Conservatives, liberals, and avoiding cognitive dissonance

I don’t find these exercises in psychologizing political viewpoints very illuminating, due to (1) their irrelevance to the truth of the positions and (2) the massive number of confounding factors. However, I was interested in this curious datum from conservative and liberal responses to being asked to write essays in favor of their political opponents:

In fact, some conservatives sounded rather miffed after taking the study, leaving comments like: “Not for all the tea in China would I write that.” In contrast, note the study authors, some liberals seemed to revel in the assignment. “This was fun!”, as one put it.

You don’t hear the phrase very often these days; but I’d just like to note that I would write pretty much anything for all the tea in China (and the more pesticides, the better).

Snowden and Greenwald

Here is a nice piece by journalist and former democratic operative Kirsten Powers on the lamentable but predictable media and government focus on Snowden’s personality. Here is  a nice piece by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen contrasting the neutral and opinionated style in journalism.

Nazi hunting

What I find eerie about Nazi-hunting stories (aside from Nazism itself…) is primarily the thought of the post-WWII lives of the Nazis themselves, living quiet, comfortable, often suburban lives. Here is a new case from today’s NYT. It details the case of 94-year-old Michael Karkoc. There is all the usual eeriness, but I was also surprised by the particular reasons why Karkoc was discovered:

In a background check by U.S. officials on April 14, 1949, Karkoc said he had never performed any military service, telling investigators that he “worked for father until 1944. Worked in labor camp from 1944 until 1945.”

However, in a Ukrainian-language memoir published in 1995, Karkoc states that he helped found the Ukrainian Self Defense Legion in 1943 in collaboration with the Nazis’ feared SS intelligence agency, the SD, to fight on the side of Germany — and served as a company commander in the unit, which received orders directly from the SS, through the end of the war.

It was not clear why Karkoc felt safe publishing his memoir, which is available at the U.S. Library of Congress and the British Library and which the AP located online in an electronic Ukrainian library.

Karkoc’s name surfaced when a retired clinical pharmacologist who took up Nazi war crimes research in his free time came across it while looking into members of the SS Galician Division who emigrated to Britain. He tipped off AP when an Internet search showed an address for Karkoc in Minnesota.

“How America Became Orwellian”

Juan Cole posts an annotated timeline, complete with considerable linked documentation, from ProPublica detailing some notable moments in the history of surveillance-related issues. (HT: Brian Leiter)

Related, Jack Shafer in Reuters has thoroughly documented the double-standard taken toward leakers. (HT: Greenwald‘s Twitter feed)

Study on the effects of being turned away for an abortion

The New York Times has a thorough article by a medical student detailing a study that compares certain outcomes for women who successfully seek an abortion, and women who seek an abortion but are turned away. Evidently there has been a paucity of data on this issue, despite the intense focus on the effects of abortion itself in public debate.

“All past studies of women denied abortion in the United States have been hospital-specific and local, focusing on a brief amount of time, without a control group,” says Roger Rochat, former director of the division of reproductive health at the C.D.C. and a professor of global health and epidemiology at Emory University.

There are some striking statistics in the article, e.g. that only 9% of “turnaways” (in the study) ended up utilizing adoption services. Also interesting is the fact that, despite the comparatively negative outcomes for turnaways, the main anecdote in the article involves someone – referred to as “S” – who nevertheless becomes extremely attached to her child and glad that she did not have an abortion. The main researcher, Diana Green Foster, is not surprised.

When I told Foster S.’s story, she wasn’t surprised that S. ended up bonding with her baby. “That would be consistent with our study,” Foster said. “About 5 percent of the women, after they have had the baby, still wish they hadn’t. And the rest of them adjust.”

Report on gov’t collection of Verizon phone records [updated]

Here is some reporting and commentary in The Guardian by Glenn Greenwald on a leaked court document that permits the government to indiscriminately collect certain information of Verizon customers.

Someone obtusely complains in the comments, “Can’t help feeling I’m only getting one side of the story here.” Greenwald replies, “There’s probably another court order that I’ve decided to hide from you that reads: ‘About that last order: just kidding. The government is only entitled to get the phone records of people about whom it has presented evidence of wrongdoing’”.

Fortunately, however, the Obama administration has, in a brief Reuters piece, explained the “other side”. An administration official says that the program keeps us safe, letting us know “whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities.” This seems to me to be something of a non-sequitur. After all, total, comprehensive government monitoring of all communications and behavior could serve this same purpose. No one denies that. The relevant argument is about how much intrusion of privacy can be constitutionally justified, for this and other purposes (especially when no evidence has been presented against those being spied on).

UPDATE: Here is an interview on the subject (and the government’s response) with Greenwald by Jake Tapper on CNN.

UPDATE 2: Is Glenn Greenwald going to reveal new secret documents in his possession every day?

How to destroy the future

That’s the title of this cheerful, lighthearted romp by Noam Chomsky.

Philosophy defended

Here is a nice defense of the need for philosophy in addition to physics in The Guardian.

Climate change consensus

Here is a nice piece in The Guardian summarizing a study of the climate change literature.

h/t Juan Cole

Ayn Rand on C.S. Lewis

A friend sent me this delightful post at First Things, which includes Ayn Rand’s marginal notes to one of C.S. Lewis’ more strictly philosophical but lesser-known books, The Abolition of Man.

One comment of non-comedic interest: Rand says of one passage, “Here’s where the Kor­zybski comes out in him.” I’m not familiar with Korzybski, but according to Wikipedia, he thought that “people do not have access to direct knowledge of reality; rather they have access to perceptions and to a set of beliefs which human society has confused with direct knowledge of reality.” This makes sense of Rand’s comment on Lewis’ claim that the object of scientific discovery is at least partly an “artificial abstraction” rather than reality itself.

“The cheap, driveling non-entity!”