The point of a political movement...

Is not to have any political views or principles, says David Brooks. Rather, you should have a "disposition." You see, if Republicans had no system of beliefs, and instead were disposed to be leery of change, they'd be so much better off right now! That's what Edmund Burke would have wanted.

They'd certainly be more malleable, I suppose, and Brooks has a point that Republicans' beliefs are hurting them at the moment. But the trick is to adjust Republican beliefs to the new reality (especially regarding foreign policy), not to abandon the idea of principle.

But then again, the framework Brooks sets up at the beginning of the piece -- the difference between dispositions and creeds, never explained -- doesn't really follow through the rest of it. He basically argues for a creed organized around the Burkean principles of slow change and resistance to abstract theory.

It strikes me that Brooks just went too far; rather than simply arguing for a return to Burke's principles, he tries to convince readers that Burke's philosophy was so awesome that it wasn't really made of principles at all.

Yeah, don't sue the record companies

Usually music pirates just pay a few thousand dollars to settle out of court, but one woman decided to fight. Cost her a $220,000 verdict.

As much as I think illegal downloaders/download providers should be punished, that is a bit much. Especially considering that, technically, the verdict only applies to 24 of the 1,702 songs she pirated. That's $9,250 a song.

Though I suppose, God only knows how many people downloaded each of the songs she "shared."

Lead sentence of the day

From the AP:

Regardless of how the first trial of a person accused of illegally sharing music online turns out, the record industry plans to keep suing listeners.

That's loaded language if I ever heard it; they're not suing "listeners" who "share." They're suing "thieves" who "steal" and "give away things that aren't theirs."

Here's a shocker

If it costs a lot to put out a new product, and there aren't enough people who want to buy it, it's very likely no one will make said product. Therefore, people with unpopular preferences have a harder time buying stuff.

That proves how horrible the free market is. I want Sony to make a big-screen TV that only shows images in purple and pink, and they don't. Waaaaa!

Someone call Carlos Mencia and Borat

...because the former once did a gag where the "Miss Afghanistan" contestants were covered from head to toe. Now Megan McArdle notes:

the winner of Miss Arab World is veiled.

Is nice!

Wanna be a professor? Then shut up.

Cathy Young seems right on Norman Finkelstein, a professor and ideologue -- with no publication record -- who was denied tenure.

But this passage baffles me:

Somewhat similar issues are raised by a tenure case at Iowa State University, where astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez was denied tenure last month despite a stellar teaching and publication record. Gonzalez is a fellow at the Discovery Institute, which supports "intelligent design," and the co-author of the 2004 book, Privileged Planet, which champions this theory. While the university claimed that the rejection of Gonzalez was based on his inability to raise research grant money, some of his colleagues have admitted that their vote against him was based his advocacy of "intelligent design."

Writing in The Weekly Standard, David Klinghoffer has decried the decision as a blow to academic freedom, claiming that Gonzalez is being punished for "the expression—outside the classroom—of an inconvenient personal belief."

Yet Gonzalez is not being penalized for expressing his personal belief in, say, the resurrection of Christ as a miracle outside the laws of nature. His advocacy of "intelligent design" amounts to promotion of ideologically motivated junk science. Even if he does not bring this advocacy into the classroom, a science department can be rightfully concerned about its reputation being used to lend credence to an anti-science crusade.

How could any reasonable person think this is OK? His job is astronomy, and he's great at it. If he were using his university title for something not only factually wrong but morally repugnant -- say, KKK recruiting -- there would be a point. But advocating an unpopular theory on his own time? That doesn't just hurt academic freedom; it dangles professorships in front of people, telling them to shut up permanently if they hold the wrong beliefs.

And by the way, I thought Intelligent Design was just another religion-inspired form of creationism. Remember, Cathy Young? So how is advocating Intelligent Design any different from advocating a belief in "the resurrection of Christ as a miracle outside the laws of nature"? Presumably, if God resurrected Christ, it's also possible he created the world and guided its evolution, no? How is either belief more scientific or "anti-science" than the other?

Record labels now obsolete! Oh wait, no.

Everyone is making big deal of Radiohead's decision to release the new album itself. Problem is, the main functions of a label are to fund, record and promote artists. Radiohead members have plenty of money, can hire their own recording staff and are big enough that they don't need the marketing. What exactly does this prove?

Additionally, they're putting the record up for download for "whatever you want to pay." Again, terrific if millions of people will get it, and presumably some will donate. Radiohead will recoup its costs. But this does nothing to change the fact that less and less money is going into the music industry -- because of downloading -- so the industry can't invest much in high-risk, inventive new bands.

If anything, this will actually compound the problem. The big bands will leave the labels and keep all the money to themselves, leaving labels without a cash flow from successful acts. That cash flow used to fund a crop of new bands, only a few of which made it big. Now there's no money with which to find the next Radiohead.

Until the day independent artists can reasonably expect to make some money off their work without labels, I'll be pining for the old system.

The Hispanic poverty rate fell

...from 30 to 20 percent in the last decade or so. Great, except (A) it's still above the national average, so more immigration means a rising poverty rate and (B) here's how they did it:

Consider the Hispanic success in obtaining skilled, blue-collar jobs, as measured by the census category for precision production, craft and repair occupations. From 1994 to 2006, as the total number of these jobs grew, the percentage held by whites fell from 79 percent to 65 percent. The percentage held by blacks remained constant at about 8 percent, and the percentage held by Hispanics more than doubled, rising to 25 percent from 11 percent. As whites left these relatively well-paid jobs, Hispanics rather than blacks moved into them.

Terrific. Many of them come illegally. Then they bid down the wages for low-skill labor, keeping poor citizens (especially blacks) in poverty. Then they move up the ladder to better-paying jobs, keeping poor Americans (especially blacks) in the low-wage market. Then more immigrants come illegally to keep the low wages low. They send billions of dollars back to their home countries.

Though of course by working for cheaper they help us all save a few cents here and there. What would we do without them?

Jena and black incarceration

Heather Mac Donald responds to Orlando Patterson, who actually wrote a piece pretty similar to her recent one. With the Jena 6 case as a jumping-off point, she argued that activists were using racism allegations to hide the fact of black crime.

Her new point:

While Patterson does manage to squeeze out some previously taboo truths about black criminality, he hedges those truths with so much politically correct boilerplate about a racist justice system as to almost entirely blunt their impact.

Actually, I thought Patterson did a perfectly good job in offering a balanced picture. The average white tends to think negatively of blacks, and this bias probably affects the justice system -- this can be true right alongside the fact that blacks are locked up more primarily because they commit more crimes.

And what's a little baffling is the Jena 6 connection. The issue in that case is whether town officials treated blacks and whites differently (both behaved badly) -- of what importance to that debate is the fact that blacks do tend to commit more crimes? It's a bit unfair to use a alleged white racism story as an excuse to harp on black crime.