dmarusic16

My point is that it’s precisely the wrong frame. And indeed, you make my point for me: we can do better than “hope”.

I’m certainly neither arguing for not looking at the past, nor for doing nothing. I’m suggesting that the universalist language of the founding, and then subsequently the brilliant rhetoric of Lincoln trying to knit together a country wrecked by Civil War, is not helpful. Elevating actual monstrosities to a religious plane leads to lots of handwringing about “atonement” and “repentance”, a lot of which ends up easy to dismiss by those less sold on the metaphor. Instead, sober discussion about the realities of race today, and even more importantly how those play out along class—an underdeveloped subject among most Americans—would be welcome.

America is a country, not a project of universal human redemption. Countries do horrible things at times, yes. And these things should be studied. But it’s high time we abandon the gauzy religious rhetoric (“original sin”) when we talk about the United States. It’s a hangover from Lincoln’s rhetoric, and in many ways it’s not healthy, as it prevents us from taking concrete steps to fix concrete problems.

Polar looks great! Just the kind of service I’m looking for. (Hope an iPad/tablet version is in the offing alongside mobile.)

Maybe I was reading too far into your statement. But in general terms, politics (and conflict in general) stems from a struggle over the power to allocate scarce resources towards conflicting conceptions of what is “good” or “deserving”. Often times, statements against privileging your own group to the detriment of others—and I concede you didn’t make that case directly, but I’ve often seen your comparison invoked in such arguments—implicitly assumes that politics, too, should be transcended. There is a sentiment that politics is a vestige of irrationality, and that if everyone was properly educated and could see the greater good, they would necessarily favor that over parochial group interests.

Are politics becoming outdated, in your opinion, too?

I can’t judge if the claptrap he quotes the geniuses spouting is effective, but the author’s screed sounds like a classic American snake oil salesman pitch.

One reason Europeans tend to misunderstand America is that they come from comparatively more homogeneous and therefore higher trust societies. America is overall better at integrating immigrants, but a solidarity deficit remains. Result: we don't get the nice socialized benefits. It's not the government as much as the polity.

So much credit goes to Villeneuve, who elevates scripts that could easily go wrong into works of art. See Sicario if you haven't, for example—a script that would have been a pedestrian drug war film in lesser hands.

Also: Consider the source. Sputnik is unreliable and Kremlin-controlled, and whatever analysis they cook up is usually FUD.

Yeah, that's very much not what the World Bank is about.

Holy Christ, I had no idea this existed. Awesome.

Not true: Mike Bostock's stuff is all over the NYT website very frequently. He and Jeremy Ashkenas seem to be key players over there. Very inspiring work from both of them.

At the same time, D3 makes all sorts of smart decisions for you when you're making charts with it. I'm always pleasantly surprised, for example, by how D3 picks just the right number of tick marks on axes. Mike Bostock has taste and deep knowledge of how to make good visualizations, and it shows. A similar library made by a less able person would barf out way uglier charts.