or predictable in its outcomes, than is Keynesian political macroeconomic management. The economy is not a machine, and any time a politician says, “If we will adopt Policy X, we are sure to achieve Statistical Abstraction Y,” he is talking through his hat. . . .

We probably credit politicians too much for good economic outcomes and blame them too much for bad economic outcomes. The economy is big and complex; public finances are less so, and we could, right now, enact policies that would address the imbalances in those public finances, and do so in an orderly and largely predictable way. But that means making very unpleasant choices of the sort that are bound to be keenly unpopular with voters in New Hampshire, Iowa, Florida, etc. . . .

It is important to work toward growth, of course, and to adopt good economic and monetary policies that we think will encourage it. . . . But counting on optimistic assumptions about growth beyond current projections is, for the most part, a way to evade the very difficult business of reconciling our public income with our public spending. We have to work with what we have, with the reality before us.

Ross Douthat, the New York Times' house conservative, links to Williamson's piece and adds that Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty has been engaging in

magical thinking, in which cutting taxes on business, investment and high-earners leads to 5 percent growth every year for a decade — something that neither the Reagan nor the Clinton booms came close to achieving — which in turn goes a long way toward closing the budget deficit, happily, before we have to start in on painful cuts.

Ramesh Ponnuru (who writes for the National Review) has more thoughts on how Republicans "don't appear to be trying very hard" to come up with a realistic economic agenda. "[H]alf-remembered bits of Reaganism aren’t a sufficient conservative agenda for today."

When conservatives are so consistently attacking Republican policy — not for being too squishy or compromising with Democrats, but for being too rigidly, ideologically extreme — those conservatives are worth taking seriously.

"You cannot tell someone that you love them and stay silent when people call for their death."

"'Love' is empty when you say someone's life isn't natural."

America's tax rates would be similar to Europe's if health-care costs counted as taxes.

Bruce Bartlett explains:

When Americans see these data they are usually incredulous that Europeans submit to such seemingly oppressive tax levels. Conservatives, in particular, tend to view freedom as a fixed sum: the bigger government is as a share of G.D.P., the less freedom there is for the people (if government consumes, say, 40 percent of G.D.P., then people are only 60 percent free).

The late Milton Friedman popularized this idea, but even he thought that freedom would not be seriously threatened in Western democracies until government spending reached 60 percent of G.D.P. We are far away from that “tipping point,” as he called it; in 2010, total federal, state and local government spending amounted to 36 percent of G.D.P.

American conservatives tend to ignore the composition of spending; to them, just about all spending is equally bad. . . .

Average American workers must pay for health care out of their pockets, or through their employers in the form of lower wages. Europeans prefer to pay higher taxes and get government health care for every resident in return.

Conservatives universally believe that whenever the government provides a service it will be vastly more costly than if the private sector does so. This is why they support the plan offered by Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the House Budget Committee, to essentially privatize Medicare. Conservatives believe competition will drive down health costs for the elderly.

But O.E.C.D. data show that Americans pay vastly more for health care than the residents of any other major country. . . .

[I]f we had a health care system like those in most developed countries, we could, in effect, give every American an increase in their disposable income of 8 percent of G.D.P. – about what they pay in federal income taxes – and have health care no worse than they have in Britain or Japan. It would be like abolishing the federal income tax in terms of allowing people to spend more of their income on something other than health care.

Because most people have little more choice about medical spending than they do about the taxes they pay, one can think of the two as being similar in nature. . . .

Looking at taxes alone, the burden in the United States is 25 percent below the O.E.C.D. average, but including the additional health costs Americans pay, the United States is just 4.7 percent below average.

Something is starting to creep me out about advertising in general, and Apple's advertising in particular.

I've been feeling more and more unnerved by how advertisers abstract away from so many of the fascinating details that make people who they are, and hand us dull, cartoonish, predictable stereotypes that we're supposed to aspire to.

Apple just announced its new operating system, Lion, and I can't focus on the new features because I'm distracted by how insidiously Apple-like the advertising images are.

Apple ads promise a world with perfect racial and gender diversity — but almost no other kind of diversity.

No one is significantly overweight or underweight; everyone's moderately slim.

There are no same-sex couples.

Only a few different ages seem to be allowed: everyone's either 7, 17, or 27.

And of course, everyone has the same expression all the time.

I assume they did a focus group and found that seeing an abundant amount of diversity in the race and gender categories somehow makes us feel better about a world where people are homogeneous in every other way.

Swedish playground

Dr. Jack Kevorkian (1928-2011)

Dr. Jack Kevorkian, "the central figure in the tumultuous national drama surrounding assisted suicide," died today at age 83.

"My ultimate aim is to make euthanasia a positive experience. . . . I’m trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its responsibilities, and those responsibilities include assisting their patients with death."

I also posted a Metafilter thread, which is getting a lot of comments. "Silentgoldfish" says:

I've worked in a palliative care ward. All he was trying to do was make legal the kind of things that happen already but aren't spoken of. And stop people needlessly suffering.

Another commenter, "sotonohito," says:

I watched my father, already pretty much brain dead, suffer two weeks of agony. The hospital wouldn't give him enough medication because that would cause constipation of all insane things. It went on until a nurse risked his job and told us that we had the right to order my father transferred to a hospice.

We did, and though they allowed him to die (removed ventilation), and administered sufficient painkillers, they still were prevented from simply ending his life [which] we knew he would have wanted.

Does Mitt Romney have a good chance at being the Republican presidential nominee?

An ongoing discussion between two New Republic writers. One of them, Jonathan Cohn, thinks Romney has a good chance, while the other, Jonathan Chait, thinks he's doomed by the health-care issue.

One factor I don't see either of them bring up: the conventional wisdom is that Republicans prefer a candidate who's run for president in the past. (I suppose Republicans would say they like to see someone diligent and battle-tested, who's paid their dues — and Democrats would say Republicans are uncomfortable with newness and youth.)

Of course, this isn't an ironclad rule. George W. Bush's nomination in 2000 might seem to be a counterexample since he hadn't run before. But the main other strong candidate, John McCain, hadn't run before either, so this wasn't a factor as between those two. OK, Pat Buchanan had run in the past, but he never had a chance. The general rule isn't a silver bullet that renders all other factors irrelevant.

John McCain's nomination in 2008, on the other hand, is a clear example of the general rule. None of the other plausible candidates (Romney, Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson) had run for president before.

You might think 2012 doesn't even offer an opportunity to test the theory, if you think Romney's record on health care makes him an implausible candidate off the bat (along with his flipflop on abortion, his general reputation as a flipflopper, and the fact that he was governor of a state that Republicans view as ultra-liberal). If health care is truly a deal-killer for most Republicans, then it doesn't matter if Romney's record as a candidate in 2008 is an advantage; he has no chance anyway.

Well, I'm not convinced. Everyone knows health care is a major obstacle for Romney. But every presidential candidate faces obstacles. You generally can't completely rule out someone who would otherwise be a formidable candidate based on a single issue. McCain got the nomination despite a very long list of issues on which he had flipflopped and/or taken liberal positions. He was on record attacking the Bush tax cuts on first principles, saying they were unfairly tilted toward the rich. Sure, he later tried to characterize his past position as narrowly as possible (by saying he objected to the tax cuts only if there continued to be excessive spending), but this was as disingenuous as Romney's attempt to distinguish health care as a national issue from the decision he made at the state level: it's hard to imagine any voters actually basing their vote on such transparently post hoc line-drawing. McCain simply took the hit on taxes and other issues, but he ended up getting enough votes to be the nominee. And aren't tax cuts at least as defining an issue for Republicans as health care?

What Medicare services should be cut?

The New York Times' Room for Debate gives some suggestions.

Do we mislead college students about how to pursue their careers and lives?

David Brooks says we do, in this excellent column.

The whole thing is worth reading, but here's a sample:

[T]heir lives have been perversely structured. This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.

Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Most of them will not quickly get married, buy a home and have kids, as previous generations did. Instead, they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role.

No one would design a system of extreme supervision to prepare people for a decade of extreme openness. But this is exactly what has emerged in modern America. College students are raised in an environment that demands one set of navigational skills, and they are then cast out into a different environment requiring a different set of skills, which they have to figure out on their own.

Worst of all, they are sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears. If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. . . .

College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to.

Similarly, Eliezer Yudkowsky (who writes the blog called Less Wrong) has observed "how completely ridiculous it is to ask high school students to decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives and give them nearly no support in doing so." What kind of "support"? For example, "spending a day apiece watching twenty different jobs and then another week at their top three choices, with salary charts and projections and probabilities of graduating that subject given their test scores."

Why do we give such bad advice to people who look up to us? It's not that hard to stop and notice what's wrong with the advice. After all, Brooks's column probably didn't take long write, and it certainly isn't difficult to read. If you feed students the "find yourself"/"limitless possibilities" message because it projects an appealing image of yourself — as someone who's encouraging and inspiring to young people — you may be helping yourself more than you're helping them.

RELATED: Don't "do what you love."

ALSO: Advice to prospective undergraduates who want to make the world a better place.

Not only does rock music not cause suicide, but...

. . . "merely describing a song as ‘suicide-inducing’ or ‘life-affirming’ leads listeners to perceive it as such."

So, "by labelling music as suicide-inducing, campaigners and legislators may be helping to create the problem they aim to eradicate."

The devastating sentence Mitt Romney deleted from the paperback edition of his book

Romney, referring to the results of his health care reform in Massachusetts, wrote:

“We can accomplish the same thing for everyone in the country.”

Again, that sentence appeared in the hardcover edition (early 2010) but was absent from the paperback edition of his campaign book. The book's title: No Apology.

An interview with a patient who claims he "faked his way" into a psychiatric hospital

The patient, "Tony," was convicted, at age 17, of causing grevious bodily harm. (This was in Britain.) He started creating a new persona for himself by plagiarizing from any sources he could find — movies like A Clockwork Orange, a biography of Ted Bundy — so that he'd be sent to a psychiatric hospital instead of prison.

It worked. But Tony instantly regretted it and tried to get out.

In a new book called The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson reports on his interview with Tony in the hospital:

It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy.

"I know people are looking out for 'nonverbal clues' to my mental state," Tony continued. "Psychiatrists love 'nonverbal clues'. They love to analyse body movements. But that's really hard for the person who is trying to act sane. How do you sit in a sane way? How do you cross your legs in a sane way? . . ."

"[T]hey saw how well behaved I was and decided it meant I could behave well only in the environment of a psychiatric hospital and it proved I was mad."

I glanced suspiciously at Tony. I instinctively didn't believe him about this. It seemed too catch-22, too darkly-absurd-by-numbers. But later Tony sent me his files and, sure enough, it was right there. "Tony is cheerful and friendly," one report stated. "His detention in hospital is preventing deterioration of his condition."

I'm sure I'm not the only one who read this and thought of one of the greatest movies ever made:

"What is religion’s role in gender discrimination?"

"The truth is that the Abrahamic religions fear women and therefore go to extraordinary and sometimes brutal lengths to control them, constrain them, and repress them in every way. Show me a non-religious society that feels so threatened by the thought of female sexuality that it will slice off the clitoris of a young girl to ensure she can never experience sexual pleasure. Show me a non-religious society that feels the need to cloak women from head to toe and force them to experience the outside world through a slit of a few square inches. All three Abrahamic religions share the myth of Adam and Eve, the myth that it was through woman that evil was let loose in the world. They share the heritage of Leviticus, which declared a menstruating woman unclean, to be set aside, untouched, a revulsion that remains even today among some orthodox Jews, who will refuse to shake a woman’s hand for fear she may be menstruating. What kind of lunacy is this? It is the lunacy of a Bronze Age mindset fossilized by the reactionary forces of religion."

UPDATE: For some reason, people who try to post a comment on this post are getting their comments deleted. If you tried to post a comment here, I assure you I didn't delete your comment. My dad, Richard Lawrence Cohen, emails this comment since he wasn't able to post it (and I wasn't able to post it in the comments section either):

Female genital mutilation is a horrible crime, but it's an ancient cultural practice, not a modern religious one. A papyrus from 163 BC, as well as evidence on mummies, indicate that it was begun in pharaonic Egypt, not in "Abrahamic" society. Today, while it's mostly done in Islamic parts of Africa, it's been condemned by high religious authorities including the Supreme Council of Islamic Research and the Coptic (i.e. Egyptian Christian) Pope. It's practiced by many sub-Saharan African peoples, notably including the Dogon, who are animistic, and the Bambara, who though predominantly Muslim still strongly maintain aspects of their powerful pre-Christian-era Mandé culture. In the colonial era, the Kikuyu of Kenya reinvigorated their practice of clitoridectomy as a protest against Christian missionary indoctrination and in favor of their traditional beliefs; indeed the Mau Mau rallied around the practice during the independence movement of the 1950s.

However, as we know, Western civilization is responsible for all the world's problems. Especially "Abrahamic" civilization.

Well, that blog post is extremely critical of Islam and burqas, which aren't exactly "Western civilization."

I'm considering switching to a different blogging service over Blogger's countless commenting bugs, as well as other bugs and shortcomings with Blogger. What do you think?

ADDED: I asked for reader comments in that last paragraph, but I forgot that you might not be able to comment! So, feel free to email me with your opinion of whether I should switch to a different platform. One of my main concerns is whether creating a duplicate blog would hurt my Google pagerank.

Why it matters that British students don't learn about British imperialism

"[S]adly, the fact that we as a nation do not have a collective narrative for our imperial adventures means we think that we cannot teach them. So students, like myself, are denied the truth about our past, left to learn it elsewhere, if at all, to the detriment of our own worldview."

The many problems with unpaid internships

Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy is a new book by Ross Perlin about, as the title suggests, what's wrong with unpaid internships. (Perlin also recently did a New York Times op-ed about this.)

From The New Republic's review of the book:

The economic and legal problems with this arrangement are glaring. Internships exclude those whose families cannot afford to support them; they displace paid workers; they allow companies to dodge liability and colleges to cash in on “internship for credit” tuition dollars.

As Matthew Yglesias has observed, the fact that employers use internships to skirt minimum wage laws blinds us to the negative consequences of those laws:

[Y]ou don’t see a decline in employment because people can just find loopholes.

The review also points out a deeper problem with internships:

“Once you’ve been told that your work isn’t worth anything,” Perlin rightly observes, “you stop taking pride in it, you stop giving it your best.”

But is that true? Many people are more passionate about and take more pride in their hobbies than their paid work. If Perlin is right, however, this would be a strong argument for paying kids (in the form of money or gifts) for getting good grades in school.

Molly Fischer, the author of the New Republic book review, notes the irony that she once interned for Benjamin Kunkel, who wrote one of the blurbs on the back of the book. Fischer says:

Benjamin Kunkel, I recall once having to deliver something to your apartment. Benjamin Kunkel, if you are reading this, I did not feel exploited. But my pleasant summer at a literary magazine puts me in the minority of my peer group.

I wonder: do The New Republic's unpaid internships somehow not lead to all the problems that Perlin and Fischer point out?

Donald Trump quits.

"What am I supposed to do with all these toupe jokes I've collected!?" -- Duncan Jones

Newt Gingrich on an individual mandate to buy health insurance, and subsidies for those who can't afford it

He's in favor of these policies.

He might not say so now. But Gingrich has made it pretty clear, over several years, what his real position is.

As that blog post points out, Mitt Romney is far from the only major Republican presidential candidate with a problem on this issue.

And let's hope the media keeps pointing this out. Surely they wouldn't just target Romney to the exclusion of other candidates with similar records, right? Why, that would suggest that the media harbors a largely superficial and irrational animosity against Romney, and it's hard to imagine that!

Torture didn't help us find and kill Osama bin Laden; it led us astray, says John McCain.

Senator McCain talked to Leon Panetta, head of the CIA, to get the facts, which turned out to be quite different from what former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey suggested in an op-ed.

This article quotes the revelations from a long anti-torture speech McCain gave on the Senate floor:

The trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. We did not first learn from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the real name of bin Laden’s courier, or his alias, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — the man who ultimately enabled us to find bin Laden. The first mention of the name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, as well as a description of him as an important member of Al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country. The United States did not conduct this detainee’s interrogation, nor did we render him to that country for the purpose of interrogation. We did not learn Abu Ahmed’s real name or alias as a result of waterboarding or any ‘enhanced interrogation technique’ used on a detainee in U.S. custody. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts, or an accurate description of his role in Al-Qaeda.

In fact, not only did the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed not provide us with key leads on bin Laden’s courier, Abu Ahmed; it actually produced false and misleading information. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed specifically told his interrogators that Abu Ahmed had moved to Peshawar, got married, and ceased his role as an Al-Qaeda facilitator — which was not true, as we now know. All we learned about Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti through the use of waterboarding and other ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ against Khalid Sheik Mohammed was the confirmation of the already known fact that the courier existed and used an alias.

I have sought further information from the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and they confirm for me that, in fact, the best intelligence gained from a CIA detainee — information describing Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s real role in Al-Qaeda and his true relationship to Osama bin Laden — was obtained through standard, non-coercive means, not through any ‘enhanced interrogation technique.’

In short, it was not torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees that got us the major leads that ultimately enabled our intelligence community to find Osama bin Laden. I hope former Attorney General Mukasey will correct his misstatement.

Mickey Kaus calls out Nicholas Kristof's "faux mot" about Republicans supporting contraception for horses but not for humans.

Kristof posted this to Twitter:

You can’t make this up: Republicans back contraception for wild horses, cut it for humans.

He explained the point at the end of his most recent New York Times column.

Kaus points out that Kristof's refusal to appreciate the views of people who disagree with him is actually unhelpful in advancing Kristof's own position:

The conservative Republican response is presumably that life begins at conception and human life is sacred, while horse life is not. Duh! Also that we worry considerably less about the moral and social effects of promiscuity and eugenics on equine society. . . .

The chances that it will actually win over anyone are nil–but it will get him applause from a large audience (at least 1,079,881 [the number of people who follow Kristof on Twitter]) of the already convinced. It’s as much entertainment as argument. Not that there’s anything wrong with it! Unless you want Kristof’s side to win.

This is not just an issue about contraception for humans and horses. There's a much broader problem with people failing to understand their political/ideological opponents' actual views (particularly the left failing to understand the right). When people do this, it's a giveaway that what they care about most is not whether their position actually prevails; they're more interested in demonizing their opponents and, by contrast, putting halos over themselves.

Mitt Romney's Republican opponents charge that under his health care reform, there are long wait times to see doctors.

They also say primary care physicians are less likely to see new patients than they were before.

And they're right — according to Jonathan Cohn, a left-of-center supporter of President Obama's health care reform.

There just doesn't seem to be any evidence that Romneycare caused those problems. Cohn explains why at the link.

But I suspect that Cohn's approach — rigorously scrutinizing the relevant data — is not exactly going to dominate the discussion in the 2012 Republican presidential primaries.

A commenter on Cohn's post adds that even if Romney's state health insurance law does lead to negative consequences, we shouldn't assume that a national version of Romneycare (which is more or less what Obamacare is) will lead to similar consequences:

I know a (poor) woman who had moved from MA to Florida a few years ago. When universal health care was introduced in MA - and she subsequently got pregnant - she moved back. Though I haven't seen any studies it seems likely that such "market forces" are drawing a number of indigent people in which would tend to increase the load on the system. . . .

[This] problem is solved immediately by a national plan.

The theory of federalism says that states act as "laboratories of democracy," allowing us to see the consequences of policies on a relatively small scale before deciding whether to enact them nationwide. But individual states are so different from the entire United States that the results of a state-level policy experiment might be meaningless or even worse.

What's so great about primitive societies?

Not as much as some would have you believe, according to that article about the Jarawa people of the Andaman Islands (to the east of India) (via):

A recent full-page advertisement in a glossy magazine showed a picture of a smiling woman from the Jarawa tribe in the Andaman Islands off the coast of India. The accompanying text read, "No war, no poverty, no drug abuse, no corruption, no pollution, no overpopulation, no prisons -- and we call them primitive?" Their 55,000-year, isolated, self-sufficient and sustainable existence is at threat, the ad suggested. Luckily, Survival International "is helping the Jarawa protect their land and defend their lives." . . .

The glorification of the Jarawa and in general of tribal life, with its supposed freedom from violence, poverty, drugs, crime, and overpopulation, is part of a dangerous denial of the huge benefits that modernity has brought to the vast mass of humanity. It is easy to get emotional about a supposedly idyllic Stone Age existence when we're staring at elegant photographs on a computer screen while sipping our Starbucks chai latte. But if we decided to actually return to the lifestyle of uncontacted peoples, the vast majority of the planet would die off from starvation, and those who remained would face nasty, brutish, and short lives. Romanticizing that lifestyle provides no insights into how we can better run a planet of 7 billion people on a sustainable basis -- and does little to illuminate the challenges and needs of tribal people themselves. . . .

[The Jarawa's] current limbo of semi-engagement may be the worst possible place to be. It exposes them to disease and violence without proximity to vaccines, hospitals, or real security. Yes, the record of paternalist integration is grim, but it is difficult to make the case that the record of paternalist exclusion and glorification is better.

I'm reminded of this old column by Jonah Goldberg:

The simple truth is that everyone thinks that much of the Third World is a write-off. Many conservatives just don’t care. And, many Leftists — especially when it comes to South America — think that saying we should “preserve unique cultures” is somehow different than saying “keep these people in poverty.” . . .

Now, I’m a conservative. I like the past. I love tradition. In fact I want to conserve these things, hence the word conservatism. Conservatives are opposed to the bleaching of culture or the erasure of history. Conservatism, the saying goes, is dedicated to the wisdom of the ancients. But that wisdom believes in progress, determined by reason and tempered by tradition. That’s why none of us believes white people would be better off living like Vikings, Goths, or Huns. Why should we think that Africans or Indians should?

I was just in Italy. Now, anybody who has spent five minutes in Italy knows that it is a very — oh gosh what’s that word? — right: Italian country. The food, the language, the traditions, the very air itself is Italian. If you can be an Italian with a cell phone, a full set of teeth and an apartment, why can’t the same hold true for Zulus? Is there something about being a Zulu that’s antithetical to being modern? (I know there are plenty of Zulus with cellphones and the like already, but the point is that I think many liberals find this disappointing).

By the way, if you read that whole Jonah Goldberg column, you'll see how bizarrely incoherent some columns were in the days before blogging gave everyone an outlet for their random thoughts.

The killing of bin Laden will have major political consequences.

So argues Peter Beinart.

The whole article is worth reading (like most of what Beinart writes on foreign policy), but here's a sample:

[T]he view that Democrats won’t use force . . . was never true. Bill Clinton, after all, sent troops to Haiti, and bombed Bosnia and Kosovo. But barely anyone remembers those missions and because their rationale was humanitarian, they made the Democrats seem like armed social workers. The bin Laden operation, by contrast, was pure testosterone. Once U.S. intelligence tracked bin Laden to his compound, Obama chose the most aggressive option—a commando attack—rather than missile strikes, even though it risked U.S. deaths or hostages. In the mountains of Tora Bora, it’s worth remembering, George W. Bush made the opposite choice: deploying Afghan rather than American forces because he feared American casualties. And bin Laden got away. . . .

Second, the view that Democrats pray at the altar of international institutions and international law. Nonsense. . . . Obama has dramatically increased drone attacks, in Afpak and beyond, which shred international law. And this attack was so unilateral that we didn’t even consult with the “ally” on whose territory we carried it out. When Obama said he would strike in Pakistan without its permission during the campaign, few believed him; it didn’t play to type. Now it’s more likely they will.

With the death of Osama bin Laden, a fake Martin Luther King quote is born.

In the past 24 hours, I've seen this "quote" posted by many different people in my Facebook feed, apparently as a counterreaction to the celebration of the death of bin Laden:

‎"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Megan McArdle points out that the first sentence of that "quote" was probably never said by Martin Luther King, Jr.:

[I]t's a bit too a propos. What "thousands" would King have been talking about? In which enemy's death was he supposed to be rejoicing? . . .

In fairness, the rest of the quote was really said by King (repeatedly, as documented by Wikiquote). But that's no excuse for opportunistically fabricating the one sentence.

McArdle goes on:

What's fascinating is the speed of it. Someone made up a quote, attributed it to MLK jr, and disseminated it widely, all within 24 hours. Why? What do you get out of saying something pithy, and getting no credit for it?

Perhaps they only wanted to say this thing, and knew that no one would pay attention unless it came from someone else. Or, perhaps they are getting a gargantuan kick out of seeing people repeat their lie ad infinitum.

You know what I hate? Genocidal terrorists.

Live video of President Obama's statement on Osama bin Laden

JOIN THE LIVE CHAT

VISIT WHITEHOUSE.GOV

*applauds*

Advice to prospective undergrads who want to make the world a better place

Katja Grace quotes her friend Katla's "advice to aspiring undergraduates" on her blog Meteuphoric (which is definitely worth bookmarking):

Don’t use the apparent altruism of a course or degree as a strong sign of its usefulness for the world. Apparently altruistic courses are the ones concerned with climate change or poverty or species extinctions or social stigma or genocide or so on. Many people are apparently altruistic as an excuse for not doing difficult courses, and the coursework will be designed accordingly. Part of designing coursework for people who aren’t up to difficult courses is understanding that they do not need tools for solving important problems in the world, but rather for getting a job at all.

Also, courses about problems such as climate change or third world development naturally will not include much material on how to solve these problems, as they have not been solved. Instead you and your ‘altruistic’ acquaintances will probably have to discuss how to solve them yourselves, or if your teacher recognises that you are not up to this, to learn to describe how difficult and complex they are. On the upside, solving the problems will be easy because you are probably too ignorant to constrain them much. On the downside, your solutions will not improve the world.

Do many Americans pay no taxes? Do tax cuts increase government revenue?

Respectively . . .

1. No.

The New Republic's Jon Chait (via Paul Krugman) explains:

[Y]ou will see the endlessly circulated right-wing talking point that nearly half of all Americans pay no income taxes. . . . [T]hey focus entirely on the federal income tax, because most people will not understand this constitutes just one portion of the overall tax system. . . .

Americans pay different kinds of taxes to different entities. State and local taxes tend to be regressive. Payroll taxes, which fund Social Security and Medicare, are also regressive. To balance this out, we have a pretty progressive income tax. If you focus only on the income tax, it makes it look like the rich are getting screwed. But of course the income tax is just one element. And conservatives are working hard to make the tax code more regressive at every level of government.

2. No.

The conservative National Review's Kevin Williamson criticizes Speaker of the House John Boehner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and others for claiming or insinuating that lower taxes lead to higher revenue:

Tax cuts do not generally increase revenue, and Republicans should stop saying otherwise. . . .

There are no free lunches in taxation, or anywhere else.

Can you imagine a world where cutting taxes increased tax revenue? What would happen? Every politician would always support cutting taxes, as this would give voters everything they want: low taxes and lots of government benefits! Yay! Needless to say, that is not what the real world is like.

Now that that's clear, can we please put an end to, as Krugman calls them, the "zombie tax lies"?

Music Friday: Walk Like an Egyptian

Played by bluegrass group the Cleverlys:



The Bangles' original (if this embed isn't working for you, you can watch it here):

"Wasting food"

It's not so bad. (via)

There's a broader point to be made here about environmentalism and signaling, but I don't have time to go into it now . . .

How much of a problem is it that you don't have enough time in your whole life to become "reasonably well-read"?

Linda Holmes observes, on NPR's website:

The vast majority of the world's books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It's just numbers.

Consider books alone. Let's say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That's quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let's say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you're 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you're 80. That's 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.

Let's do you another favor: Let's further assume you limit yourself to books from the last, say, 250 years. Nothing before 1761. This cuts out giant, enormous swaths of literature, of course, but we'll assume you're willing to write off thousands of years of writing in an effort to be reasonably well-read.

Of course, by the time you're 80, there will be 65 more years of new books, so by then, you're dealing with 315 years of books, which allows you to read about 20 books from each year. You'll have to break down your 20 books each year between fiction and nonfiction – you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory ... I hope you weren't planning to go out very much.

You can hit the highlights, and you can specialize enough to become knowledgeable in some things, but most of what's out there, you'll have to ignore. (Don't forget books not written in English! Don't forget to learn all the other languages!) . . .

We could do the same calculus with film or music or, increasingly, television – you simply have no chance of seeing even most of what exists. Statistically speaking, you will die having missed almost everything.

That's a very quantitative way to look at it, as if the main thing that matters is what percentage of "everything" you've consumed. I don't see why that should be the standard.

It's analogous to the way people marvel at how "insignificant" humanity is because we're so small relative to the entire universe (which, by the way, would seem to imply that physically larger people are more important than smaller people — and surely we don't believe that). How big would we need to be in order to be "significant"? How much would we need to read, view, or listen to in order to be "well-read" or "cultured"?

Tyler Cowen's Discover Your Inner Economist offers a different way to look at this, which I find more meaningful. In the book's chapter on art, Cowen says we've become "cultural billionaires" — we just need to realize and take advantage of this fact. An overwhelming amount of great art is available to us for amazingly little money via libraries, museums, architecture (which you can see for free by walking down the street), Netflix, YouTube . . .

That doesn't solve the quantity problem. But we have so much access to such an astoundingly high level of quality that it would seem ungrateful to fuss over not having enough hours to get to most of it. We have enough time to live lives that are incredibly rich in literature and other art.

I happily admit there are whole genres of music that I consistently don't pay any attention to. "But that's so close-minded!" Well, it is and it isn't. I'm not making an objective judgment that these genres aren't worthwhile for anyone to spend time on. It's just that I, like everyone, have my own time management strategies. I've listened to Beethoven's symphonies a ridiculous number of times, always knowing there was some other piece of music I hadn't heard before, which I could have spent that time listening to . . . and I'll never hear it now. But I'm confident I've had good reasons for making such choices. I'm not worried I might be a little more ignorant of other musical genres, or novels I could have been reading at the time. I actually like the fact that I know much more about my own tastes than the vast majority of all content, of which I'm ignorant. This is part of the joy of life.

You wouldn't dream of trying to live in every city in the world, or even 10% of them, because that would mean you'd spend less time at home. Quality is more important than quantity.

The fact that everyone experiences such a limited number of books, paintings, songs, and cities adds to each individual's uniqueness. These experiences shape our identities. If we were all somehow able to read every book, live in every city, etc., we'd be much more similar to each other, which would get really boring.

(Cross-posted from Metafilter.)

Why do politicians lie so much?

Robin Hanson blames the voters.

Are Paul Krugman and David Brooks in a secret feud?

Jonathan Chait gathers the evidence that Krugman and Brooks have been planting their New York Times columns with implicit attacks on each other.

Chait concludes:

Brooks views Krugman as making himself a hero to the liberal choir, while he (Brooks) fearlessly challenges both sides. Krugman sees Brooks as residing comfortably within the cozy embrace of the conventional wisdom, whereas he (Krugman) risks being cast as a partisan or a radical by arbiters of respectability like Brooks for following the logic through to its conclusions. . . .

What makes the feud somewhat pathological is the Times' convention of keeping its columnists from openly debating each other. I suppose this is designed to advance the cause of civility. But the reality is that this just creates a lot of sniping, and the inability to quote and describe each others' arguments in any detail makes it impossible to treat them seriously.

First date

"So, what's your sign?"

"Pisces." (Thinking: And the fact that you asked that question is my sign that we won't be having a second date . . .)


UPDATE: I posted this to Facebook too, and one friend responded:

Were you on a date in the 70s? (the decade, that is)

Another friend said:

Ask her what color your aura is, and how old you will live to according to the little creases on your palm. If she starts telepathically communicating with an invisible friend *AHEM,* "spirit guide," she's a keeper!

Seeing those two comments together made me feel like a character in one of the LA scenes in Annie Hall.

Incoherent views on taxes, spending, and the deficit

Bruce Bartlett (who was an economic policy advisor for Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr.) runs through 15 recent polls of the American public's views on taxing and spending.

Some of the most disheartening points:

[T]hree-fifths of voters believe that the budget can be fixed just by eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. . . .

[S]upport for cutting spending is largely confined to small programs such as foreign aid, and that people favor increasing spending for big programs such as Social Security. . . .

[O]nly 49 percent of people believe that reducing the deficit will require cuts in programs that benefit them; 41 percent do not. Also, only 37 percent of people believe that reducing the deficit will require higher taxes on them; 59 percent do not.

People overestimate how much we spend on foreign aid, and they underestimate how much we spend on Medicare and Social Security. We want to believe that if we happen to like a program, it doesn't cost too much. "Big government" is bad, so the biggest programs must be the ones we don't like.

Do married men engage in less antisocial behavior because marriage tames them?

Or is there a "selection effect," i.e. men who are less antisocial (as in antisocial personality disorder, not as a synonym for "asocial"!) are more likely to get married in the first place?

Turns out the answer is: both.

The creator of the National Organization for Marriage's 2010 "Summer for Marriage Tour" explains how he saw the light on same-sex marriage.

"Having spent the last five years putting all of my political will, interest and energy into fighting against the spread of same-sex marriage as if it were a contagious disease, I must admit that it is hard for me to put the following text into words let alone utter them with my own voice." "I now support full marriage equality."

Louis Marinelli tells the story of how he came to a few realizations while on his anti-same-sex-marriage tour:

I really came to understand that gays and lesbians were just real people who wanted to live real lives and be treated equally as opposed to, for example, wanting to destroy American culture. . . .

I soon realized that there I was surrounded by hateful people; propping up a cause I created five years ago, a cause which I had begun to question.

The whole post is worth a read.

In an email interview, he gives more specific critiques and recantations of some of his past statements. This is my favorite:

Once I wrote that homosexuals are deceitful people who care only about themselves or something to that effect. Honestly, aren’t we all? It was wrong for me to exclude everyone else from that description. We all lie and when it comes down to it, we will do what is best for ourselves. So throwing in a little levity, I stand by the comment but want to apologize for limiting its scope to the gay community.

Remember the 2005 press conference of San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders?

Megan McArdle shows what it's like to bake a cake in 2011 vs. what it would have been like in 1950 or 1900.

"[W]e face the absurd phenomenon of colleges encouraging students to go into six-figure debt ... but forbidding them to drink on campus ...

... because they're deemed insufficiently mature to appreciate the risks."

Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a. Instapundit) argues that the federal drinking age in the United States should be lowered from 21 to 18 — and that Republicans are particularly well-positioned to bring about this change:

Republicans are supposed to stand for limited government, freedom and federalism, but it was under a Republican administration—and a Republican transportation secretary, Elizabeth Dole—that states were forced to raise their age limits or face financial penalties. That was before the tea party, though. Perhaps today, when Republican leaders across the board are singing the praises of limited government, it is time for them to put their money where their mouths are and support an end to the federal drinking-age mandate.

And if arguments based on fairness and principle aren't enough, perhaps one based on politics will do the trick: This will get votes.

Democrats traditionally do well with the youth vote, and one reason is that they have been successful in portraying Republicans as fuddy-duddies who want to hold young people down. This may be unfair—college speech codes and the like don't tend to come from Republicans—but the evidence suggests that it works. What's more, the first few elections people vote in tend to set a long-term pattern. A move to repeal the federal drinking-age mandate might help Republicans turn this around.

There's also the fact that almost no other country in the world has such a high drinking age. And I think ours is the highest of any developed country. But I guess Republicans don't like the "America is the only country in the industrialized world..." style of framing.

The top 10 posts from year 3 of this blog

I started this blog on April 12, 2008, exactly 3 years ago. As I've done at the end of the 1st year and 2nd year, here are my 10 favorite posts from this past year.

1. Blogger of the Day: Andrew Sullivan, The Crusader

2. Scheduling life

3. The top 10 greatest classical composers of all time

4. We're all hypocrites.

5. The view of computers from 1982 and the view of photography from 1859

6. What is the atheist / secular humanist / free thought community missing?

7. Did the journalists who reported on the Koran burning threat understand what they were doing?

8. Getting it wrong about language and more

9. Professor Robert Summers of Cornell Law School

10. How to use "What would I regret the most?" to make life decisions

What are we banning kids from doing?

1. Bringing lunch from home to school. (via)

2. Playing outside. (via)

Attorney General Eric Holder: “The facts are clear. Intimate partner homicide is the leading cause of death for African-American women ages 15 to 45."

And he's right that the facts are clear. The facts are clear that Holder is wrong.

As that Volokh Conspiracy blog post explains (corroborating a column by Christina Hoff Sommers), homicide is not the most common cause of death of African-American women ages 15 to 45. It's the 5th most common. And those are homicides by anyone, including strangers; only a fraction of them involve domestic violence.

Sommers adds:

Holder's patently false assertion has remained on the Justice Department website for more than a year.

How is that possible? It is possible because false claims about male domestic violence are ubiquitous and immune to refutation. During the era of the infamous Super Bowl Hoax, it was widely believed that on Super Bowl Sundays, violence against women increases 40%. Journalists began to refer to the game as the "abuse bowl" and quoted experts who explained how male viewers, intoxicated and pumped up with testosterone, could "explode like mad linemen." During the 1993 Super Bowl, NBC ran a public service announcement warning men they would go to jail for attacking their wives.

In this roiling sea of media credulity, one lone journalist, Washington Post reporter Ken Ringle, checked the facts. As it turned out, there was no source: An activist had misunderstood something she read, jumped to her sensational conclusion, announced it at a news conference and an urban myth was born. Despite occasional efforts to prove the story true, no one has ever managed to link the Super Bowl to domestic battery.

Snopes has a longer takedown of the Super Bowl myth. Snopes concludes:

The ensuing weeks and months saw a fair amount of backpedalling by those who had propagated the Super Bowl Sunday violence myth, but — as usual — the retractions and corrections received far less attention than the sensational-but-false stories everyone wanted to believe, and the bogus Super Bowl statistic remains a widely-cited and believed piece of misinformation. As Sommers concluded, "How a belief in that misandrist canard can make the world a better place for women is not explained."

Kurt Cobain was found dead 17 years ago today.

He's estimated to have committed suicide 3 days earlier. (Wikipedia.)

Here's an interview with him from December 1993, after they released their last album. Most of the clip is pretty mundane, but if you skip ahead to 6:38 (after it looks like the interview has ended), you can see a chilling moment. He talks about his famous stomach problem:

Ah! It's gone! I finally have been prescribed the right stomach medicine after 6 years of being in constant pain . . . I was in pain so long, I didn't care if I was in a band, I didn't care if I was alive. And it just so happened that I came to that conclusion at a time when my band became really popular. It had been going on and building up for so many years that I was suicidal. I just didn't want to live. So I just thought: if I'm going to die, if I'm going to kill myself, I should take some drugs. May as well become a junkie, because I felt like a junkie every day.

I've blogged tributes to Nirvana and to Cobain, so I don't have anything more to add to what I said:

I vividly remember when I was 13, sitting around watching MTV on April 8, 1994. Kurt Loder announced on MTV News that Kurt Cobain had been found dead in his home and that the cause of death was "a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head." I was so young that the meaning of that delicate phrasing didn't register with me, so I asked my mom about it. She had to explain: "That means he killed himself."

Nirvana released only three proper studio albums. In an interview near the end of his life, Cobain was critical of the band's soft/loud formula and talked about wanting to branch out stylistically. He was disappointed that the band up to that point had emphasized the heavy side of that formula instead of a poppier, Beatley side. We'll never get to hear how the band might have developed; the analogy would be if John Lennon had died not in 1980 but in 1965. They should have done so much more. But they changed the direction of rock music in the few years they were around.

ADDED: This Metafilter thread has a lot of remembrances of Cobain and Nirvana. A commenter named lubujackson says:

As a tween when Nirvana hit, I never thought "life sucks" was Nirvana's message as all the haters seem to believe. Lyrically, the songs cover a lot of ground in an impressionistic way, and at the time I just thought Nirvana was really good, satisfying rock music. Most importantly at the time, they passed the Holden Caufield "sniff test" for phoniness.

DaDaDaDave says:

Nirvana made great music to jump around your seventh-grade best friend's living room to. For me that was about it (and that was enough), but I had several friends in whose emotional lives Kurt Cobain was an important force for good. Cobain's songs may be about depression, but they aren't depressing--even the slow, sad ones have a reinvigorating and genuinely human energy. Two decades later I can put on any Nirvana album (even Bleach) and it still sounds good; any Nirvana album on my car stereo will cause me to drive faster. What more can anyone ask of a rock band?

Naju comments:

I was 12 and my favorite band was Nirvana, and I can't tell you how influential and positive they were for me. They were my punk rock, they made me question everything, they made me smarter. It's easy to be jaded about the whole downer teen angst thing going on in the music. But I was young and reading the biography of the band was sort of life changing. The way Kurt befriended and stood up for gay people at his high school, and the ways he went against the grain in order to be compassionate and real, made me realize that my friends laughing about "fags" were just incredibly immature and lame.

Gompa says:

People sometimes forget just how hard it was, before the internet, to access unconventional culture, particularly if you didn't live in a major city. I was in high school in northern Ontario in the early 1990s, and other than these mix tapes my friend's older collegiate neighbour made for him that had some Dead Kennedys and Dead Milkmen and stuff like that on 'em, we were completely out of the loop. You'd catch a Sonic Youth video on the MuchMusic "alternative" show, go down to the crappy little record store at the mall, go to the "S" section - nothing. I remember it being flat-out miraculous to find the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Mother's Milk album in one of those stores.

After Nevermind? Before long, there was a whole section in those stores stocking this kind of stuff. Also, Cobain was a namedropping goldmine - I'd read an interview with him, write down the names of every band he referenced, and then go on a shopping spree next time I was in Toronto. That's how I discovered Fugazi, the Meat Puppets, the Vaselines, L7, the Pixies. Basically uncovered the trail that would, by '93, lead me to quit a business degree and do something I actually gave a shit about with my life.

Discovering Nirvana at the age of 18 changed the basic course of my life. I'll always have Kurt Cobain to thank for that. Wish he was still around to hear it.

Here's a comment I posted over there:

Nirvana was to grunge rock as the Beatles were to '60s rock, or as Mozart was to the Classical style, or as Bach was to Baroque. They didn't invent their style. They perfected it. You don't become the definitive reference point for a whole genre just at random.

Kurt Cobain was the first to admit that he mostly ripped off a lot of other bands to make Nirvana's music. I'm so glad he did.

I'll close with a comment by adipocere:

I remember hearing Bleach played for the first time on a radio station with the vaguely-defined "college" format with a "What? Is? That?" sensation. I believe I got that on cassette and played the hell out of "Negative Creep" (try that song in your workout mix).

Damn, listen to "Sliver." That's the track where Cobain's empathy and his ability to craft a set of lyrics around someone else's story became his strength. I wouldn't say it was his formula but it was definitely a new plateau for him.

Much later, I heard "All Apologies" off of In Utero and turned to a friend. "I don't think he's going to be around much longer." It sounded like a suicide note or the foreshadowing to some dreadful accident.

Finally, I was driving a hundred miles home at three in the morning, trying to stay awake, radio blaring, when the DJ came on to announce the news. I pulled onto the shoulder, got out of the car, stood there for a while not believing it, then got back in. I did not have trouble staying awake for the rest of the drive home.

Michele Bachmann might win the Republican presidential nomination ...

... by being like Howard Dean.

That's Jon Chait's argument. It's not as silly as it might sound at first, even though Dean failed to win the nomination the only time he ran for president. Remember, you win not just because of your own qualities, but also because of the inadequacy of every other contender.

Is obesity caused by "food addiction"?

Medical News Today reports (via):

Some people really are addicted to foods in a similar way others might be dependent on certain substances, like addictive illegal or prescriptions drugs, or alcohol, researchers from Yale University revealed in Archives of General Psychiatry. Those with an addictive-like behavior seem to have more neural activity in specific parts of the brain in the same way substance-dependent people appear to have, the authors explained.

It's a bit like saying that if you dangle a tasty chocolate milkshake in front of a pathological eater, what goes on in that person's brain is similar to what would happen if you placed a bottle of scotch in front of an alcoholic. . . .

The authors believe that no studies had so far looked into the neural correlates of addictive-like eating behavior.

Those researchers say:

One-third of American adults are now obese and obesity-related disease is the second leading cause of preventable death. Unfortunately, most obesity treatments do not result in lasting weight loss because most patients regain their lost weight within five years. Based on numerous parallels in neural functioning associated with substance dependence and obesity, theorists have proposed that addictive processes may be involved in the etiology of obesity.

Food and drug use both result in dopamine release in mesolimbic regions [of the brain] and the degree of release correlates with subjective reward from both food and drug use.

The article goes on to cite some scientific research, but it's all about the general phenomenon of food addiction. I'm not seeing any correlation or causation between the addiction and obesity.

My question is: if food addiction is the real problem, aren't we all suffering from it?

A children's chorus sings "Lisztomania" by Phoenix

That's the PS 22 Chorus (via Cover Song Archive, via Metafilter).

Phoenix
Tags:
Phoenix, MTVHive

(If that second embedded video doesn't work for you, you can watch it here.)

Did you notice the word that was censored for the kids?