:: Media Times Review Blog ::

Stephen Schwartz, Tech Central Station

What do we do about terrorist incitement on the internet? I have noted on several occasions that the main enemies of democracy and pluralistic Islam — al-Qaida, the ultra-Wahhabi clerics of Saudi Arabia, and jihadists in Pakistan — seem to have far surpassed the antiterror forces in use of this versatile and effective form of media. Those of us who have studied terrorist sites and video products are struck by how much more sophisticated and impressive they are, in their presentation, when compared with U.S. government and other outreach efforts.

Rob Mitchell, Business Week

The charities we choose to support say a lot about us. Consciously or not, we prioritize and decide which charities mean the most to us, just like we do with a consumer brand.

Occasionally a single cause captures the public imagination, as Make Poverty History (MPH) has; its symbolic white wristband has become as ubiquitous as iPod earphones or the latest Harry Potter book, and is in itself a fashion statement (or as Richard Curtis, one of the UK charity’s patrons, prefers to call it, a “passion statement”).

Jennifer Snead, n+1

David Hempton’s Methodism: Empire of the Spirit
(Yale, 2005)

Charles Murray, COMMENTARY

When the late Richard Herrnstein and I published The Bell Curve eleven years ago, the furor over its discussion of ethnic differences in IQ was so intense that most people who have not read the book still think it was about race. Since then, I have deliberately not published anything about group differences in IQ, mostly to give the real topic of The Bell Curve—the role of intelligence in reshaping America’s class structure—a chance to surface.

By Alan A. Stone, Psychiatric Times

In his acclaimed biography of Justice Benjamin Cardozo, Harvard Law Professor Andrew Kaufman devotes part of a chapter to a lurid murder case in which Cardozo, then serving on New York’s highest court, wrote an opinion interpreting the classic M’Naghten formulation of the insanity defense (Kaufman, 1998; People v Schmidt, 216 N.Y. 324). The case decided in 1915 is a classic cautionary tale for forensic psychiatrists and, with the wisdom of hindsight, one might even suggest that it is also a cautionary tale for the great justice.

Jack Jordan, Spiked: online

When the spotlight of the Western media was last on Ukraine, optimism was in the air. ‘Our man’ was in, the oligarchs were out and a new era in Eastern European politics was being predicted by journalists and politicians alike.

The so-called Orange revolution – in which the opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko fought his way to the presidency despite electoral fraud, the state-controlled media and an attempted poisoning – was hailed as a shining example of the New Europe in action. It made for a good Hollywood narrative: the dioxin-scarred Yushchenko finding the strength through ‘people power’ to take on the dark forces of the post-Soviet world. With the colourful occasion of his inauguration ceremony and the party afterwards on Kyiv’s central square, the story was given a neat climax, and the attention of the world turned elsewhere.

Arnold Kling, Tech Central Station

Economists support the idea of health insurance. However, many of us believe that policies that pay for all health care services are not real health insurance. Insurance should protect people against catastrophic loss, but it should not insulate them from the cost of all health care. As an economist, I believe that the law of demand applies in health care. I believe that if patients are insulated from the cost of health care, then they will err on the side of obtaining unnecessary CT scans, MRI’s, and visits to specialists. They also will “err” on the side of obtaining useful preventive care.

S. T. Karnick, The National Interest

In the last several decades, modernity–the period initiated by the Enlightenment–has come under increasing criticism. Most prominently, of course, the postmodernists have put together a critique of pure reason, as it were, that uses logic to question the rationality of modern, Enlightenment-based philosophy. In arguing that all reasoning is based on attempts to gain, sustain or increase power, postmodernists openly seek to obliterate the very foundation on which the modern world was built: the supremacy of reason.

Paul Farhi, American Journalism Review

Philip Meyer, who has studied the newspaper industry for three decades, can see the darkness at the end of the tunnel. If present readership trends continue indefinitely, says the University of North Carolina professor, the last daily newspaper reader will check out in 2044. October 2044, to be exact. “I use that as an attention-getting device,” says Meyer, whose latest book, “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age,” spells out the bad news in elaborate detail. “It’s shocking, but that’s what the numbers say.”

Don Boudreaux, Cafe Hayek

Browsing through the August 15th issue of Time, I came across an insightful quotation from the brilliant Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker is quoted in Time’s cover story on the role of religion in schools. Pinker says, defending the theory of natural selection against the idea of “intelligent design,” that

Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity’s highest callings.

Indeed so.

I don’t here write to enter my two-cents in the debate between Darwinians and creationists (although, for the record, I am solidly in the Darwinian camp). I write to record that Pinker’s insight applies to society no less than to biological beings.