Psychopolitik 2.0

-These people are crazy.  Period.

-Somebody is gonna get fiiiiiiiiired…

-In the “so what else is new?” department: Gov’t attempts to set aside contracts for disabled veterans, ends up handing yet more money to Boeing & GE instead.

-Ross Douthat reads an argument that loose credit has removed class distinctions from use of cosmetic surgery & says this to it:

Riffing on the data, Tyler [Cowen] writes that “cosmetic surgery is not just a zero-sum game but rather it leads to better matches, more matches, and more people who are happy with their looks or with the looks of their partner(s).” I would go halfway with him, and say that it’s certainly a rational response to a culture where airbrushed images of perfect beauty flood the airwaves and supermarket aisles, where male instincts about sex are increasingly influenced by the siliconed imagery of hard-core pornography, and where high divorce rates (which are especially high among the working class) ensure that large numbers of women find themselves re-entering the dating pool in middle age. Whether it’s something to be welcomed, though, is another question entirely.

Figures he’d gripe about shifting social norms on sexuality & completely ignore the “easy credit is an unalloyed good!” assumption underneath it all.  Me, I’d rather have a culture of tight money & loose sex than the reverse.

Not surprised: last night was gorgetastic!

Also not surprised: The people that review movies, at least those I’ve seen, completely missed the point of “Ninja Assassin” (the next columnist to bitch about a lack of intricacy to the plot of an obvious popcorn splatter-flick needs to lose their job on the spot.  It’s not like they don’t warn you).

Really “WTF?” surprised: The star of something that kicked that much ass is this guy?!?  What?!?!?

Earlier I was at the bookstore, checking out all the books I can’t afford.  Happened to pick up Superfreakonomics, out of curiosity towards a specific part of the book I heard about — Sudhir Venkatesh’s analysis of prostitution.  Found it interesting, but what stuck in my head was a relatively small detail in a chapter about altruism.  To just spit it out, building from an anecdote about a murder where allegedly there were a bunch of witnesses but no one tried to do anything about it, they along the line mentioned a psychological experiment like this.

The premise is simple: one person is given a sum of money, & told to offer an amount from it to a 2nd person.  If they accept the offer, both keep the money; if they don’t, neither gets anything.  Here was my thought on that game before they revealed the result they got:

“I’d think the 2nd person would expect half, & reject less.  At least, that’s what I’d do, and if I were the first person I’d offer half.  What reason is there for the 1st to have more?  They didn’t earn it, it was just handed to them for the goofy little game.”

Then, there was an altered version of that game called Dictator, where the 1st person got to give the 2nd whatever amount they deemed appropriate & they couldn’t challenge it (hence the name Dictator).  My thought on that:

“Well in that case what incentive does the 1st have to give the 2nd person anything?  They’ll probably tell ‘em fuck you & keep all of it.”

Needless to say, the results did not line up with how I thought at all.  Go pick up the book if you want to know how they did.  Don’t buy it though, that section & the prostitution one are the only parts worth reading, just read those & put it back on the shelf.

The U.S. economy sucks worse in some places than others.  Yet, that isn’t as bad as getting blown up.  As a result of that calculation, Iraqi refugees are coming here.  A lot of them had been settling directly in Michigan, since there’s a substantial population of people there from the Middle East, but the State department decided to try to prevent that.

Guess what happened?:

The U.S. government resettled Mazen Alsaqa in Massachusetts in February. Within a month, the Iraqi refugee moved to Michigan.

It wasn’t that Alsaqa disliked Worcester, Mass. But he never thought twice about staying. Even though the U.S. government tried to keep him away from the Detroit area and its soaring unemployment, that was the only place Alsaqa wanted to live.

Tens of thousands have fled Michigan’s troubled economy in recent years, yet Iraqi refugees continue to move there despite a U.S. government policy trying to limit refugee resettlement in the Detroit area. Family ties and cultural support from the region’s large Middle Eastern community appear no match for the U.S. effort, which tries to place refugees in cities where they stand a better chance of financial success. […]

Southeastern Michigan has one of the country’s largest Middle Eastern populations — about 300,000 can trace their roots back to the region — and has long been a top destination for Arab immigrants to the U.S.

So people prefer places where there’s familiar cultural ties, regardless of what bureaucrats tell them.  What a shock, huh?

@Jeff Goldberg, w/r/t Palin attempting to talk about Israel: The 2nd one.  If you need to ask anymore…

Ross (as in Douthat, not Rick Ross), re: the new incoherence of the American right-wing:

From Glenn Beck to the Tea Parties, much of the energy in the post-Bush G.O.P. is with people who have grasped, albeit sometimes in inchoate ways, that big government and big business are increasingly on one team, and the champions of free markets and limited government are on the other. But they don’t know what to do about it, and what they do seem to know — cutting taxes, and letting the rest take care of itself — is often non-responsive, not only to the problems the country faces, but to the problems they themselves have diagnosed.

He makes it seem as if the symbiotic relationship of big business & politics is a relatively new thing.  It’s more accurate to say that it has become more obvious to more people than it used to be, but expecting anyone with mainstream press cred to acknowledge this is pointless anyway, so I won’t dwell on it.  Even then though, he gives this group more credit than they deserve IMO.

Considering the string of lobbying groups that have been tied to their public demonstrations, the coincidental lag time of reaching the conclusion that Something Is Wrong just when the launch codes are handed to a black guy, and the overall demonstrated lack of substance behind the anger, to say they’re mad and just don’t know what to do about it just doesn’t pass the smell test. The reality far as I can tell is that this is the same old nativism & fear-mongering, just with a whiff of economic anger due to the current downstroke being deep enough to not ignore.  It’s less that they’re stumped for solutions than it is that they have a psychological block from admitting what the problem is (because it’d sound like something a “librul” would say, if not an actual leftist).

If this crowd were genuinely fed up with actually-existing capitalism then they wouldn’t be sympathetic to the Republican party, as though both engage in the same things the popular image is that the GOP is the business party.   That said, if the response of Sarah Palin fans when they find out she zigged where they thought she had zagged all along is any indication, they may not even be that aware…

Good news: Cory Maye, the Mississippi man who, as a result of the “War on Drugs”, ended up railroaded as a murderer over an obviously understandable mistake, will get a new trial.

Bad news: Even so much as saying “dog” in a song a certain way is now copyright infringement.

Props to Balko for both.

This makes none:

Who would’ve thought bare space could be so expensive?:

From the edge of the Thames River in New London, Conn., Michael Cristofaro surveyed the empty acres where his parents’ neighborhood had stood, before it became the crux of an epic battle over eminent domain.

“Look what they did,” Mr. Cristofaro said on Thursday. “They stole our home for economic development. It was all for Pfizer, and now they get up and walk away.”

That sentiment has been echoing around New London since Monday, when Pfizer, the giant drug company, announced it would leave the city just eight years after its arrival led to a debate about urban redevelopment that rumbled through the United States Supreme Court, and reset the boundaries for governments to seize private land for commercial use.

Pfizer said it would pull 1,400 jobs out of New London within two years and move most of them a few miles away to a campus it owns in Groton, Conn., as a cost-cutting measure. It would leave behind the city’s biggest office complex and an adjacent swath of barren land that was cleared of dozens of homes to make room for a hotel, stores and condominiums that were never built. (emphasis mine)

^^^^Some “renewal”, huh?

Shorter ZdNet blogger: “So Microsoft tweaked UAC on Windows 7.  Well, if you think UAC protects your computer enough to be worth the hassle at all, I have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn you might be interested in”.

Honestly though, if you’re dumb enough to be online without any active protection beyond a freakin’ nag prompt, you deserve whatever happens.