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A Noted Dozen for February 22, 2013

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  • Matthew Yglesias (November 2012): Latino vote 2012: Opposition to immigration doesn’t explain Romney’s crushing defeat: "In the past, predictions of a brown wave… struck me as… misguided. As the Hispanic population grows, it also gets… 'Hispanic' (take me for example)…. [But] consider the GOP’s deeply racialized campaign against Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.… I’m not the only fair-skinned English-dominant person with a Spanish surname who was genuinely shocked… the country was treated to a mass racial panic in which Anglo America was about to be stomped by the boot of Sotomayor’s ethnic prejudice… a 'lightweight' who’d been coasting her whole life on the enormous privilege of growing up poor in the South Bronx…"

  • Eric Boehlert: "Friends Of Hamas" And Why The GOP Can't Win The Internet: "If you want to appreciate how vast [is] the digital divide… separat[ing] conservative failures and liberal accomplishments online… just look…. Breitbart's Ben Shapiro… suggesting Hagel… received 'foreign funding'… from… Friends of Hamas'…. Andrew McCarthy, and AM talker Hugh Hewitt all hyped Breitbart…. By comparison, note Monday's news… prestigious Polk Award for the big campaign scoop David Corn posted online last September about… Mitt Romney, ['s]… '47 percent' of Americans who 'believe they are victims'…. Andrew Leonard…. 'Democrats have grasped a fundamental attribute of the digital age -- information is easy to share -- and have understood that the best way to take advantage of this special quality is set up a structure in which "smart people" are allowed to operate freely in an environment where information flows fluidly.'

  • Josh Barro:** Why We Need Republicans: "Democrats make their own errors in evaluating the economy…. Republicans have an often-healthy skepticism of regulation…. When they try, Republicans can make government more efficient…. Republicans aren't all out to lunch… Republicans are succeeding in states where their national brand is severely damaged tends to be that their state-level policy agendas are markedly better than the party's national one."

  • Evan Soltas: Spend Now! It’ll Save Us Money

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  • Megan McArdle: America's New Mandarins: "[L]ike all elites, they believe that they not only rule because they can, but because they should… do not fundamentally question the idea that the world should be run by highly verbal people who test well and turn their work in on time. They may think that machine operators should have more power and money…. But if they think there's anything wrong… it is that clever mandarins do not have enough power to bend that system to their will…. [T]he mandarins are in many senses deserving: they work very hard, and they are very smart. But there is one important thing they do not know, which is what it is like to be anyone except a mandarin…"

  • Racialicious

  • Jack & Jill Politics

  • The Waiting Room (2012 film)

  • Walter Jon Williams: And Speaking of Fiction: "Ian McEwan ('One of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945') asks what happens when a novelist loses his faith in fiction. And I found myself nodding in agreement as I read along. 'Novels? I don’t know how or where to suspend my disbelief. What imaginary Henry said or did to nonexistent Sue, and Henry’s lonely childhood, his war, his divorce, his ecstasy and struggle with the truth and how he’s a mirror to the age—I don’t believe a word: not the rusty device of pretending that the weather has something to do with Henry’s mood, not the rusty device of pretending'…. Honest to God. You should make at least a little effort to suspend my disbelief. McEwan’s talking about… the 'bourgeois mimetic novel'… the concerns of the educated middle classes are, basically, the concerns of the entire world.  Whether Henry and Sue can find happiness in their marriage, whether Henry can learn to love his job, and mortgage, and his first intimations of mortality… that’s it,  That’s all.  The whole grand apparatus of fiction is reduced entirely to this… even if you’re writing about adultery in academe, for God’s sake make me think you know something about it other than having read a bunch of other novels on a similar theme…. [Y]’know what?  None of the authors I’ve been reading have attended Taos Toolbox, and they really oughta. Cuz I would learn ‘em better. I really would."

  • Galileo Galilei: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

  • Andrew Gelman: My beef with Brooks: the alternative to “good statistics” is not “no statistics,” it’s “bad statistics”: "[M]y beef is with David Brooks for not correcting his numbers. Janet Mertz contacted him and the Times to report that his published numbers were in error, and I also contacted Brooks (both directly and through an intermediary). But no correction has appeared…. The problem with Brooks… [is] that he does use data, he just doesn’t distinguish between good and bad data. He doesn’t seem to care…"

    • Scott Lemieux: Your Use Of Data For Any Purpose But Validating David Brooks’s Lazy Intuitions Infuriates David Brooks: "David Brooks’s attempt to lash back at being thoroughly humiliated by Nate Silver without responding directly. Anybody who reads sportswriting has seen Brooks’s argument a million times… five paragraphs railing against geeks in their basements… the rest… arguing… Pitcher A has a higher total in a nearly useless statistical category you remember in a fond haze of nostalgia from your days as a child when a win was a win and you’d get five bees for a quarter and Warren Harding brought some real integrity to the White House, dammit."

On February 21, 2013:

February 21, 2013 at 22:19 in #weblogging | | Comments (4)

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