There’s a fairly common argument made among Apple fanboys that the difference between Apple and Microsoft is that Microsoft responds to user demands by fulfilling the demand and Apple responds to user demands by fulfilling the underlying demand that the users didn’t even realize they were asking for. It’s a cute way of saying that Apple doesn’t do what you want, it does what you need. On the surface it’s an interesting concept; of course, it’s also one that fails the test of history. No user was asking for the Ribbon UI when Microsoft started integrating it into their interfaces. They came to a decision about the Ribbon UI through extensive user testing but ultimately chose something that they thought answered the underlying needs. Apple doesn’t do user testing. That’s the big difference. Apple doesn’t care about users in the same way, they do things the way they want and expect their user base to follow them or for their new way to lead to new users in numbers that will offset the loss from their existing base. In other words, Apple don’t care, Apple don’t give a shit:

But I’m not here to incite an argument about whether or not Apple cares about their users. I’m more interested in the idea that what a person thinks they want isn’t necessarily what they actually want and how that relates to what’s happening in television right now.

What people who like television want is to pay less and have more control over what and when they watch. Those goals are generally achievable but with caveats that a lot of people don’t really think about. We might want to pay less but that will make our shows cheaper, it will make some shows not exist in the first place.

I’ve already written about the way television works and how the current system of advertising drives most of the financials for the networks, but there’s another side to this equation. The countless cable stations that mostly air syndication repeats that have flooded the market in the past couple decades, the channels that get placed in cable package bundles in annoying distributions that make you purchase five bundles of seven channels each to get the eight channels you really want to watch, are a large part of how cable providers make money as well. Those annoying distribution packages, the ones that force you to buy channels you don’t want or care about to get the ones you do care about, are a way of offsetting costs from expensive channels. This is, as far as I know, a much smaller part of the cost of generating original content, but it still factors into the cost calculus of a lot of the smaller cable channels that do produce original content.

A consequence of making cable options more flexible might be that channels that you really like, that produce shows you really like, stop being bought in generic packages by people who enjoy other channels that you don’t care about. This leads to fewer cable providers supporting that channel and that channel having less money to work with. I’m not necessarily saying this is a good way of socializing the cost of television¹, but this is the way it works now and changing that can have undesirable outcomes. But if you still want to get rid of the annoying lack of flexibility in cable packages² you have to accept the possibility of paying more for some of your preferred viewing. Either that or change your viewing, which brings me to my next point.

Earlier today, Alyssa Rosenberg argued that there should be more shows like Louie. Now I’d love to see more shows like Louie, though if it were the only type of show around — something that would basically have to happen if users get what they currently want³ — I’d have to stop watching television⁴. But Louie is certainly a poster child for a cheap⁵ show that still provides humour and pathos in strong doses, but its system of operation is not one that scales. Louis CK is a true anomaly, and I mean that in the best possible way. He is brilliant and prolific and willing to work cheap; he was offered other show opportunities and turned them down because of the limitations of network input. The only reason his show exists is because he worked for less. The only reason his show exists is because he can construct all these stories and write and film and edit them all on his own. Put simply, Louis CK works harder and better and cheaper than pretty much anyone else, and there aren’t a lot of people with both the inclination and the ability to do the same. Resting our hopes for the future of television on Louie is ultimately foolish.

This race-to-the-bottom mentality of seeking out cheap shows above all reminds me of our current political landscape⁶. Everybody wants the good parts of government, the infrastructure and public resources, without the bad parts, the taxes. Unfortunately, we have to take the good with the bad. It’s true that television can have a different configuration of good and bad, but there will be bad, and I wonder if the people who rail against the backward ways of the cable providers and networks really understand that the new economy they are demanding will fix their existing ills but introduce new ones, ones that are possibly worse. I wonder if they’ve really thought this all through⁷.

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Footnotes

1. As much as I hate Reality Television, I’ve come to accept that without it, there would be many shows that the networks would not be able to afford to make. [↩]
2. This argument also holds for shows that are produced for a specific channel with cheaper shows socializing the cost of the more expensive fare, and is what my earlier piece mostly discussed. [↩]
3. Rosenberg’s piece talks about the stratification of television into super cheap shows like Louie and very expensive affairs subsidized by foreign markets, the latter of which is simply another unsustainable source of funding that will have to be supplanted over time as other nations get the very same options we are having to adjust for now. [↩]
4. Or maybe catch up on the great shows of the past decades that I’ve yet to see. [↩]
5. At $250,000 an episode, it’s basically cheap enough to produce while still making money at the $1 an episode price point that people seem to have decided they won’t go beyond. [↩]
6. Geeze, did I really have to shoehorn politics into this discussion? Looks like. [↩]
7. Spoiler alert: they haven’t. [↩]

Not long ago, two people I follow on Twitter were talking about Star Trek.

The first was, based on my knowledge of the tweeter and the context of the here and now, I see as (most likely) a comical remark about the nature of our current culture of politics and how distrustful we are of foreign powers¹. The reply was less clear. It seems pretty obvious that, in the context of the Star Trek universe, the Federation is a peaceful organization. The only wars we’ve seen them take part in have been defensive, and they establish political and economic ties with neighbouring civilizations, including former enemies.

The only two rationales I can see for that second tweet are 1) that he agrees with Matt Yglesias that the Federation is not to be trusted and he misspoke intending to say it is absurd that they insist on claiming to be a peaceful organization; 2) he believes that an organization as large and powerful as the Federation should be a non-peaceful organization, perhaps expanding and annexing nearby planets and civilizations by force. The former is ridiculous when you look at the canon of Star Trek, which clearly shows the Federation as a benevolent force. The latter is ridiculous for a few different reasons.

Arguing for any nation/organization to be aggressive and possessive toward non-members is very odd to me. I’d thought the days of moral superiority, Manifest Destiny, or American Exceptionalism — all the sorts of ideas that lead to thinking a people are above another in some fundamental way — were gone but I can reluctantly accept that some people still linger on some of those thoughts. The even odder thing is that we’re applying 20th century precepts to a fictional 24th century organization, created by a man trying to construct a futuristic utopia. The political realities of today probably won’t apply three hundred years from now, and they definitely won’t apply to the fictional, preconceived-as-peaceful, time of Star Trek.

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Footnotes

1. It’s entirely possible he is genuinely positing that the Federation doesn’t deserve to be trusted, but if that’s the case, this post remains relevant. [↩]

Today, there was a shooting in Arizona. Numerous people were injured and killed, among them a federal Judge and a congresswoman. Based on an eyewitness description of the events, the shooter first approached the congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, and fired at her point blank shooting her in the head before beginning to fire indiscriminately on the crowd that was there to have a public talk with the congresswoman.

For some reason, much of the news describes this as only a shooting, but beyond that it seems quite clear that it was also an assassination attempt. The merits of calling it a terrorist act are less evident — terrorism naturally has a goal of instilling terror to alter views, whereas this seems much more like removing a powerful person with dissenting views, something quite horrifying but perhaps not terrorism. Nonetheless, this is a horrible act and one that should, and is, being roundly condemned.

Unfortunately, I can’t expect the actions of today to effect the decisions of tomorrow for the Republic machine that routinely attacked the Democratic party’s policies with rhetoric calling it un-American, anti-Democratic, telling their constituents to be “Armed and Dangerous,” and building a hit-list of Democratic congresspeople.

I make no claim that the shooter was a Republican, or even that he heard these extreme statements — based on what Gawker has collected about him, he was a genuinely insane fellow — but it has to be said that this is a toxic environment to live in, one that can push a mentally ill person over the edge. But nobody on that side wants to say that¹. There’s a great deal of condemnation of the act, but nobody seems to be expressing regret over their phrasing or tone or the Manichean lies they used in attempt to jockey for political power.

People that make this connection are already being accused of political rhetoric, but actions have consequences irrespective of politics. Obviously, I mourn the people murdered today, and I hope for swift recoveries for those injured, Congresswoman Giffords included, but to ignore a sad truth seems wrong especially at a time like this when a madman seeks to remove a voice they dislike from the world.

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Footnotes

1. It says even more that, when a clearly disturbed individual is able to legally buy a gun, the topic of gun control is seemingly verboten. [↩]

Ezra Klein, in an attempt to analogize Chris Christie’s chances at a 2012 presidential bid compares it to Pepsi vs Coke.

In 1975, Pepsi unleashed “the Pepsi Challenge,” a blind taste test where subjects threw back an ounce of each beverage and reported back on their favorite. Their favorite was Pepsi.

You already know what happened next: Coca-Cola developed a more Pepsi-like product called “New Coke.” America rejected New Coke. Coke came back with “Coca-Cola Classic.” America celebrated the restoration of the country’s carbonated identity, and Coca-Cola’s disastrous decision ended up entrenching its original product.

Behind all this was a problem with the Pepsi Challenge. People liked Pepsi more in small increments. They liked Coca-Cola more when they had to drink a can of the stuff. And this, I think, is going to prove a problem for Chris Christie.

Arguing that Pepsi had a “flashier” taste that doesn’t stand the test of time sounds like a Coke fan going on the defensive over the obvious results of a blind taste test¹. But seeing as I prefer Pepsi, it would be useless to quibble over that point. Taste is totally personal. However, his post ignores a well-known fact about New Coke: people did prefer it².

In all the taste tests, New Coke beat Pepsi as well as Coke Classic. Unfortunately, brand identity was such a huge factor in Coca-Cola’s dominance, consumers took the rebranding and reformulation as an affront to their national history.

It may be that Chris Christie is best taken in small doses, but that has nothing to do with the Pepsi Challenge or why New Coke failed.

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Footnotes

1. A taste test that convinced America. Before the Pepsi Challenge, Pepsi was struggling, now it’s a formidable opponent to Coke. [↩]
2. Ezra could still argue that winning taste tests has no relevance to real world drinking, except that Diet Coke is quite popular, for both its flavour and its calorie cutting, and its formula is based on New Coke. [↩]

Michael Ian Black, a really funny dude, wrote up his thoughts about the whole Conan situation. It’s a great read, despite what I think are exaggerations regarding the fervor of “Team Coco,” though I wanted to expand on something he brought up and maybe pivot it a bit.

His early point that Conan is being treated like a working-class folk hero is questionable at best — Conan’s audience has always skewed young, and I doubt that’s changed during the recent surge of support — but his discussion of the origins of his supporters is interesting.

I think the deeper reason people are so inflamed by this petty war is that Conan in his own way has come to represent the aggrieved, the injured, the wrongly terminated. I think there is a sense in this country that giant corporations are ruining everything, even late night talk shows. Something so insignificant takes on greater importance because I think on some level, “The Tonight Show” actually has become a very flawed stand-in for all the jobs lost to corporate greed, arrogance, and stupidity. We see Conan as a victim because we feel as though, like us, he wasn’t given a fair shot. If a guy like that, a guy who has everything, can be downsized and demoted, what hope do the rest of us have?

One way of thinking about it is through the corporate world but, to my eyes, the return of Leno’s Tonight Show has much more relevance when analogized to the current political climate.

The world is shitty right now. Especially for the young, presumably liberal, audience of Conan O’Brien. We elected a vibrant young politician to the presidency a little over a year ago with the idea that he would fight for the progressive liberal goals he said he would. Instead he’s fallen prey to the idiotic desire to crawl to the political centre despite a strong electoral mandate to push the things he said he would push. What’s worse, each time his opposition fumbles he creates new compromises, weakens his position, claims that he needs to be more accommodating to the immovable objects he’s tasked with moving.

And here comes Conan. He’s a young vibrant comedian who’s given a chance to run The Tonight Show, to remake it in his image. And he did that. When he first started, he appeared semi-neutered but as he grew more comfortable with the show, he loosened and began to adjust his new surroundings to who he was and not the other way around.

What’s more, when the news came that he was being cast aside, he didn’t compromise, he became more like himself. And, yes, people loved him for it. Because that’s why they were excited about him being there in the first place.

I don’t know about any of you, but Conan going down swinging felt like a win to me. Maybe it’s a shallow one, but it doesn’t seem like we’re going to get any real ones any time soon.

Earlier, Dave Weigel wrote a great post about why he doesn’t cover Sarah Palin’s twitter feed or her facebook posts. He uses the opportunity to chastise the rest of the press to behaving as subservient to Palin when their relationship should be the opposite.

It seems now that Andrew Sullivan found the post and is using it to continue his crusade against Palin despite contradicting the spirit of the post by continually posting her nonsense tweets on his blog. He defends his actions by saying it’s his responsibility to “keep tabs on the lunacy.” That might be more compelling if he hadn’t posted less than a day ago one of her tweets verbatim and without comment.

I’m no fan of Palin, but Sullivan’s continued coverage of her is more tiring than anything else; maybe it’s because Sullivan has bit into this particular piece of meat so fervently, or maybe it’s because of the Trig pregnancy conspiracy theory he likes to push on occasion, but every time he starts to talk about Palin I zone out. Luckily, Weigel is still covering her, and doing so without calling her out as a sign of the apocalypse.

There are two essential rationales people can use on the left to blame Obama and the White House for the failure of the Senate to produce a bill with a public option and/or Medicare buy-in provisions.

The first is that Obama is a super-genius 11-dimensional chess master who has been setting up all the pieces to knock them down precisely to accomplish health care reform without these two progressive policies in place.

The second is that Obama can swoop into the Senate, jiggle a few carrots, whack a few sticks, and everyone would fall in line and health care reform would pass with the exact requirements of Obama and his White House without further complications.

Anyone who ascribes to either of these positions is a fool, or really digs the DC universe.

I personally think Obama should have done more to pressure moderate Democrats to toe the line on this issue; I don’t think it would have done any good, but at least Obama would have demonstrated some position. As nice as it is to have a White House administration more interesting in passing legislation than jockeying for power, it doesn’t hurt to bluster on occasion.

But I’m not going to sit here and argue what others have: that Obama is essentially talking a good game in public but sneaking wry grins in private as his plan to limit health care reform unfold. These sorts of extremes do nothing but persist the idea that the executive branch not only does but should have a choke hold on the rest of the government. Quite frankly, even if Obama did have the power and clout to wrangle the Senate into line, which I don’t think he does, shouldn’t we be glad he isn’t doing that? I thought Bush was hated for his abuse of the office, not because he abused it to get things we didn’t like.

Glenn Greenwald has been making much hullabaloo over the White House’s apparent willingness to drop the public option and a medicare buy-in from the Senate health care bill for the sake of getting a bill through Congress before the process manages to collapse in on itself.

Many different progressives have been reminding Glenn that the President isn’t all powerful and that expending his political capital trying to push obstinate senators toward a more progressive bill would almost certainly result in nothing, or worse a deeper obstinacy from senators feeling bullied.

He cites the example of the White House pressuring freshman Democrats with what is essentially ostracism if they don’t vote for a war funding bill as proof that Obama can play hardball with the legislative branch when he really wants something done. But I think this ignores some depressing realities within Congress.

Obama can pressure freshman congressman to support a war bill because they are likely on the left, and people on the left need the support of the DNC and the Obama Administration. But on health care, Obama would have to push people from the Right towards the Left, something for which he can offer no incentives.

Nelson won Nebraska despite Obama losing, not because of it. There’s no pressure he can apply in that situation. And Lieberman is a petulant child who wants only to punish progressive policies. Maybe Obama could have tried the hardball tactics here, and maybe it would have worked, but these two scenarios are not comparable except in the most superficial way.

Dave Weigel over at The Washington Independent wrote last night about a Fox News poll last night asking people who they thought wants victory more, Obama or the Taliban. Now, it’s a fairly ridiculous question to ask — because that’s totally irrelevant unless the gusto with which terrorists try to attack you somehow makes them endearing — but I think the results do reveal a worrying bias.

The fact that Democrats overwhelmingly feel that Obama wants it more is a little troubling. Terrorists (and freedom fighters, if you so choose to think of the Taliban in such terms) do outrageous things for their causes. Like, for example, fly jet planes into building and strap explosives to themselves. I’m sure Obama wants to win in Afghanistan, if only for the political capital it will give to the Democratic party after seven years of Republican negligence in Afghanistan, but I think claiming he ‘wants it more’ than the Taliban stretches the point a bit too far.

A fair point that can be made is that the poll specifically targets the ‘Leadership of the Taliban,’ who might not be willing to strap bombs to themselves so much as they are willing to strap bombs to other people in an attempt to build their own power. I don’t really know enough about the hierarchy of the Taliban and such groups to say if there’s a difference in the radicalism of the leaders vs the ground soldiers, but even targeting the ‘Lords’ of the terrorist movements seems incredulous. When it comes down to it, I can’t imagine Obama worrying that the Taliban will eventually kill him, except in some existential abstract manner, but America wiping out every last Taliban member seems like it would be a fairly realistic worry.

Don’t you need to actually accomplish something to be awarded the Nobel prize?

It’s probably premature in Obama’s case but he’s certainly got a few things he can cite as evidence that he’s been an agent of peace. What has Neda done? She got shot. I don’t mean this as a knock on her sacrifice or her nation’s desire to be free of a theocratic dictatorship, but that’s really all she did.

Ignoring the obvious rules regarding posthumous Nobel prizes I sincerely don’t understand what anyone is thinking when they espouse awarding a Nobel peace prize to a young Iranian university student who happened to get shot during a political protest.

What’s more, the idea of granting it to one of the reformists in Iran seems equally vapid. While it can be said that Obama won the Nobel primarily because he’s not George Bush, I think we forget how negatively the world viewed President Bush. The simple fact that America is represented on a global scale by Barack Obama has already vastly shifted the rhetoric regarding America world-wide. Add in his accomplishments with respect to nuclear proliferation, and his national-level climate change legislation, and his (supposed) desire to end the Bush administrations abuses of human rights, and we’re a lot closer to world peace right now than we were just a year ago. I still think it’s premature for Obama to win the Nobel, but to consider Neda, or her fellow reformers, as a better choice seem laughably parochial.

All the discussion over on The Daily Dish about religion and atheism has led to some premature ejaculations on my part. I’ve meant to write about the various forms of atheism and the ones to which I ascribe for a long time now¹ but I never got around to it until these discussions reinvigorated me on the subject.

In particular, the form of atheism I most often identify with, apatheism, is described quite well by one of Andrew’s readers:

Maybe there is a god. Maybe there are many gods. Maybe there’s no god at all. Maybe I could drive myself crazy second-guessing myself and every theologian and pastor and religious friend out there. Maybe in the end it doesn’t matter, and I’ve just got to lead the best life I can, as I see it, and if that’s not good enough in the end — if there be an end instead of a simple fading away — then as far as I’m concerned, any god that would condemn me for doing my best to be the best person I can isn’t a god I’d want to believe in, in the first place.

Dedicated readers out there might recall that I was once a very passionate christian. Well, I called myself christian but I didn’t believe in the holy trinity nor in the divinity of Jesus Christ, so really I was just a guy that strongly believed that God existed. I had debated with myself about the nature of God for so long and in such detail that I had come to the conclusion that God is so far beyond human comprehension that any attempt by us to understand his wishes or obey his will would be a terrible distortion.

Eventually, I argued myself down to seeing it as this apatheist does: I’m going to live my life the way I think is right and good. The god that deems my sincere efforts unacceptable while leaving his criteria ambiguous is not a god I want to worship.

At the time this moved me deeply and I can remember understanding the significance of this shift. I had gone from a mostly-Anglican Christian to an I-don’t-know-what², and I felt great relief at finally overcoming some of my deepest issues with my faith.

Naturally, not long after that I stopped believing in God. Not necessarily as a result of this religious shift, rather I suspect that this shift was merely a stepping stone my psyche deemed necessary as I weaned my mind off the belief in deities. Nonetheless, I had become a full-bore apatheist.

Apatheism can appear deceptively like a form of lazy religion³, but what I believed then and what I believe now are very different. What I believed then was that a god that will ultimately judge my life, but I accepted the impossibility of knowing its criteria and simply lived a life I thought was right.

But to the apatheist, God is not unknowable, God is irrelevant. God, even if he did exist, doesn’t matter.

If everyone but me believed in God, but they didn’t let that belief affect politics, or science, or education, I’d be content. But what I see instead is the vilification of atheism and the slow creep of church into state. And that’s when I’m not an apatheist anymore.

I’d love to not have to care about religion, but quite frankly that’s irresponsible given the growing atmosphere of religiosity in our culture.

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Footnotes

1. With numerous drafts broaching the topic from slightly different angles sitting on this blog from two years ago [↩]
2. I later realized that it was strikingly similar to a view known as ignosticism, though I contend there are still vital, though subtle, differences mostly borrowed from apatheism [↩]
3. Or conversely, lazy religion can be seen as a form of apatheism [↩]

There’s been a really great ongoing debate happening over at The Daily Dish surrounding atheism. It started when one of Andrew’s temporary replacements likened atheists such as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins to fundamentalists and religious extremists.

As it’s developed, I’ve read many intelligent arguments on both sides. But the truth is most of the religious side of the debate presumes a level of deference to religion. Atheists, it seems, are not allowed to compare religion to belief in Santa Claus or similar fanciful beliefs. At first it was attacked for being glib, but that does little to alter the fundamental similarities in the belief in Santa Claus and the belief in God.

Subsequently, the argument was made that people spend a great deal of time developing their religious stance, whether it’s through thorough readings of the philosophies of theologians across the ages or merely an internal conflict, and so the comparison is unfair. Admittedly, there are people who examine their beliefs thoroughly, break down all the preconditions of life that their parents instilled in them to arrive at a self-determined philosophy, one which includes God, but those people are a far and away minority. For many people, religion is a part of their life because they’ve never thought about it¹.

Similarly, following an atheist argument that religion can undermine the “development of logical thinking” in children, a religious reader responded with:

I have an 18 year-old and a 15 year-old which my wife and I have raised in the church. They are both at the stage where they are questioning and challenging everything. The idea that I could possibly “brainwash” them into believing anything is specious.

Which isn’t wrong so much as it is unsophistcated. The fact is that the reader almost certainly could “brainwash” their children if they wanted to. We always read of the children who escape from a cult they were born into, but we ignore the fact that many children remain in the cult, contented and certain that their way of life is the true path to salvation.

I use cults as an example, but parents with enough religious zeal can just as easily cause many problems for their children. Home schooling children that the Earth is the centre of the universe and that it’s only 6000 years old and evolution is a lie — all things that Christian parents do² — absolutely affect the child for years to come. No one is claiming that the damage is irreparable — after all, there are atheists out there — but to ignore it because it lacks 100% efficacy is exceedingly naive³.

The problem with having a religious debate is that when atheists argue with fundamentalists nothing is accomplished, but when they argue with reasonable, temperate theists like those reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog, we get nice nuanced arguments which describe God in a manner very different than the norm. The theists seems to forget that atheists are mostly arguing against the edge cases.

I’m staunchly atheist, and confident that there is no God. But when I attack religion, I don’t attack the muted and temperate version that intellectuals believe in, the kind where God is a passive observer, or where he sets the pieces up and has spent the past 12 billion or so years watching them all fall around him like a massive set of dominoes. I attack the religion that forces genital mutilation, stonings, oppression of women, ignorance of science, and all the stuff that the brainy version of religion has eschewed in its development.

Often, atheists (and theists) are accused of ignoring the moderates of the debate, instead focusing on the fringes of their debate, but one thing I’ve noticed as time goes on is that even the extreme atheists, so far as I know, do not argue for the abolition of religion. What they argue is that religion is irrational and that the world would be a better place without religion. The first half of that argument is absolutely true. Religion is the belief in something for which there is absolutely no evidence, an inherently irrational stance. The second half is much more contentious and an argument that I personally don’t accept. That said, the “atheist fringe” is much less extreme than the religious fundamentalists, so to act as though they are equal criticisms seems disingenuous to me.

The edge cases matter⁴. So don’t call upon the “civility” of atheists to sit down and shut up when it comes to the pernicious ills of religion.

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Footnotes

1. I speak from experience; many members of my family have no actual philosophy with respect to their religion, they merely accept it as what they’ve always “believed.” [↩]
2. Obviously not all Christian parents, but these extremes do exist [↩]
3. I’m not advocating the abolition of religion here, nor would anyone suggest state-enforced atheism, but ignoring the problems of religion accomplishes nothing. [↩]
4. On both sides of the discussion [↩]

I don’t get Ross Douthat. People I know keep telling me he’s not a total idiot (obviously, being a conservative implies a certain level of idiocy) but I’ve yet to find any of his words of any value, except perhaps to his own ego.

His most recent New York Times column, for example, extols the “romantic excess” that liberals seem to lack. He claims that “modern relationships have been drained of danger and purged of eros.”

Except he doesn’t think modern relationships are passionless, he think modern liberal relationships are passionless.

Our hyper-educated, socially-liberal elite is considerably more romantically conservative than its blasé attitude toward pornography or premarital sex would lead you to expect.

…

This tameness has beneficial social consequences: When it comes to divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births, Americans with graduate degrees are still living in the 1950s. It’s the rest of the country that marries impulsively, divorces frequently, and bears a rising percentage of its children outside marriage.

…

Better, perhaps, if this dynamic were reversed. Our meritocrats could stand to leaven their careerism with a little more romantic excess.

Ignoring the self-pitying Douthat sneaks into that first sentence, as all proper right-wingers must, it speaks to a massive misunderstanding on his part of the difference between passion and responsibility. To say that I’m not passionate because I’m capable of putting a condom on or willing to not pick up the first girl I see at the bar — not that either of those statements apply to me personally; for the moment, I’m speaking for other liberals with more game — is an utterly foolish thing to say.

The idea that something is not passionate unless is it reckless and stupid and embarrassing, exemplified by countless romantic comedies over the years, is a childish belief that most liberals have grown out of. Put bluntly, passion isn’t a quickie marriage, it’s a safeword.

Piling on, I’m not sure why Douthat is cheering on reckless marriage, frivolous divorce, and bastard children (I’m a bastard myself, so no insult intended) seeing as he’s the conservative between the two of us. But, let’s not get bogged down with logic. There’s columns that need writing.

Patrick Appel, filling the void for Andrew Sullivan, questions the usefulness of the new cap-and-trade legislation that squeaked by Congress at the end of last week:

I am eager to spend money to slow global warming. Still, I question whether a crippled cap and trade bill will make it harder to pass decent legislation later on.

But quite frankly, something is better than nothing. Joseph Romm seems to agree with me — put more honestly, I agree with Romm — and offers this useful tidbit:

It is worth noting that the original Clean Air Act — first passed in 1963 — also didn’t do enough and was subsequently strengthened many times.

So let’s do whatever we can get away with, in terms of climate change. Maybe it’s not enough, but if the choice is between something or nothing, that’s a no-brainer.

As much as I’d like the Washington establishment to do an about face simply because a lot of young people were interested in politics last fall, it’s not going to happen that way. We’re going to have to fight for every inch. So let’s start with this. All avalanches start somewhere.

There was a recent article about Scientology, focusing on the bullying and domineering attitude that Scientology’s current leader, David Miscavige, injects into the religion. Here’s what I have to say about Scientology: whatever.

I maintain that the things Scientology have done, ranging from domestic espionage to extreme litigation to the death of church members due to negligence, are not acceptable. But I also maintain that they are not unexpected. Religions in their growth pangs often commit horrific acts in an attempt to establish themselves. You need only look at the violence, corruption, and manipulation of the Catholic church in the middle ages to see evidence of that. And the holy wars of expansion of early Islam are just as telling; no religion has a monopoly on such offenses.

Similarly, Scientology’s “wacky” beliefs, like the multi-trillion-year-old universe and Thetans and the like are no more bizarre than the base beliefs of the Abrahamic religions. The difference is that we’ve grown up in a civilization centred around Moses carrying divinely inscribed tablets dictating the rules of the faith, around Noah building an Ark that carried his family and every single species on the planet for 40 days and 40 nights, around Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt for the sin of looking back upon Gomorrah, around a man who was a god who was martyred and resurrected and ascended to heaven. These stories are not less outlandish, they are more familiar. They don’t carry the stigma of the Space Opera.

None of what I’ve written defends Scientology in any way, but I don’t attack it for doing exactly what countless other churches has done in our history. It’s a double standard that makes no sense.

I know you’re thinking right now that the crimes of other religions are in the past and that because they happened in the past either a) it was ok because it was moderate for the time or b) it’s useless to chastise them for acts they no longer commit.

The first point is wrong, in my opinion. Morals are morals. I don’t care if it was done in exceptional circumstances. Wrong is wrong.

The second point is more valid, and I agree with it wholeheartedly. But Scientology hasn’t committed domestic espionage in the recent history, so to attack them for it is equivalent to attacking the modern Catholic church for the Inquisition or the Crusades.

In the end, I think that, if Scientology survives this initial growth to become an actual religion, it will become less hard line, but that won’t happen due to external pressure. If anything, the continual attacks on the religion from the outside will allow the church to establish a line of defence, just as Iran’s Supreme Leader has for decades by invoking the spectre of American Imperialism. Over time, Scientology’s member will force the church to change. Or it will collapse on itself. And the rest of the world isn’t going to do anything to affect the outcome or its time of arrival.