the paranoid center

Jesse Walker's piece in this month's reason is truly stellar. Too many good quotes to pick one, but I will anyway:

"If the Oklahoma City bombing stands out, that is because it is unique in American history. Eliminationist rhetoric may flower in some of the fringes, but the violence that sometimes follows is usually petty stuff. The most formidable eliminationists have always been in the American center, not on the margins. They aim to preserve or extend the existing social order, not to subvert it. And they have the most guns...

It's comforting to imagine that violence and paranoia belong only to the far left and right, and that we can protect ourselves from their effects by quarantining the extremists and vigilantly expelling anyone who seems to be bringing their ideas into the mainstream. But the center has its own varieties of violence and paranoia. And it's far more dangerous than anyone on the fringe, even the armed fringe, will ever be."

i'm smiling next to you in silent complicity

Today's post by Will Wilkinson is nominally about libertarian agnosticism in the debate over gay marriage, but this bit applies beautifully as a general principle:

One cannot use an ideological image of perfect justice to excuse or ignore an obvious injustice within the actual imperfect system. That these injustices could not arise within one’s vision of the best society does not mean that they have not in fact arisen. That a debate would not occur in an ideal world does not mean that it is not occuring or that nothing morally hangs on its conclusion. To decide to sit out the debate, with an eye on utopia, is not a way to keep one’s hands clean.

"it’s like the first ten years of aviation without a plane crash"

My students know just what kind of food system they want: a food system that isn’t based on industrial scale monoculture. They want instead small farms built around nature imitating polycultures. They don’t want chemical use; they certainly don’t want genetic engineering. They want slow food instead of fast food. They’ve got this image of what would be better than what we have now. And what they probably don’t realize is that Africa is an extreme version of that fantasy. If we were producing our own food that way, 60 percent of us would still be farming and would be earning a dollar a day, and a third of us would be malnourished.

That's Robert Paarlberg, talking about his motivation for writing Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa in an interview with reason's Kerry Howley.

I'm looking forward to some tasty, locally-grown and most likely organic produce flowing into my kitchen when the Durham Farmer's Market re-opens next week, but this is as good a time as any to point out that environmentalism generally and localtarianism specifically are luxuries enabled by the unprecedented affluence we enjoy in 21st century North America and Western Europe.

The simple fact of the matter is that there is no credible scientific evidence that the genetically modified crops (which constitute a HUGE portion of the American market, especially corn and soybeans) have detrimental health or environmental effects. And in fact, most of them are modified for the express purposes of reducing the need for chemical pesticides and maximizing yield (thus minimizing the ammount of arable land used.)

According to Paarlberg, the influence of (primarily) European NGOs has kept these technologies out of Africa, effectively keeping African agriculture decades behind the rest of the world. Exporting anti-GM hysteria to Africa isn't just patronizing and paternalistic, it's deadly.

quoteable

At some point I stopped reading Will Wilkinson's blog, and I cannot for the life of me remember why. Especially when he writes stuff like this:

I sometimes think that liberal individualism is something like the intellectual and moral equivalent of the best modernist design — spare, elegant, functional — but hard to grasp or truly appreciate without a cultivated sense of style, without a little discerning maturity. National Greatness Conservatism is like a grotesque wood-paneled den stuffed with animal heads, mounted swords, garish carpets, and a giant roaring fire. Only the most vulgar tuck in next to that fire, light a fat cigar, and think they’ve really got it all figured out.

Read the whole thing. I just didn't want to quote the whole post.

"kill a lot of people, then stop"

I really did want to write a bit more about Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize, but then I read this piece by Jesse Walker, which has rendered anything I could have come up with utterly pointless and redundant. Perhaps most importantly, he points out the at the Prize has never really been about peace:

In 1919 it gave the prize to League founder Woodrow Wilson, whose previous contribution to peace was to plunge the United States into the most pointless major war in its history.

Read the whole thing.

dept. of hidden treasure

I was waiting in an exam room at the doctor today* and the only reading material at hand was a copy of ESPN The Magazine from last August.

I should preface the following by pointing out that my interest in sports is pretty casual overall. I love watching football, but even during the season I watch maybe 6 or 7 games in their entirety. The NBA is boring, though I do like college basketball now and then (I hear it's pretty popular around here.) Hockey is great in person, but I've never watched on TV. Baseball is unbearable unless the weather is perfect and I have a designated driver so I can get pleasantly buzzed during the entire game. I'd rather wax my scrotum than watch NASCAR.

What I'm saying is, I'm not exactly the target demographic for a sports magazine, despite the fact that I am 18-35 years old and male.

So, believe me when I say that ESPN the Magazine is awesome.

The photography is stunning. The layouts are really innovative, drawing your eyes over the page in a different pattern every time. To tell the truth, it looks exactly like Seed, which is also excellent. As in the same fonts, the same cool text-to-photo flowchart designs, everything. I haven't been able to put the layout credits side-by-side yet, but I'm sure it's the same people. And they are very good at what they do.

And the articles I read were great. One was a photo essay of college football players, that talked about the physics of the various collisions they undergo. Another was on the new Cardinals' stadium in Glendale (as well as some other crazy futuristic stadiums around the world. But the one that really got to me was about Vladimir Chubinsky, (the story doesn't appear to be archived online, otherwise I would post a link) a Ukrainian trainer in Atlanta who has this incredible system of weight training. Basically, he has his clients lift huge amounts of weight through a very limited range of motion. His clients include a guy with MS who not only has gone from being nearly in a wheelchair to walking unassisted, but can also lift over 1000 pounds (the author describes him doing so firsthand.)

Anyway, if you are even remotely interested in sports, you should check it out. I'll probably order a subscription before football season starts.



*I'm fine. I had a kidney stone last month that I have managed to refrain from blogging about (until now) and this was the follow-up.

stuff by better writers than i

Because some days I just can't do this myself, you know?

--Christopher Hitchens doing a book review.

--An oldie-but-goodie by Nick Gillespie.

--Some guy I've never heard of ties together the continuity of Episode IV with I-III quite convincingly.