Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2550

Palin vs The Press

The editor of the Missoulian, the daily newspaper in western Montana, is sick of Sarah's smears:

Contrary to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's warning to the standing-room-only crowd at this afternoon's Teen Challenge fundraiser in Missoula, the media did not "sneak in" to her speech. We were not there as "moles," in her words. ... I only mention this because that sort of talk – "Be careful. There may be some media that sneaked into the room." – is intended to create distrust of the...

Mental Health Break

A different way to see the city:

Brad Laner - Eyes Close from Josh Laner on Vimeo.

Vimeo - Multimedia - Development Frameworks - Flash - Business

Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Figs, Ctd

Christina Agapakis updates her fascinating post by linking to another by Christie Wilcox. In it, Wilcox explains how some fig species fight back against freeloading wasps that try to use the plant without pollinating it:

Firstoff, the figs carrying cheater offspring were aborted more frequently.When a fig aborts a larvae-containing fruit, it kills all of the larvaeinside. One active species only kept around 3% of the number of figsthat the passive pollinated species did. But to punish them...

"They Pay You To Listen"

In response to Craigslist's censorship of sex ads, sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh takes aim at five myths surrounding prostitution:

I've been studying high-end sex workers (by which I mean those whoearn more than $250 per "session") in New York, Chicago and Paris formore than a decade, and one of my most startling findings is that manymen pay women to not have sex. Well, they pay for sex, but end upchatting or having dinner and never get around to physical contact.Approximately 40 percent of...

American Non-Exceptionalism

 



At Aidwatch, Bill Easterly argues that the beauty of a fractal - a shape which has the same amount of "jaggedness" or "unevenness" at every scale - mirrors the levels of inequality in the world.

Huge disparities of wealth can be seen between the U.S. and sub-Saharan Africa (above, where red is rich and yellow, poor). But looking closer, the same patterns appear on the national and local levels within the US. There is a similar inequality of wealth between Appalachia and the greater DC a...

The Iraq War And Islamic Terrorism

This David Frum article is getting some push back. The most quoted paragraph:

Remember
how there was supposed to be a surge of rage against the governments
who fought the Iraq war? Yet the worst violence occurred in France,
which did not join the war. And even in France, Islamic extremist
violence has abated since 2005, contained and defeated by effective
police work.

Kevin Sullivan counters:

This strikes me as an incredibly simplistic - not to mentionshortsighted - analysis of the still to...

The Manufactured Misfit?

Camille Paglia exposes Lady Gaga on the cover of Sunday Times Magazine:

Although she presents herself as the clarion voice of all the freaks and misfits of life, there is little evidence that she ever was one. Her upbringing was comfortable and eventually affluent, and she attended the same upscale Manhattan private school as Paris and Nicky Hilton. There is a monumental disconnect between Gaga's melodramatic self-portrayal as a lonely, rebellious, marginalised artist and the powerful...

DADT: What Now?

Cohn does some crystal ball reading:

While the judge hasdecided that DADT is unconstitutional, she hasn't said what, exactly,the government has to do in response. If she says the government has tostop enforcing DADT, then Justice has to appeal, for the reason I said.But, based on what I've seen, it sounds like it's possible that shewould just order the reinstatement of the plaintiffs in this case. Ifso, then it is barely possible--unlikely, but imaginable--that thegovernment would just drop...

The Case For Modesty In Afghanistan, Ctd

Andrew Exum calls Joshua Foust's criticism of the Afghanistan Study Group report "the most clinical and devastating take-down of a policy paper I have ever read." Josh:

[T:]he best way to ensure Afghanistan does not fall into chaos is to leavethe country as stable as possible. Reducing it to a Special Forces andDrone targetting range, which the group recommends, is just asunsustainable in the long run as the current counterinsurgency effort.Maintaining an active drone program to preemptively...

D'Souza's Duct Tape

As noted earlier, Newt Gingrich is touting Dinesh D'Souza's latest nonsense. Weigel retorts:

D'Souza uses a lot of duct tape to put this together -- his argumentthat one quote from the NASA administrator means that Obama hasinvented a "curious mandate to convert a space agency into a Muslim andinternational outreach (sic)," for example. It's the kind of analysisthat puts greater import on quotes from speeches and interviews thenfrom the theory and research that inform the thousands of...