If any public official in America deserves the contempt of all citizens, it is Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the Maricopa County lawman who has forced innocent men to march down the street in pink underwear, reportedly forced a Latina woman to give birth while shackled to a bed, and is now trumping up bribery charges against a local judge. That Arizonans repeatedly elect this man is a mark against their polity.

The thing that I find so depressing is that the actual stance of the right toward interventionist war won’t change at all.  While Chaffetz and those sharing his political views may have some luck in the future convincing the American right that it is opposed to Obama’s wars, once conservatives are back in power and faced with their own foreign entanglements, the right will have forgotten entirely any opposition it once held toward interventionism.  Such opposition is grounded entirely in political maneuvering rather than any moral or philosophical framework.

In fact, I’ve argued myself away from my Glenn Beck piece almost completely at this point.  Not only is Beck the ultimate opportunist, the people he may convince of American empire or the danger of American foreign policy would be convinced as easily the next day of the need for more American power and further interventions once it is their own team were making the case. There is no philosophical bond between the current conservative base and the concept of limited government in foreign affairs. Limited government extends only to domestic issues, while the security state can grow unabated.

At best the new anti-war right will be something of a paradox, and doomed to expire.  I think Jack is engaged mainly in wishful thinking here, another problem currently afflicting many on the right.

“If anyone tries to tell you that uncertainty about climate change is a reason for inaction, he’s either a fool or a scoundrel. Probably a bit of both.” ~ Mark Kleiman

Kleiman makes a number of assumptions in his piece before reaching this one.  He assumes some hypothetical climate change statistics and then assumes that because he has made such a speculation that the policy going forward should be precautionary against said speculative fiction.  But simply because Mark Kleiman says that we might see an 8 degree (C) increase in temperature by 2100 does not make it so.

Writes Kleiman:

Ordinarily, it is the proponents of action who bear the burden of persuasion.  But in this case political inaction means, in effect, licensing a massive gamble, though no individual chooses to make it. Rather, the gamble would be the outcome of billions of uncoordinated self-interested decisions: precisely the sort of process that, in the absence of external costs, leads to efficient outcomes.  But none of the arguments for the freedom of economic activity applies to activities with huge, indirect, deferred, and diffuse external costs:  by contrast with Adam Smith’s baker, there is simply no “invisible hand” mechanism that directs private action in such a situation in the direction of the public interest.

Actually, just like with any free market, climate change will respond to market pressures coupled with government incentives.  Rising fuel costs will reduce the amount of fuel used and the less people drive and fewer things are shipped via truck and freighter, the lower our CO2 emissions will be.  The government can invest in mass transit to help ease in a different norm for transportation as traditional fuel, and therefore traditional means of travel, becomes more and more prohibitively expensive.  Private innovators can be allowed to come up with the next revolutionary inventions in renewable energy and green transportation.  The government can issue tax credits to innovators and consumers who participate in the green revolution.  They can also provide more grants to college students pursuing science and engineering degrees.

These are positive steps rather than punitive ones.  The punitive measures should be directed at individual players – polluters and industries which have the largest hand in producing emissions.  Cap and trade is too broad and too subject to capture to be effective.  Targeting specific polluters makes more sense, while nudging normal Americans toward a different energy and transportation model in the future. [Read more →]

“The most important dividing line between “ancient” and “medieval” – the profoundest marker of the “fall of Rome” was not a matter of language or culture, of the shift from togas to tunics or from stuffed swan to roast meat. The most important dividing line was the loss of the power and capacity to tax.” ~ David Frum, reviewing Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome

Blogs are more visceral, more immediate, and more personal.  Columns feel stiff and confined – no matter who’s writing them.  Blogs may not be able to imitate narrative journalism.  They may not be able to capture the breadth or depth of a good long-form piece, or the hard data and real reporting of actual news stories.  But one thing they can do is make the traditional op/ed column seem awfully archaic.

Of course, blogs can’t be replicated in print. So as long as dead-tree papers are with us, we’ll have the column too.  All I know is that I wouldn’t mourn the column’s passing the way I would mourn the death of long-form narrative journalism.  There can be strength in limits, of course.  800 words can make what would otherwise be a long and rambling piece into something tight and concise.  But you can do it even better with a blog.

But really.  Good grief.  I’ve heard of conservapedia but I never realized how utterly inane the project really was.  Of all the silly things on the internet, this one is beginning to take shape as a future hall-of-famer. That’s the magnificent thing about the internet – there’s always room for one more elegant disaster.

Let’s see – here’s the opening paragraph in the entry on evolution: [Read more →]

In many ways, The Office is a show about power and ambition and it is a show about trade-offs.  A lot of people think it’s a show about despair, and for a while there in the third season, it was a show about despair, but that’s not what it is now.  As Mark notes in the comments to Jamelle’s post:

In some ways, though, that despair captured in The Office is exactly what makes it so appealing. It’s relatable in a way that the average uplifting sitcom can never be. It may be extraordinarily depressing for someone just getting started, but for most of us, it simply reflects how we’ve learned to live – and laugh at – our daily lives. We can’t all be President, we can’t all be firefighters, we can’t even all achieve middle management, much less upper management. What we can, however, do is laugh, which is what Jim and Pam do (or at least used to do), or we can find a sort of contentment in recognizing that our jobs do not define who we are, like Stanley (my personal favorite character in the show) and maintain our personal character above all else.

This is a very important point. Many shows, and much of the message coming out of popular American culture, is that we are all destined for greatness. We are all destined to do a job we not only like, but love. We are, in spite of any statistics to the contrary, bound to fall into a perfect, passionate love. We will all be powerful and unique, especially if we go to college.

Of course, just like most of us don’t have the body types of movie-stars, most of us will also not be millionaires or celebrities. Most of us will only ever achieve moderate financial success. Most of us will only be content with our work. We will dislike many of our bosses and co-workers and will have to learn to live with them as best we can, just like we learn to live with our imperfect families. Are we all just under-achievers then? [Read more →]

Jim and Pam getting married did more than give Michael and excuse to hook up with Pam’s mom. It expanded the lens of The Office wide enough to reveal a disturbing fact: Jim and Pam don’t have any real friends.

Suddenly, a romance that seemed like the natural progression for two quietly charming people revealed itself to be much more depressing.

All of Jim and Pam’s witty asides and eyerolls in response to their officemates’ antics have stopped being expressions of untapped potential and started to look like passive-aggressive attempts to undermine their peers—who are the only people who will socialize with them.

I admit that the earlier seasons – seasons one and two in particular – were the most fun when it came to the Jim/Pam dynamic.  The tension of unrequited love was the life and breath of the show, and the triangle between Jim/Pam and Dwight was a lot more funny back then.  But I’m just confused by this idea that somehow Jim and Pam have no friends, and that they are somehow acting in a passive-agressive attempt “to undermine their peers – who are the only people who will socialize with them.”

First of all, how does Keane know that their peers are the only people who will socialize with them?  What does that even mean? [Read more →]