More on the "ground zero" "mosque"

Pieces from Christopher Hitchens and from the Economist.

Hitchens raises an important issue, which is at what point one stops tolerating intolerance. When I was in graduate school at Chicago, the philosopher John Rawls came and gave a big lecture on more or less that topic that attracted hundreds. He is not the most dynamic of speakers but the substance was on target, which is to say that he went into great detail making the point that this is a very hard question indeed. At some point, one can no longer tolerate the intolerant. I think that points comes when they present a serious threat to the persistence of a tolerant, liberal regime. In my view, we are nowhere near that point in the US.

The Economist rightly mocks the illiberal and un-American opposition to the "mosque".

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

A recounting of the fascinating history of the song, along with some legal lessons about international differences in copyright law, courtesy of Mark Steyn.

My main memory around this song concerns the talent show we had in sixth grade (or was it fifth?) wherein Becky Frier and Pam Johnson (and maybe someone else), who were among the girls to mature the earliest in our cohort, did an interpretive dance to this song as their contribution to the show. I remember thinking that they were somehow too old for the rest of us.

Hat tip: Nat Wilcox

Movie: Get Low

A.O. Scott is right: see this for Robert Duvall (and, in my case, Bill Murray, too).

As an aside, it is interesting to see how widely the paths of the early Saturday Night Live casts have diverged. Bill Murray was a bit slower out of the gate than, say, Chevy Chase or Eddie Murphy, but he is acting career looks a lot better than theirs right now.

Recommended.

Assorted links

1. Lexington on exceptionalism in American vacations.

2. State ideology and party identification and implied limits in the division of the Senate. But why is anyone still using a one-dimensional ideological scale?

3. Interesting bivariate correlations involving marriage.

4. The Economist on Catholicism in Europe.

5. Amazing color (colorized?) video of VJ day in Hawaii.

Scream 4 in A2

I will have to confess that I have not seen Scream 1, Scream 2 or Scream 3, but Scream 4 is being filmed in Ann Arbor, most particularly in the home of my "boss", the the chair of our economics department, Linda Tesar.

Cool.

On poop

My daughter is presently in the midst of the "poop" phase of linguistic development. It turns out that this phase does not entirely disappear as people get older, as evidenced by this long list of domain names continaing the word "poop".

Hat tip: Charlie Brown (who heard me describe the "poop" phase over lunch last week)

Children at risk?

Here is a nice piece on parental timidity by someone who has borne the full brunt of its pop cultural popularity.

A teaser:

What has changed in the English-speaking world that has made childhood independence taboo? The ground has not gradually gotten harder under the jungle gym. The bus stops have not crept farther from home. Crime is actually lower than it was when most of us were growing up. So there is no reality-based reason that children today should be treated as more helpless and vulnerable than we were when we were young.

The author blames the long-term trend towards parental timidity on popular culture, which I think falls flat as an explanation. While the relative importance of different media has changed, the news has always focused on the far tail of events related to children: bizarre kidnappings, satanic rituals and all the rest. Without a change in the claimed forcing variable, whence comes a change in the outcome.

Let me offer a couple of other possible explanations, neither of which I am particularly happy with but both of which at least do not fail at the level of face validity, as the popular culture explanation does:

1) The quality-quantity trade-off is one possible story. People have fewer children now and so they invest more in the ones they do have. They may also be more risk averse when they lack the diversification of risk that multiple children provide.

2) Risk of legal liability. Governments are much more likely to go after parents now than they used to be, at least that is my impression. No one wants to compound some bad event happening to their child with criminal prosecution and the media circus that goes with it.

But somehow neither of these seem like quite enough to explain the magnitude of the cultural change that has taken place between when I was growing up, and spent most afternoons wandering about the neighborhood relatively unsupervised for hours on end, and now, when the vast majority of parents would shudder in horror at the very thought of such behavior.

And good for "America's worst mom" for not caving.

Via the Agitator