Strange Doctrines

Obama's Line in the Sand to GOP

Shorter Obama: You guys better not belatedly object to the day I chose to give this speech, or else I'm going to give the speech on a completely different day, as long as that's more convenient for you.

Majestic Equality

A few months ago, liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Ann Walsh Bradley accused her conservative brother Justice David Prosser of putting her in a chokehold during an argument.

After an investigation, Sauk County District Attorney Patricia Barrett announced that she has "determined that no criminal charges will be filed against either Justice Bradley or Justice Prosser for the incident." (Emphasis added.)

Good to know Justice Bradley won't be charged for getting herself into that chokehold.

UPDATE: Justice Prosser stays classy.

D-Yoo Process

Shorter John Yoo: The Obama administration's misbegotten decision to assassinate rather than apprehend Osama bin Laden was the ineluctable result of the administration's overly fastidious compliance with due process.

Nudge Nudge

We know perfectly well that concerted behavior by groups and suggestive remarks by authority figures can affect the behavior of an individual.

According to most on the right, however, what we must not do is seriously consider the possibility that concerted behavior by groups and suggestive remarks by authority figures might have affected the behavior of an individual.

Good luck with that.

Side Note: No, this does not prove that "toxic rhetoric" caused Jared Lee Loughner to shoot Gabrielle Giffords and so many others. That's hardly the point, is it?

What Is It Like to Be a Mouse?

Christine O'Donnell might just have the brains to bridge the phenomenological divide and tell us.

Carrying Water

Shorter Jay Bybee: Dispensing water to inflict pain and suffering? Not illegal. Dispensing water to alleviate pain and suffering? Totally illegal.

Kids Today

According to this New York Times piece, a meta-analysis by Sara Konrath purports to find that "college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than those of 30 years ago, with the numbers plunging primarily after 2000." This claim somewhat dovetails with previous studies that supposedly document "an increasing narcissism among college students since the late 1980s."

Conceding the point that kids today are just awful people, I still think we really should try a little harder to see things from their point of view. (We're the ones with all the empathy, after all.)

Anyway, the article ends by noting the practical implications of this "rapid deterioration" (Bruce Perry, quoted in the article) in empathy: "Low empathy is associated with criminal behavior, violence, sexual offenses, aggression when drunk and other antisocial behaviors."

Thing is, after the late 1980s, the rate of violent crime began to decline.

Must be that lacking empathy takes all the fun out of being cruel.

(H/T Rob Sica.)

Petroleum Antinomy

To make up for all the oil lost in the Gulf, I'm trying to use fewer water bottles.

On the other hand, material from those bottles would come in really handy should there be a need for Operation Junk Shot II.

So maybe I should use more water bottles.

And Now It's All This

Bob Somersby gives Christopher Edley a razzing:

Christopher Edley thinks he’s one of your “betters.” [] According to Edley, rubes like us should want our “betters” in important posts, like the post in which Kagan will serve:

EDLE: The tension between elitism and populism is embedded in our national DNA because America rejected the model of a monarch ruling by divine right in favor of an iffy experiment in democratic self-governance. So now you are responsible for choosing your leader. Do you want someone like you or someone better than you?

What an astonishing framework! But so it goes when people like Edley spends decades inside institutions like Harvard, convincing themselves that they and their peers are “better” than all the rest of us rubes.

Not fair. What Edley meant, of course, was merely to ask whether in choosing your leader you would want someone better than Yoo.

(Via Angry Bear.)

A Difficult Question

On the one hand, the President is right to say that Sarah Palin doesn't sound like someone with any real expertise in nuclear weapons policy.

On the other hand, Sarah Palin does sound like someone with real expertise in schoolyard bullying.

So which of them is right?

(Thankfully, we can rely on our professional news corps for careful analysis of the question.)

The GOP Mainstream is Exactly Like the Liberal Fringe

Orin Kerr indulges in his worst habit - straining mightily to find partisan equivalences where there are none:

If you took the public outcry over the Patriot Act in 2001, replaced “police state” with “socialist state” and replaced “privacy” with “freedom,” and then replaced the claims of violating the Fourth Amendment with claims of violating the Commerce Clause, you would pretty much have the public outcry over the health care law today — except from the Right not the Left. 

But Orin hedges: "Of course, I’m not saying the two laws are the same. [Of course not.] But I’m struck by the rhetorical similarities of the case made by the laws’ outspoken opponents."

It's a good thing that Orin hedged, there. It would really have been stupid to compare the laws substantively (police powers versus healthcare) or procedurally (the one passed with a single Democratic "no" vote, the other without a single Republican "yes" vote). Idiotic even. So kudos to Orin for carefully marking that distinction. His readers might otherwise have gotten the wrong idea.

The real point Orin wants to make, then, is about the many "rhetorical similarities." Which of course there are. Thing is, they are similarities between what you hear now from congressional leaders and what you heard then from some guy on the Internets. (Okay, and maybe Randi Rhoades.)

So I guess I'd just want to suggest that the analogy is perhaps one not worth making.

Spare the Rod

...and pour the water instead. Such has long been my counsel.

And I am most gratified to learn that, at last, a forward-looking head of household appears to have taken heed of my call.

Let it not be gainsaid: one can make a difference.

You Are Not Qualified to Have an Independent Opinion

I keep meaning to do a long, thoughtful post on scientific pseudoscandals like "Climategate" and the fatal socio-epistemological problems for lay skepticism about consensus theories. But...time and all that, you know.

In the meantime, this post at the Economist captures the spirit of the problem:

[W]hat am I supposed to do the next time I wake up and someone whose name I don't know has produced another plausible-seeming account of bias in the climate-change science? Am I supposed to invest another couple of hours in it? Do I have to waste the time of the readers of this blog with yet another long post on the subject? Why? Why do these people keep bugging us like this? Does the spirit of scientific scepticism really require that I remain forever open-minded to denialist humbug until it's shown to be wrong? At what point am I allowed to simply say, look, I've seen these kind of claims before, they always turns out to be wrong, and it's not worth my time to look into it?

Well, here's my solution to this problem: this is why we have peer review. Average guys with websites can do a lot of amazing things. One thing they cannot do is reveal statistical manipulation in climate-change studies that require a PhD in a related field to understand.

Bubblin' Crude

Michael O'Hare distills Dubai-ity.

Simple Answermongering Blogging

A Media Matters post sports the headline "New Low: Beck and Right-Wing Media Minions Fearmongering About Kids to Attack Progressives." Eugene Volokh queries whether terms like "fearmongering" are "rhetorically over the top?" The answer is No. Next question?

Comparative Parliamentary Decorum 101

Seminar here.

The Right to Jump the Shark

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to brandish assault rifles near the president shall not be infringed. Or so the usually (but unfortunately not this time) excellent Will Wilkinson argues.

Best Teddy Hagiography

Goes to Anne Laurie. Dashed with a splash of cold water by Koz at the first comment.

(Via Thomas Levenson.)

That First Step's a Doocy

Shorter Steve Doocy: One mustn't be rude to the brownshirts.

(H/T Rob Sica.)

Giving Birthers a Wide Berth

A TPM reader makes a funny: "Isn't it awfully convenient that a man with no discernable British accent suddenly claims that he is British just after it's pointed out the the UK health system would have euthanized him as a child?"

(Background here.)