Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2570

How Medium Dictates Message

Claire Berlinski is on a book tour:

A week of doing radio interviews has left me vaguely disgusted with myself. Honestly, if all you knew about Margaret Thatcher was what you'd heard me say in one of these interviews, you wouldn't know much. It's not for want of trying on my part, but there's just no time to make a serious argument this way.

Even as the words are coming out of my mouth, I'm thinking, "That doesn't really make sense if I don't explain the context; there's an obvious...

Social Conservatism Or Conservative Socialism?

Democracy in America looks at :

ONE OF the more interesting, though perhaps less significant, fault lines between social conservatism and economic conservatism is the peculiar issue of state liquor monopolies. There are nine states in the union where the government maintains a direct monopoly on the sale of hard liquor. These lonely outposts of American socialism are not the country's most liberal states; they're mainly conservative ones, including three of the seven...

Face Of The Day

Two weeks old baby tiger 'Schuna' is pictured on September 5, 2010 at
the zoo in Wuppertal, western Germany. As 'Schuna' was not accepted by
its mother 'Mymosa', the animal is bottle-fed and brought up by
keepers. By Horst Ossinger/AFP/Getty Images.

Germany - Wuppertal - History - Personages - People

The Point Of Fluffy Rhetoric

Last week one of Tyler Cowen's readers asked him why corporate-speak exists. Cowen's answer:

People disagree in corporations, often virulently, or they would disagree if enough real debates were allowed to reach the surface. The use of broad generalities, in rhetoric, masks such potential disagreements and helps maintain corporate order and authority. Since it is hard to oppose fluffy generalities in any very specific way, a common strategy is to stack everyone's opinion or points into an...

"Philosophy Is Dead"

It was reported last week that Stephen Hawking doesn't think God had a hand in creating the universe. Burke's Corner is staggered by a couple of Hawking's assertions:

In his failure to exercise modesty in his pursuit of scientific knowledge, Hawking makes a particularly startling claim - that "philosophy is dead".From Plato and Aristotle to Maimonides and Aquinas to Kant and Hegel,Hawking dismisses how the human mind across cultures and millennia hasreflected on transcendence and humanity's...

Craig's Blacklist

Tracy Clark-Flory comments on the closing of Craigslist's "adult services" section:

It seems that the sex workers and pimps who were pushed out of thevirtual red light district are now spreading throughout the site. ... Stopping the sale of sex on the Internet is like trying to keep frogsin a bucket. You can shutter the most popular online venue forprostitution, but that doesn't eliminate the demand.  Independent sexworkers will find other ways to do business, and so will pimps...

Back To School

Raghuram Rajan wants to extend more credit to create more high-skilled workers. Manzi wants more:

[I:]mproving schools is not going to be close to enough. I believestrongly, for example, that we need a new approach to immigration thatreconceptualizes immigration as recruiting rather than law enforcement.Though it is unfashionable to say it now, we need to figure out how toextend the market revolution to sectors of the economy that remainprotected from it by political power. We have to figure...

Is Obama's Proposal Any Good?

Pete Davis is a tad underwhelmed:

Yesterday, President Obama announceda six-year $50 billion program to rebuild 150,000 miles of highways, tolay and maintain 4,000 miles of rail lines, to restore 150 miles ofrunways, and to put the NextGen air traffic control system in place.Tomorrow in Cleveland, he is expected to announce full expensing forall businesses of qualified investment made by the end of 2011. These arereasonable next steps to sustain the economy as the American Recoveryand...

About My Job: The Opinion Journalist, Ctd

Chait picks through Conor's list:

As I see it, #12 -- "to produce an intellectually honest argument" --is the correct answer. I'd put it slightly differently: to explain theworld as I see it. Understanding the world requires digesting facts,but it can't be done entirely through digesting facts -- it requiressome degree of normative judgments as well. That is what opinionjournalism should do. You can be in this business to influence people,but then you're in a very tricky position when it...

Mental Health Break

A video of summer holidays in England in the 1930s. Wait for the somewhat ominous surprise around the 1.30 mark:

England - Recreation - David Lloyd George - Magna Carta - Adolf Hitler