Here’s a little counterfactual for you. Suppose the CEO of a retail chain that is predominantly patronized by cultural conservatives published an op/ed in which he announced his support for abortion rights. Then suppose some of the customers of his chain decided to boycott because they were opposed to abortion. Would Rod Dreher write a post like this? [Read more →]

It’s been my contention, for some time, that a lot of the anti-Microsoft sentiment from certain fans of Apple isn’t actually based on good-faith considerations of Microsoft’s products and services but out of simple partisan sentiment. (As a pillar of stoic neutrality and sterling integrity, I am beyond such accusations myself.) This is similar to a lot of the general negative attitudes towards Microsoft, concerning the anti-monopoly suit (fun fact: Apple packages a Web browser with their OS), and how Microsoft supposedly wants to “take over the whole electronic world” (when Apple, in fact, produces a far broader range of products than Microsoft).

We have a bit of an opportunity to see who really cares about the quality of the product and who is just a shrill ideologue. Windows 7 has been out as a free-to-download release candidate for months. (I’m writing this post on my computer which is currently running that RC.) It has been released to manufacturing and will soon be available to purchase. By almost all accounts, it’s an elegant, fast, powerful operating system that removes many of the typical complaints of the Windows experience. Meanwhile, the Zune HD is coming, and it looks awesome. Really, really awesome. (Check the link and watch the movies.) This is a big turnaround for Microsoft, for the previous Zunes, while not as bad as many have made them out to be, were truly poor cousins of Apple’s iPod, a near-miracle of smart design, style and functionality. The Zune HD doesn’t just look like a competitor to the iPod touch; I think, if it lives up to the promise of its features, it’ll be a flatly superior product.

Now, it may be the case that the Zune HD isn’t as awesome as it seems now. And perhaps Windows 7 has a host of flaws that we’ll come to discover. I’m certainly not saying anyone has to claim to like either of them if they don’t. But if all the smart tech writers who are praising them are right, then chances are, a lot of Apple partisans will be impressed by them. If that’s the case, there will be a clear decision to be made: tip the cap and praise Microsoft, and recognize that Microsoft products are attractive alternatives that smart people can prefer; or ignore them, and continue to act like there is no appreciable reason to choose to buy Microsoft products. I’m interested to see how it goes down.

I think I’ve nailed down what bothers me about a lot of the defenses of the town hall protesters by, let’s say, more sophisticated, politically engaged and connected conservative pundits: I read, and all I can think is “this sounds like anthropology.” I was just reading a piece that someone linked to, from a smart professional politics and culture writer, and though he was attempting to defend the ways of Joe and Joanne Plumber to the world, it could not have demonstrated better how little he was like those people than if he had just written that down as a sentence in the piece. I think it should give us a little pause if we are talking about other Americans in a way that evokes Margaret Mead talking about a premodern tribe.

This kind of Real American rah-rahing that Robert Stacy McCain, et al. take part in often is usually done less crudely by more culturally liberal, reformist conservatives. But as the volume of these protesters grow louder– the more loudly these protesters insist that this is a defining moment of us vs. them–  it becomes harder for culturally sophisticated conservatives to resist the pull of circling the wagons. They are angry because of what they see as an arrogant dismissal of the town hall protesters by liberals, and further they imagine all sorts of malign things about the people who are dismissive. Perhaps, in some instances, they’re right, although I have found the national conversation about the protesters remarkably restrained, considering how, yes, frenzied and incoherent many of the protesters are. A few conservative pundits seek to reduce all liberal critique of the protesters into insults of culture. That’s not fair, for most of us, and worse, in the commission of accusing liberals of reducing protesters to cultural cues, they are doing the exact same thing to the protesters themselves. These pundits respond to what they perceive as an illegitimate reduction to culture by standing every argument on the basis of culture.  It’s exactly considering elements of culture above what people actually have to say and the opinions they hold that, I think, is offensive. This is why the (classic) liberal ideal of centering political disputes on the content of political expression, and not on identity, is so radical. It is egalitarian and uninterested in the concerns of social and cultural space.

And, God bless them, conservative pundits of all stripes just do not fall out of love with the idea that the country is at its heart and in its majority white, straight, Christian, rural and Republican. I don’t know how many elections we have to have where the shifting demographics of this country are clear before they will catch on. Will it really take until this country becomes a majority Hispanic nation before there penetrates the larger conservative mind the reality that this country is not made up solely of people just like the protesters? Why do they still think they can refer to “America” when they are really referring to one shrinking slice of our electorate? I didn’t get it in November; I don’t get it now.

I extend to the people at the town halls the respect of listening to what they have to say and taking it seriously, and it’s for that reason I dismiss them. Because to the extent that they have an argument at all, it is an empty one, with almost no coherent objections to proposed health care reforms, lots of shouting and sloganeering and posturing, and nothing that I would call a rational, constructive argument. I take it that sometimes the question is precisely about the division of people who are politically savvy and those who are not, but here again the wages of what it means to demonstrate respect to someone on an intellectual level are clear. Were I to suspend discrimination and endorse the facile narrative of the town hall protests as some new Jeffersonian revolution, I would be extending to those people the most profound disrespect I know, the disrespect that says that they are not intelligent, adult or sophisticated enough to endure my disapproval. I disagree with them. I find their arguments empty and their protests childish. Some of them, I genuinely fear, because they have demonstrated themselves so gripped by anger and so far from reality that real violence seems inevitable. Were our positions reversed, I would prefer this kind of considered dismissal over the soft bigotry of low expectations.

That kind of self-defeating “respect” is something some defenders of the protesters avoid. Many in the conservative media do not, and not just the more crude forms but those from some very sophisticated, very smart people. The town hall protesters may live to be dismissed by liberals, but they also live to be patronized by conservatives. When I read some conservative bloggers talk about Real America, I cringe, for the same reason I cringed recently when talking to an otherwise charming old lady who told me she loved “the inherent nobility” of black people. Like the old lady and her exoticism, they and their admiration sand off the particular human reality of the people they say they are admiring.

We’ve all heard the arguments against the arguments that the Web is making us stupid. (Nobody actually makes a crude form argument remotely that simplistic, but moving on.) Certainly, I’m not going to attempt to argue that sort of thing, because I don’t entirely believe it, and more because that’s one of those opinions that will cause the Webby world to come down on you with absurd amounts of vitriol. (One of the worst things about the Web, incidentally, the enforcement on all the positions of some.) I do want to say, though, that the fact that people who spend many hours a day on the Internet and/or are professionally employed to do so think that the Internet doesn’t make us stupid isn’t what I’d call a particularly compelling bit of evidence.

When I say that we have a moral obligation to provide people with adequate health care when their employment or financial situation prevents them from having it, I am usually told that “no one argues” the opposite. No one, I am led to believe, genuinely opposes universal access to health care. They just disagree with me and others about how to go about delivering that access in a fiscally responsible way.

Now, I could argue, and have, that saying “I support universal health care,” but opposing any and all actual attempts to get there, is a particularly cruel bit of rhetoric. But okay. Fair enough. A lot of people opposed to currently debated reforms favor universal coverage generally. If only we could afford it, let’s keep the changes iterative, free market pixie dust and libertarian magic beans, etc. etc. OK. I have been told, though, that no prominent pundit or commentator actually opposes government-guaranteed universal access to health care.

Well, here’s Megan McArdle.

She says, “I was writing about my deeper opposition to the entire project of providing, paying for, or otherwise guaranteeing health care…. [F]or most people on the left, this is akin to declaring that I would like to take up killing orphans in my spare time….”

I don’t know anything about orphans. I do know, though, that Megan McArdle’s ideal America has some senseless, preventable deaths. Because here is a fact that anyone concerned with our health care system and its reform should admit: our system leaves many people without adequate health care, and that this lack of adequate health care sometimes leads to death. Prevention and early detection are the foundations of American medicine. And the lack of same does indeed kill people. At the top of this post is a picture Deamonte Driver, the young man who died of a toothache two years ago and caused, for the briefest moment, our country to consider exactly what is at stake when we talk about health care reform.

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Tyler Cowen has graciously responded to my recent post in an email. With his permission, I am printing it below. In the interest of accurately representing him, I’m going to post the full email.

“First, I stress that my view is about diversity of outcomes — often extreme diversity — not that things go well for everyone or even most autistics.  I feel you are misrepresenting my views on this a bit.  I’m not saying it is all “good,” by any means.

Kanner and Asperger recognized varying outcomes as important from the very beginning of this literature, although some of their points often get lost.

You wish to claim that the needs of “high-functioning autistics” are becoming central.  Keep in mind that Jenny McCarthy and Autism Speaks are still dominating this debate in the public arena, not the neurodiversity crowd.

In my view we do not know the ratio of “high” vs. “low” functioning; there are probably more “highs” than we think though it is unlikely that they are in the majority. I also have reservations about the term as it is used in that manner.

I very much argue against the idea of autism as personality traits or for that matter autistics as “shy” (many of them are not, or they have non-shy temperaments which they cannot meaningfully express).  I view it as a cognitive profile with varying advantages and disadvantages, not a personality profile.

If we look at the history of Down Syndrome, or for that matter issues of race and gender and discrimination, or transgender issues, greater recognition of varying outcomes has gone hand-in-hand with better treatment for those with the less advantaged outcomes.  That’s a pretty consistent pattern and I believe it will hold for autism as well.  It’s not either/or and it’s not as if the “high-functioning types” are wrecking some kind of current idyllic paradise for the “low-functioning types” or calling for cessation of aid.  Quite the contrary.  This is perhaps the one point I would wish to stress to you the most.

I would, say, wish to eliminate the often serious motor and coordination problems experienced by autistics.  I’ve never met anyone, autistic or not, who wouldn’t agree with that.  I would not, however, in general wish to eliminate autistic minds and I believe there is a coherent notion of such a mind without the motor (and other) problems.  You might not disagree with that, but I’m not sure you are distinguishing between those concepts with enough clarity.

I worry about creating a separate category of autistics who are in essence labeled as “truly autistic, you are the people who have absolutely no chance.”  First, there are some amazing success stories, even if they are a minority.  Second, even if they can’t succeed by conventional standards, a large number of these autistics are extremely intelligent and have many other virtues and capabilities.

Also keep in mind that some of these people (and I mean those who can’t talk, bang their heads, have other serious life problems) wake up every day and type “autism” in news.google.com and blogsearch.google.com to read what is new on the topic.  I worry about how they should respond to the notion that they are a kind of pure disorder and the possible implication (not necessarily intended by you, I grant) that in essence their minds should not even exist.  Why don’t we instead adopt a more sophisticated terminology that recognizes a) cognitive profile as the key feature, b) varying outcomes, c) multidimensional capabilities which render pure definitions of “mild” and “severe” quite complex, and d) the need for aid and assistance in a great number of cases?”

And, in a follow up email

“Note that recent work by Patricia Howlin conservatively estimates that at least 1/3 of autistics have some kind of savant-like ability.  So far this paper is being taken very seriously and she is well-established and well-respected in the area.

I do agree, however, that savants as a phenomenon are “over-recognized” in popular culture.  My book mentions them only in passing, as I would rather people had a better sense of the non-savant-like intelligence abilities of autistics.

At some deeper level, of course, these abilities, and the possibilities of savant-like skills, may well be related.  Most likely autistics have greater access to lower-level forms of information processing (and that involves both costs and benefits).

I should stress that this portrait applies to idiopathic autism but probably not to etiological autism as represented by Fragile X, TS, mouse models, etc., noting that most human autism is idiopathic in nature.”

Your power rankings, while cute, should never, ever be treated as big news on your website. When one team passes another in an artificial competition that neither knew they were participating in, this is not the time for the extra bold font. You know?

Or, perhaps, we need a more delicate, more nuanced and more intelligently considered use of language when we talk about autism and in particular those who are autistic and high-functioning.

So: I don’t have Tyler Cowen’s new book. I am planning on purchasing it on Amazon soon. (Payday is Friday.) I’m going to restrict myself, then, to this diavlog and the things I’ve read from and about Dr. Cowen’s book online. I have to say, I watched this diavlog, and I said to myself, “This is an argument for those who have never had to restrain a severely autistic child who was trying to smash his face into his desk. For those who have never had to take care of an autistic person who has been rendered entirely nonverbal by the disorder. For those who have never contemplated helping a severely autistic person use the bathroom, or cleaned up after them because they are incapable of doing so.”

This is uncharitable. I have, in fact, little idea about Dr. Cowen’s exposure to those with severe autism. My own exposure to such people has been entirely professional, and I have no right to pretend that I have a personal stake in the issue. Even if I had the most personal connection possible and Dr. Cowen had none, it would change nothing about either his argument or my own. Indeed, I said this very thing in my first post in which I asserted that austism is a disorder, and in my later (less successful) follow-up on that issue. (I encourage anyone reading on to read the first post in which I lay out why I believe autism is best viewed as a disorder.) But I think that Dr. Cowen is deeply wrong in how he talks about autism, and I think it is a symptom of a broad misunderstanding about the reality of life for most autistic people, one which has serious and negative consequences for autistics.

[Read more →]

I take it that some of my fellow liberals and progressives like Ross’s new column more than his other recent columns, particularly his now notorious Texas vs. California column. I’m with them, incidentally, and I do think that Ross’s column today is better than his last effort. I can’t help but think, though, that a big part of the reason that I and other liberals prefer this column to the last is because we think that we’ve won the argument against social conservatism. This isn’t a matter of Ross, heterodox conservative that he is, endorsing a position that liberals like; he is endorsing a socially conservative position. But I think that liberals don’t mind arguments to social conservatism that much (the way they do arguments to economic conservatism, ala Texas vs. California)  because they think that, politically, social conservatism is a settled question, and we’ve won. I don’t think that’s entirely true, personally, and if I put them on the spot, I imagine many liberals wouldn’t admit to feeling that way. But my suspicion is that liberals are more amenable to a column like today’s because they think that, on this set of issues, we can’t lose.

La Belle Dame sans Merci
by John Keats

Ballad

I.

O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.

II.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms!
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.

III.

I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

IV.

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

V.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look’d at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

VI.

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

VII.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
“I love thee true.”

VIII.

She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept, and sigh’d fill sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

IX.

And there she lulled me asleep,
And there I dream’d—Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream’d
On the cold hill’s side.

X.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!”

XI.

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

XII.

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.

1. If baryons and electrons and some other of the subatomic particles are only a small percentage of the stuff that constitutes the universe, why is it that they are the only thing that we observe in our tiny part of the universe? Why don’t we observe dark matter or dark energy in our immediate surroundings, whether in/on our planet or in the immediate space surrounding it? If a certain element of something is a very large percentage of that something, we expect (although don’t know) that we’ll see quite a bit of it around us. So, for example, oxygen is the third most common element in the universe, and it is hard to find a place in, on or above the earth that doesn’t have (in some molecular structure) a great percentage of oxygen. (Even, for example, in the crust of the earth.) But to my understanding, we observe nothing besides baryons et al. in our immediate surroundings. Is this because dark matter or dark energy are unlikely to be found in the kind of space that we occupy? Or is this again a consequence of the fact that they are “dark,” that we can’t observe them directly, and we have reason to believe that there are significant amounts of dark matter and dark energy around us that we cannot observe?

2. I’ve always understood the old “dropping a tea cup” vision of entropy to be largely metaphorical. I understand, to the degree to which I’m able, the four laws (including the zeroth, that is) of thermodynamics, or as much of the math as I’m able to handle. I understand that the entropy of a thermally isolated system never increases decreases (fixed, stupid mistake). The trouble is that people seem to take as the major message of the second law the idea that time trends towards chaos over order, that absent an expenditure of energy, matter will move from a more ordered to less ordered state. (I am ready to be savaged for my I’m sure egregious misrepresentations of the science.) The trick for me is that I think that thermodynamics defines order only as a system which requires more energy to reach than the alternative. But most people I’ve encountered, when talking about entropic order, think about order additionally in what I can only consider human terms, and involve ideas of practicality and human use that (it seems to me) are a result of human history and aren’t some facet of the order of the natural universe.

So what confuses me about the tea cup example– the idea that it is much easier to take the ordered state of the tea cup and make it disordered, by dropping it, than it is to take the constituent parts of the cup and make it into a tea cup, and that this demonstrates entropy– is that people seem to speak as though there is something inherently related to our thermodynamic science about practical human considerations of “order,” rather than order being for the purposes of entropy only a state which requires more energy to attain. In other words, people talk as if there is something inherently more ordered about the cup in the state of a cup than the cup in the state of hundreds of shards of porcelain. That is, that the cup as a cup is more ordered not simply because it takes more energy for it to be put into a cup than put into shards, but because of some sort of inherent “order” to the cup taking the cup shape. To me, that’s applying human attitudes to the fundamental states of the universe in a way that I find unscientific. The universe doesn’t give a shit about the cup being capable of holding water.

One way I like to think about science is to think about what a non-human intelligence might say about a given phenomenon, what they would observe similarly to what we observed because they have to. A non-human intelligence would bring with it no human baggage in terms of norms, tradition or philosophy, but would observe the same things that must be observed. So, for example, a non-human intelligence would look at a thermally-closed system and observe entropy rising, because they would have to. Their conclusions might be different, how they apply that observation might be different, but if they are measuring the energy in a thermally closed system, they will observe the same increase in entropy that we do. So far, so good. What I don’t think is clear is that the non-human intelligence would look at the cup and say that it is more “ordered” in any sense other than the fact that it requires more energy to turn it into cup form than to turn it into shard form. This is because the alien (or whatever) intelligence would not necessarily have the same vision of the practical use of a cup versus the practical use of shards of porcelain. They would necessarily see the cup as requiring more energy to be put into cup form than for it to later be turned into shards; that’s an empirical observation independent of practical considerations. But I don’t think it’s at all clear that they would see the cup as more functional than the shards. It’s hard for me to understand how hundreds of irregular porcelain shards could have more practical function than a tea cup, but then, I’m human, and I’m constrained by human convention.

So– am I right that people assume into entropic principles a human notion of practicality and use on top of the question of amount of energy to reach a certain state, and erroneously? Or is there some aspect of higher-energy-to-achieve states like tea cups compared to porcelain shards (or clean rooms to messy rooms, etc.) that makes them likely to appear to us to be of greater practical use? Or do I have something deeply wrong in my basic conceptions of these things?

Forgive me if I’m not being particularly clear.

Jamelle Bouie, of the United States of Jamerica fame, to the ranks as a member of the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.