So my friends niece claims. I think it's at a frequency inaudible to the male ear.

Be nice James. I mean the boy is Canadian for one thing and for another thing he's delivering a good demanded by the market (with the market in this case being defined as 13-30 year old women).

That said I never listen to anything he sings.

 Well both swordfish and especially tuna are a complex and likely very sad story. Their international migratory paths make them prime examples of the tragedy of the commons as they are currently well on their way to commercial extinction (and probably literal extinction after that). Shark hunting is a pet peeve of mine since my own childhood digs are utterly plagued with swarming masses of seals which, being cute and cuddly, are protected earnestly front hunting while their primary predators (being neither cute nor cuddle) are being chased to extinction.

Terrible, the poor man.

I'd say the stuff you've been reading is badly overexcitable. I'd also note that your impression is based on incorrect assumptions. My own impressions have been that the west is importing accountants and making them work as painters because their credentials are not transferrable.

Isn't this essentially praying to ourselves then?

Jay I'll note in passing that all of the countries on that list (except Japan) have vibrant and highly active immigration system so a sub replacement level birthrate merely means they're skimming the cream off the third world populations to make up the difference. From my viewpoint this is an unambigously good thing.

Now Japan, well they're going to have to hope their robots can come through or else they're going to have to join the club and permit immigration. Or I suppose we'll get to see what actually happens with a first world country with actually declining populations.

Yeah because Cindy Sheehan, for all her loss, is the arbiter of who's repented enough on the internet.

If you don't believe his apologies, well that's the end of it for you but it's far from dispositive to me or anyone else. It's your opinion, not a fact, and I find it deeply unpersuasive. If Sullvan has apologized (he has, repeatedly) then I will take that at face value and move on; I'm a liberal, not an inquisitor. If you have the power to read peoples souls over the internet then your powers should be used for more important good than throwing names at Sullivan. I expend energy defending Sullivan (and to a lesser degree The Bell Curve)because I disagree with your conclusion, I disagree with your reasoning, I disagree with your methodology and I disagree with your tone. I think it harms our communal cause, fails to persuade (and indeed turns against us) those who are undecided and weakens our ability to argue against our opponents. I also disagree with your selection of opponents. Sullivan is not much of a liberal but he sure ain't a movement conservative (more specifically he's a movement conservative apostate). He makes much more salient criticisms of conservatives than many of the more reliably left wing writers I read, therefore he's an ally and a valuable one at that.

Reading comprehension fail here old shoe. I observed that your shrill inflexible pearl clutching reminded me of the prissy argument style that some of the more crusty right wing Christians indulge in. Just because you're imitating their failed argument styles doesn't make you one their belief group, it just makes you a bad debater.

Sullivan was called out and not pandered to when he did his over the top raving during the dark days of the beginning of the Iraq fiasco. That's part of the reason he has repeatedly recanted.

The book in question may have some counter arguements against it but the idea that a carefully written is equivalent to some ku klux scrawl written on a billboard in the south is pathetic. Materials like The Bell Curve should be refuted with counter arguements, facts and empirical research. Not be screaming "that's racist" and then covering one's ears.

The Democratic party, in my eyes, is doing tolerably well. I can understand your frustration; I feel it in a way. I mean here I have an elder, a fellow lefty and a compatriot with whom I share no doubt many a principal screeching around like some brittle easily incensed schoolmarm (apologies to all school marms out there) over a doughy (and no little bit fey) immigrant Brit and a rather academically written if controversial book and making all of us left wingers look the fool.

Well I'm part of the "decadent left" so that'd be an attack on me too. And since he's already apologized (repeatedly) for it what more do you have to kvetch about?

Relax old boy, if someone's wrong on the internet it's far from the end of the world and certainly nothing to get your blood pressure up over. In as much as Sullivan's advocacy for war has harmed families it seems fair to assume his advocacy against other wars (Iran for instance) have done commesurate good.

James, per the red state model the main thing you get by persuading people to marry young is a whack of kids living through divorces in their teenage years.

In my own meager experience libertarians say that in a society with minimal intervention poverty will be greatly reduced. They usually go on to assert that voluntary contribution supported charity should then be sufficient to cover those who cannot contribute sufficiently to society to get enough to survive by in exchange.

James specifically, when he talked about his idea of a libertarian (minarchist) society, allowed that some kind of wealth redistribution might be necessary to convince the lower ranks of society to go along with such a setup.

But the whole dealie is no one knows exactly what a majority libertarian economy society would look like., it's all theory. The only data points are pre-1900's. The poor died in the streets but on the other hand  economies, technologies and morality have come a long way since then.

Jesse, I agree that people in general and home owners in particular are very much NIMBY's by nature but I think that a great deal could be done to minimize the abominable state of zoning in much of the urban areas and there is a pressing need (from a liberal point of view) to change the status quos both for economic, equality and especially environmental reasons.

Zoning laws are generally a matter of the answer being set by default to "No". People wishing to develop or redevelop must fight the inertia of the system. I'm of the opinion that this should be changed. I wouldn't go so far as to say that zoning should be abolished but I do think it could be reformed so that development and increasing building density faces a more positive permissive default posture from the rules and that it's incumbent on those who would object and obstruct such development to put in the energy and effort to prevent it rather putting the onus on the developers.

I've always said, Burt, the only thing that would be more hellish than a world with too many lawyers would indeniably be a world with too few. Happy Turkey day to you.

I don't see how. Your arguement style reminds me strongly of a true believer conservative so I thought pointing it out might provoke some thought. Being a very dry bread agnostic myself there was little meaning intended beyond that.

Big tents are how we'll help roll this kind of damage back. Leave the narrow visions to the conservatives I say. Also, Sullivan is an opinion blogger. If bloggers had to prostrate himself and stop to do good works every time they said something wrong there wouldn't be any bloggers, just a lot of youtube videos of fat guys in pajamas whipping themselves.

Well we'll have to disagree about the racist term. I am a comparative youngster myself but having watched how the term racist has declined precipitously in efficiency even in my own politically conscious lifetime (in the early 90's it stung considerably, by the late 90's it was generally responded to with a shrug and now a days it most often provokes an eye roll) I feel this is considerable evidence that the term is being overused, frequently misapplied and is rapidly turning toothless.

I already tendered my own perjorative: hyperbolic. One I submit is both meritted and descriptive.

I'm certainly amenable to the idea that they (and Sullivan) are wrong. But racist? I suppose I just have a higher threshold for accusing it than you. I dislike slinging the term about so liberally, I think it weakens it and empowers real racists.

Has the Bell Curve been refuted by scientific study? I'm unaware that Sullivan ever advocated policy changes be enacted to deal with alleged inherent differences in the various races. A book isn't racist for asking things we don't like (and I don't like the things the book asks or suggests) inquiry isn't racist for inquiring so long as it's done in good faith. Your attitude in this smacks of the Catholics when dealing with Galileo and far more dangerously it waters down the meaning of the pejorative "racist" which indirectly enables and strengthens genuine racists and bigots. I'd strongly suggest you reconsider.

As for the Iraq war; Sullivan was undeniably wrong and his rhetoric, in typical Sullivan style, was as overwrought and hysterical as it was wrong. Were he your standard neocon, unapologetic, unrepentant and backing up his assertions to the hilt to this day I'd say an argument could be made in favor of the scumbag pejorative. But Sullivan has publicly and painfully recanted, apologized and become an ardent foe of his former allies on that subject. If being wrong on anything anytime regardless of behavior after that error makes one a scumbag then we are living in a scumbag world and you're hurtling rocks from within a fortress of glass.

I'd suggest again that you really reconsider. With the former assertion it seems to me like you're lowering yourself to the level of a very close minded Catholic and with the second you're reducing yourself beneath that level since even conservative Catholics claim to value forgiveness where you are espousing none.

The problem of the meritocracy is a worrisome one, though not I personally think, an intractable one. But it's certainly all the more reason to not continue extending intellectual property indefinitly beyond the life of the creator. For one thing almost all of them inevitably end up in the hands of corporations, they attract specious litigation like a rotting whale attracts blowflies, entrenches winners of the biological lotteries and it stifles economic activity and further creativity.

Perhaps so, and that's a harsh way for you to put it. But I don't think you have considered the unique nature of the "property" in question. The whole point of intellectual property of this nature is its non-zero sum nature. If a song or a technique is copied the original creator technically has not lost any property of their own. A song is not diminished by being repeated, a design does not fade from the original schematic when it is copied. Land and other material property is pretty much by definition zero sum. It's use is limited, you and I cannot eat the same apple, we cannot both employ an acre of land for different uses. Intellectual property needs copyright protections to encourage its discovery but those protections need to be loose enough  to allow it to have value and there's very little merit to the endless copyright extensions that seem to be becoming all the more the fashion now a days.

David, a clarification. If my memory of the comment thread is accurate the lottery comparison was not aimed at persons who create and copyright intellectual property but rather at their descendants who continue to collect royalties from their forbears accomplishments. If that is the case the lottery comparison is perfectly apt since the beneficiary of their ancestors accomplishments is in essence the winner of a biological lottery, to wit being born to an accomplished parent.