antimeria

Oh, irony. You never disappoint.

The salient grafs from the three stories:

1. A top Toyota official claimed that a negotiated agreement with U.S. government auto-safety regulators prevented a widespread vehicle recall and saved the Japanese auto giant more than $100 million, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post after it was turned over to congressional investigators.
   [...]
   Under the heading “Wins for Toyota & Industry,” [Toyota North America president Yoshi] Inaba wrote: “Negotiated ‘equipment’ recall on Camry/ES re. SA, saved $100M+, w/ no defect found.” “SA” stands for “sudden acceleration.”
2. Kabul Bank’s boss has been handing out far bigger prizes to his country’s U.S.-backed ruling elite: multimillion-dollar loans for the purchase of luxury villas in Dubai by members of President Hamid Karzai’s family, his government and his supporters.

   The close ties between Kabul Bank and Karzai’s circle reflect a defining feature of the shaky post-Taliban order in which Washington has invested more than $40 billion and the lives of more than 900 U.S. service members: a crony capitalism that enriches politically connected insiders and dismays the Afghan populace.

3. A federal judge on Monday morning approved a $150 million settlement between the Securities and Exchange Commission and Bank of America over allegations that the firm lied to investors about bonuses and mounting losses during the financial crisis of fall 2008.
   [...]
   And although the bank will be able to put this episode aside, it faces another major lawsuit by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo that charges both the bank and two former top executives with fraud. The SEC declined to charge any individuals.

From a Newsweek article about the decline of Islamic extremism:

Over the course of 2003 and 2004, Saudi Arabia was rocked by a series of such terrorist attacks, some directed against foreigners, but others at the heart of the Saudi regime—the Ministry of the Interior and compounds within the oil industry. The monarchy recognized that it had spawned dark forces that were now endangering its very existence. In 2005 a man of wisdom and moderation, King Abdullah, formally ascended to the throne and inaugurated a large-scale political and intellectual effort aimed at discrediting the ideology of jihadism. Mullahs were ordered to denounce suicide bombings, and violence more generally. Education was pried out of the hands of the clerics. Terrorists and terror suspects were “rehabilitated” through extensive programs of education, job training, and counseling. Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus said to me, “The Saudi role in taking on Al Qaeda, both by force but also using political, social, religious, and educational tools, is one of the most important, least reported positive developments in the war on terror.”
[...]
As Al Qaeda in Iraq gained militarily, it began losing politically. It turned from its broader global ideology to focus on a narrow sectarian agenda, killing Shias and fueling a Sunni-Shia civil war. In doing so, the group also employed a level of brutality and violence that shocked most Iraqis. Where the group gained control, even pious people were repulsed by its reactionary behavior. In Anbar province, the heart of the Sunni insurgency, Al Qaeda in Iraq would routinely cut off the fingers of smokers. Even those Sunnis who feared the new Iraq began to prefer Shia rule to such medievalism.

After the jump, another reason that torture is bad practice: (more…)

In no particular order, five people my age (+/- a few years) who make me feel embarrassed about my accomplishments thus far:

1. Randall Munroe (25), xkcd creator, former NASA contractor, and giver of talks to Google.
2. Ezra Klein (25), political blogger for the Post and American Prospect.
3. Jared Allen (27), all-star defensive end, hunter, and mullet connoisseur.
4. A-Trak (27), world champion turntablist, Kanye West tour DJ, and record label owner.
5. The xx (20), an incredibly- (and deservedly-) hyped band composed of kids who can’t legally drink at their US shows.

As an aside, when looking up Hot Chip’s frontman Alexis Taylor, I discovered the following:

I’m not an emotional person (see #5), and in general, things don’t get to me. But I lost it when Andrew Sullivan linked to a National Review post by Heather MacDonald on gay marriage, which bemoaned the “institutionalized severing of biology from parenthood”:

Orphans and abandoned children are raised by non-biological adoptive parents… But these arrangements were considered outliers to the normal practice of conceiving and raising children, forced on the parties by sad necessity.

As most people reading this know, I’m adopted (see #4), and although I’ve had a sometimes-contentious relationship with my parents, they are two of the most caring and devoted people I know. Their faith was one of the major reasons they wanted to adopt, and they would be devastated if someone told them their act of love a “second-best solution.” MacDonald’s dismissal of loving parents because they don’t conform to her vision of a “traditional family” is one of the most despicable, hurtful things I’ve ever read–and it’s worse because I’m sure she thinks she’s being perfectly reasonable.

In my last post, I wrote that to modern-day conservatives, “Outliers are to be homogenized or destroyed.” I think I need to go farther and put the stamp on it: conservatives see nothing wrong with denying outliers and nonconformists their very humanity in the name of getting their way.

It goes without saying that the rest of her post is pure drivel, so full of half-baked claims not even worth addressing that I hesitated to link it. And of course, any self-respecting conservative commentator needs an astounding lack of self-awareness (bold mine):

The facile libertarian argument that gay marriage is a trivial matter that affects only the parties involved is astoundingly blind to the complexity of human institutions and to the web of sometimes imperceptible meanings and practices that compose them.

Heather MacDonald, go fuck yourself with a pineapple, and pray to your god that I never see you on the street.

Last week, Rush Limbaugh judged the Miss America pageant (In related news, that’s still around), and being that he’s Rush Limbaugh, people have been accusing him of being sexist. So he went on Fox and Friends (where else?) to defend himself. Naturally, it went off without a hitch:

“I’m a huge supporter of women. What I’m not a supporter of is liberalism. Feminism is what I oppose, and feminism has led women astray. I love women. I don’t know where all this got started. I love the women’s movement — especially when walking behind it. This idea that I don’t like women is absurd. This is Miss America. And if there’s a Mr. America out there, it’s me.”

Bold mine. Beyond being pretty funny, this is a pretty perfect illustration of one of the biggest problems I have with conservatism as it exists in the United States today: the utter lack of self-awareness, introspection, humility, or curiosity, which breeds a reflexive hostility to anything novel. To them, opposition and outliers are to be homogenized or destroyed, not understood and engaged with.

HT: Andrew Sullivan