Another way to look at it: China and India committed to permanent greehouse gas advantage for the US (and Marco Rubio is lying)

News recently announced that China plans to enact a carbon tax, along with its longstanding commitment to never match US per-capita emission rates, and India's greater commitment to never match OECD rates, all suggest a need to look at emissions a different way.

What matters is total emissions over the modern time period from the recent past until several generations (at least) into the future.  There has to be a limit, that limit has to be divided among nations, and that division has to take population into account at some level.  The US can't be expected to produce the same total emissions as Mexico, and China can't be expected to produce the same as the US.

So if we set a per-capita limit, with China and India agreeing that for all of the 20th Century and for much of the 21st Century that the US can produce more per-capita, then the total per-capita emissions over the two centuries (or even just the 21st Century) will be far greater for the US.  China and India are saying they're willing to accept that outcome.

China and India could easily have taken a different stance, and said that because the US produces more emissions per-capita in the first 50 years of the 21st Century (let alone the previous century), then they should be allowed to produce more per-capita in the second half.  Instead they are planning to do more than we are doing.

For Republicans like Marco Rubio to say the rest of the world is doing nothing and therefore we shouldn't either, when China and India have actually committed to do more than the US by having total lower emissions, is outrageous.  And no matter how you slice it, Rubio is lying about India repeatedly - even with three times the US population it is not "polluting in the atmosphere much greater than we are" - their total emissions are one-third of ours.  Rubio is lying, and the rest of them are deceptive.

Does racial familiarity breed contempt or understanding?

Matt Yglesias points to a somewhat optimistic result from an unintentional experiment in India that brought Hindus and Muslims in close contact in a public housing complex: majority Hindus improved their opinion of Muslims, while minority Muslims had no change of opinion for better or worse of Hindus. One and a half cheers for incremental progress! Hip hip, hooray! Hip hip

Less cheeringly, a knowledgeable commenter sez casual contact usually reinforces prejudice, and only intense contact such as military desegregation really breaks it down. This fits my anecdotal understanding of why New Orleans was so racist when I lived there for several weeks in the early 1990s - working class/unemployed whites had casual contact with black population living in the hellhole public housing complexes scattered everywhere. They couldn't easily avoid each other, unlike Washington DC for the same period.

Still, there seems to be a positive long term trend that casual contact studies might be missing. I left this comment:

I also think the theory, that casual contact increases prejudice, conflicts with the tendency of racial conflicts to eventually resolve over long periods of time of several generations or more. Sometimes they’re resolved through genocide or racial expulsion, but in the modern period it seems like relaxation and eventual merger of the two particular races/ethnicities is more likely.

Maybe the way to make sense of this is that casual contact creates occasional “pockets” of intense interaction, where (for example) intermarriages and business relationships have effects similar to the military effects you describe – maybe not so much on the married couple/business partners who likely are less prejudiced, but in their immediate social circle.

And maybe short-term studies of casual contact miss some of these effects that happen rarely but lead to decreased prejudice.

Just guessing here….

Bonus Yglesias blogging wherein I quote myself: Matt thinks it's no big deal that potential Al Qaeda affiliates tried to contact Latin American drug dealers, because they failed. I think this is wrong, and part of the broader framework of the left wrongly thinking our porous borders are no big deal for national security. I babbled:

I’m going to somewhat disagree with Matt on this. If the African guys truly were Al Qaeda, then the incident shows an attempt, an attempt, by Al Qaeda to link to drug trafficking networks. That’s worrying because drug traffickers and immigrant smugglers have fairly effective systems of getting through US borders. It isn’t something to dismiss as unimportant.

Unfortunately, wingnuts on the right have grossly distorted and exaggerated it to serve their own loony interests on Cuba and Venezuela. It’s really a problem that one of our two political parties has no interest in actual, effective policy.

Review: 1.5 original things to say about Slumdog Millionaire

Like everyone else, I really enjoyed Slumdog Millionaire. Good date movie, even a good family movie for older kids who can tolerate some violence. Like some critics, I think it should have ended ten minutes earlier before dealing with the final contest question, but it's okay anyway (and end credits were excellent).

So I hope I have something original to say about it. The half-original musing is thinking it might not be well-received in India when it opens there this month - the hero is a Muslim whose family suffered from violent Hindu attacks, and it doesn't show India's downtrodden as being well treated. Should be interesting to see that reaction.

More original, maybe, is thinking there's a resemblance between this story and the Ramayana. Maybe it's just due to the fact that there's only so many ways to tell the "boy loses girl" plot, but that both stories take place over many years and that the hero is assisted by his brother seems interesting.

Anyway, definitely worth watching.