Aug 10, 2015 | Politics
From Jon Stewart, Patron Saint of Liberal Smugness - The New York Times
Many liberals, but not conservatives, believe there is an important asymmetry in American politics. These liberals believe that people on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum are fundamentally different. Specifically, they believe that liberals are much more open to change than conservatives, more tolerant of differences, more motivated by the public good and, maybe most of all, smarter and better informed.
The evidence for these beliefs is not good. Liberals turn out to be just as prone to their own forms of intolerance, ignorance and bias. But the beliefs are comforting to many. They give their bearers a sense of intellectual and even moral superiority. And they affect behavior. They inform the condescension and self-righteousness with which liberals often treat conservatives. They explain why many liberals have greeted Tea Partiers and other grass-roots conservatives with outsize alarm. They explain why liberals fixate on figures such as Sarah Palin and Todd Akin, who represent the worst that many liberals are prepared to see in conservatives. These liberals often end up sounding like Jon Lovitz, on “Saturday Night Live,” impersonating Michael Dukakis in 1988, gesturing toward the Republican and saying “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy!” This sense of superiority is hardly the only cause of our polarized public discourse, but it sure doesn’t help.
And Mr. Stewart, who signed off from “The Daily Show” on Thursday, was more qualified than anybody to puncture this particular pretension. He trained his liberal-leaning audience to mock hypocrisy, incoherence and stupidity, and could have nudged them to see the planks in their own eyes, too. Instead, he cultivated their intellectual smugness by personifying it.
His claims to be objective fell flat. For instance, Mr. Stewart denied being in President Obama’s corner by re-airing a clip in which he had made fun of the Obamacare website’s rollout, as if that was the same as questioning Obamacare itself. That was par for Mr. Stewart’s course, mocking liberals’ tactics and implementation but not their underlying assumptions or ideas.
Aug 6, 2015 | Politics
From ESPN article on Adrian Foster:"'No, bro, I don't believe there's a God, why would I believe there's a devil?'
[...]
With that, he displays his talent as a master of the eloquent shrug and leans back in an office chair in a back bedroom that he's turned into a recording and writing studio. The house, a rental, is modest for a man working on a five-year, $43.5 million contract. There's a Range Rover in the driveway but no fleet. "I don't want or need much," he says. "Just something fairly safe for the kids to grow up around, and that's about it, really. The rest is luxury, fluff. I've saved about 80 percent of what I've made, and I will continue that. I won't have to work when I'm done -- live off the interest, put my kids through college, let them have the money when I'm in a box and call it a day, man."
[...]
"Every once in a while she'll mention Jesus or God," he says. "One time she likened God and Jesus to Zeus and Hercules. She did it on her own. She said something along the lines of, 'They're the same. They're both stories.' I thought it was brilliant on her part to be able to distinguish it."
[...]
Foster stops short of calling himself an atheist, not because he isn't -- his language is the language of the atheist -- but because someday he might not be. "I have an open mind," he says. "I'm not a picket-sign atheist. I just want to be a happy human being and continue to learn." He also has a visceral dislike of labels. (On June 28 he tweeted, "hop in the uber and the driver immediately turns it to the rap station. he's absolutely correct, but don't judge me, yo.") "If I tell you I'm a Republican, your mind immediately starts telling you all the things I must believe," he says. "Same with the word 'atheist,' and I don't like people making assumptions about me.
[...]
The two running backs communicate almost daily, and when Forsett ends a conversation or text exchange with "I'll pray for you" -- as he often does -- Foster responds with "And I'll think for you."
Jul 17, 2015 | Politics
From The Mythical Connection Between Immigrants and Crime - WSJ:
...numerous studies going back more than a century have shown that immigrants—regardless of nationality or legal status—are less likely than the native population to commit violent crimes or to be incarcerated. A new report from the Immigration Policy Center notes that while the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. more than tripled between 1990 and 2013 to more than 11.2 million, “FBI data indicate that the violent crime rate declined 48%—which included falling rates of aggravated assault, robbery, rape, and murder. Likewise, the property crime rate fell 41%, including declining rates of motor vehicle theft, larceny/robbery, and burglary.”A separate IPC paper from 2007 explains that this is not a function of well-behaved high-skilled immigrants from India and China offsetting misdeeds of Latin American newcomers. The data show that “for every ethnic group without exception, incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants,” according to the report. “This holds true especially for the Mexicans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans who make up the bulk of the undocumented population.”It also holds true in states with large populations of illegal residents. A 2008 report by the Public Policy Institute of California found that immigrants are underrepresented in the prison system. “The incarceration rate for foreign-born adults is 297 per 100,000 in the population, compared [with] 813 per 100,000 for U.S.-born adults,” the study concludes. “The foreign-born, who make up roughly 35% of California’s adult population, constitute 17% of the state prison population.”[...]Every immigrant here illegally has already broken a law, though that doesn’t mean they are predisposed to crime. In a 2005 paper, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago reported that more recently arrived immigrants are even less crime-prone than their predecessors. In 1980 the incarceration rate of foreign nationals was about one percentage point below natives. A decade later that had fallen to a little more than a percentage point, and by 2000 it was almost three percentage points lower.
[...]How do you balance border security and labor-market demand? Should relatives of people already here continue to be given an immigration preference? Is it time to move toward a skills-based immigration system similar to Canada’s? How should the federal government treat border states and cities that bear the upfront costs of illegal entries? Is walling off the southern border feasible? Would it make the U.S. safer? And what should be done about the estimated 12 million undocumented people already living here?
From Jon Stewart, Patron Saint of Liberal Smugness - The New York Times
