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Showing posts from December, 2012

Happy Holidays!

Apologies for the lack of posting, I've been busy with holiday and family stuff. I should be back after the new year. In the spirit of wretched commercialism, note that Spec Ops , my favorite game this year, is on sale at Steam for $15. In the meantime, I quite enjoyed this sermon, which I had never heard before:

Bill Keller, South Africa, and Political Dysfunction

Bill Keller, recently retired executive editor of the New York Times,apparently lived in South Africa for a time as the local bureau chief. The framing device for his column today is what lessons new Arab democracies can learn from South Africa after 18 years of freedom: I wish I could say the lessons from here are easy. But it is becoming clearer by the day that a glorious constitution carries you only so far if its values have not taken root in the culture. So South Africa has an exquisite balance of powers on paper — but is, in effect, a one-party state, riddled with corruption. It has a serious independent judiciary — but is now contemplating loopholes to let tribal courts practice South Africa’s version of Shariah. This country was years ahead of the United States in recognizing the rights of homosexuals, including same-sex marriage — yet there is no openly gay leader in the ruling African National Congress, and lesbians have been targets of punitive rape and murder. It has

Yahzee on Far Cry 3

I enjoyed this:

Does Political Rhetoric Matter?

Kevin Drum has an addendum to my post about the rhetoric of the "fiscal cliff," which I think is mostly correct. (As a reminder, I was arguing that liberals should try to be more rhetorically coherent, better to drive out nonsense like "fiscal cliff," which is horribly misleading.) Jonathan Bernstein, meanwhile, in his once-yearly tradition of being correct about most things but wrong when he pays attention to me , has a much more radical proposition. Word choice matters not at all, he says : Beyond that, the really important point is that in almost every case, what we call this stuff matters a whole lot less than people think, and probably not at all... At any rate, my view is that there's basically no evidence that it would make any difference at all that whether we call all of this the "fiscal cliff" or something more accurate. Similarly, pick an issue: it almost certainly didn't matter that people came to call the recent health care refor

Spec Ops: The Line and the Morality of Drone War

Warning: major spoilers ahead.   Spec Ops: The Line is one of the best games I have ever played and if you're a gamer, I highly recommend it. I'm going to spoil most of the plot, so if you haven't played it yet, be warned. Let me start with some background.  Spec Ops  is based on  Heart of Darkness , though only loosely. It is set in a Dubai which has been buried by incessant sandstorms (perhaps in a nod to future climate change). One Colonel Konrad volunteered his 33rd Battalion to oversee the evacuation, and deserted after high command ordered him to abandon the city and the refugees. The last anyone heard, the 33rd was attempting to lead a caravan of survivors out of the city, but the caravan was never seen; Dubai was declared a no-man's-land and the 33rd disavowed for treason. You play a Delta Force operative named Walker, whose team of three is sent into the city to search for survivors after a despairing transmission from Konrad gets picked up. The gameplay

Department of WTF, Russian Motor Vehicle Bureau

Yikes:

Why We Should Care about Admission Policy at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton

Ron Unz has a fascinating read in The American Conservative  about the admissions policies of elite schools. It's an extraordinarily long piece, and I hesitate to summarize it (it badly needed a heavy edit, but it's still really worth a read), but mostly it documents at length evidence of an anti-Asian and pro-Jewish bias in elite school admissions and discusses several possible solutions. It's uncomfortable in spots, especially the parts making a case that there has been a "collapse in Jewish academic achievment," meaning that according to Unz American Jews have gone from tremendously academically successful, with massive over-representation in educational awards, to something like about the average for all Americans. Here's a taste: The U.S. Math Olympiad began in 1974, and all the names of the top scoring students are easily available on the Internet. During the 1970s, well over 40 percent of the total were Jewish, and during the 1980s and 1990s, the fra

Ah, the 90s

This was perhaps my favorite movie when I was 6-7: