"This was the voice of moderation until 13 Sept, 2025"
by Doctor Science To start off the open thread, here’s a video of polar bears encountering spy cameras: Links to other videos of seasonal interest: The Luttrell Psalter Film: life in a medieval English village. Man in a Blizzard, and why Roger Ebert thinks it deserves an Oscar nomination. The Knitted Christmas Tree. It’s *15 … Read more
by Doctor Science
In the discussion to Sebastian’s post celebrating the end of DADT, commenter avedis took issue. I found avedis’ comments more honest and comprehensible than most defenses of DADT, but they raise disturbing questions about rape culture in the military.
WARNING: POTENTIALLY TRIGGERY DISCUSSION OF RAPE AND RAPE CULTURE
by russell "E pluribus unum", of course, being the motto on the obverse side of the Great Seal of the United States. It's written on the swirly banner flying over the eagle's head. The reverse side, of course, has that weird spooky pyramid with the radiant eyeball on top and those other cryptic Latin mottoes. … Read more
by Doctor Science In the spirit of the season, and also “More Frequent Posting” — Jim and Dylan are a gay couple living in the Chelsea area of New York City, and for some reason they’re getting Santa’s mail: letters addressed to their specific address and apartment, with gift requests for Santa from poor children. … Read more
–by Sebastian I don't have much to say on the underlying issue that isn't being said better elsewhere. It was unjust, ridiculous, and it is well for the country and the armed forces that it is gone. I'm not going to tell the stories of friends whose lives will be made better by this–though … Read more
by Doctor Science First of all, this is what a War on Christmas looks like: I recall being taught that one reason Washington attacked on Christmas was specifically because (English) American colonists didn’t celebrate the holiday. The German Hessian mercenaries did, though, and so would be hung over and vulnerable when Washington and his army … Read more
by Gary Farber
This new Google tool, which Bob Mackey mentioning reminded me that I'd bookmarked for blogging Analyzing Literature by Words and Numbers by Patricia Cohen, is truly useful and neat, at first look: Books Ngram Viewer. Look up key words, and phrases, and thus track concepts over time, and much else, in hundreds of millions of books over the past couple of centuries, by frequency.
Then dig. Yum.
Some link-dumping for you: How To Use PeaceTalk 101 by Suzette Haden Elgin. Check out her writings on the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense.
Use of some of these techniques, which I first started reading Elgin's writings on in the early Eighties, might be helpful to some, but not to others.
See also popularizer Deborah Tannen, though I agree with Elgin's critique of Tannen's extreme over-reliance on gender stereotyping. As usual, I don't endorse everything either writer says, but they're both worth reading, in my opinion.
Which could lead one to G.K. Chesterton on this topic, if one ever feels cranky:
There is an apostolic injunction to suffer fools gladly. We always lay the stress on the word “suffer,” and interpret the passage as one urging resignation. It might be better, perhaps, to lay the stress upon the word “gladly,” and make our familiarity with fools a delight, and almost a dissipation. Nor is it necessary that our pleasure in fools (or at least in great and godlike fools) should be merely satiric or cruel. The great fool is he in whom we cannot tell which is the conscious and which the unconscious humour; we laugh with him and laugh at him at the same time. An obvious instance is that of ordinary and happy marriage. A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is a fool, but a great fool. This largeness, this grossness and gorgeousness of folly is the thing which we all find about those with whom we are in intimate contact; and it is the one enduring basis of affection, and even of respect.
by Jacob Davies And for once, it looks like I might get what I want: The Senate voted 66 to 32 to bring the treaty to the floor in a procedural vote that fell one short of the 67 required under the Constitution for approval once it comes to a final vote. Since one Democrat … Read more
by Jacob Davies Just a quick link to a nifty mapping tool at the New York Times that illustrates how and where people of different races live; a little like the ones I posted a while back, but scalable. One thing apparent in the Bay Area maps – I suspect elsewhere too, but I only … Read more
by Eric Martin “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” -Fyodor Dostoevsky Glenn Greenwald has unearthed some disturbing accounts of the five month (and counting) detention of Army Private Bradley Manning, the suspect accused of leaking classified material to WikiLeaks. Again, he is a suspect who is accused of … Read more
by Eric Martin
The recent collapse of the Palestinian/Israeli peace talks – and the Obama administration's failure to obtain even modest settlement freeze assurances from the Netanyahu government - has, ironically, been met with a rare bout of optimism from several observers. The optimism stems, in part, from the fact that the recent collapse of the peace process may, once and for all, sound the death knell for a road to nowhere that has been the only path traveled to the exclusion of other avenues.
Now, with the peace process in shambles, and the demographic time bomb in Israel ticking, present and future necessity combined with past futility, could give birth to new, more promising strategies. Along those lines, Daniel Levy (in nibbles), Amjad Atallah and Bassma Kodmani (in more substantial form) (pdf) and Robert Wright are beginning to flesh out what one such new approach would look like: a UN-led solution, and its relative advantages. From Wright:
There is a strategy that could actually work. It would take boldness on President Obama’s part, but it could win him a place in history and the enduring gratitude of most Jews and Palestinians.
Seizing the opportunity involves first seeing the flaw in one premise of our current policy. As Clinton put that premise on Friday, “The United States and the international community cannot impose a solution. Sometimes I think both parties seem to think we can. We cannot.”
Yes we can.
The United Nations created a Jewish state six decades ago, and it can create a Palestinian state now. It can define the borders, set the timetable and lay down the rules for Palestinian elections (specifying, for example, that the winners must swear allegiance to a constitution that acknowledges Israel’s right to exist).
Establishing such a state would involve more tricky issues than can be addressed in this space…But, however messy this solution may seem, it looks pretty good when you realize how hopeless the current process is.
Palestinians and Israelis have taken turns impeding this process, and lately Israel has been in the lead. A raft of American inducements failed to get Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to forgo for even three months the construction of Israeli settlements that are banned under international law. It would be nice to think that this is just a phase, the product of an ephemeral far-right coalition. But there are signs that Israel’s drift to the right runs deep.
Only last week the chief rabbis in dozens of Israeli municipalities — who get government salaries — decreed that landlords shouldn’t rent to non-Jews. Meanwhile, hard-line settlers are systematically populating the upper levels of the military. And moderates seem to be heading for the exits. From 2000 to 2009 the number of Israelis applying for permanent residence in America nearly doubled. […]
By comparison, a United Nations solution looks Israel-friendly. Borders could be drawn to accommodate some of the thickest Israeli settlements along the 1967 lines (while giving the new Palestinian state land in exchange). But perhaps the biggest advantage is the political cover this approach would give President Obama. […]
By contrast, the current path involves Obama taking political heat every time he tries to move Netanyahu a few inches toward the goal line. And there are 97 yards to go.
A prediction: if the United Nations does take the initiative, domestic resistance will be largely confined to the right wing of American Jewish opinion. Vast numbers of American (and Israeli) Jews will rally to the plan, because lasting peace will finally be within reach.
Below the fold is a list of salient issues related to this approach prepared by Wright (reprinted with permission of the author):
by Eric Martin One of the fortunate byproducts of the most recent wave of WikiLeaks revelations was that I came across Aaron Bady's thought-provoking blog – this due to the fact that a few of his eloquent examinations of the WikiLeaks mission were widely cited. In this post, Bady discusses the normalization of the war footing that took … Read more
by Doctor Science
M.S. at the Economist talks about The lonely 6%: as Daniel Sarewitz discussed at Slate, the Pew Research Center found that while 23% of the general public identify as Republican, only 6% of scientists do. M.S. suggest three possible, testable hypothesis to explain this:
The first is that scientists are hostile towards Republicans, which scares young Republicans away from careers in science. The second is that Republicans are hostile towards science, and don’t want to go into careers in science. The third is that young people who go into the sciences tend to end up becoming Democrats, due to factors inherent in the practice of science or to peer-group identification with other scientists.
A month ago, Nils August Andresen posted a series at Frum Forum about why the educated young are shunning the GOP:
To simplify: Republicans have gone from having a clear advantage among top students in the decade following the Eisenhower administration, to being competitive under the Nixon and Ford administrations, and from being an energetic minority during Reagan and Bush Sr. to being almost eradicated today.
..
while students have fled the Republican Party, they do not seem to have moved very far to the left. The Weathermen are long gone. Hippies, utopian Marxists, socialists, anarchists – groups that were prominent in the 1960s and 1970s – are marginal today. Rather, today’s best students identify as slightly to the left of center, policy-wise liberals who massively prefer the Democratic party.
…
Let me advance another hypothesis. Today’s top students are motivated less by enthusiasm for Democrats and much more by revulsion from Republicans. It’s not the students who have changed so much. It’s the Republicans.
The 20- or 30-point advantage the Democratic Party has among educated young people pretty much matches what the Pew Center found for scientists as a whole — even though Pew’s sample was drawn from AAAS members, who are mostly middle-aged or older.
I’m not going to say that I know for sure what drove this historical process, but I can talk about what it was like.
by Jacob Davies Via Mark Thoma, the USDA reports that 42.9 million Americans collected food stamps last month, or 14% of the US population. In 2001, the number collecting food stamps averaged (pdf) 17.3 million. Between 2001 and 2010, the US economy grew from $39,773 per-capita to $42,247 per-capita (both in 2010 dollars), or $2,474. … Read more
by Gary Farber
The ObWi Bay Area Bloggers & Bullsh*t League of Earth = ObBABBLE's first meeting is hereby announced.
WHERE: Crepevine. Specifically.
5600 College Avenue, Oakland, CA
5600 College Ave, Oakland,
CA 94618
Ph: (510) 658-2026
WHEN: Saturday, December 11th, 2010, 1 p.m. until we're done.
PURPOSE: Socializing, meeting each other, fun. Talking about what we talk about on Obsidian Wings and our other favorite blogs. Flame wars dampened with beverages and cheer.
QUESTIONS: email gary underscore farber at yahoo dot com.
by Jacob Davies What do the two major parties in the United States stand for? What priorities do they put higher than anything else, so high that they are willing to compromise on things they really don’t like if that’s the only way to make it pass? Let’s see: Republican Party Democratic Party Tax cuts for households … Read more
by russell OK, looks like this is how it's going to play out: Bush-era cuts extended across the board for two years Unemployment benefits extended for 13 months Swapping 2% off of FICA for the "making work pay" tax rebate Reinstating inheritance tax as planned, but hold to 35% on estates over $5M Extending the Bush-era cuts on … Read more
by Gary Farber The ObWi Bay Area Bloggers & Bullsh*t League of Earth = ObBABBLE's first meeting is proto-organized and is hereby announced. Name likely to change, as is everything else. Frequency to start will be monthly, but subject to further detail and change; possibilities of every other weekend subgroups may occur, or may not. … Read more
Gary mentioned there had been no open thread for over a week. That's just wrong. We got your open thread right here. News in my world includes the amazing fecundity of my nieces (yay babies!), I still have a job (yay software!), and I'm almost done raking the yard (no yay). Spent last evening in … Read more
–by Sebastian I feel like I'm still sorting through my thoughts about WikiLeaks. So if this seems a bit contradictory, that may very well be because I'm of (at least) two minds about the whole thing. But it seems to me like the issue lacks balance. My pre-WikiLeaks initial thoughts on such issues were something … Read more
by Doctor Science
On Monday, zunguzungu posted a widely-linked and ground-breaking analysis of Julian Assange’s stated philosophy behind Wikileaks:
to summarize, [Assange] begins by describing a state like the US as essentially an authoritarian conspiracy, and then reasons that the practical strategy for combating that conspiracy is to degrade its ability to conspire, to hinder its ability to “think” as a conspiratorial mind. [bold mine]
by Jacob Davies Well, I sure complain a lot. But I'm an optimist – long-term, planet-wide – even if the day to day politics of the US are wearying. I also like visualizations, and this one describes why I'm an optimist: (5 minute video. If you're impatient, skip to a runthrough of the animation at … Read more
by Eric Martin This post from Economist Mom about the current dominance of pro-tax cut ideology raises several important points about the dearth of sensible tax policy debate in Washington, not the least of which has to do with the collective inability to grasp the nuances of marginal tax rates. In particular, she points out … Read more
by Jacob Davies The cables tell a tale of America being taken for a ride by Georgia’s President Saakashvili in 2008: A 2008 batch of American cables from another country once in the cold war’s grip — Georgia — showed a much different sort of access. In Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, American officials had all but … Read more