Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2832

Use The EPA, Ctd

Pivoting off Chait's argument, Plumer advocates for legislation:

In the long term...we'd really need a price on carbon to
transform the country's energy sector and give people incentive to
develop new clean-energy technologies—having the EPA just flatly tell
polluters that they have to adopt this or that specific
pollution-cutting gizmo isn't very good for innovation.

He also weighs the pros and cons of a utility-only energy bill. As do Dave Roberts and Michael Levi.

United...

Quote For The Day II

"This age needs rather men like Shakespeare, or Milton, or Pope; menwho are filled with the strength of their cultures and do not transcendthe limits of their age, but, working within the times, bring what ispeculiar to the moment to glory. We need great artists who are willingto accept restrictions, and who love their environments with suchvitality that they can produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic ... Whatever the many failingsof my work, let it stand as a manifesto of my love...

Quote For The Day

"If I were given carte blanche to write about any topic I could, itwould be about how much our ignorance, in general, shapes our lives inways we do not know about. Put simply, people tend to do what they knowand fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way,ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life. And unknownunknowns constitute a grand swath of everybody's field of ignorance," - David Dunning.



Unknown unknown - Donald Rumsfeld - Performing Arts -...

Decriminalization Or Legalization?

Matt Steinglass was for marijuana legalization before living in countries with lax drug laws. He   decriminalization:

In the Netherlands, marijuana possession for personal use remains illegal. It's just never prosecuted. And indeed this seems to be the case for all the European countrieswith relatively permissive marijuana policies...It would be nice if we could arrive at an ethically andlogically consistent legal stance on drug use, but it may be that inpractice that's very...

In Defense Of "Doing Nothing"

Jonah Lehrer finds Shirky's latest book wanting:

While Shirky pokes fun at [lolcats:], he still argues that it
a dramatic improvement over the passive entertainment of television. "The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something, and someone making lolcats has bridged that

There are two things to say about this. The first is that theconsumption of culture is not always worthless. Is it really better toproduce yet another lolcat than watch The Wire? And what about...

The Rise Of The Kid Flick?

That's Steven Zeitchik's view:

Families are the ones going to the movies these days. Perhaps the only ones.

That's not just a summer phenomenon. Almost every big hit among the 2010 releases has been a movie whose primary, if not overwhelming, audience is children 12 and under -- "How to Train Your Dragon," "Shrek Forever After," "Alice in Wonderland." Ditto for the year's biggest sleeper, "Diary of a Wimpy Kid." In fact, there isn't a single big-studio movie aimed at children that failed, save...

Chart Of The Day

Desktops are on the way out:

Amazingly, by 2015, desktops will constitute just 18 percent of theconsumer PC market, if Forrester's projections bear out. In otherwords, more than 80 percent of PCs will be portable. Part of this isdriven by what Forrester forecasts will be the wild success of tabletcomputers like the iPad. In just three years' time, tablets areprojected to outsell desktops, becoming the second-largest PC categoryafter laptops. This sounds crazy until you consider that Apple...

Yglesias Award Nominee

"Whatever you think of Theodore Roosevelt, he was not Lenin. Woodrow Wilson was not Stalin. The philosophical foundations of progressivism may be wrong. The policies that progressivism generates may be counterproductive. Its view of the Constitution may betray the Founders'. Nevertheless, progressivism is a distinctly American tradition that partly came into being as a way to prevent ideologies like communism and fascism from taking root in the United States. And not even the stupidest Americ...

The Daily Wrap

Today on the Dish, we passed along BP's latest duplicity on the extent of the leak, processed the easing of the Gaza blockade, spotlighted the latest evils to emerge over Maciel, and blogged the tweeting of an execution in Utah. The new coalition in Britain laid out its views on gay equality while Kagan stiffed gay rights. A view of the violence in Afghanistan here.

BP also burned turtles alive. Michael Barone backed Barton and Reihan did as well (but soon followed up). Crist could be coming...

Quote For The Day

"Faith in reason is not only faith in our own reason but also -- and
even more -- in that of others.

Thus a rationalist, even if he believeshimself to be intellectually superior to others, will reject all claimsto authority since he is aware that, if his intelligence is superior tothat of others (which is hard for him to judge), it is so only in sofar as he is capable of learning from criticism as well as from his ownand other people's mistakes, and that one can learn in this sense onlyif ...