Conor Friedersdorf

Three Thursday Links-Mars, The Dead & The Perpetual Public Victims

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Imagine sub-freezing temperatures and free radicals bombarding the near atmosphere-less Martian surface (oxidized and rusted red, barren), but below the Martian surface lurk big blocks of briny ice; ice with freezing cold, incredibly salty water around them and maybe just enough O2 to support some microbes.

Worth thinking about.

What are you doing with your imagination?

‘Due to the scarcity of O2 in the modern Martian atmosphere, Mars has been assumed to be incapable of producing environments with sufficiently large concentrations of O2 to support aerobic respiration. Here, we present a thermodynamic framework for the solubility of O2 in brines under Martian near-surface conditions. We find that modern Mars can support liquid environments with dissolved O2 values ranging from ~2.5 × 10−6 mol m−3 to 2 mol m−3 across the planet, with particularly high concentrations in polar regions because of lower temperatures at higher latitudes promoting O2 entry into brines’

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Perhaps quite a bit can be explained within modern movements by the following:

Freedom is precious, and liberty comes with responsibility.  Radical liberation might well involve releasing oneself from an obligation right into the clutches of some less fair, less just and less reasonable obligation.

No one’s going to tell you the new rules emerging from the latest moral ideas sweeping the ‘culture,’ you might only find out after breaking a new rule.

Due process easily becomes ‘do process our way’ and you’re wise to surmise how people are behaving now is probably how they’ll behave into the future.

No Country For Liber-tari-ans And Nobody’s Business But The Turks? Some Links

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From Middle-East Perspectives: ‘What Are Erdogan’s Intentions After The Fall Of Afrin?‘

‘That said, it is interesting that Erdoğan keeps using the term “Ottoman” in much of his rhetoric – for decades the Turks have avoided the term, claiming that atrocities such as the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides were not done by Turks, but the Ottomans. It appears now that is a distinction without a difference. His displays of the 1920 “national oath” map are not accidental – it is there for a reason.’

Sorry for the title, but I’m still thinking the resurgent Islamism and authoritarian populism of Erdogan, combined with the fires burning across the Middle-East, along with the revanchism of Putin’s Russia, and the relative weakness of European leadership, bears watching.  It’s got me worried.

Via Stratfor via Twitter:

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Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic: ”A Dissent Concerning Kevin Williamson‘

Written from inside the publication:

‘Individuals participating in the public sphere, and publications that aspire to cultivate a broad civic dialogue, ought never slip into indifference to injustice or abandon moral judgments. But neither should they mistake tolerance for moral collapse. Much can be worked out by objecting to the objectionable in ways that do not foreclose the possibility of all cooperation. As citizens, if not as employees of any particular company, we are inescapably bound. And it is incumbent on all of us, even in our inevitable moments of pained outrage, to model how to work together.’

When you write for money, you have to make some compromises on principle; you’re part of an organization.  You’ll have to plug other people’s work and placate the financial interests and readers of the magazine.  More broadly, all of us are, subtly, and often imperceptibly, influenced by the people and environments through which we move.

My two cents regarding the fracturing of the political Left: The Atlantic, The NY Times, The New Yorker etc. have long published and endorsed various forms of progressive and radical politics, especially since the 60’s.  Such politics traditionally came packaged with a commitment to the arts, the avant-garde, dissenting voices, liberal and sometimes even conservative establishmentarianism.  In the past, there was more of a functioning establishment to react against.

As I see the world, pegging highest ideals and deepest moral thinking to Civil Rights activism, social justice, and various reactionary and collectivist political movements has caught up with these publications.  There’s always someone more pure.

Just as there is a fractured and frustrated conservative movement and Republican party, there is a fractured liberal and activist Left and Democrat party.  The Atlantic is plugged into much of that populist Left sentiment (irrationally anti-Trump).

Don’t be surprised when it happens: Many individuals on the Left will continue to subsume their own experiences into group identity, feeling perfectly righteous and justified as part of a mob swarming dissenters on the path to the better, or perhaps, the perfect world to come (speaking and acting for what they believe to be ALL women and minorities within group indentity and endless protest).

Kevin Williamson, and for that matter, Fridersdorf if he’s not careful, can easily become dissenters.

Heretics, even.

Via The Future Of Capitalism: ‘The Politics Of The New Yorker’

Under A Green Moon-Ira Stoll At The New York Sun: ‘Comma in the New Yorker Opens Up Quite a Vista Of Liberal Parochialism’

From The New Yorker: ‘Writing Powered By Amtrak’

Kevin Williamson At The National Review: ‘Whose Liberalism?’ 

The Personal Ain’t Political-Holding The Line Against Rape Ideologues-Conor Friedersdorf On George Will

 

Alas, Lena Dunham

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Conor Friedersdorf wrote a piece at the Atlantic rather charitable to Dunham’s latest bid for attention.

Many people want to see themselves as cool and meaningfully bohemian, radical and counter-culturally relevant, independently artsy but successful and morally virtuous. Dunham is likely a vehicle for many of these wishes.

What if also true is that the logic of the ideology Dunham holds has led to much of the desire to moralize to strangers, the potential for deceit and incentives to lie about her own experiences, and the isolated search for Self along with the branding of a political and ideological platform to gain power and influence?

As posted, three quotations that highlight how this blog chooses to look at the world (more at what people do, not what they say):

Karl Popper:

“…and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important that equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.”

From this review here, on the late Ken Minogue:

Minogue concludes that instead of seeking “insane perfectionism” by, e.g., trying to abolish world poverty, we should simply be happy to live decent moral lives. This is, in effect, a challenge to build a better world by expressing our individuality through greater commitment to the institutions of family, markets, and church – an invitation simultaneously less exciting than undertaking grand projects and less destructive, as well.

From a Thomas Sowell piece, the Legacy Of Eric Hoffer:

‘Hoffer said: “The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.”

People who are fulfilled in their own lives and careers are not the ones attracted to mass movements: “A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding,” Hoffer said. “When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.”

What Hoffer was describing was the political busybody, the zealot for a cause — the “true believer,” who filled the ranks of ideological movements that created the totalitarian tyrannies of the 20th century.’

The Personal Ain’t Political-Holding The Line Against Rape Ideologues-Conor Friedersdorf On George Will

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Friedersdorf at The Atlantic here-‘Rage Against The Outrage Machine.’

Will’s original column here.

As the house libertarian in a publication where feminist discontents have increasingly become settled, I’m guessing Friedersdorf knows he has to get his facts right in an atmosphere where his position is not likely to be popular.

Worth a read:

‘These commentators are doing Will and their own readers a disservice. At best, they are construing his argument in the least charitable way possible. More often, they’re outright mischaracterizing Will’s actual argument in a way certain to maximize the offense, outrage, and umbrage-taking from their readers. If I were a rape victim, and a writer I trusted informed me that a Washington Post columnist said people like me wanted to be raped, or that we deserved to be raped, or that being a rape victim makes one fortunate or privileged, I’d be upset. But it ought to be clear enough that Will isn’t actually making those arguments’

As I’ve gotten a few nasty e-mails myself on this subject, I want to reiterate this is not a dismissal of the seriousness of the moral horror and crime that is rape, but a freeing of such a horrible crime to be discussed in the public square calmly and reasonably by differing points of view.  The crime is bad enough without the cult of victimhood out to morally and ideologically dominate the issue.

This ‘holding the line’ is more an appeal to keep civil society civil, and wrenching a very serious subject away from ideologues who traffic in often questionable statistics, gin up moral outrage and panic, and gain advantage by using blind, rabid emotion to their advantage to shun, shame and attack anyone who disagrees. That’s really all it can take to have a less free society, and it’s really all some people have.

After six years of an administration which also benefits from bringing further Left activists into the public square (gun-rights, Keystone pipeline, Organizing For Action), and will likely do little to turn those ideologues away, some media outlets which have drifted in the same direction lately will find it hard indeed to even criticize the ideologues among them.

This ain’t liberal, nor open, nor civil.

Here’s George Will reasonably explaining his position, and the reasons for it:

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This blog continues to support civil libertarian feminists, often ex-feminists, or even continuing feminists who criticize feminist ideology in good or bad faith because they are free to do so. They are free to bring-up the often shoddy use of statistics by many feminists, the cultural Marxism and troubling tendencies of victimhood/oppressor theories, the controlling impulses on display in the video below.

Via David Thompson, from Canada via the Agenda with Steve Paikin, notice how two panelists just can’t bring themselves around to the idea of other people speaking their minds, thinking differently and critically, and pursuing ideas freely in an open debate.

They really don’t seem to see a problem with where the logic of their own ideology leads:  To silence and shout-down opposing points of view, to constantly try and control the speech and thoughts of others.

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Related On This Site: Cathy Young At Minding The Campus: ‘The Brown Case: Does It Still Look Like Rape?

Christina Hoff Sommers (wikipedia) is trying to replacing gender feminism with equity feminism. She also wrote The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.

Are You Man Enough? Nussbaum v. Mansfield…From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’

Defending Eliot Spitzer…as a man who ought to be free of prostitution laws…but didn’t he prosecute others with those same laws?: Repost: Martha Nussbaum On Eliot Spitzer At The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A very Harvard affair: The Spelke/Pinker debate-The Science Of Gender And Science

Repost-Revisting Larry Summers: What Did He Say Again?…

From The NY Times: ‘Harvard Business School Case Study: Gender Equity’