Robert Wright

Economist Glenn Loury has a gay son, and so does blogger and law professor Ann Althouse. So I wasn't expecting their conversation about gay marriage to take this turn:

If you're wishing Glenn had been matched with someone who disagrees with him, I have good news. Here he presents the other side of the argument, which leads to some interesting thoughts from Ann about the role of religion in progressive moral change:

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The much-anticipated Facebook IPO has come and gone. In terms of optics, it was a flop. The stock closed barely above the offering price and so failed to exhibit the "pop" that it was supposed to deliver. Google, in contrast, saw its stock price rise 18 percent on the first day of trading in 2004.

Still, that 18 percent rise left Google valued at $28 billion. Today's trading left Facebook valued at around $100 billion. In this sense, the wisdom of the crowd has deemed Facebook a much better bet than it deemed Google eight years ago.

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According to a recent survey, most Facebook users don't trust Facebook to keep their data private.

Can't imagine why! I mean, it's not as if Facebook is a company that would--time and again--get you to share more data than you realize you're sharing. And it's not as if the company is run by a guy who in 2004 used private Facebook login data to hack into the email accounts of Harvard Crimson staffers and read their emails. And it's not as if this same guy would hack into a rival website and change user profiles and user privacy settings.

But you know what? If you're thinking about buying into this week's Facebook IPO, the various transgressions and missteps of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook don't really matter. Facebook has a magical property that insulates it from user discontent. It's a property that other big tech companies--Microsoft, Google, Apple--don't have nearly as much of. And it's the reason I think Facebook is a better long-term bet for investors than any of these companies.

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The State Department, according to a report in today's Wall Street Journal, is poised to do something that could increase the chances of war with Iran.

Let's set the context:

We're in the midst of negotiations with Iran, trying to keep it from building a nuclear bomb. Within Iran there is disagreement about how hard a line to take in the negotiations. Obviously, all other things being equal, it would be good to strengthen moderate voices within Iran and undermine hardliners--particularly hardliners who want the talks to fail altogether so that Iran can proceed to build a bomb.

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Katie Heaney at BuzzFeed has written a funny (in the good sense) piece called "11 Ways You're Annoying on Twitter."

Maybe the most predictable of the 11 ways to annoy people is "Tweet about food." Indeed, few things so fill me with ambivalence about following someone on Twitter as when they share the quotidian details of their lives--their food, their kids, their dogs--as if someone other than them cared.

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Mickey Kaus thinks he sees bad news for President Obama in a Gallup poll about gay marriage. Whereas only 13 percent of those polled say Obama's support for gay marriage will make them more likely to vote for him, 26 percent say it will make them less likely to vote for him.

I have a different takeaway from this poll. I think it shows that these kinds of polls aren't worth much.

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In some sense, I guess, you should feel sorry for all people and nations who suffer greatly. But that doesn't mean you should consider them helpless victims of unfair right-wing economic policies, which is the way many people, especially progressives, think of Greece. Here Matthew Yglesias and Rob Farley, both progressives, raise questions about the prevailing narrative:



You can watch their whole conversation here; it was an episode of Foreign Entanglements, a weekly show co-hosted by Farley and Matt Duss on Bloggingheads.tv.

My wife (who, by the way, is not the woman pictured on the right) spends a certain amount of time explaining to friends that they've just embarrassed themselves online. Only last week she emailed a friend and respected journalist--let's call him John Smith--to tell him that on her Facebook news feed, below the headline "Kim Kardashian Denies Naked Kitchen Photo" (which was accompanied by the photo on the right), it said "John Smith read this article."

An appreciably abashed John Smith struggled to figure out how his reading habits had become public knowledge. After clicking on the Kardashian headline, he hadn't clicked a Facebook 'recommend' button or anything. So why were all his Facebook friends being informed that while perusing the Huffington Post he'd surrendered to primordial yearnings?

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I was at the New Republic in 1989 when Andrew Sullivan published his pathbreaking cover story "The Case for Gay Marriage." There are two things about the experience that may be hard to convey to people younger than 25, maybe even 30:

1) What a radical idea this seemed like at the time. I'm not sure I'd ever heard anyone mention gay marriage, and I'd certainly never seen a written defense of it.

2) How important a single magazine could be in pre-internet days. Mike Kinsley, who for my money is the most amazing editor of his generation, had during the 1980s made the New Republic the magazine in Washington.

The combination of these two things was potent. When you take an off-the-charts idea and unveil it on the most prominent stage in Washington, it gets people talking. Yesterday, when President Obama embraced gay marriage, this was a kind of culmination of the conversation that Andrew, more than any other person, started.

Back then Andrew wasn't officially out of the closet; few prominent gay people were, compared to now. And I remember Mike wondering--with a bit of protective concern, as I recall--whether Andrew realized that, having published this piece, he would have trouble keeping his sexual identity private. Indeed, it was as an openly gay man--and an openly gay Catholic, no less--that Andrew would stay in the middle of the conversation he'd started, helping to push it outward until it enveloped the nation.

In the first paragraph of the piece, Andrew described gay marriage as an idea with both radical and conservative elements, but by the end of the piece he'd made it clear which element he considered essential: "It's one of the richest ironies of our society's blind spot toward gays that essentially conservative social goals should have the appearance of being so radical. But gay marriage is not a radical step." It doesn't seem so now, no. This fact--that radical enlightenment can transpire in the course of a couple of decades--kind of gives you hope.

Richard Lugar's remarks after his defeat in yesterday's Republican senatorial primary are interestingly asymmetrical:

I don't remember a time when so many topics have become politically unmentionable in one party or the other. Republicans cannot admit to any nuance in policy on climate change. Republican members are now expected to take pledges against any tax increases. For two consecutive Presidential nomination cycles, GOP candidates competed with one another to express the most strident anti-immigration view, even at the risk of alienating a huge voting bloc. Similarly, most Democrats are constrained when talking about such issues as entitlement cuts, tort reform, and trade agreements.

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I don't know what's more unsettling--the demagogic rant delivered here by Golden Dawn Party leader Nikolaos Nichaloliakos, or the part before the rant, when his advance team intimidates journalists into standing as he enters the room. In any event, the Greeks had better get used to this kind of spectacle, because Golden Dawn will, after yesterday's election, have a presence in parliament. I have a couple of thoughts below the video player.



The good news is that most extremist parties that rear their ugly heads wind up doing little more than that--and Golden Dawn's 21 seats in a 300-seat parliament don't exactly give it a commanding position. But two things are troubling:

1) The collapse of the mainstream parties. The New Democracy and Pasok parties--which in 2009 got a combined 77 percent of the vote--yesterday got a total of no more than 40 percent. Extremists find it easier to occupy the limelight when there's no consensus alternative.

2) The last time a Nazi party succeeded in actually gaining power in Europe, it was after crippling austerity had been imposed on the country by other countries.

In that light, maybe it's good that in France, the country best positioned to persuade Germany that there's such a thing as overly austere European economic policies, the anti-austerity party won.

I should add, for the record, that Golden Dawn rejects the "neo-Nazi" label. But whatever you call the party, there are many reports of its footsoldiers walking around assaulting immigrants for the crime of being immigrants. And note that in the video above, the party leader says, "For those who betray this homeland, the time has come to fear." No doubt he's the one who gets to define "betraying the homeland."

In a Washington Times op-ed, Rep. Joe Walsh, a Tea Party Republican from Illinois, unveils his new plan for solving the Israel-Palestine problem:

1) Make the occupied territories part of Israel;

2) Give Palestinians who live in those territories "limited voting power" in the new, bigger Israel that they'll have suddenly become residents of. (Walsh doesn't define his euphemism, but no doubt the idea is that Jews get one-person-one-vote and Palestinians get something less, so that Israel can remain a Jewish state.)

3) Palestinians who don't like having "limited voting power" can move to Jordan.

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It looks like Chen Gaungcheng isn't going to be an albatross around President Obama's neck after all. If indeed Chen and his family wind up coming to America, the oomph will go out of the Chen-based narrative Mitt Romney has been developing: Obama administration sends blind guy to gulag lest he get in the way of Hillary Clinton's Beijing photo ops.

Still, it's true that in handling the Chen case the Obama administration seemed intent on not derailing meetings between Clinton and Chinese officials. And the Romney camp will keep trying to get some mileage out of that--at least, to judge by Jennifer Rubin's Washington Post blog, the unofficial archive of Romney campaign talking points. Friday morning, after the contours of the tentative deal to get Chen out of China had been reported, Rubin wrote that the administration's handling of the case had been "reprehensible."

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So how exactly did the Chen Guangcheng case morph so quickly from diplomatic triumph to campaign disaster? Why did Chen, having said all along that he wanted to stay in China, leave the American embassy and then start saying he wanted to get out of China ASAP?

Over at the American Interest, Walter Russell Mead has a theory:

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Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng has had his share of political frustration over the past few years, but at the moment he's one of the most powerful people in the world. How he winds up framing his decision to leave the American embassy, and what he decides to do next, could (1) affect President Obama's chances of re-election (and Chen's current framing is definitely not helping Obama); and (2) significantly complicate Chinese-American relations.

The part of me that likes dissidents is happy about this. The part of me that likes to keep great powers on good terms isn't; that part of me finds it unsettling that a single person, however noble his cause, could disrupt relations between China and America at a time when the world definitely doesn't need more instability.

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In the wake of the controversy over last week's 60 Minutes episode on Palestinian Christians, the Israeli website 972 today runs an illuminating post by a Palestinian Christian, Philip Farah. On the question of whether Christians are being driven out of the occupied territory by Islamic radicals or by Israeli policies, Farah writes:

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Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post has come up with a reason for America to intervene in Syria: because only America can. Other nations, Diehl says, face obstacles to intervening that, happily, America doesn't face.

The problem with this argument is that the examples Diehl cites show roughly the opposite--that the downsides to intervention faced by other nations are faced by America as well.

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Reuters has put together a pretty sympathetic background piece about George Zimmerman, one that sets out to paint a "more nuanced" picture of him than his critics have painted. It depicts him not as some gun-toting yahoo with a Dirty Harry complex, but more as a guy who was drawn by happenstance down the path that led to Trayvon Martin.

We learn, for example, that Zimmerman first got a gun not to shoot people, but because a neighborhood pit bull kept getting loose, and an animal control officer warned that pepper spray wouldn't be enough to keep the dog at bay. Then there was the rash of neighborhood robberies, and witnesses identified the culprits as young black males. So (the article implies) it wasn't irrational for Zimmerman to suspect an unfamiliar young black male of being up to no good.

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Peter Bergen, writing in the Sunday New York Times, makes the case that Barack Obama has been a very hawkish president--that he's less the "negotiator in chief," as stereotype would have it, than the "warrior in chief."

Mr. Obama decimated Al Qaeda's leadership. He overthrew the Libyan dictator. He ramped up drone attacks in Pakistan, waged effective covert wars in Yemen and Somalia and authorized a threefold increase in the number of American troops in Afghanistan. He became the first president to authorize the assassination of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and played an operational role in Al Qaeda, and was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen. And, of course, Mr. Obama ordered and oversaw the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

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Here's a reminder for wealthy Christians who oppose President Obama's proposed "Buffett rule," which would impose a minimum 30 percent tax on people making over a million dollars a year: Jesus said, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

I realize Jesus doesn't here mention increasing any marginal tax rates. Indeed, conservative Christians have a point when they say that, though Jesus speaks ill of wealth and espouses help for the poor, he doesn't say the government should be the vehicle for realizing these ideals. So it may be a reach for liberal Christians to invoke Jesus when talking about how the IRS should treat income above a million dollars.

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