I enjoyed Belle 'The Blender' Waring's follow-up on Chait, and it reminded me of a thought I had after his anti-PC piece: this is going to be interesting just as a psychological study of one guy. He might end up backgrounding his redistributive, government-loving self and becoming by degrees indistinguishable from a lefty-attacking righty so that in twenty years one of today's kindergartners will say to her friend, "Dude, did you know that Jonathan Chait used to be a liberal?" Or he might do the harder thing, and keep plugging away as one liberal writer among others, with the occasional defensive joke about those disagreements. It's of no consequence, but I'll be watching anyway. Which is to say, consider this the Superbowl thread. I'll root for Seattle for as long as they have a socialist council member.

The only good thing about the anti-vaccine debacle is watching the "success" of the movement become its undoing, as suddenly there's insufficient herd immunity to protect free riders.

You know, we all draw lines somewhere, and I have no problem with people who send their kids to private school, despite being familiar with the "best for my kid; screw yours" arguments against doing that. But the consequences of what the anti-vax people are doing seem so much more immediate and dire that they drive me bonkers.

If I try very, very hard to be charitable, I think something like this must be going on: the risk of vaccination is not zero. Obviously, the risk of not vaccinating is much higher, but it's one of those quirks of human psychology that the dire consequences of what we do, rather than fail to do, weigh much more heavily upon us, and so these folks find themselves in various rationalizations for being unable to overcome that quirk and take responsibility for their actions and their kids.

That's the charitable view. But they really sound like morons, don't they?

In the category of most depressing website, I submit Is This How You Feel?, where climate scientists share how they are grieving for the planet.

Fortunately for your heartstrings, you have to actually read the scientists' handwriting, which is pretty annoying. But I bet they're saying depressing stuff.

--The Jeet Heer piece on the New Republic's history on race (does anyone really care anymore?) is actually pretty good. Summary: pretty racist, not all that racist, more than a little racist, meh.

--Ballghazi, deflated: the physics.