Brains, Getting To Know You...

[elfs]

Learning to Cook

Kay Steiger brings us an essay on how people graduate from college not knowing how to cook a delicious meal, and concludes that there are three things schools ought to be teaching, but don't: basic financial skills, cooking delicious food (which by default is healthier than fast food), and a comprehensive sex education. I might add that the third ought to be like the second: health and pleasure ought to be on the curriculum.

Jim Manzi explains the credit problem in caveman terms

You and Og make a deal. When he returns from the hunt, he will give you two handfuls of meat. That's debt. If instead of promising you a fixed amount of meat, you agreed that he would give you a fixed share – say half – of what he brings back to the cave, that's equity. As an example calculation, if Og takes one handful of berries under such a debt contract and a second handful under such an equity contract, and if he comes back into the cave with, say, 10 handfuls of meat, then he has to give 2 handfuls to the debt holder and 5 handfuls (half of 10) to the equity holder. He is left with 10 - 2 - 5 = 3 handfuls of meat for his dinner. This combination of debt and equity is called his capital structure.

The Neocons vs. the Realists

Joshua Muravchik and Stephen Walt have a debate on the future of US foregn policy, and in a stunning ending to Muravchik's naive (and somewhat snark-filled) neoconservatism, Walt concludes:

Muravchik claims neoconservatives "treat purely moral concerns . . . as a higher priority than would realists," yet his response evinces little concern for ordinary human beings. He expresses no remorse at the suffering that neoconservative policies have wrought and seems mostly concerned that the neocons are now "taking their lumps" over Iraq. What matters to him is political standing in Washington, not the hundreds of thousands of needless Iraqi deaths, the millions of refugees who fled their homes, or the tens of thousands of patriotic Americans killed or wounded. So let us hear no more about the neoconservatives' "moral" convictions. Amid such company, the realists who opposed the war can stand tall.

Rachel Maddow dissects David Frum. A lesson to all.

I heard this last night on the radio, and was just blown away by it. David Frum opened the show by accusing Maddow, who is frequently chirpily sarcastic and funny about the topics she covers, of lowering public discourse to a level where eliminationist rhetoric became permissible.

Watch the video. Maddow knows what Frum is trying to do: provoke her into the kind of low-brow match Frum claims he's trying to dissuade. Maddow immediately throws out the funny and spends the next ten minutes in dead seriousness forcing Frum back onto topic. Frum, frustrated that he can't get away from what Digby calls "a substantive exchange on the issue of false equivalency in political discourse," just falls apart and concededs that the Republican party this round is engaged in a much nastier game than usual. Frum just totally loses his cool here, and everyone knows it. She pwned him.

Comments

Re: Maddow/Frum

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Yes, Frum did dodge the direct question of whether he really thought that sarcastic insults and death threats are "equivalent." But the question wasn't legitimate, anyway. Who would say they are? It was functionally equivalent to asking "are you stupid?" Nobody asks that question because they expect an answer. It isn't a question, it's a statement.

But Frum said that what Maddow is doing is different than what Republicans are doing, didn't he? So why would she go back to the question? Because she brought him on the show to harangue him, not to have a discussion.

The interesting thing wasn't that Frum was dodging the question-- it's that the question itself was a rhetorical device and Maddow kept asking it.

Your analysis of the Wolfowitz thing was lifted almost verbatim from Digby's Hullabaloo. Since it has nothing to do with the subject of this discussion, why did you include it? Did you have a word-count budget for your comment?

And when in heck did _I_ say "there's a moral equivalence between" sarcasm and death threats? Don't put words in my mouth. I expect you to know I don't think that's true. I also expect a writer to know the difference between a "moral equivalence" and a basis for comparison. Democratic activists have gone well beyond sarcasm and Republicans are hardly making serious death threats, so the comparison isn't as ludicrous as you make it out to be.

When in heck did I become a conservative, for that matter? I'm not surprised when some random Obamoid (darn it, I see I didn't just coin that term after all) accuses me of being a Christian Republican, but once again, you know better, or certainly ought to.

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Re: Maddow/Frum

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Actually, I liked Digby's analysis (nice of you to notice).

And you're right: Frum had been invited on the show to talk about something else, namely his recent trip to Afghanistan. However, he opened with a paragraph that was word for word the right-wing talking point of that day: that the MSM was talking about how the right had a nasty streak, and it was therefore incumbent upon those who got the talking point to counter that the left was just as bad.

Now, why would he do that?

Frum brought to the table something he had not been invited to bring, and Maddow spent the rest of the show putting aside her usual banter to dissect the talking point and making Frum look like an idiot. Nasty? Sure. Unfair? No. Frum painted a big red target on his forehead.

And it's an idiotic point. If there was that much nastiness on the left, FOX and Hannity and Limbaugh would be repeating it in tight rotation 24 hours a day seven days a week. They aren't. They can't. And Frum took off his own head, put it on a platter, and let her have at it.

Nah, you're neither Christian or Republican, but my sense is that recently, and in this exchange especially, your defensiveness doesn't seem objective.

Re: Maddow/Frum

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Why would Frum open by talking about the developing mean streak in the campaign?

Maybe it's because the previous 40 minutes of her show, and the VERY FIRST question she asked Frum, was directly about that subject, not about Afghanistan:

"One quote I wanted to ask you about: you said that 'those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that's going to be very hard to calm after November'. What do mean by that word 'fury'?"

So where do you get off saying he wasn't "invited to bring" that subject to the table??

And when he tried to get back onto the topic of Afghanistan, and Maddow dragged the topic back to this "tone" thing, how is that HIS fault??

If I'm not being objective, it's because I'm reacting to what I see, and _I_ see way more mean-spirited campaigning from the left wing of the blogosphere. I don't believe that's because there _is_ more of that coming from the left wing; I'm only talking about what I see.

It happens that you account for, I would estimate, about a third of all the political blog posts I read in an average week, and you also generate about two-thirds of my WTF reactions. You seem to gather and distill bad analysis from other people's blogs and indeed, incautiously repeat other people's lies, way more often than I would have ever predicted possible a year ago.

I keep telling myself that this is usually because you've got a life, you've got other things to do. You're in a hurry, so you're not checking your sources and just not thinking enough before posting. Indeed, sometimes you admit that's what happened. Every time I post here, I hope that's the time you'll take the hint and slow down a little.

I mean, really, isn't it better to post less often than to have such a high error rate?

I've made it through eight years at MPR, six years of writing monthly magazine columns, and 197 blog posts (as of tomorrow) without ever screwing up badly enough to warrant a retraction. I'm not omniscient, I'm just careful. Anyone can do it. You should be more careful too.

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