Fred Hiatt has a pretty reasonable column arguing that rather than ad hoc and limited investigations, we need to look into the torture question through a comprehensive independent commission. That said, I have doubts about this part:

Such a commission would investigate not just the Bush administration but the government, including Congress. It would give former vice president Dick Cheney a forum to make his case on the necessity of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” It would examine the efficacy of such techniques, if any, and the question of whether, even if they work, waterboarding and other methods long considered torture ever can be justified. [...] But a fair-minded commission — co-chaired by, say, former Supreme Court justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter — could help the nation come to grips with its past and show the world that America is serious about doing so. It could help Americans understand how this country came to engage in what many regard as vile and un-American practices. It might help the country respond better the next time it is frightened.

It’s hard for me to understand how we can outsource a decision about whether or not “torture ever can be justified” to an independent commission. That’s a policy decision that needs to be made by policymakers. And, in fact, it has been made by policymakers. That’s how torture came to be illegal in the United States. The crux of the matter is that we came to have a bunch of policymakers who no longer believed in that principle and thus they broke the law. This leaves us with a legal issue about what to do with them. But it also leaves the policy issue hanging out there. The main position of the conservative movement at this point is that torture is excellent, and something we ought to engage in. It’s important to resolve that argument, but I don’t see any alternative to resolving it through the political process. A commission can’t do it.

This Kay Hymowitz article about how thanks to feminism nobody knows who should pay for dinner and so basically the world is doomed was published a while back, but I first saw it yesterday. I found it sort of grimly fascinating but couldn’t really find the words to express my feelings about it. But I bugged the twitterverse to get someone else to write about it and Will Wilkinson delivered:

I think I first saw this kind of argument clearly laid out in Tocqueville. If I remember correctly, he noted that there is a kind of soothing clarity in stratified societies with brightly marked class lines. When classes are stable over generations, and there is little mobility up or down, conventions that govern class relations become settled, making it easy to know how to behave toward those above and below one’s station. Moreover, when classes are fixed and mobility is limited, there is little anxiety about improving one’s position, since there’s so little prospect for doing so. American-style democratic equality creates a pattern of unceasingly stressful striving for relative rank, and all this mobility up and down produces a confusion in manners that can lead to dangerous social frictions and resentments. It becomes too hard to know what to expect of others, or what others expect from us.

This is, as far as I can tell, Hymowitz’s argument about gender relations in the post-feminist era. Women attaining something like social equality with men has created not so much liberation as a kind of toxic confusion. When women are free to be individuals, free to want different things than other women, men can’t be sure what any particular women might want from him. To open the door for her or not!? To pick up the check or not!? To be a nice guy like she says she wants or a bad boy like she really wants?! These unresolved and unresolvable questions has led inevitably to the contemporary condition in which men are either unlovable whining sad sacks or misogynist assholes who cite a cartoon version of Darwinism to justify treating a woman as little more than an upgrade from Jergens and a sock. If we don’t like it, we only have feminism to blame. Or something like that.

Exactly. As Will says, this phenomenon is real enough and it’s worth taking seriously the fact that it bothers people. But it’s really not worth taking seriously the idea that this cost outweighs the benefits, both the benefits in terms of justice and the benefits in terms of drastically enhancing the scope of opportunity available to both men and women. At any rate, Hymowitz by just really going on at length manages to lay out the underlying logic of a lot of contemporary social conservative anxiety in a way that you rarely see set out.

The latest political moves out of Afghanistan:

Afghanistan’s Electoral Complaints Commission said Friday that it had received more than 2,000 complaints of fraud or abuse in last week’s election. Mr. Karzai’s biggest rival, Abdullah Abdullah, showed reporters video of a local election chief in one polling station stuffing ballot boxes himself. [...]

For Mr. Obama, who is on vacation here in Martha’s Vineyard, and his administration, it is the worst of all possible outcomes. Administration officials have made no secret of their growing disenchantment with Mr. Karzai, who is viewed by the West as having so compromised himself to try to get elected — including striking deals with accused drug dealers and warlords for political gain — that he will be a hindrance to international efforts to get the country on track after the election.

But Mr. Karzai, in a feat of political shrewdness that has surprised some in the Obama administration, has managed to turn that disenchantment to an advantage, portraying himself at home as the only political candidate willing to stand up to the dictates of the United States, according to Western officials.

For one thing, it strikes me as a bit disingenuous to see American officials as being super upset at the idea that Karzai conducted some funny business during the voting. The fact of the matter is that for all the US government’s disgruntlement with Karzai, a Karzai victory was the only acceptable outcome for the United States. The Karzai-led regime is already seen by many in southern and eastern Afghanistan as an unduly Tajik-dominated entity, and dumping the incumbent Pashto president in favor of a Tajik challenger would have made the problem much worse.

The other thing is that we do need to ask ourselves what the implications are of the fact that portraying yourself as willing to stand up to the United States is seen as a winning political strategy in Afghanistan. Using the military to help allies under attack by hostile forces like the Taliban makes a lot of sense. But “helping” people who don’t want your held is another matter.

Farhad Manjoo enjoins would-be Kindle competitors not to make the mistake the iPod’s rivals made:

Lesson No. 1: Beat the Kindle on features, not just price. One of the reasons the iPod managed to stay on top for so long was that Apple was constantly innovating. Its rivals would match its features—stylish design, unbeatable interface, ever-better capacity—but by the time they got there, Apple had invented some newer, better, smaller, sleeker iPod, and its old version was now passé. Eventually there seemed to be only one reason to buy a rival device—it was cheaper. But it turned out price wasn’t a deciding factor for most people. Customers chose the pricier iPod because it offered a lot more, not to mention because it had become a fashion statement.

I think it’s worth considering a slightly stronger claim. The lower prices of iPod competitors was actually a problem. By releasing products that didn’t have any strikingly better features, but have somewhat lower prices, vendors of non-iPod MP3 players are basically selling a product that signals “I’m too cheap to buy a name brand digital music player.” That’s sort of poison. Costing less money than a rival product is a good thing, but signaling “I’m Cheap!” is not.

Ryan Avent wonders why libertarians hate trains. What I wonder is this. Here’s Tyler Cowen explaining why he doesn’t take the Metro:

It’s not about population density per se. It’s about how many independent, hard-to-connect nodes the system has and that is why high-speed rail on the whole works better in Europe or Japan than in many other locales. To give an example from a slightly different realm, I live right near the Metro in a high-density suburban area. Yet I don’t take the Metro to my Arlington office, which is about two minutes from a Metro stop. I’d rather do the 37-minute drive. Why? Because I stop at the supermarket and the public library on my way home at least half of the time or maybe I stop to eat at Thai Thai. If those conveniences were right next to my house I’d consider the Metro but they’re not.

That seems about right to me. But libertarians often act as if they think that this outcome is the result of consumer choice or a free market process. But ask yourself, why is it that there are no conveniences right next to Cowen’s house? Well, I don’t know exactly where he lives, but I believe it’s in Fairfax County which is governed by this exciting zoning ordinance. Fairfax County, in its infinite wisdom, allows for the creation of housing at various different levels of density in different areas. They’re differentiated by the number of permitted dwellings per acre—one, two, three, four, eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty, or thirty per acre. Even within the thirty per acre area, buildings cannot be over “150 feet, subject to increase as may be permitted by the Board in accordance with the provisions of Sect. 9-607″ and there’s a requirement that “40% of the gross area shall be open space.” We also need to make sure to “Refer to Article 11 for off-street parking, loading and private street requirements.”

All multiple-family residential structures in the county must, per Article 11, provide “One and six-tenths (1.6) spaces per unit.” A detached single-family home needs “Two (2) spaces per unit for lots with frontage on a public street and three (3) spaces per unit for lots with frontage on a private street, provided that only one (1) such space must have convenient access to a street.” A bowling alley needs “Four (4) spaces per alley, plus one (1) space per employee, plus such additional
spaces as may be required herein for affiliated uses such as eating establishments” with the eating establishment rule being “One (1) space per four (4) seats plus one (1) space per two (2) employees where seating is at tables” and with different rules for counter service.

One could go on. But I don’t really understand why it is that this kind of thing doesn’t seem to bother libertarians very much. Bryan Caplan specifically cites America’s large houses and ample parking spaces as the benefits of our free market approach when they are, in fact, the product of systematic regulatory mandates. I think this illustrates the basic tribalism of a lot of our politics. If Fairfax County were considering some kind of hippie-inspired stringent rent control law, we’d be hearing no end of it from blogging George Mason University professors. But given a set of extremely severe land use regulations that happen to antagonize environmentalist and left-wing Europhilic bicycle commuters, suddenly mandatory minimum parking requirements become the essence of capitalism.

If you look across the Atlantic to Europe, there’s no question that some real problems exist with the social exclusion of immigrant communities that’s leading, in the particular case of Muslim immigrant communities, to the rise of some extremist ideologies. You might think of it as comparable to the situation in African-American ghettos in the 1960s except smaller in scale and less severe. But the American right is obsessed with the idea that this is not “a problem that people will have to deal with” (people who, thankfully, don’t need to deal with such problems as mass child poverty or sky-high murder rates) but rather “the imminent collapse of European civilization.” Now Christopher Caldwell, one of the right’s most skilled writers, has produced a whole book of absurdly overblown claims along these lines titled, bombastically, Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.

Steven Holmes as an excellent review of the book in The American Prospect. Part of what’s interesting about this is how life in Europe makes the American conservative sympathetic to the Islamists:

This is why Caldwell refers to poverty-stricken Muslim enclaves as “the strongest communities in Europe” — strong, that is, in the context of a pitifully weak post-religious and post-nationalist Europe. “Islam is not the second religion of Europe but the first,” he says, because it has maintained its “vital energy,” while there is nothing left to European Christianity but a superficial “lifestyle.” He even ends up agreeing with Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, that Europe’s “materialist civilization” is “on the verge of collapse.” Caldwell feels more at home with Muslim values than with the values of contemporary Europe — as, he says, would Dante. And Caldwell also values women’s chastity more than women’s autonomy because chastity (not to mention virginity) “can further dignity, responsibility, and self-respect.” You may think that burqas and niquabs demean women, he ironizes, but what about “jeans that cinch halfway down the bum crack”?

Running through a lot of contemporary conservative thought is the right’s staggering lack of faith in the power of western civilization’s achievements. Liberal democracy has brought us a great deal of peace and prosperity, and time and again liberal societies have proved stronger than our autocratic rivals. But the right seems obsessed with the idea that impoverished and backward social values, or else dictatorial political institutions, offer the key to world-historical success. Thus Europe, supposedly, would be stronger if it re-embraced fratricidal violence and the United States would be more secure if we embraced the methods of the KGB.

The NYT’s Economix blog offers a chart showing the strong correlation between parental income and SAT scores:

It is, of course, possible that this effect is entirely caused by differences in parental IQ. That said, there’s no evidence that it’s entirely caused by differences in parental IQ. But such is Greg Mankiw’s zeal to defense social and economic inequality and injustice in the United States that he slams the NYT for failing to advance this evidence-free genetic determinist theory.

But for another look at the non-genetic heritability of socioeconomic status, consider this chart Peter Orszag brought to my attention some time ago:

You see that whether or not one goes to college turns out to be closely related to parental income even when you account for differential levels of student achievement. In particular, children of average intellectual ability are likely to go to college if their parents are in the top income quartile, but not otherwise. Personally, I have no doubt that some social stratification in the United States is due to genetics, but we would have to be living in a very different country before I started using that hypothesis to wave away every potential concern about inequality.