The Only Winning Move

Site Moved: Links for 29 May 2008

2008-05-29T18:00:00.000-07:00

RE: State of Union cc: Congress
Electric Sportscars are here
Wealth vs. Freedom: how do you score?
Keyboards: now in Franconian!
Peace through Prosperity
Gates on Gates

Site Moved: Links for 28 May 2008

2008-05-28T16:24:00.000-07:00

From Our Tailpipe to Yours
Our First Crow President
When Language Log isn¿t about Language
Leftovers

Site Moved: Links for 27 May 2008

2008-05-27T18:30:00.000-07:00

Heavy blogging day. As indicated, all posts are now at the new site. Here are links to today's:

Another Obama Gaffe
Guns in Australia: now more than ever!
Placebos - You Know, For Kids!
Rising Oil Prices Dampen Demand - Who Knew?
Chavez: still gettin' it wrong
A Covert Lesson in the Economics of Trade
Red and Blue States: maybe not so different

By the way, anyone who may have been a regular reader of any one of Noah's six posts on his blog "Sourcefiler," be advised that it, too, has moved - to a Wordpress site.

Moving

2008-05-26T14:54:00.000-07:00

The Only Winning Move is moving.

After nearly two years (28 August 2006 - 26 May 2008) on Blogger, I've grown dissatisfied. I've never had any problems with the Blogger server or interface per se - no official complaints. Nevertheless, working through someone else's bloghosting service is confining, and I'm ready to branch out and start rolling my own sites. And so several months ago I opened jwherring.com through a hosting service recommended by Mr. Tweedy (that he probably doesn't remember recommending, actually) with that intention. School got in the way, but I've now moved my academic homepage there (it's the main page when you click over), as well as The Only Winning Move - which can now be found here.

I doubt I'll continue crossposting here. What I'll probably do instead is link new posts on the new site here for another month or so, and then quietly delete this blog sometime over the summer.

The new blog is, for the time being, not my own design, but is content-managed by Wordpress with a template interface designed by Vladimir Simovic. I will handroll my own engine and template as time permits.

To anyone who was a regular reader, thank you very much for stopping by and listening to my thoughts! Kindly update your bookmarks.

Impatient

2008-05-26T06:22:00.000-07:00

Wired has a cool 8-minute video summary of everything that's happened on Battlestar Galactica. Did I watch it...? Hmmm....

High Prices, Yes - Taxes, NO!!!

2008-05-26T05:45:00.000-07:00

The following line comes from one of Richard Posner's posts on the excellent Becker-Posner Blog:

I would like to see the price of oil rise to $200, despite the worldwide recession that would probably result, provided that it rises as a result of heavy taxes on oil or (better) carbon emissions.

This strikes me as something that I should respond to, since I have also often celebrated rising gas prices on this blog. One could easily get the impression that I'm in favor of higher taxes on oil for all the reasons Posner gives in his post: reducing economic dependence on hostile and unstable foreign powers, stimulating investment in environmentally-friendly energy alternatives - you know, all the usual perks. But in point of fact my opinion is the opposite of Posner's here: I would also like to see the price of oil rise to above $200, despite the worldwide recession that would probably result, provided that it rises NOT as a result of heavy taxes on oil or carbon emissions, but rather as the result of natural market processes.

In fact, I have trouble understanding what the reasoning would be behind Posner's assertion that $200/barrel oil is somehow only a good thing if it's an artificial price brought on by taxes. Thinking independently, the only thing I came up with is that it gives us a "safety word" in case the recession becomes too painful. If $200/barrel prices result from taxation rather than supply problems, then the government can always "turn off the problem" (by lowering the taxes) if consumers cry "uncle!" But this reasoning is nowhere to be found in Posner's post. What he gives instead seems specious:

The taxes would jump start the development of clean fuels, and the financial impact on consumers could be buffered by returning a portion of the tax revenues in the form of income tax credits.

This seems downright irrational. If we "buffer" the financial impact on consumers, then we blunt their drive to search for alternatives. Granted, oil companies themselves might want to invest in alternative fuels to avoid the price barrier imposed by the hefty taxes Posner is proposing, but with what capital, one wonders? If their profits are suddenly slashed by an added tax burden, where is this investment money going to come from? Presumably Posner is proposing that the tax revenues be spent by the government to stimulate research into alternative energy sources, but believing that this would be done efficiently or in good faith requires me to imagine a fantasy government quite different from the one we actually have. The government we actually have, if you'll recall, sends the president to Saudi Arabia twice in the last four months to beg for cuts in the price of oil that they well know the Saudis either cannot or will not supply. Meanwhile no one mentions that we have plenty of oil right here at home that we're not allowed to touch for silly environmental reasons. Instead of talk about that, Congress votes to allow lawsuits against OPEC for price gouging, something that can only ever increase prices further. And let's not even talk about ethanol subsidies, where Congress gives handouts to the least energy-efficient form of ethanol while simultaneously slapping import tarrifs on the kinds of foreign-produced ethanol (sugar cane ethanol) that actually work. This is NOT a government we can trust to micromanage our energy spending choices!

And this:

Heavy taxes on oil would reduce not only the amount of oil we import but also the revenue per barrel of the oil exporting nations, so there would be a double negative effect on those countries' oil revenues: they would sell less oil and earn less per unit sold. The reason for the latter effect is the upward-sloping supply curve for oil. Suppose the first million barrels of oil can be produced at a cost of $1 per barrel and the second million at $2 per barrel. If total demand is one million barrels, the suppliers break even: they have revenues of $1 million and costs of $1 million. If total demand is two million barrels, the suppliers have revenues of $4 million (because the price of all barrels is determined by the price that the marginal purchaser is willing to pay) but costs of only $3 million ($1 million for the first million barrels, $2 million of the second). The lower the price of oil received by the oil producers (that is, the price net of tax), the lower their net income.

Neat trick, but is there any reason to believe that it actually works this way? Oil is well known to be an inelastic-demand product, meaning that there's really only a certain point to which we can reduce our use of it in the shortterm without completely killing our economy. I have no doubt that on the free market things work as Posner says (it costs more to produce extra oil to meet demand, and since it's a demand-driven production, prices can rise to keep pace with production cost, true), but what of a situation where demand is artificially depressed? Surely in this case the oil company can afford to sell at a higher profit margin to compensate for the tax cuts, and also save itself the trouble of extracting as much oil as it had in the past. The dampening effect on the company's profits would seem to be less than Posner anticipates. We know from the previous scenario that there is $4million worth of demand for the oil. If this demand is inelastic, there will be somewhat - but not much - less than that after the taxes, so let's call it $3million. Oil companies charge $2million on top of $1million production costs, and the other $1million goes to pay the taxes. They still make $1million ($2million in profit on $1million in production), and for doing less work. Over the long term, of course, I suppose I can't really argue against Posner's scenario. Demand would drop with time as people found alternatives. The point is simply that the punishing effect on oil-producing countries is not going to materialize for a time, and relative to what they suffer, we suffer a lot more in terms of economic slowdown. It really is cutting off the nose to spite the face.

If, however, it's a real drop in demand, then the scenario is obviously quite different. As there are real alternatives in this case, oil-producing countries then don't have the luxury of pumping up their prices safe in the knowledge that someone will buy. Once demand is more elastic, then oil profits for these countries will fall on their own. But this is pointedly not the situation caused by the taxation scenario.

Of course, I'm not a trained economist (though neither is Posner), so perhaps there are things I'm overlooking. The REAL argument against "going the tax route," in any case, is that it's an ill-advised transfer of wealth to the government.

I hear lots of arguments to the effect that the government should artificially raise prices on oil to "wean us off our addicition," and these arguments almost always focus on the supposed benefits that higher prices would have on consumption. What most people fail to consider is that all that money that gets collected in the taxes that account for the price increase is money that gets collected in taxes. It's money that people used to spend on themselves that the government is now spending for them, money lifted from the economy and given over to government programs. And like every tax, it's economically inefficient. What people would have spent on food, on entertainment, on education, etc. is now given to the government to spend on ... what, exactly? Posner suggests it could be spent on energy programs, but the government doesn't have a very encouraging history there. As noted, it's currently spending a lot of its "energy money" subsidizing hugely inefficent "alternatives" like ethanol. So let's imagine that the gas tax goes to fund some such subsidy. And let's further imagine that it works and people start buying other things instead of oil. So what happens to the subsidy? Politicians go to the subsidy receivers and say "fair is fair, people stopped buying oil, so we have less income in taxes from oil, we're going to reduce your subsidies accordingly?" In some distant utopia, maybe - but here in the real world what happens is that the subsidy-receivers threaten to vote for the opponent, and so they get their subsidies anyway. And the government pays for that by ... raising taxes somewhere else and doing more price damage to the economy if it's the Democrats, or more deficit spending doing capital damage to the economy if it's the Republicans. Either way, once you let politicians have a tax, they don't easily let it go. They'll either compensate for it by finding money (real or imaginary) somewhere else, or, more likely, now that the government has a (much larger) stake in oil tax intakes, they will be more reluctant than ever to kill off oil consumption. Making the government hostile to energy alternatives to oil by giving it a stake in oil profits seems like a really bad idea.

No - better that we just let it go. The "transfer" of wealth that currently goes to oil-producing countries happens because they provide us with something useful: an efficient energy source. This is, in itself, hugely profitable for us - comparative advantage and all that. The best way to get ourselves off of oil dependence is simply to evolve out of it, which we are currently doing without help from the government. Call it a "soft landing." Rather than Posner's government-induced shock to the economy which not only causes a recession we might not need (if the goal is energy-independence, I mean) but also gives the government an ever-greater license to meddle, almost certainly making investment in energy alternatives less efficient in the process (because the government invests on the basis of politics rather than economic and scientific reality) - what we could have instead is a slow, comfortable transition where the private market sends investment money toward profitable fuel alternatives (rather than the ones that tend to get people elected in the shortterm), leading to a more sustainable base for the future, and without needlessly throwing money to the wind in the meantime.

So yes, I'm all for $200/barrel oil, but only if it's a result of real economic signals and not just a product of the government's imagination.

Nothing Wrong with the Analogy

2008-05-25T18:44:00.000-07:00

I'm getting a little tired of defending Hillary Clinton on this site, but I would just like to say that the recent spat of accusations in the blogosphere and pundit media that she's dropping hints that someone shouls assasinate Obama are off the charts. A typical bit of commentary comes from zFacts (no persistent link available at the time of writing).

She claims her statement meant that races often last till June. But why bring up a 40-year-old assassination to make this point? She claims it's because "We all remember" when Bobby was assassinated.
Did you remember it was in June? I sure didn't. She knows that almost no one remembers.

Actually, the point isn't that it was in June, but that Bobby Kennedy was the popular choice "nominee presumptive" at the analogous point in the cycle in 1968. It's true that the dates of the contest were all different then (and for that reason I doubt she expects anyone to remember the June date specifically) and that primaries mattered less than they do now - but the aggregate facts actually make it a good analogy. Whether or not you remember that Kennedy was killed in June specifically, some things that anyone familiar with the history will remember are that Kennedy was an initial long-shot who turned out to be a lot more popular than anyone expected. The DNC was deadset on nominating Humphrey (which they did without running him in a single primary, actually) after LBJ imploded in New Hampshire, and was sort of suprised when the challenge came from McCarthy. McCarthy's grassroots popularity inspired Kennedy to run, and he quickly became the more popular anti-war alternative, the voice of the left wing of the party. Gee, see any similarities that might be relevant? A candidate who is surprisingly popular, giving the presumptive winner at the outset a run for her money, and this largely on the basis that he is the more credible anti-war candidate, having actually voted against the Iraq War Resolution? I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that it's OK if anyone sees a parallel between Obama and Kennedy here.

To top that, there were two true examples from more recent years. Gary Hart and Ted Kennedy fought until the convention. The only reason to reach back 40 years to the assassination for a false example is to bring up Obama's vulnerability.

Let's start with Ted Kennedy. This would be the 1980 election, and Kennedy, unlike Clinton, campaigned well beyond the point where he could feasibly win. Remember that neither candidate this cycle has yet reached the threshold for nomination. That was not true in 1980. Though initially favored to beat Carter 2-to-1, the bottom had alreday mostly fallen out of Kennedy's campaign by November 1979. He flubbed a bunch of questions on a nationally televised interview, and the Iran Hostage Crisis did wonders for Carter's approval rating. Carter went into the convention with a 30% lead in pledged delegates (no superdelegates in 1980) over Kennedy, more than enough to force a victory. Kennedy had lost by March, in fact, and took the fight to the convention mostly out of spite, refusing to endorse Carter or even shake his hand on stage. Let's see a show of hands of anyone who can think of a reason why Clinton might not want to compare herself to Kennedy in 1980? Yup, that's everyone in the class.

What of Gary Hart? Well, this is admittedly a pretty good analogy in real terms, since Hart, like Clinton to Obama now, had mostly lost to Walter Mondale by June of 1984. He stayed on through June arguing that "Super Tuesday III" (there were a lot of contests in June that year) would vindicate him. His position was such that he couldn't really win the pledged delegate count, but the argument was that the superdelegates (yes, they were back in 1984) would see a strong showing for him on Tuesday III as a change in the wind and support him anyway at the convention. But the catch here, of course, is that Obama is Mondale and Clinton is Hart. She hardly makes her case by comparing herself to the eventual loser!

Now, the Clintons are not exactly paragons of straight-shooter politics, so on personality alone there's good reason to think she's dropping indecent hints. But let's stop all this talk about the Bobby Kennedy analogy being inappropriate. It's perfectly appropriate for what she was trying to say. In fact, I can't really think of a better one in living memory.

Barr it is

2008-05-25T17:37:00.000-07:00

I learn via Radley Balko's blog that Bob Barr won the nomination for president at this weekend's LP convention. Balko counts this a good thing, and I'm very much inclined to agree. Balko sums it up nicely in one of the comments:

Barr has quite a bit to atone for. But I believe him when he says he has come around. Really, do you think he's going to change all of his positions once the campaign starts?

Second that. Can't quite explain it, but I believe him too. More than that, it's important to keep in mind that the LP candidate will NOT be winning the election. We are not yet an electable party. The goal at this point is to gain enough recognition to become an electable party, and the best way to do that is, if I may be blunt about it, to start throwing elections for the Republicans Ross Perot style. George Bush Sr. may have lost in 1992, but small government won big time in the 1994 congressional mid-term elections, and probably in no small part because the loss in 1992 woke up Republicans to the fact that Rockerfeller "Red Tory"-type candidates were NOT what the base wanted (as should have already been made clear to them by Goldwater's nomination in 1964 (actually against Rockerfeller himself) and most especially Reagan's primary and later general election win in 1980). There IS a small-government, pro-constituion lobby, and it is the current task of the Libertarian Party to make that voting block viable.

Bob Barr may not be the best choice to represent our interests in the White House, but that's a moot point because neither Bob Barr nor any other Libertarian is actually going to the White House - not this time, not next time, and probably not even the time after that. If we can't win the White House just yet, something useful we can do in the meantime is do our best to put the brakes on the expansion of state power. The best way to do that is dragging the Republican Party back in our direction. And a good way to drag the Republican Party back in our direction is to split their vote - prick them enough to get them to notice us and cater to us in 2010. Bob Barr, as a popular former Republican with national name recognition, is the best-positioned to do that. Best of all, it is his stated intention to do that. And, like Balko says, whatever Republican instincts Bob Barr may privately still harbor, he's unlikely to change the tune he's been singing for the past five years once the campaign starts. His political relevance at this point depends entirely on making a good showing in this election, something he is not going to do by recruiting Republican voters at the expense of driving away the core LP voting base.

So good on the party! And a great relief for me. Many of the candidates on the ticket this year were simply unacceptable, and I was seriously thinking about just not voting this year - beacuse John McCain and Obama/Clinton are obviousy unacceptable too. Given who the other parties are running, and especially given the task at hand, Bob Barr is definitely someone I can vote for. Time to take down the Ron Paul ad.

Biased, Sure, but WHY?

2008-05-25T16:54:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting article over at Cognitive Daily about covert racism. It's a summary of some studies done by John Dovido (with colleagues) designed to demonstrate that, while overt racial bias has declined into near-insignificance since the 1930s (of course it still exists on the fringes, however), covert racial bias remains stubbornly hard to identify and ameliorate.

The results discussed work like this. Some white students were given hypothetical pairs of job applicants of varying levels of ability (by pair), one of the pair being shown by a photo to be black, the other white. When looking at a pair of CVs for highly qualified applicants, no evidence of bias was found: white students are, statistically speaking, roughly equally likely to hire either candidate. However, when the two candidates are nothing to write home about, white students are more likely to choose the white applicant. Why is that?

As evidence of racial bias, it's quite convincing, of course. But I think it is important to identify the basis and mechanism of the bias before committing ourselves to any solutions. In this case, I strongly suspect that the operative bias is what I might style "affirmative action bias."

In short, "affirmative action bias" is just what it sounds like: the assumption that a minority applicant is more likely to have been given help along the road to where he is than a white applicant - that is, that a smaller percentage of his on-paper "qualifications," if I may speak in this way, are accounted for by effort and ability than would be the case for a comparable white applicant. It's an employer's way of compensating for the playing field having been artificially tilted toward the black applicant.

So, the idea is that if you're in the top percentile no amount of legs up could've gotten you there. Even if you were helped along the way by an affirmative action scholarship (or a rich uncle with Good Ol' Boy Network connections, to be fair), your presence in the top tier shows that you have the requisite amount of ability or drive, and there is no need for an employer to compensate for anything, hence the lack of racial bias. If, however, you're in the average tier and black, your qualifications become more suspect. The employer tends to assume that while you look just as good on paper, a certain number of your internships might just have been awarded on the basis of the company's need to show racial balance for PR reasons rather than because you were really the man for the job. Or that your grades might be what they are not because you're a great student, but because someone gave you enough race-based scholarships that you were able to avoid working a part-time job and thus had more time on your hands in college.

Naturally the response will be that white kids have certain systemic advantages that compensate for these affirmative action helping hands - and that may or may not be true. It's an empirical question that I have never seen solved to my satisfaction, truth be told. But absent the empirical evidence in front of him, a white employer is, it seems to me, likely to fall back on his own gut feelings about the situation, and his own gut feelings are probably this: he knows a LOT of poor white people who never had anything handed to them, and comparatively few connected rich white kids. "White privilege," to the extent that it exists, benefits only a comparatively small percentage of whites. Affirmative action, however, is freely available to all blacks simply for the point of fact of having been born black. So the employer's gut instinct is likely to tell him that while there are indeed a handful of white snot-noses who will be worthless to his organization (having been handed their qualifications through relatives' connections) in his applicant pool, there are a comparatively greater number of blacks who may have padded resumes through affirmative action programs and are worth slightly less in real economic terms than their paper qualifications let on. To be sure, the "penalty" for hiring one of the well-connected white applicants is much more expensive than hiring one of the affirmative-actioned black applicants. This is so because for most affirmative action programs you still do have to meet some minimal qualifications, which is obviously not the case if you're playing "white privilege" connections. But the law of averages nevertheless tells the employer that hiring the white guy in the general case will compensate him for these duds since he assumes that the white applicant of the pair is generally more likely to have gotten where he is by effort and ability.

I'm not sure that this counts as "racism." Certainly it's "racial bias," but it's a rational kind of bias. Whether or not it's actually supported by the facts, it's a reasonable conclusion to draw, from the employer's point of view, based on the evidence that his life experiences have given him; fighting it with more affirmative action is therefore both unfair and unlikely to address the root issue in any case. This highlights the importance, I think, of going beyond simple matters of identifying racial bias to trying to understand where it comes from. If it is, in fact, a malevolent racism that causes white people to screen applicants in this way, then affirmative action programs become more appropriate. But if it's affirmative action programs themselves that are the root of the bias, then it's time to start talking about eliminating them and replacing them with more applicant-netural schemes. Things like the NFL's practice of putting restrictions on the racial makeup of the hiring pool rather than the hiring outcome spring to mind. The rule here is that at least one applicant for a coaching position has to be a minority. There is no requirement to hire or even give preference to this person, just to give him a fair interview. Apparently, it has been effective at "diversifying" the coaching rolls. On the college level, programs in which state universities agree to accept all applicants from their state within a certain grade range have been successful "diversifiers." And, naturally, there's the option no one talks about: handing college admissions screeners applications with all personal information replaced by an identifier number so that they have no notions at all what the background of the applicant might be. In any case, the point is that racial bias is not an "across-the-board" phenomenon. There are many potential flavors, each requiring its own type of solution. Narratives focused exclusively on "racism" are not always very helpful, and experiments that document bias without probing it aren't much better.

Floating Wind Turbines - Brought to you by Big Oil

2008-05-25T04:25:00.000-07:00

Now this is just plain cool. Inspiring, really. StatoilHydro, Norway's largest oil company (take a moment to ponder) and the largest offshore oil producer in the world is launching the world's first offshore floating wind turbine generator. Yup, click on the link and have a look. The idea is that wind power might just become a viable competitor further offshore, where wind patterns are stronger and more stable. And, one hastens to add, where they can't be seen by "environmentally conscious" rich people.

The remarkable thing to a lot of people('s stereotypes) will, of course, be that one of the world's largest oil concerns is building this thing. But why not? North sea oil production is drying up - down 31% since 2001. This is largely due to extraction difficulties - the increasing cost of which is outstripping the company's ability to do new exploration and open new fields, even with oil prices as high as they are. An investment in wind power is an investment in the company's future. And in fact, investment in wind power is up in the US too. The link goes to an article about how increased demand is driving up the cost of wind generators. Which is, of course, a Good Thing - because raising prices on wind generators will lead to greater investment in their production, resulting in a greater capacity to produce them, etc. etc. etc.

I'm sorry, it hurts me at the pump too, but rising oil prices, provided they don't start running away, are a Good Thing. We can already see the results in investment patterns. Nuclear plant investment is a reality for the first time in three decades. Investment in wind energy is up. We're subsidizing ethanol to the tune of tens of billions a year. Wait ... wha? Yeah, 'cause when hasn't the government managed to stick its claws into problems the market is fixing just fine on its own.

It's what Brian Caplan (along with other economists) calls anti-market bias: "the tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of the market mechanism." And in this case, as usual, it's spoiling a good thing. If oil is getting harder to supply (because of increased demand from China et al and diminished capacity in places like the North Sea), then higher oil prices are a very good thing - for two reasons. First, because it causes people to limit their use of this increasingly precious commodity. I myself, to take an example, will finally get around to buying a helmet so I can regularly ride the bicycle I purchased last summer. Second, higher profits for oil companies mean more money to invest in future production. That's good for everyone - because when oil companies are less productive, as is happening now when they fail to keep up with ever-increasing demand, energy becomes harder to come by. Notice that oil company investment need not be in future oil projects exclusively. Oil companies don't exist to extract oil - they exist to make a profit. If there is profit in wind power, there will be investment and production in it.

And yet Congress, fuelled by economically ignorant voters, wants to (a) sue OPEC, (b) continue to all but forbid offshore drilling here at home, (c) tax "windfall" oil company profits that would otherwise be invested in energy solutions but will now have the effect of driving prices even higher than they already are and (d) almost certainly funnel those "windfall" tax profits into ethanol, which contains less than 2/3 the energy per gallonof gasoline, is $0.38/gallon more expensive to produce than gasoline, and is unlikely to become more efficient ever (this last is straight from the USDA itself, not some some raving free-market fringe group). "Moron" isn't strong enough a word...

Look - just leave well alone. The market will figure it out. Government didn't create the modern oil industry. Investors figured out on their own that Henry Ford's ethanol-powered Model T's (yup, we've already tried the ethanol "alternative" - it was in fact the first at-the-pump car fuel in America) could be improved by switching to gas. The rest is history. We use oil because it is efficient, and therefore cheap. Rising prices are as much as anything a sign of its falling efficiency relative to other energy sources. Once another energy source is more efficient than oil, the market will give you an incentive to buy that instead by making it cheaper. Like, say, in the form of lower electric bills coming from offshore, floating wind turbines... So let's let the oil companies keep their profits. I guarantee you they know better than Congress how to invest them, and that's because, unlike Congress, they have a real incentive to do right by their investments. Their future livelihood depends on it, after all.

No Racism in SciFi - Until Now

2008-05-24T19:24:00.000-07:00

It's official - there is now an organization to promote racism in scifi purchases. The link goes to the Carl Brandon society, which is apparently dedicated to documenting blackness in science fiction. It offers affirmative action scholarships to "people of color" aspiring to be scifi writers and also hands out a yearly award for best scifi book penned by a person of color.

YAAAAWWWWNNN.

Race-equality advocates really have descended into self-parody if they think science fiction is a community that needs fixing. From an article about race in scifi in the Boston Globe:

It's an area of fiction that has allowed writers to tackle sensitive issues of race and culture.

"It has always been the safe genre to talk about those issues," Harry says, "or it had been for years until there was a lot more tolerance for bringing those things up in the mainstream."

Another portion of the article has a black fan - the only black attendee at Readercon last year - saying "They're the most accepting group of folks I've ever been with."

That's basically my impression too. There are certainly some issues to discuss with regard to scifi and feminism. Though, for the record, I'm in the camp that believes that the genre as a whole has always been quite accepting of feminist viewpoints - at least since Harlan Ellison started calling it "speculative fiction" in the 60s - even if some of the more prominent writers in the genre (Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein - i.e. the "big three" - spring to mind here) were pretty clearly misogynist. (I realize that will be controversial with regard to Heinlein; I stand by my statement.) But racially intolerant? Simply put - never. I can't speak for the pulps (the one book I read by Edgar Rice Burroughs was, I admit, quite racist - one of the reasons I never gave him a second read), but I can't recall ever thinking that I was in the presence of racial bias in a science fiction book written from the golden age (the 50s) on. Quite the contrary, in fact, I would argue that science fiction was always on the forefront in fighting racism. We're all well aware that the first interracial kiss on American TV was on Star Trek, but that's just scratching the surface. Misogynist though I think he probably was, Heinlein, for example, was no racist, and was in fact fond of pulling the Cosby tactic of waiting until halfway through the novel to let slip that the protagonist is, in fact, a person of color. It's never a big issue in his books, but it is a sly way of asserting racial equality and challenging his readers on their mental assumptions. And as for Chip Delaney, it was years before I realized he was black just because in all the editorials I read by various other authors discussing their friendships with him, no one ever thought to mention it. It wasn't until I read literary criticism of his work that his race suddenly mattered - and that, I assume, only because literary critics are unfortunately trained to think in these terms (I know, having an undergraduate degree in LitCrit myself).

No - there is little, if any, racism in scifi. So of course it had to be introduced. Such is the sad state of liberation movements in the US these days: where there are no enemies, it is necessary to invent them. And that is just what the Carl Brandon society - along with the spate of LitCrit and literary anthologies of "colored" science fiction that have begun to spring up in recent years - are up to.

Thanks, guys. See a good thing, and ruin it.

It's things like this that remind one that many purported liberation movements have no such goal as liberation in mind. Rather, they exist to perpetuate the problem, like scratching at an itch, just because it gives them something to do. Science fiction doesn't need a group dedicated to discussing race issues and pushing books by authors of color. Authors of color do just fine in this genre, because this genre is in general tolerant and colorblind. Sucks to see us now having our consciouness raised way back down to the dark ages.

Writing about Battlestar

2008-05-24T18:48:00.001-07:00

At Alexis' request, I recently have the opportunity to rewatch Ron Moore's "reimagined" Battlestar Galactica, and I'm really kind of excited about it. I was a big fan of the first season and a half, and I even blogged about it a bit. I thought this would be a good chance to revisit some of those essays.

I was never really a fan of the old show, though I did enjoy it as a guilty pleasure from time to time. My thoughts on it were exactly Ron Moore's - that it was a great idea (very) poorly executed. If any show in TV SciFi history deserved a second chance, it was Battlestar. That said, I was highly skeptical of Moore's remake when it aired as a miniseries in 2003 - not because I'd heard Starbuck was gonna be a woman or anything like that, but because I still hadn't forgiven SciFi for Dune. I assumed that anything they touched would turn to shit. Boy am I glad to have been wrong!

At the urging of a friend, I watched the miniseries and found myself not just pleasantly surprised but awed. That miniseries, and the first episode of season one, rank as four of the greatest hours of television ever aired in my book. I could go on all night detailing all the improvements that Moore's version brought to the original concept - but let's just leave it at "job well done." I was hooked.

From there, though, it was steadily downhill. But the slow decline didn't keep Battlestar from being the best show on television in my mind - at least through season two's midseason hiatus. I positively adored it; watching was the highlight of my week.

About that...

I just don't know what happened. Hindsight's 20-20, and looking back I think I saw cracks showing in Final Cut. I wasn't a terribly big fan of Flight of the Phoenix either, but Pegasus was good, and so I went into season 2.5 convinced everything was in order.

Boy was I wrong. Somewhere during the Resurrection Ship two-parter things went south and never came back. Epiphanies was terrible, and Black Market was just shockingly, shockingly bad. Lots of people thought the show rebounded with Scar, but I strongly beg to differ. It was better than either "Epiphanies" or "Black Market," but that's really not saying much. I didn't see any kind of improvement until Downloaded, and by "improvement" I don't mean "Downloaded" was good, just that it was mildly interesting. Lay Down Your Burdens, however, was quite good - if not exactly a full return to form. Unfortunately, as I would later argue, I think too much damage was already done by that point. I followed the show to about midway through season three, and then I gave up on it completely. It just wasn't the same brilliant show it had been any more.

However, now that I'm rewatching the first season and a half at least, it's probably worth suffering through seasons 2.5 and 3 again and getting caught back up. I occasionally stumble on mentions of it on the internet, and the vibe I get is that a lot of fans think it eventually regained its former glory. The proof is in the pudding, of course, but seasons 1 and 2.0 were just so damn good that I'm willing to give the rest of it a second chance (even if it means sitting through the wretched season 2.5 again). With that in mind, I post here links to the reviews I wrote of several season three episodes the day after they aired:

Farewell to the Battlestar Blog - Not an episode review, but a hat tip to a blog I had enjoyed posting on (as "Adric"). It stopped just as season three was getting started and is still available to read here.

7 October 2006 - "Occupation/Precipice": Season three starts, and I express profound doubts that the writers are going to be able to dig their way out of the mess of season 2.5.

23 October 2006 - "Exodus, pt. II": I acknowledge that the show is getting better, but lament that the Cylon occupation plot arc was exposed as a sham "band aid" device. Missed opportunities and plotholes abound.

28 October 2006 - "Collaborators": In retrospect, this one was just wishful thinking on my part. It should've been obvious to me that I was going to stop watching the show, but I was holding out hope. Despite some good moments, all the symptoms that the show wasn't recovering were there.

4 November 2006 - "Torn": Things genuinely seemed to be getting better. But it was a mirage - it wouldn't be much longer before I gave up.

11 November 2006 - "A Measure of Salvation": Here I give up on the show in spirit. It's broken and can't be fixed.

18 November 2006 - "Hero": Nothing but contempt left at this point. "Hero" was a horrible episode, and so I decide the show is no longer worth my time. This is the last entry I would write on it.

Of course, it turns out that I'm forever the stupid optimist! Rewatching season one now, I remember how great the show was when it started. It's rekindled some of my enthusiasm - just enough, in fact, that I'm open again to all the praise I hear for it on the internet. We'll give it a second go. I guess I can't promise that I will actually manage to sit through seasons 2.5 and the first part of 3 again, but I'll give it a try. And certainly I'll watch the bits of season three I skipped last year! Here's hoping against hope (again)...

The Final Cylon Should be Billy

2008-05-24T18:04:00.000-07:00

It seems betting sites are taking odds on who Battlestar's final cylon will turn out to be. Neat. Lots of subtle signals on the net lead me to believe it will be Anastasia "Dee" Dualla - but I would just like to go on record saying I hate that option. Clearly the best the writers could do for themselves would be to find a way to get Paul Campbell to come back as Billy Keikeya. This isn't, by the way, my idea - I heard it suggested two years ago in the comments on the now-defunct Battlestar Blog, and I thought it was brilliant. The suggestion being that Billy steps out of the shadows at some point when Roslin is alone. What a chilling scene that would make! I hope the writers don't pass up this opportunity.

DebateGraph

2008-05-24T17:35:00.001-07:00

This seems like a mildly useful tool. It's called DebateGraph, and it maps out the issues in a debate in a helpful file hierarchy style format. Seems like a good way to present all sides of an issue to a curious outsider in easy-to-understand fashion. I would personally find it most helpful in reading Supreme Court cases, where I often have difficulty keeping track of what all the threads of precedent were doing in the decision.

Hot Chicks Get Perks - Who Knew?

2008-05-24T04:41:00.001-07:00

Hoaxes are often invaluable in revealing, or at least confirming, contradictions in an institution. So it was with Alan Sokal's famous takedown of Social Text. Probably everyone has heard of this: Dr. Sokal, a physicist, submitted a paper called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" that was packed with nonsense but written in post-modernist jargon. The point was that if post-modernists themseves are unable to tell the difference between their scholarship and bullshit that sounds like their scholarship, then there's really nothing to what they're doing. Sokal explained that he was trying to save the academic left from absurdity - specifically from the danger that it was becoming anti-scientific.

I stumbled across a similarly revealing hoax yesterday on a site originally called "Libertarian Girl," but now available as archives (the blog itself is defunct) here as "Libertarian Man of Mystery."

The hoax worked like this. Some dude reckoned that there weren't enough girl libertarians, and that he would get more attention as a hot chick than as just another male political blogger. So he grabbed a pic from a Russian mail-order bride site and pretended to be a hot chick instead. He writes:

One thing I learned from this blog is how easy attractive woman have it. When I had a blog as my real self, no one linked to me, no one left any comments, it was as if the blog existed in a vacuum. But things were different for Libertarian Girl. Every day I'd check Technorati and discover new unsolicited links. It was like I had warped into an alternate universe where all the rules had changed. At the rate things were happening, this would have been an A-list blog in a few more months.

So much for the idea that internet political commentary is a "boys club." Girls seem to have a distinct advantage in such circles - at least if they're attractive. No doubt there're some social science papers to back this up somewhere.

A parting shot from author:

I should have figured that the type of people who read libertarian blogs are the same type that read Russian brides websites. When I make my next hoax blog, I'll make sure to use a more obscure photo.

I wonder what would happen if he started with a hot photo and then removed it, perhaps even with a post about how "she" wanted people to focus on "her" commentary. You know, leave the photo up long enough to make it onto people's blogroll links lists, but then take it down in time to avoid getting caught? What happens, I wonder, to the hit rate once the photo is gone? I'm guessing it would drop. Without the constant reminder that it's a HOT girl they're dealing with, the confirmation that libertarian bloggers are presumably seeking for their philosophy by noting that it's now "cool" enough to attract hot chicks would be less palpable.

The Legal Ethics of Memory Supressants

2008-05-24T04:40:00.001-07:00

This is a rather interesting article about an issue I hadn't even known was on the horizon: the legal issues surroudning memory dampening. Apparently, there is some reason to believe that the beta blocker propranolol, typically used to treat hypertension, may also be effective at preemptive treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - by blocking the formation of memories of the triggering event. This is based on some double-blind experiments done on people admitted to hospitals after severe accidents. Members of the group given propranolol withing 6 hours of the experience were markedly (though results did not reach statistical significance) less likely to show effects of PTSD several months later (it is my understanding that treatment with propranolol was continued over 10 days under the assumption that recalling a memory, apparently even a dampened one, enhances it) than members of the placebo group.

Propranolol only dampens memories - it does not erase them entirely - by retarding their formation. So not only does propranolol not offer complete freedom from traumatic memories, it also has to be administered rather quickly. The article (which is from a legal journal) concludes that this makes the legal issues less accute. But of course it's worth thinking about them now all the same because the day may come when more effective - in the sense of "selective and total" - memory blockers are available.

The author - UCSD law professor Adam Kobler - identifies these specific legal issues:

(1) Informed consent - since propranolol has to be administered relatively quickly, the patient is usually not in a state where he can give a completely detached judgment about whether he wants his memories dampened. However, this is the case with a number of medical issues, so Kobler doesn't see this being the major concern.

While memory dampening is a more novel and unfamiliar therapy than is amputation, every significant medical innovation is novel and unfamiliar for some period of time, and that is not ordinarily enough to vitiate the quality of patient consent. In any event, a patient's state of trauma cannot be a complete hindrance to obtaining his informed consent, for if we truly thought a patient incompetent to consent, we typically still seek consent from close relatives or the courts.

I'm not a legal scholar, and so I don't know how seriously PTSD and so on are taken relative to decisions to amputate, but I wouldn't be as dismissive of legal complications as Kobler is here. It seems to me that a complicating factor in all of this is likely to be that it's harder to draw a causal inference between trauma and PTSD than it is between injury and physical debilitation. The psychological mechanisms underlying PTSD aren't well-understood enough to allow us to reasonably predict which individuals will suffer from it under which circumstances. Some people deal better iwth mental trauma than others. So I would imagine there are a whole host of legal wrinkles (that can be exploited for lawsuits) out there where "consent" to have one's memory dampened soon after an accident is an issue.

(2) Obstruction of Justice - This is probablly the most interesting one. Can the government hold people responsible for retaining their memories - at least long enough to testify in a criminal trial? Apparently, the definition of obstruction of justice is deliberately broad to as to cover "novel and creative schemes" that people might come up with - i.e. beyond threats or tampering with evidence or getting a witness drunk, etc. Obviously, it was intended for just the kind of situation that propranolol imposes. For largely this reason, and also on the basis of United States v. Neiswender (1979) 590 F.2d 1269, Kobler thinks it possible that witnesses and even crime victims will be charged with (probably some mild form of) obstruction of justice for taking propranolol to supress memories of the violent events they witnessed or were victims of.

This is one of those issues that's harder for a libertarian, I think, than for adherents to other political philosophies because we generally have a greater concern for bodily integrity and individual autonomy. If the individual owns his memories - and surely we libertarians agree that he does, especially as regards those physically encoded in his brain (in contrast with those written down or related to another or whatever) - then surely there is a property and an automony issue in allowing him to supress them, even if that's a hindrance to legitimate state efforts to incarcerate violent offenders. My own personal instinct on this - not having thought too much about it - is, however, pretty unlibertarian. I don't really mind prohibiting memory tampering in the interest of furthering police investigations. This is mostly, I admit, because I'm pretty skeptical of mental trauma issues in general. I would add that memory is a notoriously tricky thing anyway, and that witness testimony is known to be unreliable, so I doubt this is going to be as big an issue as it might, at first, seem, especially as forensic technology improves and every square inch of the planet comes to be filmed.

(3) Mitigation of Emotional Distress Damages - Apparently refusing reasonable medical treatment has been used to lessen damages in owed to plaintiffs in lawsuits. This is for cases involving a victim who is a religious goofball of some sort - say, a Jehovah's Witness - who thinks that God forbids certain kinds of medical treatment. The courts have (thankfully) held that such decisions are the plaintiff's responsibility, and damages are generally awarded on the basis of what more ordinary people would choose to do in the same situation. For this reason, Kobler speculates that defendants in damage lawsuits may try to have emotional distress damages lessened on the grounds that the plaintiff refused memory-dampening treatment. However, he considers the danger minimal that courts will take such claims seriously, especially as memories are usually essential to the fact-finding process in such suits. I agree, and would in any case add that what constitutes "reasonable treatment" will evolve as memory dampening does (or doesn't) become generally accepted.

All-in-all, a very intersting issue that I hadn't even known was out there.

Pinker and his Dignity

2008-05-24T04:36:00.000-07:00

Steven Pinker is a figure that, as an aspiring Linguist, I'm trained to scoff at as "pop linguistics." But on actual reading I typically find him invaluable. So it is with this recent essay on the moral concept of dignity of his in The New Republic, a nice expose of the use by the religious right of a slippery concept to advance their political agenda.

The basic point is this: there is nothing essential that "dignity" buys us as a legal concept that "autonomy" hadn't given us already. But where "autonomy" is a relatively stable concept - most rational people can agree, or at least hold enlightened discussion about, where it begins and ends - "dignity" is largely in the eye of the beholder. In that sense, it's a stand-in for whatever moral prejudices its advocate already holds, not really a pointer to independent moral truths. The best line in the essay is this one:

In one's imagination, anything can lead to anything else: Allowing people to skip church can lead to indolence; letting women drive can lead to sexual licentiousness. In a free society, one cannot empower the government to outlaw any behavior that offends someone just because the offendee can pull a hypothetical future injury out of the air.

Quite right.

That said, Pinker's argument suffers in a predictable way: since dignity is a proxy for autonomy, it is unsurprising that many of the objections he raises against using dignity as a legal standard can also be raised against autonomy. Specifically - when he says that dignity is fungible and sometimes harmful, one could, it seems, make the same case about autonomy. To the first point he argues that while religious types tend to treat dignity as sacred, ordinary people frequently voluntarily suffer indignities for other gain. Well, fair enough, but the same is surely true of autonomy. Pinker cites "having sex" as "undignified," but surely entering into a marriage is a surrender of autonomy? Likewise, getting anesthetized for surgery and having one's insides played with is surely undignified - and it involves a surrender of autonomy. Etc. etc. If dignity is fungible, then so is autonomy, and no advocate of autonomy as a legal principle should be disparaging dignity on these grounds, therefore.

And so it is with harm. Pinker notes that preserving dignity for some people is actually harmful to society. Some of his examples are silly, but others resonate with me: "political and religious repressions are often rationalized as a defense of the dignity of a state, leader, or creed: Just think of the Salman Rushdie fatwa, the Danish cartoon riots, or the British schoolteacher in Sudan who faced flogging and a lynch mob because her class named a teddy bear Mohammed. Indeed, totalitarianism is often the imposition of a leader's conception of dignity on a population, such as the identical uniforms in Maoist China or the burqas of the Taliban." Quite right. But Pinker's failing to make an important distinction here: the religious types are typically talking about violations of one's "right" (they think of it as a right) to dignity, not imposition of dignity (indeed, they would no doubt say that "real" dignity cannot be imposed with a required dress code, that this is a misunderstanding of the concept, etc.). So they're off the hook with regard to Pinker's Maoist China and Taliban examples. As to the others, one's at pains to see how the calculus here is different from that of any balancing act involving conflicts of autonomy. My right to bodily integrity supercedes a murderer's autonomy in deciding to kill me. He violates my autonomy if he succeeds in killing me, and the state violates his by proscribing murder. There's a conflict, and society resolves it in favor of the victim. A legal system necessarily involves such tradeoffs. My rights end where yours begin, etc. It would be silly to say that only those things which never have to be balanced and are never the cause of conflict are the proper subject of law! It's exactly backward, in fact: law exists because their fundamental rights and interests put people in conflict. In the Salman Rushdie example, then, the issue isn't really that dignity is an unworkable concept, but rather that we in the west rate freedom of speech higher. And I will certainly be the first to agree that it should be rated higher - and for exactly the reason that Pinker gave earlier: because "dignity" is a subjective, socially conditioned and emotional concept, and we can't run a society on whim. The point is simply that Pinker should have stuck with that approach rather than trying to malign dignity because preserving it can, in extreme circumstances, cause harm. Preserving autonomy can also cause harm, but what of it? The point, again, is not that anything that, left unchecked, can be harmful is inadmissible as a legal principle, it's that things which are subjective and emotional should not be admissible as legal principles. We can't make laws based on people's "feelings," and THIS is the reason we should reject dignity as a principle.

So Pinker's essay should be about a third shorter than it is. Aside from that third, however, I find it convincing.

How NOT to Solve a Housing Crisis (India Version)

2008-05-23T18:55:00.001-07:00

This bit in the Washington Post from January is a nice illustration of how the law of unintended consequences is often the result of attempts to subvert the law of supply and demand. It deals with - largely unsuccessful - attempts by local governments in India to eliminate slums. It's why these well-meaning endeavors fail that's interesting.

In short, it goes something like this. Parts of India are crowded. HUGELY crowded. On the order of 16million people to a city crowded. Crowded. So naturally real estate prices tend to soar. If you have a situation where the population of an already people-saturated place is exploding, real estate prices are going to go up (think Tokyo in the 80s, for a more familiar example). So what to do about the slums? If real estate prices are out of control, then it would seem like the government is priced out of being able to afford housing projects for slum dwellers. Ah - but what if we use the housing bubble to our advantage?

The scheme works as follows. The government loosens zoning restrictions (oh yeah, because this was in the Washington Post, it didn't occur to anyone that zoning restrictions might have something to do with the prohibitive price of housing. Someone must really leave an economics textbook lying around at a major American newsdaily one of these days, just to see what happens.) in exchange for a promise from highrise builders that they will also erect some subsidized-rent buildings. Because housing prices are so high and the profit margin on new tennemants so huge, there is more than enough intake from the highrise to pay for the subsidized buildings and still go home with a healthy take. So - simple, right? Problem solved?

Well, not exactly. 'Cause, see, when you go and flood the market with new houses, some of which are artificially cheap, guess what happens to real estate values in general? Yup - they bottom out. And so, suddenly, the profit margin on the new tennemants isn't so huge anymore, and almost overnight there are no takers for these subsidized building projects. The money just isn't there anymore.

That's all economics 101 - but here's the really interesting bit.

If you build at the rate that the housing crisis -- or an election promise -- demands, the market crashes, making a cross-subsidy unworkable. Therefore, you build slowly, so that housing prices remain high. But when prices remain high, some of the former slum-dwellers will sell their flats and move back to the slum. Sometimes that was their plan all along.

Interesting, eh? When slums are available - some people actually see them as "affordable housing." They take advantage of the government scheme, buy a subsidized place, wait for the market to (inevitably) crash, followed by a general drying-up of bids on contracts to build the subsidized houses, at which point prices go back up, they sell their apartment and move back to the slum.

I dunno - the solution to all this seems simple enough to me. If the government wants to help solve the slum problem, then why not just have a general moratorium on zoning laws, at least for a decade? Take a section of the city, throw out the zoning laws, let developers build as high as they want. If the market gets flooded with houses, then some slum dwellers are suddenly able to afford. If a housing crunch follows, then those slum-dwellers that bought in can resell at a profit. In any case, the new buildings aren't going away. This cycle will happen a couple of times, but each time through new buildings get built, and so with each succession the prices can't go quite as high as they did the last time. Over time, the effect is that prices stabilize. The turnovers get less dramatic, and the housing market becomes more predictable. You might not completely eliminate the slums, but with time you build enough houses at low enough prices that most of the slums go away on their own.

Put simply - we build our way out of a housing problem. Gee, who woulda thought? And we can do that because ... (drumroll) ... there are no zoning laws telling us we can't. True, to some extent the current approach with the zoning laws in place is not much different; it follows similar cycles. That is because, as chronic Soviet (and now Venezuelan) shortages effectively demonstrated over most of the last century, government wishful thinking is not immune to economic realities. You can say nice things like "every worker gets beets," but that only works if you produce enough beets for every worker. And you only produce enough beets for every worker if you make it worth the beet-growers' while to grow that many beets. Here's a clue: people respond better to "if you grow this many beets, you'll live comfortably" than they do to "it is your patriotic duty to grow this many beets, regardless of what we pay you."

Something similar is almost certainly going on in India with regard to housing. To get rid of the slums, the government needs someone to build a lot of hosues quickly. That can easily be achieved by simply removing the zoning laws. If it's suddenly legal to build tall buildings on a lot in a hugely crowded city, people will do it. And indeed, the high price of land (resulting from overcrowding) is, in fact, a market signal that such a thing needs to be done. Land is hugely expensive because it is scarce, and in a rational economic system that means that there are rewards for people who figure out ways to stretch it further - say, by housing thousands in a highrise rather than merely hundreds in a four-story getup.

I don't want to say that homelessness and slum-dwelling in India are entirely the government's fault. Obviously it's a lot more complicated than that. And eventually India will build its way out of its housing crisis one way or the other, whether or not the government is fiddling with things. The contours of the process are the same with or without government intervention, but there are nevertheless two advantages to getting the government out: (1) the process happens a lot faster and (2) there are no incentives to stay poor (think about it: you've lived all your life in a slum, so you don't really mind 'cause you're used to it, and suddenly someone hands you a free flat that you can live in for a bit and eventually pocket a bunch of free cash by moving out of. Do you (a) work for a living and buy your own house or (b) take the offer and pocket the free money? Hmmmm....). So yeah, it's a question of time. A sincere interest in seeing the poor housed means you look reality squarely in the face, realize that it can't be done overnight, accept the gradualness of the process but trust your Economics 101 that tells you that if there's a 4million-person demand for housing in a city of 16million, the market will provide. Of course, I guess the politicians don't see it quite that way. They would rather keep their finger on the zoning law trigger, and are content to see things happen just a little bit slower to that end. Nice folks, these politicians.

Why I'm Skipping Indy

2008-05-23T04:48:00.000-07:00

i09 has a great takedown of the new Indiana Jones movie in the form of a poll called What Scifi Plot Should Indiana Jones Steal Next? The most plausible-sounding choice was "Indiana Jones and the Lost Continent," but I voted for "Indiana Jones: A Space Odyssey." Have a visit yourself and leave your feedback!

Honestly, what were Spielberg and Lucas thinking making this into an X-Files movie? I'm sure the X-Files movie will be bad enough on its own, thanks, without you two goobers showing off just how big of has-beens you are in the process.

Ok, fair enough, I haven't been to see the film yet. And I say "yet" as though I eventually will - but this review has pretty much convinced me to avoid it like the plauge. Why? Funny you should ask, you know. I'll admit to being one of the few people who like Temple of Doom (another reason why I have a grudging appreciaton for Roger Ebert, in fact, in addition to his gutsy four-star review of "Halloween," for which I am eternally grateful, is that he was also one of the few critics who recognized Temple of Doom for the great film it is). I liked "Raiders" a lot better, but I also really liked "Temple." The series jumped the shark for me with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - not so much because the plot was bad, but because they'd sacrificed the larger-than-life, over-the-top, sense-of-wonder-meets-action-flick comic book style of the earlier two for cheap laughs and one-liners. I love a good one-liner as much as the next guy, but ... well, actually, to be honest, I really don't love a good one-liner as much as the next guy. Not anywhere near as much, in fact. A truly good one-liner is a once- or twice-a-movie kind of thing, and it's REALLY clever and a REAL takedown. Unfortunately, someone in Hollywood went out for a hotdog one day and heard people quoting "I'll be back" and thought, "Great! We don't have to write conversations anymore." And "Last Crusde" is a definite victim of this. Instead of breathtaking stunts and exotic locales we get ... a dad teasing his son. Fucking great - just what I always wanted in an Indiana Jones movie. An INDIANA JONES movie.

When I heard they were making a new Indy movie, I thought "Well, they can't redo 'Raiders,' because Hollywood stopped making good blockbusters some time ago. But what I can hope for is another Temple of Doom - you know, something with cool sets and atmosphere and violence - rather than another Last Crusade, which was all goofy family-values silliness. But how will I know which one I'm getting ahead of time? From the review:

As was true of the previous films, this one attempts to balance light comedy with action. The jokiness that occasionally damaged The Last Crusade is more pronounced here with one-liners punctuating the dialogue. There are some clever ones, to be sure, but most are perfunctory.

Crap. It's "Crusade."

But the film doesn't work on the most basic level where even The Temple of Doom succeeded: getting viewers on the edges of their seats. That's not to say the film is without action; it features a number of such sequences. But a key element is missing: excitement. There's no suspense and not a lot of energy.

Yep - no denying it now. Those were my two fears, and this reviewer helpfully confirmed them. They redid "Crusade," and skipped "Temple" entirely. So I will skip this movie entirely. Maybe someday, if it's on TV and I happen to have nothing better to do. But as much of an Indiana Jones fan as I once was, I think I'll invest the money I would have spent on an inflated box-office-priced ticket in a good book instead.

The Polygamists' Stonewall

2008-05-23T03:02:00.000-07:00

In light of how trendy it's become to talk about gay marriage as though it were a civil rights issue on par with Jim Crow, I find it increasingly astonishing that people continute to ignore the question as relates to polygamists. The link goes to an article by William Saletan that charges that the state has a right to ban polygamy because it's "not in our nature." Which rather does raise the issue why homosexuality is in our nature? Sure, for some people it evidently is - so why the blanket, across-the-board assumption that there are no people who can form healthy polygamist unions? It's simple prejudice. Surely this, like gay marriage, is a decision that should be left to the consenting adults themselves and not to William Saletan's personal experiences of what is and isn't in his nature. And yet, it is the normal practice among same-sex marriage advocates to distance themselves from polygamists.

It's been almost 40 years since Stonewall, and gay rights have come a long way. Thankfully, the government is no longer allowed to police private, consensual sexual practices, and homosexuals can go about their business. But "Stonewall" incidents continue for polygamists.

Consider the recent case in Texas. The linked article tells the story of a tearful phone call from a 16-year-old girl to a woman's shelter San Angelo that she'd been beaten and raped by a man she was forced to marry at the FDLS (a Mormon offshoot) compound YZR in West Texas. The government dutifully informs us that this is a pervasive pattern at the compound and promptly seized over 400 minors in a raid. Of course, no one thought to ask why they needed this phone call to go in if they already knew, as Texas Child Protective Services officer Lynn McFadden assures us, that "There is a pervasive pattern and practice of indoctrinating and grooming minor female children to accept spiritual marriages to adult male members of the YFZ Ranch resulting in them being sexually abused." Apparently we're just supposed to shrug our shoulders and go "you know - 'these people' are just like that," and not worry about the due process issue. And it took a while for people to start worrying, even after the raid failed to turn up the girl who made the heart-wrenching phone call. And why couldn't they find her? Well, because it turns out the call was really probably from Rozita Swinton, a 33-year-old woman living far away in Colorado with no connection to FDLS other than trying to frame them. Now to get an idea of the kind of attitudes and prejudices we're dealing with - here's an interview with Flora Jessup, an anti-polygamy activist who had been talking to Swinton on the phone for two weeks under the false assumption that Swinton was a 16-year-old being systematically abused by her father. Incredibly, Jessop says that "I would like to point out that the system absolutely worked in this case. When -- as hotlines get calls from children purporting to be abused, just as I do, it's not my responsibility and my job to decide whether those calls are legitimate." Well, right, not her responsibility to decide if they're legitimate - she just reports on to the police. But sure it is the police's responsibility to make some kind of decision there, right? To not just assume that every accusation they get is true? How is it an example of "the system working" when the police allow their prejudices to get in the way of doing normal investigative background checks resulting in hundreds of bogus custody seizures? Even more incredibly, Jessop goes on to admit that Swinton is disturbed, but nevertheless that "... in a little bit of a way, want to give her a hug because she's protected hundreds of children from the abuses, the widespread systematic abuses they were suffering in this group." Has she indeed? Jessop, who lives in Florida, knows for a fact, then, that systematic abuse was going on at the YZR ranch in Texas? And if she knew this all along, why didn't she simply tell the police herself? Oh, right, because she doesn't know any better than you or I do what was or wasn't going on at the YZR compound in Texas - she just hears "polygamy" and instantly loses all concern for due process protections. The same way that a disturbingly large number of people heard "poor black accuser, rich white defendants" in the Duke Rape Case (link goes to some of KC Johnson's excellent coverage) and decided due process was a quaint distraction.

Look - the reason we have due process protections at all is for precisely the reason that people think with their stereotypes. It's in our nature, I suppose. As The Onion satirically points out, stereotypes are a real time-saver. Except when they're wrong - and it's for THOSE cases that we have due process. We have due process because people's impressions about things AREN'T science, AREN'T reliable, and certainly aren't anything in the ballpark of "fair and just." If the state wants to go snatch a bunch of kids from their parents, you and me and every citizen in this country needs a better process of justification for that action than "well, you know, polygamists, religious kooks, um, yeah."

If it had been a raid on a gay neighborhood seizing all the adopted children because of a bogus phone call from a 33-year-old in a another town purporting to have been sodomized by his gay dads, this never would've gotten this far. In the 1960s, obviously it would have, but times have changed, and society is now confronting its prejudices about homosexuals. The times are past when the police can go on TV and say "well, you know, gays" and count on everyone to collectively forget about the Fourteenth Amendment. What troubles me is that we continue to have to fight this battle with each new group. Isn't it enough, after having exposed unjust treatment of blacks and gays, that people should be able to start actually embracing diversity and actually tolerating members of groups different from their own? Why does it seem we have to go through and catalogue all the classes of people who need "protected group" status one-by-one before anyone gets their rights?

Thankfully, the system "absolutely worked" in this case in the end, if I can steal Jessop's thunder, and the Appeals Court told the police to go back and reread their basic training manuals. But I'm seeing disturbingly little realization from the media that it was largely prejudice that got us here. If anyone needs proof that there is systematic discrimination against polygamists, this case should do the trick. Like with any other legal issue, we need to think with our heads and not our hearts on this one. So you don't like polygamy. I myself am not lining up to join. But surely whatever distaste people feel about it is not a legal issue. And surely, anyone who feels that gays have the right to marriage because "they're in love" has no grounds to doubt or oppose the legal claims of polygamists who feel the same way. Polygamists are people too. We just can't see it yet because discriminating against them is still in fashion. Even for large numbers of gays who themselves claim to be the special victims of "marriage discrimination." What a world.

Regulating the Already Self-Regulating

2008-05-22T15:26:00.000-07:00

Here's something worth celebrating. Data centers are declining to comply with the government's supposedly-anonymous "EnergyStar" background research project. See - some trend hacks have decided that Data Centers will be consuming more energy than the airline industry by 2020, so the government now thinks it has an in to regulate them. It's already recommending that they adopt energy-saving policies - as though, given the nature of their business and how they make their money, that wouldn't be something they weren't already looking into on their own. I mean - imagine yourself as the head of a data center. Your job is essentially keeping a room full of harddrives running and online. The two major things that can go wrong are: (1) power outages and (2) overheating. Naturally staying online is your main concern - which, I hesitate to point out, is good for all of us. Given how much information is online these days (Christ - ALL the information about how much money I have and owe, for example! I use cash essentially only to play $10 poker anymore...), redundancy and reliability are crucial to the functioning of the economy. Ok - so once you're reasonably sure that you're safe from crashes, what's the first thing you look to to lower expenses so that you can expand your market share and profit? Yeah - my first, second and third guesses were "power consumption" too. So once again we have an example of the government stepping in to regulate something that doesn't need regulating because it will take care of things on its own. As if the EPA doesn't already have enough to do dreaming up ways to justify preemptive governmental protection of polar bears. (Ok, ok, that's the US Geological Survey's job, I know.)

So I would just like to applaud the low compliance rate with this study. The data center industry is right to worry that the government is just itching for an excuse to regulate them in ways both costly to the rest of us an inefficient in achieving actual energy savings in any case. To illustrate the point - consider this project in our own Indianapolis.

Lifeline also plans a green campus environment by employing hydrogen-assisted diesel generators, reflective roof technologies, returning of old parking lots to green space, as well as implementing innovative HVAC technologies.

That's from a data center that just bought a defunct old mall - a building that was doing nothing good for anyone - and turned it into a useful part of the internet. No one required it to do all these green things - these are things that it decided to do on its own for its own business interests.

And this is all not to mention, of course, that data centers already benefit world energy consumption just by existing. They centralize data storage so that individual companies don't have to build their own centers and backup systems. I don't have any numbers on it, but it's reasonable to assume that farming out backup to designated data centers is more secure and more energy efficient than having each individual company manage its own data storage.

So, the EPA can officially fuck off, and I'm really glad to see the data center industry telling them to do just that.

Hate Crimes: where they happen and where they don't (are the same place)

2008-05-22T07:40:00.001-07:00

Here is an interesting page. It's Esquire's 2006 infographic on instances of hate crimes across the US. It gets its raw numbers from FBI reports and lays the data out on a map of the US - with numbers showing the total recorded instances per state and colors showing how that squares up with per capita population.

Intersting points include:

(1) The South is apparently the place where people are least likely to be victims of hate crimes. Almost all southern states - with the notable exception of Virginia - are in the blue, meaning they are in the category of the lowest per capital instances of hate crimes. Mississippi and Alabama, widely panned in popular culture as the most racist states in the union, also have the lowest instances of reported hate crimes, at 0 and 1 respectively.

(2) The Northeast, by contrast, is the most hate crime-prone region per capita. How's that for a complete reversal of all the stereotypes of a "racist" South and "tolerant" North you were taught in school?

(3) Most strikingly - Arizona and New Mexico have apparently switched geographical locations without telling anyone.

The map is, of course, completely misleading on one level. Everything depends on (a) how much information local authorities choose to share with the FBI and (b) what local definitions of hate crimes even are (they vary widely). Cross-state comparisons are, in fact, impossible under these circumstances, not merely "difficult," as the helpful disclaimer tells us.

On another level, it's completely revealing: hate crimes are a self-fulfilling prophecy almost by definition. If you live in a state that defines everything as a hate crime, you live in a place where a lot of them happen to occur. One notes, for example, that high-scoring Virginia is the state that gave rise to the Supreme Court ruling that cross burning is not protected free speech, even though, perversely, burning the flag apparently is. (For the record, I consider burning cross es and flags both - and anything that belongs to you, provided you don't endanger bystanders, really - to speech in the relevant definition for the First Amendment.) If this intolerance of speech rights is prevelent in Virginia law, it's not surprising that a lot of stuff that's protected speech elsewhere turns up as a "hate crime" on Virginia's radar.

The Cure that Didn't

2008-05-22T03:42:00.000-07:00

This story does an especially good job of highlighting the cult of addiction. It's about Chantix - a prescription drug to help people quit smoking from Pfizer. According to the company's website, it works by targeting the same receptors that nicotine targets, providing a (presumably) non-addictive nicotine-like buzz while suppressing the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal.

Here's the comedy. From the Chantix website:

Some patients have reported changes in behavior, agitation, depressed mood, suicidal thinking or behavior when attempting to quit smoking while taking CHANTIX. If you experience any of these symptoms, or if your family or caregiver observes these symptoms, please tell your doctor immediately. Also tell your doctor about any history of depression or other mental health problems before taking CHANTIX, as these symptoms may worsen while taking CHANTIX. ... You may have trouble sleeping, vivid, unusual, or strange dreams while taking CHANTIX. You should use caution driving or operating machinery until you know how quitting smoking with CHANTIX may affect you.

And indeed, the link to the article (the first link) tells of how the FAA is now prohibiting pilots from using the drug because people have been having vision problems and heart trouble.

What we have here, in other words, is a "cure" that's worse than the disease. Not only that, but it doesn't seem to be too terribly effective. The Chantix website claims a 44% success rate, but - and here's the laugh - adds that "You may benefit from quit smoking support programs and/or counseling during your quit attempt." That's because, in fact, their trials included accompanying weekly counselling sessions. Oh, and it turns out it's not really as effective as 44%. Pfizer gets that rate by - get this - measuring cessation rates inside of 12 weeks. If you measure them any later than that, it's really only 23%. And if we recall that there were weekly counselling sessions during the 12-weeks of the trial, we have to admit we don't really know what portion is accounted for by the accompanying counselling aid. Now, when you consider that 9% of the people in the placebo group remained off cigarettes after 52 weeks, you might be tempted to conclude that the counselling alone accounts for 9%. But that's silly - because if the same counselling was administered to the placebo group it's likely to have been less effective (since the placebo group wasn't having their withdrawal symptoms artificially supressed, and since their 7 "free" days of smoking at the beginning - Chantix treatment starts you off with a "free" week during which the drug keeps nicotine from being effective - didn't include conditioning them to see cigarettes as just nasty-tasting without the nicotine buzz, then obviously their counselling sessions weren't tailored to their actual situation). If a different counselling session was administered, then we've introduced a rather serious confound and can't really trust the data at all.

So what we seem to have is an expensive way to probably not quit with rather serious side-effects. Wonderful. If that isn't unintentional self-parody, I don't know what qualifies.

Some people are amazingly weak. The bottom line is that nicotine addiction is a choice. Going to the store, putting money on the counter, purchasing a pack of cigarettes, putting one in your mouth and lighting up is a string of choices. Quitting smoking involves interrupting this chain at some point - a thing that anyone who is conscious of his own actions can do. When you fall off the wagon with smoking, it's because avoiding the withdrawal symptoms has become more important to you than giving up. That is the bottom line, and no drug that merely lessens your withdrawal symptoms changes the terms of the game. Until they come out with a drug that instantly alters your chemical makeup to remove the dependance altogether, some amount of willpower will be involved. The dismal success rates of these drugs owe to this: anyone who believes they can quit with "just a little push" from Chantix doesn't understand what willpower is. Willpower isn't "I will do this if it's easy." Willpower is just "I will do this."

To be clear, I'm not joining in the crazy cacophony of people who seem to think that the FDA should bar Chantix on grounds of insufficient effectiveness. I don't personally see the difference between legal cigarettes and legal Chantix, honestly. Pfizer, of course, needs to come clean about the results of its trials, but since as far as I can tell the information is out there on the internets for all of us to read, then consumers can make up their own minds whether it's worth it to them to try - just as they can make up their own minds whether it's worth it to them to smoke, in fact. No - I'm not calling for a ban on Chanrix. I'm just pointing out that Chantix and things like it are indisputably effective in at least one way: highlighting how silly the "quit smoking" industry is. Chantix reportedly made Pfizer $277million last quarter, and the recent 5% drop in prescription rates has sent the company's stock down 1.2%. Just stop to marvel at the concept: there's an almost $300million make-or-break-a-company market in peddling a painful and probably dangerous experience that is 77% likely to turn out to have been a failure a year later.

The following line from this About.com article sums up the situation nicely:

A drug that has the potential to help 22 out of every 100 people using it quit smoking is impressive indeed.

Since when does the "potential to help" a mere "22 out of every 100 people" rate as "impressive?" A fool and his money, as they say...

Barr the hot Item?

2008-05-20T02:08:00.000-07:00

Make that not one but two major conservative internet outlets (NRO and Townhall) that have articles yesterday that seem predicated on the idea that Bob Barr will be the Libertarian Party nominee after this weekend. Barr was a very late addition to the fold (declaring his candidacy formally only last Tuesday), and last I checked he was polling ahead of the others in delegates, but not by enough to win the first round of voting - a problematic position going in to the often-unpredictable LP convention. For what it's worth, he's my first choice on the list, but I would hardly consider this thing over. Does National Review know something we don't?

Goin' Ta Mars

2008-05-19T15:42:00.001-07:00

Via i09, a really interesting video detailing what a trip through one of Mars' "canals" might be like. THIS is what CGI is for!

Now it REALLY Ain't Over Till It's Over

2008-05-19T14:59:00.000-07:00

So Obama has decided against a victory declaration tomorrow after all. Veeeerry interesting. Could it be, oh I dunno, because his margin of victory is more convincing now? Or is it maybe because some superdelegates are getting signals from the DNC that they wanna hold out to the last possible minute for the chance of a Hillary victory? Either way, the media will now have to change its "narrative" on the supposed destructiveness of the continuing campaign, and I, for one, will be very curious to see just how they go about that.

Courtesy of the Gay Marriage Debate: the importance of moral principle

2008-05-19T14:34:00.000-07:00

Dinesh D'Souza, a pundit I respect less and less recently, has another misinformed column on Townhall today. It's about the California Supreme Court's recent decision on gay marriage, and it - unsurprisingly, considering who the author is - gets a good bit of the facts on the case wrong. Because this is fun, let's go through what they are:

Now the high court of California has made gay marriage into a right that is immune from restriction by the majority of citizens in the state.

and

The court has to pretend that there is a right to gay marriage even though it is nowhere evident in the state constitution. ... It is simply not an enumerated right, nor is it a right that can be clearly derived from other enumerated rights.

Well, at least he's right that there is no enumerated "right to marriage" in the California State Constitution. Of course, the Court itself says as much in its ruling, in which it also spends close to 100 pages going over an exhaustive list of precedents stretching back to the 1930s and continuing up to the present day of California state courts treating marriage as a fundamental right under Article I sections 1, 7 and 9 of the state constitution. Whether D'Souza agrees with this precedent is, of course, a different matter. I myself, for what it's worth, do not. But the point is that the Supreme Court most emphatically DID NOT just "make" a right to marriage that didn't previously exist. It is a "right" that has been recognized by California law for some time now, built on a foundation of numerous rulings and affirmations over decades.

Oh, but wait, D'Souza was talking specifically about gay marriage when speaking of rights that aren't enumerated in the California Constitution. Oh, well, that's alright then. Or ... not ... because if we're talking about specifically enumerated rights, then neither is there a right to any kind of marriage in the California Constitution. Interestingly, D'Souza doesn't seem to have a problem with all those years of precedent that nevertheless establish a right to heterosexual marriage. So which is it? Courts have the authority to read in unenumerated rights - in which case this court may, with proper reasoning, read in a right to gay marriage - or they may not, in which case it isn't clear where California Courts got the authority to overturn the state's statutes prohibiting interracial marriage in, e.g., Perez v. Sharp? Maybe D'Souza would like to come clean and publicly state that the decision in Perez was wrong too?

More to the point, D'Souza is skipping over the substance of the Court's ruling here. The Court did not "make" a right to gay marriage at all. In fact, it specifically affirms the state's right to decide, through democratic means, to restrict marriage rights only to certain classes of citizens. What it - quite interestingly - chooses not to allow is the situation of extending the same substantive rights to different groups of people under different names. Yes, goofy though that sounds (and goofy though that is), the substance of the Court's argument is that giving gays all the benefits of marriage and then calling it a "domestic partnership" is what's wrong.

It's a tortured bit of logic, granted. After all, the Court's reasoning here is that naming rights different things for different groups is a prelude to discriminatory treatment, and yet it affirms in other portions of the ruling that such treatment is the perrogative of the state should it choose, say, not to extend "domestic partnership" rights to homosexuals. The point is not to support the Court's "reasoning" here (which I do not), but simply to call attention to the fact that D'Souza apparently doesn't know what it is.

This is made all the more clear by his strange assertion that the Court relies on the Fourteenth Amendment in reaching its decision. In fact, it does not. It mentions it in the ruling, but the ruling itself is based entirely on California statutes and precedents. The relevant "constitution" mentioned is the state constitution, and the "equal protection clause" cited is, in fact, Article I section 7 of the same.

From there we venture off into conservative la-la land, recycling the same reductio ad absurdum arguments that have become, increasingly less convincingly, a staple of right-wing commentary on the issue.

Now gay activists, with the acquiescence of the California high court, want to remove one of the criteria of marriage while keeping all the rest. Yet if it's discriminatory to gays to require that marriage be between a man and a woman, why isn't it discriminatory to Mormons and Muslims to require that it remain between two people? Isn't incestuous marriage also between "consenting adults" who have a right to equal protection of the laws? And why doesn't the Fourteenth Amendment protect the fellow who wants to walk down the aisle with his poodle on the grounds that "I love my dog and my dog loves me"?

The last one is so silly it's hardly worth responding to. C'mon, D'Souza - have you ever seen a reference in any portion of any laws anywhere in the world to an animal's "informed consent?" Jesus Christmas - if you can't have a contract with a dog, and if a dog can't vote, and if a dog can't apply for a driver's license, then it isn't too terribly taxing on the old gulliver to imagine what legal process we might employ to prevent a dog legally consenting to marriage.

As to all the other questions, the simple answer is "why not indeed?" Honestly - can anyone come up with a good reason why Mormons and Muslims shouldn't be allowed to continue the well-established traditions of their respective faiths and enter into polygamous marriages? Provided there is consent all 'round (meaning that all members are of legal age, etc. etc.), what is honestly the problem? Why should the Judeo-Christian tradition take precedent in this nation that's supposed to guarantee religious freedom? Ditto the situation with incest. No doubt D'Souza would respond with completely convincing scientific evidence of the nasty consequences of such a couple breeding. Fine, we'll prohibit them having kids of their own. But if two grown adults decide to enter into a lifelong partnership, isn't that their business? Where is the compelling government interest in preventing this? Just to reiterate, if there's a compelling government interest in preventing reproduction between such people, so be it. But what is the interest in preventing their marriage? After all, the western tradition on which D'Souza imagines California's marriage laws are exclusively based has frequently tolerated such marriages. To condemn them on the basis of tradition, D'Souza would need to be in the awkward position of explaining why "tradition" starts in the 1930s as opposed to the 1500s.

Now, to give credit where it's due, the rest of this is actually quite sensible. D'Souza explains that he accepts that there are important differences between polygamy and gay marriage, the point is simply that "discrimination" of some kind or another is built into any government recognition of a privilege for some groups and not others. "Consequently," he concludes, "it's unreasonable to say that gays have a constitutional right to override the definition but other groups do not. The court's real justification seems to have little to do with constitutional reasoning and everything to do with an assertion of political power."

Yes, correct. That's exactly what's going on here, and good of him to call them on it. He then goes on to say that to the extent that a particular group seeks to redraw the definition of marriage so as to include itself, it needs to take its case to the legislature and not to the courts. Again, quite correct. As a libertarian, of course I would prefer that marriage remain under the auspices of private contracts, but so long as the state reserves to itself the right to define and regulate "marriage," then the proper venue for modification is indeed the legislature (or also ballot initiatives, in California) and not the court system.

But that still doesn't answer the questions he raises. Why, indeed, are conservatives so opposed to polygamous and incestuous marriages? Why is this a compelling state interest? Why, for that matter, is there a compelling state interest in preventing gay marriage? The obvious answer seems to be that there is no such interest, and D'Souza is merely arguing for the right to enforce his prejudices at the ballot box. I can see how that's better than enforcing one's prejudices through the Court system, as gay rights activists are wont to do, but in both cases we're enforcing prejudices, grabbing for our own groups legal privileges that no rational foundation in natural law grants to them to the exclusion of others. D'Souza's only claim to moral superiority over his opponents here, in other words, is that he feels more compelled to follow legal orthodoxy than they do. Well ... grand! But he doesn't seem to feel especially compelled to justify his voting choices in any way, which doesn't do very much for his reputation as a responsible citizen.

The lesson here is, I think, for everyone. All of these questions that D'Souza raises are in fact questions that D'Souza and conservatives need to answer, but so long as gay rights activists insist on subverting proper legal procedure and going through the courts to secure to themselves something that D'Souza rightly argues is not a natural right but a legal privilege, they allow conservatives like D'Souza to obscure the issue. It was never their intention, of course, but that's the consequence of all this. Rather than asking important questions of conservatives, like "where does your right to marriage come from?," they are content if courts simply hand them what they want - and, apparently, any old basis for that will do.

Neither side looks particularly good from where I stand. Gay rights activists are apparently unconcerned with legal procedure, or with the damage to the fabric of a functioning democracy that encouraging courts to subvert it can do. Conservatives are thereby able to assert a legal right to enforce their prejudices at the ballot box without having to deal with the harder questions of where their prejudices come from or why they should be law, simply because, by comparison with the people who filed the bogus lawsuit in the first place, they look like the ones playing fair.

The truth, of course, is that neither side is playing fair. "Fair," in a pluralistic democracy, means affording people as much leeway to live their lives free from interference as can be tolerated. If conservatives can demonstrate no compelling state interest in securing only to heterosexual couples the property and decision rights that go along with marriage, then we need to get on with getting the state out of the business of regulating and defining marriage. Thanks, however, to the gay rights activists who insist on taking these issues to court, it's even money that the voters of California will vote to amend their state constitution in the fall to include in it a statute that belongs in no constitution. Yes, California will then be in the bizarre situation of having, among its fundamental laws, a definition of marriage -- as if any such thing has anything at all to do with the basic functioning of law in California or any state. Good for the lawyers and the citizen activist groups; bad for the rest of us.

The principle being illustrated here is this: society can save itself a lot of needless grief by getting it right the first time. Just leave marriage to private contracts already. That's an equal-opportunity solution that leaves conservatives free to call gay marriages "domestic partnerships" without stepping on anyone's fundamental property rights and gays themselves the equal legal representation of their unions that they so crave. Perhaps best of all, it gives the courts something better to do than rule that a group has a "right" to call partnerships "marriage," even though the court declines to say whether they have a right to the partnership in the first place.

Or whatever.

Who are the Police?

2008-05-19T09:45:00.000-07:00

Via Volokh, an interesting case. It's (snicker) Herring v. United States, and it deals with the interesting 4th amendment question of "who are the police." Orin Kerr gives a pretty good summary, so click on the link for details. In brief, though, what happened is that a cop got suspicious of a guy named Herring and called in to see if there was a warrant out on him. There wasn't in his county, but a call to a neighboring county turned one up. One problem: the warrant had been recalled by the time this information was relayed. It's sorta like paying a bill online but having to wait for it to be visible from your account overview page - the database interface said there was a warrant, but a check for the actual warrant reveals that it had been recalled earlier (Kerr doesn't say how long the lapse was here, though - probably longer than a day). So when the clerk went to fetch the actual warrant, it wasn't there. Too late: the officer had already arrested Herring and found in his possession illegal guns and drugs. THE QUESTION: since these materials were found under a search authorized by a recalled warrant, but executed in good faith by the arresting officer on the assumption that the arrest was ... erm ... warranted (sorry), do or do not the drugs and gun qualify as admissible evidence under the Fourth Amendment?

Kerr doesn't have a hard opinion, but he takes the intersting stance that it comes down to a question of who "the police" are. If "the police" are just the arresting officer, then "clearly" due process was followed - that is, the officer had good reason to arrest this person - and so any contraband that turns up on the search is admissible. If, however, "the police" refers to the entire organization, then a recalled warrant doesn't give them probable cause to perform the search, the search was therefore improper (having been performed during an unauthorized arrest), and the seized materials cannot be used as evidence.

I said Kerr doesn't have a hard opinion, but he does express an inclination to the former interpretation - which is, incidentally, why I put "clearly" in shock quotes above. Kerr reasons that the potential for abuse here is probably overstated. Yes, granted, this opens the door to a potential kind of bad faith action on the part of the police, but Kerr (probably righty) points out that this avenue is largely already avaiable in slightly altered form. After all, it doesn't have to hinge on a warrant; a corrupt officer can just as easily make up facts that establish probably cause another way, leading another officer to perform an improper search.

No doubt Kerr is right about that, but I still respectfully disagree with his overall conclusion based on other facts of the case. While certainly it's true that in general "due process" cases are resolved from the perspective of the arresting officer, I see no overriding reason why that standard has to be applied in all cases. If all the relevant information is right there on the scene, then fine. But if some of the relevant information comes from off-scene, then it seems to me that the entire organization is involved at that point. In this case, the crucial bit of information that enabled the improper arrest came from off-scene, so that's a pretty clear case when "the police" are the organization, and not just the arresting officer.

To the extent that we need a single resolution to the question of whether "the police" is the officer on the scene or the entire organization, the solution seems pretty simple. We say that "the police" is the entire organization and for purposes of applying the due process test, we only include those parts of the organization that were responsible for construing the facts in the way that they did in the individual case in question. In other words, to all practical purposes, it's the arresting officer, and in some rare cases it will involve the entire police information network when this is needed to resolve questions of this kind. If we don't do it this way, then we give "the police" the ability to compartmentalize itself for the purpose of securing a search, and that doesn't seem like a good precedent to set. It's like saying "in case of a tie, the police win," which is clearly not the intention of the Fourth Amendment. The police are responsible for obtaining accurate information on criminal activities. Indeed, I should think that, contra Kerr, it's not just a matter of encouraging the police to keep up-to-date databases, but also of encouraging them to instate methods of communcation internal to their departments that are accurate and effective. This isn't just about warrants.

My prediction is that the Court will see it similarly.

How The Other Side Lives Matters Too

2008-05-19T05:39:00.000-07:00

It will come as no surprise that I'm no fan of Mike Huckabee. Nor that I don't much care for McCain either. And though I can't point to any specific reasons, really, I think on a personal level I always disliked Romney most of all. So it's sort of fitting that pundits are talking about the Republican VP selection field as though it were a contest between Romney and Huckabee. Virginia Postrel links to an article that's about ready to call it for Huckabee. Which, for me like for Postrel, will go in my long column of reasons not to give in to the temptation to vote against Obama by voting for McCain in November.

That said, I think Huckabee is definitely the smarter choice from McCain's point of view. This is mostly because Huckabee's base is, I strongly suspect, more solid. Yes, granted, Romney makes a better appeal to small-government conservatives, arguably the portion of the party that McCain is most alienated from. But there are two reasons why this probably doesn't matter much. First, given what he's likely running against, McCain has a pretty low bar to being the chosen candidate of fiscal conservatives in 2008. Of the two evils running, it's pretty clear he's the lesser. Second, I don't think Romney's support was ever all that solid. Fiscal conservatives didn't like or have any confidence in Romney, they just sorta figured he was the least bad in a pretty bad bunch. So it isn't as though there are disgruntled Romney supporters that McCain has to win back. They'll just transfer their reasoning from Romney to him in the general election automatically. Third and most importantly, there are reasons to believe that there isn't a viable libertarian voting block anyway. Whatever our pull, it seems likely to be less important than the Religious Right's pull. Unlike us, the Religious Right actually can deliver states at general election time. If you take the current Republican primary contest as a feedback generator for VP choice - which I do - then notice that Huckabee, who's officially out, is still doing better than Paul, who remains in. Romney, of course, "suspended" his campaign and so had his name removed - but that says a lot about his own confidence in his voter appeal - which is to say that in classic John Edwards fashion he does't want there to be any public record of his poor performance. He knows that his market value plummets once he's no longer an alternative to McCain in a way that Huckabee's and Paul's don't.

Just to be clear, I'm not at all happy about a McCain/Huckabee ticket, but then I was never happy about a McCain ticket period. I'll be voting Libertarian, as I always do. As Postrel says, choosing Huckabee (or Romney, for that matter) as running mate only makes my "wasted" LP vote that much easier to cast. But there's a point Libertarians should pay attention to here. Letting the Democrats go whole-hog to the left, as they're doing in their primary now, gives the Republicans that much more wiggle room on statism themselves. It enables tickets like McCain/Huckabee. If we're serious about wanting small government solutions, we need to talk to Democrats as well as Republicans, if only because bringing the Democrats closer to the fold means the Republicans have to compete harder on issues we care about to get our attention. Right now, McCain has the luxury of not having to worry about fiscal conservatives and small-government advocates, and that's entirely a function of who his competition is.

Two More Words I Need

2008-05-18T17:29:00.000-07:00

Recently trolling around some radical feminist takedowns of Firefly, I discovered two more words I needed and never knew.

The first of these is a kind of corollary of Julian Sanchez' hugely useful "outsight" - which, for a refresher, is:

A statement believed by the person who utters it to be an important or profound insight, but which is in fact regarded by its audience as so obvious or elementary that it reveals the speaker as hopelessly ignorant or slow-witted, at least relative to the relevant group.

Wandering in Feminist Wonderland over the weekend, I realized that we need a related form of this work that means something like:

A person who believes themselves to hold radical or shocking opinions when in fact they are rehashing familiar ground.

Just to make clear the distinction, I first became concsious of needing a word for this talking to a bookshop owner in Black Mountain a decade ago. I can't remember the name of the shop - which was just a temporary vehicle for this woman to get rid of her paperback collection and is now defunct - but it was something like "Mysteries of the Hills?" Anyway, good as her collection was, she herself was quite annoying, always saying things like "I've found that men can't write about female characters, but women are good at writing about male characters," and then immediately putting her finger to her lips and saying "Oh, shhh! I'm not supposed to say that." See what I mean? Independently of whether the opinion is true (and in this case I'm not so sure it is: I would say that women are in general better at writing their male characters than men are at writing their female characters, but there are plenty of male authors who do quite a good job writing about women all the same), the point is that it isn't new or shocking, and going about like you've just said something really challenging and threatening to the establishment when in fact you're just repeating "Gynocentrism 101" is irritating at best, pathetic at worst. (For an example from Linguistics, be sure to check out Indiana's own Bob Port, who specializes in selectively quoting Chomksy and then following up with a second act of repeating well-established findings in Cognitive Science as though they were news to anyone.) So - I don't have any brilliant suggestions myself, but I think English needs a corollary word to "outsight" that's an adjective or noun for this kind of person.

Another word that I stumbled across was the practice - apparently invented on Gorgon Poisons - of calling male feminists "unicorns." Now, what Gorgon means by this is that men can't be feminists:

Oh, oh and a male feminist (no, no they really do exist, like unicorns and fairies, don't be so patriarchal) disagrees with me about all sex being rape.

That's the first use of it I saw, but the rest of the relevant post contains several references to male feminists as "unicorns," the implication being that they can't exist, and it's all a front.

I actually find this word useful myself, but not in exactly the same sense that Gorgon/Allecto means it. I think there can be male feminists, but probably not male gynocentrists of the kind that Gorgon represents. To the extent that there are such people (and it cannot be denied that one not terribly infrequently meets men claiming to be gynocentrists), I'm inclined to agree with Gorgon that there's probably a motivation beyond ideology at work. Either they're faking it, or there are some self-loathing issues, or, most commonly in my opinion, they're opting out of normal male sexual competition for whatever reason. And in fact, I am reasonably sure, from what I gather watching Buffy and Firefly, that Joss Whedon himself may be in this last category. No proof, of course, but I think the Whedon stand-in in each series is Xander (Buffy) and Wash (Firefly) - with Wash "more so" than Xander. Point being - he's no Riley, Angel or Mal - i.e. not an alpha by anyone's standards - and one coping strategy I've noticed in guys who are conscious of falling short of alpha status but definitely wish they had it is to drop out altogether and take "the girls' side." I had a roomie in college who definitely fit in this category. I propose we call these people "unicorns." Fitting - because while it comes close to being a real creature, and while there's nothing inherently contradictory in its nature, I'm not convinced I've ever actualy seen one, you know? The ability of some guys to lap up any amount of contradictory tripe radical feminists spit out unfazed tends to the conclusion that they're not really sincere. Trust a feminist to know that - no one knows their motivations better than them.

This One's not for Us

2008-05-18T16:16:00.000-07:00

There has been much rejoicing in libertarian circles over the California Judiciary's recent decision that gay marriage is legal in California. I would like to politely suggest that some of this enthusiasm may be misplaced.

The California case is interesting for a number of reasons. Most importantly, the text of the decision makes clear that the Court is ruling, to some extent, on a matter of semantics.

Accordingly, the legal issue we must resolve is not whether it would be constitutionally permissible under the California Constitution for the state to limit marriage only to opposite-sex couples while denying same-sex couples any opportunity to enter into an official relationship with all or virtually all of the same substantive attributes, but rather whether our state Constitution prohibits the state from establishing a statutory scheme in which both opposite-sex and same-sex couples are granted the right to enter into an officially recognized family relationship that affords all of the significant legal rights and obligations traditionally associated under state law with the institution of marriage, but under which the union of an opposite-sex couple is officially designated a "marriage" whereas the union of a same-sex couple is officially designated a "domestic partnership."

In other words, the Court declines to say whether gays actually have equal partnership rights under the state Constitution, but merely notes that as California statutes have afforded them the same rights (California recognizes domestic partnerships - it was in fact the first state to pass such recognition through the legislature without being compelled to do so by a court order), it is impermissible to use distinct legal names for the unions of hetero- and homo-sexual couples. Put simply, if the state legislature had never bothered to create a domestic partner registry, there would be no basis for this ruling.

Another interesting point is that it goes out of its way to specify what the state constitutional "right to marriage" means. As this section goes on for nearly 100 pages, it would be difficult in the extreme to pick a representative section to quote. The basic idea, however, is that marriage is an important social institution for a number of reasons including, but not necessarily limited to, the establishment of meaningful familial bonds, the raising of children in a stable environment, providing a clear locus of responsibility for the care of incapacitated citizens, defining and maintaining familial relations, etc. Past California court decisions have ruled, on essentially this basis, that marriage is therefore something that the legislature is free to define, regulate, and to create incentives to promote (for this they rely primarily on McClure v. Donovan (1949) 33 Cal.2d 717, 728). Given that marriage is a bedrock social institution well-established by tradition and well-connected to the maintenance of the social relationships that help society function, Courts in California have concluded, based especially on sections 1, 7 and 9 of Article I of the state constitution (California's "Bill of Rights," actually), that it is a fundamental right, even though there is no explicit reference in California's state constitution to a "right to marry." Article I of California's state constitution is available online here, but for brevity it's reasonable to consider section 1 a restatement of the "inalienable rights" of the Declaration of Independence plus a right to "privacy," section 7 a guarantee of due process rights and equal protection before the law, and section 9 a guarantee of the sanctity of contracts.

A further interesting point is that this particular court decision not only adds to the list of reasons why marriage is a "fundamental right" emotional considerations, but also acknowledges that this is not grounded in precedent:

Although past California cases emphasize that marriage is an institution in which society as a whole has a vital interest, our decisions at the same time recognize that the legal right and opportunity to enter into such an officially recognized relationship also is of overriding importance to the individual and to the affected couple.

and

The ability of an individual to join in a committed, long-term, officially recognized family relationship with the person of his or her choice is often of crucial significance to the individual's happiness and well-being. The legal commitment to long-term mutual emotional and economic support that is an integral part of an officially recognized marriage relationship provides an individual with the ability to invest in and rely upon a loving relationship with another adult in a way that may be crucial to the individual's development as a person and achievement of his or her full potential.

The final interesting point of this decision is that it makes explicit that extending the designation "marriage" to the already established legal category of same-sex domestic partnerships will not endanger the traditional institution of marriage in any way. The reasoning here isn't stated as clearly as that for the other points, but it seems to be based on the first point: because legal statutes already afford same-sex domestic partnerships all the same legal privileges of heterosexual marriage, it is difficult to see how merely changing the name of these partnerships to include them in the former category would pose any threat to such a well-established (both legally and in civil/religious tradition) institution as marriage.

Let me now set out some reasons why libertarians should be careful with this one.

(1) It affirms the state's right to define and regulate marriage. Obviously this one will be of the most concern to most libertarians. I believe strongly - and I think I share this convicton with most libertarians - that marriage is a private matter properly handled contracturally between the concerned individuals. To the extent that there is a fundamental right to participate in defining the terms of any contractural relationship into which one enters, it is completely improper for the government to go about regulating the terms of marriage. The government needs to get out of the business of telling people what their marriages mean. Its role here is simply to enforce the legal contracts that free citizens draw up between themselves. Naturally such contracts should be drawn up in accordance with state (and federal) laws governing the raising of children, disposal of property, etc. But that is precisely the point: any substantive issue that could legally constrain a marriage contract can be and in fact is already defined outside the context of marriage. There is simply no compelling interest that I can see for the government to create a legal category for "marriage" that it can then micro-manage. If entering into relationship is a "fundamental freedom," as the California State Supreme Court here says it is, that means the government needs to let people exercise their own judgment about the details of those relationships.

(2) Even in affirming the state's right to define and regulate marriage, it wilfully ignores legislation passed on precisely this point. In 2000, California voters passed, with a 61.4% majority, Proposition 22, which limits marriage to a partnership between a man and a woman. Glenn Greenwald has tried to argue that as the California legislature has twice approved legislation requiring the adoption of a gender-neutral marriage bill, that in fact the Court is simply following recent public opinion trends in California in extending marriage to gays. But this is obviously disingenuous. Directly-elected state representatives may have passed such bills, but the equally directly-elected governor has vetoed them, and that on the grounds that it is a matter for a ballot initiative. If public opinion is as Greenwald says, then why haven't gay rights activists felt comfortable proposing a ballot initiative to overturn Proposition 22? 61.4% is a pretty convincing expression of the will of the majority, after all, and if circumstances have truly changed since 2000, the mechanisms are definitely in place in California for revisiting the question. What is unacceptable is a court that reserves to the government the right to define and regulate marriage but then refuses to allow regular governmental procedures to be followed in hammering out that definition. Greenwald's sophistry notwithsatnding, this is a classic case of "judicial activism."

(3) It gives arbitrary preference to some lifestyle choices over others. My major complaint about the gay marriage "struggle" in general is that gays are essentially arguing for the extension of marriage privileges to their group and not against the enterprise of restricting and regulating marriage itself. This is something that no libertarian should get excited about. Rights apply to everyone or no one at all. If there is a "civil right" to marriage, then why, one wonders, does it apply only to hetero- and (recently) homo-sexual couples and not to groups? There is, after all, no shortage of historical precedent for polygamous and polyandrous marriages playing all the useful social roles in society that the California Supreme Court enumerates as justification for state involvement in the marriage enterprise. I am sick to death of something being cast as a "civil rights" struggle that is, in reality, just about extending privileges to one's own group. It would be as if Martin Luther King Jr. had argued for equality for black people but told the government to do what it wanted about Jews. It just doesn't work. Either you're committed to the idea that any marriage is valid provided it performs (or at least has the potential to perform - since, let's face it, many individual heterosexual marriages are bad news for all involved, however conformant with tradition) the social functions the Court cites in its reasoning, or you're jockeying for special recognition for your own special interests. It is far from clear, using the Court's own logic, why it is only homosexual couples that the current statues discriminate against and not polygamous religious sects as well. After all, the right to exercise one's conscience in following his religion is actually written out in Article I of California's State Constitution, unlike the "right to marry," which has to be inferred. Certainly there is nothing anywhere in the California Constitution that limits marriage to couples, and it is disingenuous of the Court to play flexible with the language of precedent long enough to extend marriage to homosexual couples without extending it to any "useful social units."

(4) It recognizes a government interest in promoting "happiness" by official recognition of one's relationship status. I personally find this bit the most distasteful. Happiness is not a right, but rather something that must be pursued. When the framers wrote this into the Declaration of Independence, what they meant was that the government needs to get out of people's way in order to let them engage in this pursuit. They did not mean by any stretch of the imagination that it is the job of the government to rubber-stamp an official certificate of acknowledgment that one has achieved happiness. When the framers of California's State Constitution write, in Article I, section 1, that

All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.

I am equally sure that they did not have in mind a role for government as official contributor to people's individual happiness by officially approving their family relationships! What kind of an infantile individual needs the government to tell him when he's in a family and when he's not? No, this is not the government's job. The government can, should, and indeed has the duty of enforcing his property contracts with his spouse(s) and protecting the rights of his children, if he has any, but it is not there to grant him "the ability" to "join in a committed, long-term, officially recognized family relationship." Free individuals have this ability period - with or without the government's apparently-magical happiness-granting certificate. Gays who consider themselves married are, in fact, married in the relevant sense already. They do not need the government to make them happy, and I resent in the strongest terms the implication that anyone needs this.

In closing, let me say that I fully understand, and support, the property rights issues involved here. The most convincing reason that marriage needs to be taken out of the hands of government and returned to the realm of individual private contracts are exactly these. The right to designate heirs, dispose of one's property, grant power of attorney to individuals in the case where one is incapacitated (such as in making medical decisions when one is not conscious) - all of these things are RIGHTS THAT ARE, OR SHOULD BE, HELD INDEPENDENTLY OF MARITAL STATUS. As a single, heterosexual male who has no intention of marrying, I am a case in point. Why am I not afforded the same rights in determining what happens with my person and property as married individuals? Why is the power to issue such designations limited to people in intimate relationships - and only certain government-approved kinds of intimate relationships at that? There is a civil rights issue here, but it is much larger than the issue of whether gays should have legally recognized marriages. I am not interested in what the government thinks makes people happy, and I don't consider it the government's duty to make people happy. The government's job is to protect natural rights, nothing more or less. Happiness is an individual's own concern.

So I don't think libertarians should get too excitied about this ruling. It is not a bold step forward for liberty. Quite the contrary, it is a retrenchment of the state's authority to meddle in personal relationships in the odious form of extending, under the guise of "rights," privileges to a certain group while ignoring other groups that almost certainly have better claims, all the while carving out an "essential" role for the government in affirming individual happiness - a role it was never meant to assume - and this only after creative legal acrobatics have allowed the Court to affirm society's "right" to define and regulate marriage while blatantly disregarding what a clear majority of "society" has actually, and quite recently, said on the matter through established legal process. I'll pass.

Noah, pt. II - The Return

2008-05-17T17:56:00.000-07:00

He's baaaack. Just as I was starting to think it was absurd to keep Noah's blog on my roll, he went and updated. Go have a look: it's a bit that I totally agree with about the legalization of gay marriage in California by judicial fiat. I'll have something of my own to say about that soon too; today I got distracted watching a load of TV. Anyway, welcome back Source-Filter!

President's Questions

2008-05-15T14:29:00.000-07:00

A friend points my attention to McCain's recent suggestion that the US President should have weekly meetings with Congress where he answers questions in the style of Prime Minister's Questions in the UK and Canada.

On the one hand, this seems like a very good idea. One of the greatest political frustrations of Americans, I think, is watching the President hold say-nothing press conferences where he gets to choose (to some extent) who attends, and where he has a reasonably easy time dodging questions. PM Questions is different. In Prime Minister's Questions (UK), the PM faces the opposition leader, who can hammer him about points of policy if he so chooses. Even in the more organized Canadian version, the PM is still facing a hostile and unified audience which has the right to be there - unlike in press conferences where individual reporters can be asked to leave, and all reporters are competing for the president's attention (making it easy for him to sidestep questions he doesn't want by simply giving a halfassed answer and calling on someone else). So yes, I think we'd all like to see a president a bit more accountable to the public for his positions in this way.

On the other hand, there are important differences between Westminster and Congressional systems that shouldn't be overlooked. Most importantly, the president isn't responsible for national policy in the same way that a Westminster-system Prime Minister is. The Prime Minister generally represents, and makes final decisions on policy for, the majority party (or ruling coalition) in Commons - i.e. for the sitting government. While he isn't de jure an elected dictator, de facto it sometimes comes close - especially in systems like Canada's where MPs aren't generally allowed to vote their conscience against their party in Commons. The president in a Congressional system, by contrast, heads a completely different branch of government, one which is, in theory anyway, not really concerned with creation of policy so much as its implementation. We all know that the presidency has gotten too big for its britches in the past 100 years (especially since FDR), and so maybe there's now some sense to calling the president to account for national policy. But I still worry that this kind of a Q&A session would lend too much public legitimacy to the (technically erroneous) idea that the President is the chief policy architect of the country. It may, in fact, even be used to try to usher in even more expansions of presidential power, such as line-item vetos, etc. (All a future president has to do is complain loudly that Congress is giving him more grief than he has power to answer in the Q&A session - you know, take the line that "if they're gonna hammer me about policy, maybe they should give me the power to make it?" - that kind of thing.) If someone should be answering questions on a weekly basis about policy, it should probably be the Majority leaders of each House. But even then it's sort of against the spirit of the original Republic - simply because the Founding Fathers made clear that they didn't want an adversarial system of competition between parties. Representatives were supposed to voice the concerns of their constituents, nothing more.

I suppose we're kind of a distance from the Republic the Founders intended in a number of ways, and more's the pity. So from a realistic point of view, I guess I have no objection to a weekly "President's Questions" set. And I would especially encourage a weekly debate between the majority and minority leaders of Congress. But in all honesty I doubt it's going to do much good. For one thing, our politicians have gotten so good at speaking bullshit that I don't think a Q&A session is going to do much to hold them to account. For another thing, there's probably not enough at stake in our system for this kind of thing to be really effective. In the UK system, it's people who are out of power questioning people who are in power, and that goes a long way. In our system, so much legislation is bipartisan, and the parties are (comparatively speaking) loosely organized enough, that I don't think you're going to see the same kind of block adversarial system that you see in Westminster systems. What you'd get is more along the lines of grandstanding by individuals advancing their special interests ... i.e. something not too terribly different from what goes on in Congress now.

If Senator McCain wants to say something useful about the presidency, then he needs to make clear that the president isn't responsible for fixing all the nation's problems. He needs to especially make this clear to Obama supporters, who seem to think that their guy is going to cure all their ills overnight just by talking pretty. In fact, the surest way to make himself distinct from Obama is to quit promising people the moon. And if something good were to come out of any future Q&A sessions, hopefully what that would be is showing the American people that there is no central desk in our Republic where "the buck stops," and that that's probably as it should be.

False Rape Accusations for the Internet Generation

2008-05-15T13:44:00.000-07:00

This seems like a really bad idea. A girl who claims to have been the victim of a rape has posted information about it on YouTube.

According to the article, lots of people are telling their stories online in chatrooms and on social networking sites because it's a chance to "communicate without having to face someone or fear their judgment." And to that extent, this is probably a Very Good Thing. But there is a definite downside to this as well. First of all, not even rape awareness advocates are so hot on people posting details of their attacks online - and for a couple of very good reasons. Mainly: infomration once posted on the internet can be permanent, leaving open the chance that a later employer, enemy, publicity hound, whatever might stumble across it and use it against the victim. Secondarily: the perpetrator might find it and get a chance to relive the experience. Second of all, this seems like the perfect vehicle for the "revenge false accusation," which is unfortunately quite common. Just to reiterate what I've said before - a "successful" false accusation of rape (where the falsely accused goes to prison) is much worse than a "successful" actual rape. It is completely unforgivable that society is generally concerned only with protecting victims of rape and rarely talks about victims of false accusations.

Unsurprisingly, the article linked is a case in point. The entire article makes not a single mention of the frequency of false accusations, nor of the consequences that a victim of a false accusation can face. Instead, we get tripe like this:

But counselors said survivors are going to look wherever they can to find help and comfort, particularly when they don't get it through the court system.

That's nice, but the court system isn't for "comfort," it's for justice. The court system isn't there to make people feel better, but to remove known criminals from the general population and so prevent further damage.

"What you hear from every rape crisis center from Pensacola to Key West is that there are hardly ever any prosecutions," she said. "Most sexual violence is acquaintance rape and unfortunately, a lot of juries still think that if a victim had a relationship with their attacker, then they cannot be raped by that person."

What a disingenuous way to put it. The main problem with getting prosecutions isn't that the juries fail to understand what rape is, but rather that victims don't get themselves to hospitals to get tested in time. If Rape Crisis Centers want to fight the rape problem effectively, they need to encourage victims to get evidence on record as quickly as possible. Obviously, pursuing a case based on the purported victim's word alone is something the police should not, in fact, do. The very definition of a "witch hunt" is going after a person because he fits a criminal profile, rather than because there is any evidence to back up the conclusion. To the extent that rape resource centers blame the problem on a lack of willingness on the part of juries to the exclusion of a lack of evidence, they are encouraging witch hunts.

Pointedly, the case in question is just such a case.

Orange County authorities charged the 23-year-old man Crystal accused of assaulting her with lewd or lascivious battery. According to court documents, Crystal and the man both said they had an ongoing sexual relationship.

and

The prosecutor, who declined to comment to CNN, concluded that the teen and the 23-year-old had consensual sex, according to the case file.

Florida law states that a 15-year-old cannot give consent to sex. And though Crystal was 15 at the time of the alleged forced encounter, the prosecutor wrote that the case would not be prosecuted because Crystal was "a mere 1 month away" from turning 16, when it would be "legal to give consent," according to documents.

In other words, an investigation was done, and no conclusive evidence of rape was found. If there was a rape at all, it was "statutory," a technicality in the case of a girl who is 1 month away from turning 15. There's little doubt how that case would go: the accused would claim the girl had lied to him about being 16, and the jury would buy it because she was awfully close anyway. The prosecution wouldn't get a conviction even on the purportedly "proveable" charge of statutory rape, and so they choose not to waste their time. And why not? 15-and-11-months versus 16-and-1 is a hair hardly worth splitting when you're talking about a girl who repeatedly willingly had sex with a man she later claimed attacked her. Now - don't get me wrong - consensual sex between partners most definitely does not give one the right to violate the other. But recall that in this case there doesn't seem to be any hard evidence of a violation. (CNN certainly doesn't report on any.) Absent hard evidence, NO rape case should go to trial.

The reporter here is playing fast-and-loose with the word "rape." On the one hand, there's the violent type that involves a clear violation of the victim's bodily rights. On the other hand, there's the merely technical type that involves an arbitrary cutoff point not dissimilar to the voting or drinking ages. The one is clearly not the same as the other, and the two crimes should probably have different names, actually. But since they don't, we can technically call what "happened to" Crystal a "rape."

In any case, regardless of the wisdom of posting the intimate details of your sex life, consensual or otherwise, on YouTube, I find it appalling, and all-too-typical, that an article on this subject fails to even mention the potential damage that this practice will do to people falsely accused. Again - if false accusations of rape were rare, that would be one thing - but they most definitely are not. By choosing not to cover that side of this issue, CNN abdicates its professional standards at a social cost that is far from trivial.

Why Now?

2008-05-15T07:14:00.000-07:00

As everyone knows, Edwards endorsed Obama yesterday, leaving everyone scratching their heads asking "why now?" Wouldn't it, after all, have been better for Obama for Edwards to do this immediately after North Carolina? I mean, hell, they could've even held the press conference outside the voting booth or something. Point being, Obama needs this thing ended before Hillary causes more trouble, and doing that ahead of West Virginia would've been better for everyone, no? Ah-ha, they say, I've figured it out! Obama had Edwards wait until Wednesday deliberately - to rain on Hillary's parade. Edwards has more delegates than she gained on him (never mind that they aren't pledged to vote how Edwards tells them), and Edwards, unlike Obama, actually appeals to her base. So Edwards endorsing Obama the day after West Virginia is meant to render West Virginia meaningless by saying "see, here's a guy white, uneducated, working-class people can get behind, and HE likes Obama, AND he's popular enough that this will turn the tide back after WVa."

Well, right, could be, might be, who am I to say? It's just that I think too much of the commentary assumes that Obama has all the say in this. Commensurate with the media's lovefest with Obama, of course (he's gonna Change the World! ® - no REALLY!), but maybe not commensurate with reality. I'd like to say I'm not really all that cynical - I'm just cynical of John Edwards, and so whenever that dude's name is on something, I think "what's in it for him?" about 50milliseconds faster than I think it for any other politician. And so I think if you want to sniff this one out, you have to stop thinking in terms of "what's good for Obama" and start thinking in terms of "what's good for Edwards."

And then it all comes lucid.

Coward that he is, Edwards couldn't be bothered to endorse anyone until he was pretty sure the game was over. This is not a man who takes political risks. Oh, he's reasonably good at spinning his positions as risky, but they never actually are. Ditto this case: all the bloggers who predicted back in February that Edwards would endorse Obama after Super Tuesday got the endorsement right but the timing wrong. Really, they should've known better. The Edwards I know takes safe bets but makes them look daring. And that's what's going on here too. He waits until the media has called it for Obama, but he doesn't wanna be just another in a long list of superdelegates (wait - wha? Edwards is not even a superdelegate!) jumping ship after North Carolina. That would make it all too clear that he's just being opportunistic. So he waits instead until after West Virginia, which everyone knew was going hard for Clinton - the last possible time this election season that he has the chance to endorse someone without it looking like a fait accompli. Kentucky/Oregon is going to change nothing, exactly no one cares about Montana and South Dakota, and no one honestly believes that the DNC is going to let Puerto Rico decide its candidate for it. It really is now or never - and better now than last week.

Not to mention, of course, that Edwards pretty transparently sold his endorsement to gain Obama's support for his anti-poverty initiative. Obama needs "street cred" with the white millworkers, and Edwards gave him the opportunity. Anyone fail to see where this is going? Yup - Edwards gets a cabinet position in the Obama Administration, probably something like HUD. Better yet, Obama is just goofy enough to do something like expanding the cabinet to create a "Poverty Department" that Edwards could chair. Or, wait, I probably have that backward, right? What Obama would do instead is collapse several currently-existing departments - including HUD - into one, and let Edwards be Secretary of that instead (no doubt with a suitably Orwellian name like the "Department of Shared Prosperity"), claiming to have "eliminated government waste" even as Edwards concocts new ways for Democrats to buy votes for themselves with our tax money.

Another sure sign that this ball was in Edwards' court all along is that pansy-ass "slip-of-the-tongue" interview that Edwards gave MSNBC Friday, where he pretty clearly said he voted for Obama but then played the "you misunderstood my southern drawl" card to pretend he hadn't. That doesn't sqaure with the rest of your theory, you say - wasn't Edwards waiting until after West Virginia to endorse so that he could "look daring?" Well, right, that's the whole point. On Friday, it looked like a flood of superdelegates would turn camp for Obama. No use endorsing him if you're the last in that line. But equally no use endorsing him if you have nothing really to sell, and Edwards has more to sell as a way of mitigating the inevitable loss in West Virginia than he does trying to stymie it. A hard choice, right? But why choose at all when you can have your cake and eat it too? So he does the smarmy thing and says something without saying it. If the tide with the superdelegates continues to turn to Obama, Edwards can always go back and own his "slip-of-the-tongue." And if not, hey, who's counting? He can go ahead with the original plan and wait until after West Virginia.

But the best reason, of course, to believe that it was Edwards himself who decided to wait until after West Virginia to endorse is his cowardice. Edwards, let's not forget, is fighting for his political survival. He knew going in to this thing that (a) he wasn't going to win the nomination and (b) there was no way in Hell the voters of North Carolina were sending him back to the Senate (every time I read in the press that Edwards is a "former" Senator from North Carolina I fill in my own inversion of the Arthurian legend for him: "the once-and-never-again Senator from North Carolina"). A second shot at the Vice Presidency was unlikely, but not impossible. No doubt Edwards kept his options open there. But it is, in any case, pretty clear that Edwards ran for president this second time in the hopes of getting an appointment of some kind. I mean, when you know the voters of your "home" state aren't gonna give you a second chance, when you know you can't win a fair democratic contest, the next best thing to do is gun for an appointment, right? And maybe in the meantime all will be forgiven, who knows? But cabinet position leads to VP bid leads to presidential bid - or whatever's going through that "ambition-only" zone that passes for his brain. And, well, the last thing that a coward with ambition needs is a slap in the face. Knowing that Clinton was going to win West Virginia no matter what, Edwards can't possibly endorse Obama ahead of time and watch it have no effect. That would be admitting his own irrelevance. So he did it afterward, when the voters of West Virginia - supposedly "his" demographic - can't possibly tell him how little they actually think of him.

So sorry, Johnny, this one's not impressed. And I'm guessing the remaining superdelegates won't be either.

Words I Needed and Never Knew

2008-05-15T06:47:00.000-07:00

Some time ago I meant to blog about scheissenbedauern - a faux (and ungrammatical, but never mind) German portmanteau of "to shit" and "to regret" that's meant to mean "The disappointment one feels when something is not nearly as bad as one hoped it would be." You know, like Neil Diamond. Bad, but not as bad as you were hoping it would be, thus spoiling the rant to your friends you were building up listening to it. I would say that the TV show Friends is the best example of this I have from my own life. I want to hate it, and I do hate it, but I have to honestly admit it has its moments now and then, and that's hugely disappointing on a whole different level from the badness of the show itself.

Apparently this word was invented by Joe Queenan - and I meant to give a shout-out for inventing such a useful word, but I ended up writing about some other quotable things he'd said instead. I blame it on beer.

But today I came across another such totally useful word, so I have a chance to remedy the error. This one is "outsight," apparently coined by Julian Sanchez. It's:

A statement believed by the person who utters it to be an important or profound insight, but which is in fact regarded by its audience as so obvious or elementary that it reveals the speaker as hopelessly ignorant or slow-witted, at least relative to the relevant group.

It's amazing, actually, that I've lived 33 years without realizing that I desperately needed both of these words. But I really do. I can't even begin to estimate how much metabolic energy I've wasted speaking in paragraphs when the simple addition of one of these two to the English vocabulary would've let me go on about my business in miliseconds.

The one problem with them → I don't think either is terribly likely to catch on. Well, "outsight" might, but "scheissenbedauern" is just all kinds of wrong somehow. Maybe it's interference from the fact that I happen to know it would be ungrammatical in German. Or maybe it's interference from the fact that it fails to complete an obvious paradigm with Schadenfreude (i.e. it should be Schadenbedauern instead). Or maybe it's just that it has too many syllables and sounds too obviously foreign. I don't know, but my gut tells me I won't be hearing many examples of this one. "Outsight" I have more hope for. Even so, I would venture to say it has the opposite problem as Scheissenbedauern: it's almost too plain for its own good. Still, I get why it's witty, and I definitely plan to start using it on a regular basis (easily achieved in graduate school - a place teeming with people who try to pass off Really Obvious Things as Deep Insight).

There is apparently a genre of books devoted to exploring these terms - you know, either exotic foreign words we "don't have in English" or words we desperately need but weren't aware of lacking. If the reviews are any guide, the book behind the first link is god-awful, and the second is actually sort of good. When I'm done with graduate school, have put in my time as a post-doc, and am finally tenured at a name-brand university and reclaim some of that precious commodity known as "free time," I may give it a read.

Still not exactly losing

2008-05-14T09:23:00.000-07:00

Byron York nails it in a column today about Hillary Clinton's continued presence in the race:

If the Democratic presidential race were a runaway, if Barack Obama were, say, 1,500 delegates ahead of Hillary Clinton, then there would likely not be so many anguished cries for Clinton to quit the race.

Right. The reason everyone is calling for her to concede is because she does stand a chance, albeit not a very encouraging one. And Democrats are kidding themselves if they think this division means nothing with regard to their chances in November. Clinton won West Virginia with 67% of the popular vote - more or less exactly my prediction of "close to 70%", and a landslide by any measure. West Virginia is about as rock-solid Democrat as they come. Clearly, there is a not-insignificant demographic among the Demcrats' "base" that considers Obama unacceptable.

Not fair? Oh, but it is. Clinton cinched this victory a week after everyone pronounced her campaign dead. And a week during which large numbers of superdelegates jumped to Obama. If "momentum" were really on his side, Clinton's win in West Virginia should've been feeble. These people went to the polls to say they don't want Obama on their ticket; there is no other interpretation.

Oh yeah, and about those superdelegates. Notice that there wasn't a flood of them. There were enough to square with the interpretation that they wanted to jump ship (declare early, whatever) to be on the nominee preumptive's good side, but hardly enough to support the theory that the DNC was acting behind the scenes to bring the campaign to a close. Don't forget that even though Obama is the nominee presumptive (at the moment), it's far from clear that he can hold his own in the national campaign. Winning a primary as a dark horse candidate and going on to lose the general eleciton - a la George McGovern in 1972 - is not a good recipe for future influence in the party. Hell, even one-time election-winners like Jimmy Carter get sidelined in this party if they fail to deliver. Carter's been redeemed a bit in the meantime, of course, but he spent most of the 80s in the wilderness. So even with his "nominee presumptive" status, Obama isn't exactly a risk-free superdel magnet. He's still a gamble, as an individual bid. Which is why the fact that there hasn't been a flood of superdelegates to his camp ahead of yesterday makes it fair to say that the DNC isn't sold on him yet. They may not be sold on Clinton either, but I'm guessing they'd still rather hand it to her than to him if at all possible.

Of course, it's looking less and less possible. Even so, the contest is far from over. York is right on the money when he says that if it were over, no one would care that Clinton were still in the game.

The rest of York's column is pretty much tripe, though. There's the usual math tricks to illustrate how weak Obama's lead actually is ("He's the 'president of Chicago!'"), and then a series of cheap shots at the Democrats' supposed inconcistency between counting votes in 2000 and not wanting to count them in Michigan and Florida now that don't quite add up. I mean, I get that there's a certain amount of hypocrisy in the Democrats' sudden insistence on sticking to the rules. After all, most Democrats you talk to think Al Gore won in 2000 because he won the popular vote - i.e. they aren't too concerned with playing that contest by the rules. Suddenly delegate counts are more important than popular votes - at least to Obama supporters, and I too am enjoying the rich irony here. But there are nevertheless important differences between the 2000 general election and the 2008 primary election that York chooses to gloss over.

But whatever. Hillary is still in the game, the Democrats' ship is still sinking, and the continuing mess bodes well for McCain in November.

Caplan Nails It

2008-05-13T10:01:00.000-07:00

Via Cafe Hayek, I came across this excellent piece in support of the gas-tax holiday from Brian Caplan. Caplan is someone I've been meaning to read for some time. His book is a staple of Cafe Hayek recommendations, in fact. Now that I've seen his writing skills in action, maybe I'll give him a more thorough read.

The point of the article is that Hillary Clinton's (and John McCain's) proposed gas-tax holiday is actually a blessing in disguise, though almost certainly not for the reasons that Clinton (or McCain) would state in public. The basic idea is this: in reality, (temporarily) repealing the federal gas tax will actually benefit the oil companies more than consumers. This is simple economics. The supply of oil is fixed, so there's actually very little (in the short term) that oil companies can do to increase output. Demand, however, is flexible: when prices go up dramatically, people find ways to consume less. So - by giving consumers an $0.18 break, all the government does is stimulate demand, meaning that the oil companies peddle more of their product and pocket the excess for themselves. The tax holiday benefits them, not us. Put differently - oil companies' profit margin on the oil they sell remains the same (since it long ago ceased being affected by the tax), but the tax cut lowers the at-the-pump price - meaning people will buy more gas. So oil companies take the same percentage of a larger market. Bully for them.

Increased profits for oil companies are good for two reasons. First, when the market becomes more lucrative, they have greater incentive to invest in production refinements, making the industry more efficient. In fact, the added profits would probably go to fund just such a thing. Second, taking an action that actualy benefits oil companies has the dual benefit of assuaging the public's demands for "action!" while not doing any actual harm to the supply of oil. In the 70s, of course, Nixon (and Carter, to a lesser extent) did exactly the wrong thing and regulated supply and pricing, with the effect that there was a Soviet-style shortage of gas right here in these very United States. I think Caplan takes the right tack here in assuming that politicians are just dumb actors who are motivated by desire for job security to do what the public wants. It's nice for us in the blogoshpere to carp about "spineless" politicians, but any rational agent, threated with being sacked, will do what it takes to keep his job. If the public wants "action!," politicians are bound to supply it. Nixon supplied it in spectacular fasion, with an equally spectacular disaster to show for it. The nice thing about the gas tax holiday is that it lets Clinton (and McCain) pretend to be doing something without doing the actual damage that Nixon's price controls wrought.

But I think Caplan missed at least one other side benefit to this particular politico-goodie. Once repealed, the tax is going to be hard to reinstate, and that's a Very Good Thing. We don't want government profit tied to a politically volatile commodity. That is, I personally don't want the government having a stake in continued oil production, which it currently does (to the tune of $9billion or so). If we're to ween ourselves off of oil, the sooner various interest groups turn their attention elsewhere, the better. Once consumers get used to oil prices that are - let's be realistic and say $0.06 - lower, no one is going to like a politician who suddenly adds at least that much back onto their prices overnight (the inevitable result, from a consumer's point of view, of repealing a tax holiday). So going down this road means that government abdicates, to some non-trivial degree, its ability to regulate the oil market. I'm all for it.

Granted, there are proposals for "windfall taxes" in the works. This would, at best, cancel out the effects of the gas tax holiday. But that's a good thing in its way simply as a function of the publicity that the tax holiday is getting. Any failure to deliver on lowering prices at the pump will end up in the proposing politician's lap, possibly with the added goodie that the public isn't so easy to fool next time 'round (having learned its lesson - at least a little bit - that taxing things leads to higher prices).

All that said, I don't much care what happens with the federal gas tax. Oil prices aren't going down any time soon absent some serious breakthroughs in the extraction and refinement processes, and that means possibly not ever. I'm optimistic enough to believe that government has learned from its mistakes on price regulation. Which is to say, enough voters remember the pain of the 1970s that we won't be that stupid this time around. $0.18/gallon isn't going to make or break anyone in the long run, so what we really have here is a neat demonstration of just how powerless government actually is to regulate these things. It's a nice schooling on the follies of Socialism. You can (a) regulate prices and thereby ensure that there will be shortaages, or (b) let the market alone and guarantee that there will be oil to consume, though possibly not at the prices you would fantasize. To the extent that we, as a society, collectively choose option (b), it is an encouraging sign that we've grown up since Nixon's time.

The Quotable Einstein

2008-05-13T08:12:00.000-07:00

A letter to be auctioned in London brings Einstein back into the fold. Seems the guy was an atheist after all. My grandmother is going to have to find someone else to quote when she wants to make the point that intelligent scientists belive in God too.

The interesting point of this story for me is how different Einstein's tone is in the private letter than in his public statements on religion. In public, he was in the habit of making ambiguous statements that left the door open for religious hucksters to claim that he was in their camp (even though he had repeatedly publicly rejected the idea of a personal God). In private, apparently, he sometimes called belief in a personal God "childish superstition" and "the product of human weakness."

Hear, hear!

In fact, I have never found much to disagree with in Einstein's public statements on religion either. Points that he makes that I like include:

There is no personal God - the most important point for me. I can be agnostic about whether or not there is a Creator, but I find it exceedingly difficult to respect people who think that this hypothetical All-Powerful Being gives two shits whether their grandmother just died, or where they put their car keys. There may be a consciousness to the universe. I doubt it, but I can't refute it. But if there is it can't possibly be concerned with shielding the United States against terrorist attacks so long as it keeps the lesbians in line, or making sure people don't drink alcohol on Sunday, or whatever else the religious right is currently complaining about.

Morality cannot come from God - a crucial point for me. Morality cannot be something determined on a reward/punishment basis. A moral action is an action undertaken for the preservation of a rule, not for the promise of a reward. While I recognize that there are some religious people who understand this, the overwhelming majority of them seem not to. If you're avoiding telling lies because you think God will disapprove, then, well, better for the rest of us, I suppose, but your motivation is nevertheless not a "good" one.

A legitimate conflict between religion and science cannot exist - in light of the ID "controversy", the third most important point for me. As I have said before, science and religion operate on different founding principles with different ultimate concerns. Any conflict between them has been manufactured by an interest group.

I do have some bones to pick, though. Einstein was wont to wander off into the realm of the sentimental talking about his "unbounded admiration" for the Cosmos, blah blah. I personally think we can do without all the flowery language. Yes, natural beauty is beautiful, but I don't think an ordered universe is something to marvel at. We make the assumption that the universe is ordered for the purpose of doing science, but I don't see anything in that assumption that's supposed to move me to quiet reflection. It simply is or isn't the case that the universe is ordered. From where I stand, it seems to be ordered, and I accept this as a fact so completely that I can scarcely imagine it being otherwise. Since I cannot imagine an unordered universe, I lack the requisite mindset to marvel at the order of it all.

A point that is bound to be more of a letdown for some than his rejection of religion, however, is Einstein's assertion in the same letter that the Jews aren't special. Now - there is little doubt that Einstein was a cultural Zionist, often speaking fondly of Israel as "our nation," etc. But I find it extremely gratifying that he nevertheless goes on to write that "And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people."

There is a fine line that separates Zionism from racism, and it is exactly this. The belief that the Jews are a distinct cultural group with a shared history that are deserving of nation status is perfectly fine with me. Though not Jewish myself, I largely agree with it. That this nation should exist in Israel/Palestine is obviously a more complicated issue, but since it is already there I defend its right to continued existence, and in accordance with that I support most actions that Israel takes to defend itself from its hostile Arab neighbors. But like any national-"ism," Zion-"ism" is forever in danger of crossing over into jingoism. And this idea that the Jews are somehow chosen or privileged or possessive of special destiny is pretty obviously on the other side of that line. It is an opinion so offensive, in fact, that I believe it is disingenuous of Jewish scholars to write about anti-Semitism as though it were irrational, or based purely on envy, or as though it came from nowhere. Any religion that adopts as one of its premises that its practitioners are special and that you have to be born into it to be one of the chosen (i.e. Christian-style conversions are strongly discouraged) is bound to make enemies. Jewish historians who cannot talk about this openly do their subject a huge disservice.

So it's also nice to see Einstein clearly reject this more militant form of Zionism, and reassuring to know that this man whose face appears on so many bumpers stickers was no racist.

What was the topic again?

2008-05-12T17:31:00.000-07:00

I've been writing a bit lately about the recent trend in Christian apologetics' strategies of trying to style Christianity as more rational, perhaps even more evidence-based - than atheism. I've also scoffed a bit at John Derbyshire for overreacting to "Intelligent Design." But I do agree with Derbyshire on one point: there is something decidedly smarmy about the way Christians are arguing these days.

Dnesh D'Souza published a case in point today. Apparently he's just come off of a debate with renowned philosopher and animal rights activist Peter Singer entitled "God: Yes or No?." D'Souza is gracious enough at the beginning of his column to note that it was brave of Singer to come debate him in front of a 3,000-strong Christian audience at a Christian college. In light of what D'Souza goes on to say, I think that admission was, in fact, revealing - for it is clear by the end of the column that the debate was a setup.

D'Souza invited Singer to debate on whether or not God exists - but he admits that:

In my opening statement I showed the profound connection between Singer's Darwinian atheism and his advocacy of infanticide and euthanasia.

Which isn't, one is at pains to point out, the advertised topic of the debate. But of course, Singer doesn't need defending and had no trouble responding to this:

Remarkably Singer responded by saying he didn't come to debate his bioethical views! Rather, he wanted the debate to focus exclusively on the question of whether God exists or not. I didn't want this to be a debate in which Singer and I ended up talking on completely different subjects, so I engaged him on his chosen ground.

Actually, there's nothing "remarkable" about it. Sticking to the topic is the custom in an honest debate. It's true enough that politicians don't typically do this, but they don't get their reputation for deceit from nowhere. The final flourish about engaging Singer "on his chosen ground" is what's really galling, though. Presumably, both parties agreed on the topic beforehand, making it D'Souza's "chosen ground" as much as Singer's. If D'Souza had intended to debate bioethics instead, he should have invited Singer to a debate on that topic.

Even so, I was disappointed that Singer wouldn't stand up for the opinions that have made him famous, or infamous. Our topic resolution was broad enough to permit a discussion both of the existence of God and also of the social implications of the theist and the atheist positions.

First of all, Singer is more than willing to "stand up for the opinions that have made him 'infamous.'" Even a cursory glance at his biography confirms this: he has, for example, repeatedly lectured in Germany despite deliberate disruptions of his talks and a denounciation of his ethical positions from German academics so near-universal there that he was, for several years, unable to find a university willing to give him a podium there (this owes to his pro-euthanasia views, which are taboo in Germany due to associations with Hitler). If D'Souza had wanted to debate Singer on biomedical ethics, there is little doubt that Singer would have accepted. Second of all, there are no certain "social implications of the theist and the atheist positions." What "the" social implications of each "position" are depend rather a lot on which brand of religion you subscribe to in the case of theism, and which brand of secular ethics you subscribe to in the case of atheism. I myself am, for example, a confirmed atheist, and I've read Singers Practical Ethics from cover-to-cover and agree with almost none of it. Atheism didn't lead me to the same ethical place (in fact, I don't believe Singer's conclusions can even properly be called "ethical") as Singer any more than Christianity leads D'Souza to the same place that Islam would have.

D'Souza knows all of this, of course. He is simply being deceptive. He's pitching a version of events that he knows to be false for the purpose of misleading his audience. And for this reason I've little doubt that blindsiding Singer with the change of topic at the debate was also an intentional setup. What's interesting to me is how acceptable this kind of bait-and-switch tactic has apparently become even among intellectually respectable Christians these days. There was a time when a Christian apologist would hardly have felt the need to bait an atheist into debating him on a Christian campus and then switch topics on him after the event was underway. A lot of people tell me that religion is in our genes. If so, it is evidently being bred out. The manic street preachers and snake-oil salesmen of religion have, of course, always been con men, but there was an age when Christian intellectuals were not. No longer, apparently. The signs are unmistakeable: slowly but surely, religion is dying.

Appropriately perhaps, D'Souza finishes off his column thus:

Is Singer showing us where the road to complete secularism actually leads?

AH, yes, the dangled implication - oldest tool in the set of someone wishing to leave an impression he is incapable of arguing for directly. As it happens, as an atheist myself with a degree in Philosophy, I can answer that question with an emphatic "no." But D'Souza doesn't need to take my word for it. The bookshelves in Philosophy libraries are full of accounts of the reasoning of atheists who don't reach Singer's ethical conclusions at all - most notable among them, perhaps, the writings of one Immanuel Kant (Singer's favorite philosophical punching bag).

More Bigotry from My Man Mitt

2008-05-09T18:56:00.000-07:00

Mitt Romney annoys me. Professionally. Ideologically, I suppose my biggest enemy of all the Republican candidates was Mike Huckabee (though that would be mitigated quite a bit if I could believe he was serious about the Fair Tax). But some people just rub you the wrong way, and for me that was Romney. I just can't stand the guy. Of all the Republican candidates, he struck me as easily the most arrogant and insincere.

One of the things I especially don't like about him is his smarmy, snake-oil salesman approach to religion. I have written before about how contradictory I find the opinion that "any religion is better than no religion." Proponents of it like to call it "siding with a conscience of faith." It is, I suppose, the majority opinion on morality in America that you have to have a religion to have it. And, frankly, one of the main reasons I despise Mitt Romney is that he tries to pander to this opinion with a silver tongue.

National Review is busy reprising its lovefest with him on exactly this point. They've published in full a speech he made articulating exactly this "argument" yesterday at the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty.

Let's listen to Mitt talk trash while pretending to be broad-minded.

Of course he talks mostly about his "Big Speech," you know, the one where he tried to tell us that "better me the Mormon than some atheist" - as if any atheist could possibly win a major party nomination in this day and age.

In the days that followed, my remarks drew a considerable amount of congratulatory comment - and some criticism as well.

Funny - I remember that almost exactly the other way around. There was lots of criticism - and some congratulatory comment as well. But Romney was never one to sell himself even.

He then responds to exactly one of these criticisms - namely the one that says you can't purport to represent the whole of the American people if you systematically ignore non-believers - who George Will helpfully points out number just between the populations of California and Texas.

At first, I brushed this off - after all this was a speech about faith in America, not non-faith in America. Besides, I had not enumerated the contributions of believers - why should non-believers get special treatment?

Oh, gee, I dunno - maybe because if you're offering as a selling point for your candidacy that your "conscience of faith" is an indispensable qualification, any listener with an average IQ picks up on the unmistakeable implication that you believe non-believers can have no moral consciences (or at the very least deficient ones)? Sorry, kiddo, but if you're going to insult a swathe of the lisening public larger than the state of Texas, even if only by implication, people are gonna notice.

He then goes on to say that he "missed an opportunity" to remind everyone that non-believers have as much a stake in religious liberty as believers. Speaking as a non-believer myself, I would just like to say that that's not quite true, and Romney's general attitude is a convenient illustration why. Non-believers have a stake in religious liberty only if it is extended to include the right not to worship. People will say I'm splitting hairs, but I'm not at all. Clearly I'm not if in fact the attitude prevails - and Romney's "Big Speech" is a sterling example of it - that a religious conscience, any religious conscience, is preferable to a non-religious one. Romney clearly makes the distinction himself when he says his "faith speech" was about "faith in America, not non-faith in America." Someone who can say that a simple speech about the politics of faith in America ipso facto excludes the faith-less would, one imagines, have little trouble turning around later and saying that religious liberty doesn't apply to them either.

But the real howler in this speech is the point he goes on to "make:" that religion is indispensable for liberty.

Oh really?

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of history can rattle off ten examples of nation-states that oppressed people in the name of religion in a quarter as many seconds. In fact, one of the major grievances that led to the foundation of the Republic of which Romney wanted to be president was exactly that: religious repression.

But don't worry. Romney's got his bases covered. He wasn't talking about the kind of faith that oppresses people.

History abounds with examples where religion has been imposed by the state upon a people - from the Greek city-state to the dictatorship of the Taliban. But that is not the faith of which I speak.

Of course it isn't. Because why address an issue when you can define it away? This is an old habit of Romney's, in fact.

Would America and the freedom she inaugurated here and across the world survive - over centuries - if we were to abandon our faith in God?

Yes.

I do not believe so.

This is hardly a novel view. Nor is it divisive.

How, one wonders, is this anything other than divisive? The man just said as clearly as he possibly could that atheists have nothing to contribute to the preservation of freedom - that it's a project they couldn't manage on their own. That's about as divisive a thing as one can say on this subject.

Next come a couple of selective quotes from the Founders purporting to affirm Romney's belief that religion is a sine qua non. The one from Adams I'll have to grant him. But this one from Jefferson?

"Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure," Jefferson once asked, "when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift of God?"

Clearly, Romney has misunderstood the implication. It isn't important that the rights come from some ghost, but merely that they are independent of government consent.

Next, apparently religious people love freedom more than anyone else:

Nor can we overlook that people of faith have a unique appreciation for freedom. Because the practice of religion requires freedom, liberty is especially precious to people of faith. They are willing to sacrifice much to protect it.

COME ON! This applies to anyone who values their right. He might as well have said "the pursuit of an education requires freedom" and concluded from it that intellectuals have a unique appreciation for freedom. Or that participating in a market requires freedom, so businessmen do. Etc. etc. ad inifinitum. NO doubt Romney would say "yes, each of these people have their own unique appreciation of freedom." But that, of course, exposes this for the sideshow it is.

Here, though, is the real clincher:

I love how plainly that thought was put by John Adams: "Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean Hell."

And that puts the lie to everything that Romney said before about including non-believers. He starts off by telling us that we have a stake in the liberty he wants for the faithful, and then turns around and says - in as many words - that atheists have no role to play in sustaining American freedom, and that, indeed, life would be absolute Hell if everyone were a non-believer - which is to say, that the religious are the only reason this world is habitable at all.

What a load of bigoted bile.

Waitin' for the Hammer to Fall

2008-05-09T12:04:00.000-07:00

And so it begins...

Obama has just picked up three -- make that five -- superdelegate endorsements, compared with one for Hillary. One of these, in fact, switched from backing her to backing him. I think it's safe to say that this will turn into a steady trickle ahead of Tuesday. If the DNC has any behind-the-curtains opinions, they pretty much need to act now. I don't think anyone would cry foul if a sizeable number of superdelegates pledged for Obama at this point. People definitely would if they pledged for Hillary, though I've noted, and David Limbaugh makes the case more persuasively, that it would be unfair if they did. The race is in exactly the situation that calls for superdelegate intervention, in fact. Superdelegates function like a check on the popular nominating process, making sure that the strategists who actually have to coordinate party interests in Washington with the new president if elected, and who have to actually manage the behind-the-scenes stuff that's crucial to any campaign's success, get someone they can work with. There are really two scenarios where you might want superdelegates calling an election. One when the public has been hasty, and the other to break a tie. One could argue that both, in fact, apply here - that Obama is running mostly on "momentum" now, and that his actual constituency (blacks and latte drinkers) is a McGovern coalition waiting to happen, and that in any event his lead over Clinton isn't convincing enough to hand him the mantel on popular choice alone.

But in line with what I said yesterday, these things have to be played by the rules, and the rules allow the superdelegates to choose how they want. The election has come to a point where it's close enough that they can put their man over the top. And so if they choose to do this for Obama, then he is the legitimate Democratic Party nominee for 2008.

5 endorsements in one day is a lot. It will be interesting to see how many more come in. My only real opinion about this is that if the superdelegates are going to call this race, the worst thing they can do is be timid about it. There will be questions of legitimacy regardless of who the nominee ends up being. That kind of thing kills elections. The most important thing for the Dems if they want to win in 2008 is to be able to rally behind a leader. If the superdelegates are going to call it for Obama now, they need to do it decisively, preferably (from their point of view), decisively enought to shut down Hillary's completely duplicitous bid to have Michigan and Florida counted. Letting delegates trickle in for Obama while Clinton goes on to claim West Virginia by a huge margin on Tuesday is only going to cause more confusion and division. Which is GREAT for the Republicans, of course, but I'm Libertarian, and thereby agnostic about what happens to McCain and buddies. So - Dear Democratic Superdelegates: if you're going to do this thing, do it right and do it now.

The Fat Lady Squeaks out a Note or Two?

2008-05-08T04:41:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I'm publicly defending a Clinton on anything, least of all their right to continue an election, but I think reports of Hillary's death are exaggerated.

Well, actually that's not quite the way to put it. Two days after Indiana/Carolina, it's become hard to imagine that Obama won't be the nominee - but not, crucially, because of the results on Tuesday. It's more to do with the popular interpretation of them.

A typical case would be this piece in TIME:

But while the upcoming primaries in West Virginia and Kentucky will undoubtedly test the resolve of pundits whose eulogies for the Clinton campaign can be undone by the whiff of "momentum," we've already seen the final round.

And John Zogby:

I honestly believe that she will find a way to get out of the race before the next primaries - so as to not hurt her future and to not be blamed for hurting Mr Obama and his chances in the general election.

And John Judis in New Republic:

The Democratic primary is over. Hillary Clinton might still run in West Virginia and Kentucky, which she'll win handily, but by failing to win Indiana decisively and by losing North Carolina decisively, she lost the argument for her own candidacy.

And George Will gets really nasty, with an uncharacteristically flawed analogy about a World Series where you count total runs rather than total games won.

So it goes, commentary after commentary: the consensus is that Obama cinched the nomination in spirit, if not officially quite yet, on Tuesday.

The trouble is, I don't think he did. Here's why. It's not unreasonable to think that Clinton can take West Virginia by close to 70%. This is exactly her demographic - and if she wins by that kind of margin, she'll have reset the game, both in delegates (there are 28 - 21 for her would erase what Obama gained Tuesday) and the popular vote (in which she had a slight lead on Tuesday - and will again after West Virginia). This is followed by Kentucky and Oregon, which amounts to a repeat of Tuesday on grounds more favorable to Clinton. Kentucky will go for her, Oregon for Obama, but the delegate count is roughly even at this point, and there's a good chance Clinton will win Kentucky more decisively than Obama wins Oregon. What happens with Puerto Rico is anyone's guess (these are not the same "Latinos" that the media talks about when it talks about the "Latino vote" in the US), but if Clinton won that too, she'd be convincingly ahead in the popular vote and would have narrowed the gap in delegates at the 11th hour.

George Will's analogy is striking for its flaws. Of course he isn't actually saying that politics is like baseball, but he is saying that like any other game, politics means nothing if not played by the rules. But Clinton is playing by the rules. The rules say you need 2025 delegates to cross the threshold. Obama isn't there yet, so the game goes on, right? Going with Will's baseball analogy, it would be like a World Series where the game was a virtual tie, and as soon as one team pulled ahead they chopped off all the other innings. Not fair. The rules allow Clinton to keep going, so why shouldn't she? Indeed, things seem likely to go her way in the final rounds.

The only answer I can think of is that media coverage hasn't tended to emphasize these facts, but has instead chosen to call the game before it's over. And so the game is over - because going on to narrow the gap and pick up superdelegate votes in this kind of atmosphere will render Hillary unelectable in the general contest. Public consensus, if not a measured majority, is that she should step aside - and so I guess she has to.

But in her defense, this seems like a really hasty and emotional way for a party to choose its nominee, and the irony is that it's almost certainly making the wrong choice. I think Obama will prove to be a paper tiger in the real contest. No use counting him out, of course - he's a very good speaker, charismatic. But I don't think his fuzzy-light message of hope as panacea is going to play as well with the general electorate as it does with the Democratic Party faithful. More to the point, his core constituency of blacks and latte drinkers doesn't reach into enemy territory at all (whereas McCain, by comparison, is pretty good at picking up support from Democrats). John Judis (previous link) compares him to George McGovern. I think that comparison is apt.

So far, Zogby's predicted "30 or so superdelegates declaring for Obama" haven't materialized. That's a good sign that the DNC isn't sold on Obama just yet. But if the commentators keep talking like they're talking, the DNC's not going to have a choice but to hand it to him.

Any way you look at it, it's a mess, and the Democrats might want to seriously rethink the way they run their primaries ahead of 2012. For my part, even though I don't have a horse in this race (I vote Libertarian), I find the whole situation frustrating. I'm no fan of Hillary Clinton, but neither am I a fan of a political system where "momentum" counts more than the official measure of support. It would be better to hold judgment and let the contest run to the end. But I suppose we'll know in a day or two. If the superdelegates are going to pull plug on this one, they need to do it sooner rather than later. The night of the West Virginia primary (next Tuesday!) will be too late.

The Protest Votes that Aren't

2008-05-07T06:45:00.000-07:00

A popular meme in the wake of elections results in Pennsylvania and North Carolina recently has been how badly McCain is supposed to be doing. Since becoming the nominee presumptive, he hasn't been able to do better than 80%, the line goes, ergo he will have a hard time in November. For typical examples of this argument, see Sam Stein on Huffingtonpost, and this entry on DailyKos.

From Sam Stein:

As the battle over Indiana progressed between Sens Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton late Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, a set of depressing polls numbers were finalized for John McCain.

In the GOP primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, the basically uncontested Republican nominee did not gain more than 80 percent of the vote.

A sine qua non for electability, apparently.

And from DailyKos:

And don't miss the fact that McCain, running virtually unopposed, can't nail down more than 80% of GOP primary voters in PA, NC and IN. They're voting for anyone but McCain.

Yes, all 20% of them.

And from King of Zembla:

There's good news and better news. The good news: after a huge win in North Carolina and a hairsbreadth loss in Indiana, Barack Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominee, and can finally turn his attention to November's general election. The better news: John McCain, who has had the Republican nomination sewn up for weeks now, failed to manage 80% support in either state primary, which means that almost two hundred thousand Republicans went to the polls simply to cast a protest vote against him.

So what, one wonders, did the other 80% of Republicans who went to the polls go to do? Play with the fun buttons? Experience the joyous cameraderie of waiting in line? Take advantage of the voting booth curtains as a hard-to-find-venue for a rare game of peek-a-boo?

Let's put this in perspective, shall we?

The last time McCain was in the running was 2000. How did that primary play out?

Well, on the Democratic side there was a hard challenge from Bill Bradley that never really got off the ground. Al Gore cinched the nomination on Super Tuesday (March 7 in 2000) by winning New York and California, the latter by a huge margin. Bradley dropped out on March 9. And then what happened? Click on the link and see for yourself. As late as June 6, Gore was still winning primaries with margins of only 70% or so on average, none with a showing greater than 74% after April 4. Between March 7 and April 4, 12 primaries were held, of which Mr. Gore won only 6 with figures greater than 80%, and one of those was his home state of Tennessee (which he won with a whopping, if predictable, 92%). In other words, even after Bradley dropped out, Gore won only 1/3 of the remaining primaries with the kind of margin that DailyKos et al seem to think is essential for party unity. Mysteriously, Gore was able to go on to win the popular vote by a slim margin in the national contest. A minor political miracle, one presumes.

And the Republicans? That contest was actually competitive, with McCain beating Bush in roughly 1/3 of the primaries through Super Tuesday. Like Bradley, he dropped out on March 9, but didn't endorse Bush until 2 months later. Bush did comparatively better than Gore in the remaining party primaries, but if you look at the results between March 7 and May 7 (when McCain finally got around to endorsing him), Bush breaks this apparently-all-too-critical 80% mark only 4 times (out of 13) - with McCain scoring higher than 20% in a couple. After McCain's endorsement, his name vanishes from the top challengers, but votes continue to be cast for Alan Keyes in the 10% range right up to the end.

Two presidential terms later, I somehow doubt Mr. Bush is sweating it too much.

1996, a sweeps year for incumbent Clinton, obviously won't be very informative on either side, but what happened in 1992?

For the Dems - this was Clinton's "comeback kid" year, when his longshot bid somehow succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. Clinton lost a lot of early caucuses and primaries, but he swept Super Tuesday, solidifying himself as the front-runner. And then it was over, right? Well, not exactly. Jerry Brown, who had already won narrow victories in Maine, Colorado, Nevada, Alaska, and Vermont - resorted to a then-innovative 1-800 number funding scheme (no internet then) which allowed him to edge Tsongas (who had won New Hampshire) out and go on to beat even Clinton in Connecticut. He blew his shot in New York and Wisconsin - where he had an early lead - by suggesting that he would allow Jesse Jackson (then reviled as anti-semitic) on as his running mate. But this didn't mean an easy ride for Clinton. A grassroots movement forced Tsongas back into the race, and he scored a respectable second in New York. Tsongas had to quit due to funding problems (again, no easy internet avenue available in 1992), but Jerry Brown wasn't finished yet. Clinton still needed a win in California to cinch the nomination, and Brown gave him a run for his money (41-48) there. He hung on for most of the rest of the primary, and managed to pull a respectable showing on the first ballot even at the convention. Clinton, of course, won the nomination and held the presidency for the next two terms, but it wasn't for lack of a protest vote avenue.

Let's not even talk about Reagan in 1980, because that one's just too easy. Reagan had a bumpy ride to the nomination, to put it mildly, and yet now he's the party's undisputed folk hero. They even held a Republican primary debate in his presidential library this year and more or less invited all the candidates to make the case that they were the next best thing to ol' Ronnie.

So let's please hear no more about how McCain's historically healthy 70-80% showings are meant to be signs of weakness. This is obviously par for the course for these things. It's true that Republicans aren't happy with him, but then, Republicans are never happy with their candidates. It was apparently Bill Clinton himself who noticed that at convention time "Republicans fall in line and Democrats fall in love." I would consider that an accurate characterization. I won't take the time to lay out the case here, but any cursory look at elections politics in the US will confirm that Republicans decide on their nominee early and then don't fuss. And their nominee is usually the next person in succession anyway - which this season, absent a Cheney bid, was clearly McCain. It's the Democratic primaries that are traditionally divided and messy. This year has, somewhat surprisingly given how things started out, proven to be no exception. I myself, in fact, believe that this trend bears a large portion of the explanation for the Republicans' incongruous success at winning the presidency, which is out of proportion to their representation at local and even congressional levels.

People are indeed casting protest votes against McCain. They want to be sure he gets the message that, as the nominee, he is expected to represent their interests if he wants their votes. This is especially true, one suspects, of the people who vote for Ron Paul. But protest votes aren't all of it. The race for VP is gearing up too, let's not forget, and both Huckabee and Romney have made clear they want the slot - Huckabee more openly than Romney. Some of the people who are voting for Huckabee are no doubt sending that signal too.

It's tempting for Democrats, only just now starting to wrap up a bruising primary, to console themselves by thinking that their divisions will be cancelled out by analogous Republican divisions, but it just ain't so. McCain is going to win this election, and in no small part because his base is NOT similarly divided. Lots of people on Dem blogs (especially the heavily pro-Obama DailyKos) have been complaining that the media blew up the Wright controversy to keep Hillary in the game. While they're spinning media conspiracy theories, they might also consider that the media has been blowing up McCain's recent showings to try to keep him out of it.

A Frustrating Result

2008-05-07T02:13:00.001-07:00

Last night's election results are frustrating. For me personally because I predicted different, for Democrats because it's just barely close enough that Hillary doesn't have to stand aside, and the electorate in general because we still don't know who the Dem nominee will be.

I mean, I guess conventional wisdom this morning is that we can say with reasonable certainty it will be Obama. But here's the thing. Until yesterday, Hillary had him beat in popular vote, and she's still leading him (barely) in superdelegates. And as dumb luck has it, West Virginia and Nebraska are next, both of whch will hand her wins, West Virginia probably by a huge margin. So in less than 7 days she'll be ahead in the popular vote again - probably by about the same margin she was going in to North Carolina/Indiana. And while she won't have exactly brought the delegate gap into a statistical tie, she'll be looking better on that front by May 13th too. After that is Kentucky and Oregon, which have roughly the same number of delegates, on May 30th, which won't solve anything because Kentucky will go for Clinton and Oregon for Obama. Since Kentucky is more likely to go strong for Clinton than Oregon is to go strong for Obama, Clinton will in all likelihood make her popular vote buffer zone more convincing there, and may close the delegate gap a little more. Depending on how all that came out, she might well have been looking like the better choice for nominee by the end of May.

But there was one - and now there are two - trumps still out there. The first one, of course, is superdelegate pledges. More on that in a moment. The second one is that Puerto Rico has switched to a primary, which means it has to be held on June 1st now, and turnout and results will be less predictable. More to the point, results will be more even than they would have been under Puerto Rico's normal caucus approach. DNC rules require primaries to be proportional representation, and since the election will not have been decided by the time it rolls around, and since this is Puerto Rico's only chance for a long time to decide an American election, we can imagine that turnout will be high. And I guess it will largely go for Obama, though almost certainly not enough to put him over the top after Kentucky and West Virginia.

So here's where it gets complicated. On the one hand, the DNC will have a stake in not letting Puerto Rico decide its nominee for it. And it will definitely have a stake in not letting Kentucky and West Virginia trump Obama's current mildly-convincing lead. It will want to go into the convention with at least the illusion that the party base united behind one of the two. So this would speak for a flood of superdelegates to Obama. On the other hand, with the election this up-in-the-air, the party will essentially be unable to avoid the charge that the elite ignored the popular will and voted the way it wanted if a flood of superdelegates decides it for Obama before Clinton gets to stage her last act. People will say - and will be right - that Clinton lost because of dumb luck in the primary scheduling. If West Virginia and Kentucky had followed Pennsylvania, things would have been different, etc. Furthermore, it's hard to ignore just how Obama won North Carolina. It was huge turnout in the black vote, obviously - and winning that by 91-6. Obama's win in NC, while convincing, was hugely demographically lopsided, and still raises serious questions about his general-election viability. If he's only able to win blacks and latte-drinkers, it won't be enough. For her part, the superdelegates are simply not going to hand Clinton a victory after last night. It would look artificial, to say the least, and it would kill black support. The DNC's caught between a rock and a hard place there. The solid black support for Obama means they can't ignore it, but it's also giving a boost to him that won't be sustainable in the general election. To see why, consider that black voters are overwhelmingly Democrat. Their pull in a general election is considerably less than in the primary - and if even a small percentage of current Clinton supporters jumps party lines in frustration in November, it's enough to put McCain, who was never counting the black vote in his totals anyway, over the top. Ditto, to an only slighly lesser extent, the latte drinkers. Put simply, Obama is winning the constituencies that the Dems don't have to court in the general election because they can always count on them. Clinton's winning the Democrats more likely to end up voting Republican if it comes to that. Meaning: there's more of a danger of bleeding voters if Obama is the nominee than if Clinton is.

I don't know what to make of it all. I'm going to stand by my prediction that Clinton ends up with the nomination for now - but much more timidly than before. Because the hugely unpredictable variable in play right now is the superdelegates. This is going to end up being their decision, and there's a tension there between what's good for the party and what's good for them individually. To the extent that they think Obama has a chance in a general election, the individually smart thing to do is pledge for him early. Because that way, you literally are handing him the election and earning yourself a higher place on the pecking order in the realignment of the DNC that would follow an Obama election win. But it's risky - first because of the real possibility that Obama is unelectable in a general election contest, and second because (and this is just me, I admit) the party hacks are probably hoping for an 11th-hour Clinton win. If you pledge for Obama and lose, the Clinton machine sticks around and is now hostile to you.

Hard to say. Yesterday I thought we'd know by today. Today I think we won't know until June.

Calling it Wrong

2008-05-06T18:27:00.000-07:00

So it looks like my prediction about the election will turn out to be wrong. I'm headed for bed with the spread at 53-47 for Hillary in Indiana and 59-39 for Obama in North Carolina. In other words, Hillary's going to win Indiana (though media stubbornly refuses to call it - probably because Lake County results aren't in at all yet), but not by nearly as much as she needs to. By the end of the night, it'll be something really close - 3-4%. And she's getting completely creamed in North Carolina.

My basic argument is that Clinton is the more electable general election candidate, and so the DNC will be looking for an excuse to hand it to her at this point. If she had been able to pull off a more convincing win in Indiana and narrow the gap a bit more in NC, they might well have done. But they can't do it without an excuse and risk another 1968.

I'd say at this point that Obama's margin in North Carolina is looking solid enough that it almost doesn't matter what happens in Indiana. Granted, only 33% of the results are in in NC, compared with almost 70% in Indiana. Clinton may well gain in NC. But I notice from CNN's map that Buncome County - the last big prize - isn't in for NC yet, and there's still a lot of steam left in Forsyth County. Obama may well have done better than a 20% margin by the time I wake up.

Who's to say - the night is young. But if things keep going the way they're going now, it's looking like I'll have egg on my face, and Obama will have cinched it by tomorrow. No doubt it will drag on longer, officially. But I don't see how the DNC can deny Obama a win after a showing in delegate-rich NC as strong as the one he's currently polling.

The Wolf before the Fox

2008-05-06T07:15:00.000-07:00

There's a cute bit in Reason today trying to draw moral equivalence between McCain's friendship with G. Gordon Liddy and Obama's friendship with Bill Ayers. From one point of view, touche! From another - come on...

I suppose there's no denying that Liddy is a political criminal in exactly the way that Ayers was. Ayers planted bombs hoping to kill servicemen, Liddy was a co-conspirator at Watergate who also cooked up a plot to kidnap anti-war activists protesting the 1972 Republican convention and dump them in Mexico. Put differently, Ayres was a terrorist, and Liddy was a jackboot. So from that point of view, "which is worse" really comes down to whether you're more afraid of terrorists or government abuse of power. And that's an interesting sort of question for a Libertarian, really. I would go so far as to say that it's largely what separates left-libertarians from the classical liberals. I guess for left-libertarians, the government jackboot (Liddy) is the scarier bogeyman, and so they will find Obama's friendship with Ayers more forgiveable. For classical liberals like me, I should think it's Ayers who's the bigger bogeyman - because he's an anarchist hoping to start a revolution, and those of us who are more conservative would rather not throw the baby out with the bathwater in a half-baked uprising.

Of course, on the question of effectiveness there's no denying that Liddy is scarier. The Weather Underground probably wouldn't have been able to achieve its goals, whereas Liddy nearly got away with his. And that's ignoring his questionable practices as a drug warrior for a DA's office in New York, where he first achieved notoriety for aggressively pursuing Timothy Leary. Equally true, however, is that the Weather Underground is a bit scarier for we the little guys. Liddy was really only ruining political careers, where the Weather Underground was hoping to kill people, eventually on a larger scale.

So it's a tough question, I admit. But I'm gonna say that I find it easier to forgive friendship with Liddy than I do with Ayers all the same - and that on the grounds that Liddy is at least a patriot. Alright, before anyone starts speaking Rhetoric and saying that "patriots don't piss on the Constitution," I would just like to point out that any number of people with sterling patriotic bona fides have tried to subvert the Constitution. To make the point in terms both sides can understand, I give you an example each of a Democrat and a Republican. The Republican would be the current president of the nation, whose administration has been pushing for all kinds of illegal surveillance powers and has almost certainly abused the ones it did acquire. The Democrat would be FDR, who tried to illegally expand the size of the Supreme Court when it handed down rulings he didn't like. Neither President Bush's nor President Roosevelt's patriotism are typically questioned - not even by their opponents - and yet both were largely unburdened by constitutional considerations. And before anyone else starts speaking Rhetoric and saying that the Weather Underground was patriotic from their own point of view - go ahead and stuff it. The Weather Underground was trying to overthrow the government and replace it with some unspecified brand of revolutionary Marxism. That's not "patriotism" by any workable definition.

Liddy's lack of respect for the rule of law is no worse, philosophically, than Ayers'. And unlike Ayers, Liddy served his time in prison for what he did. Both are publicly unreprentant. And both, let's be fair, are people that presidential candidates shouldn't be associating with. I'm not defending McCain's association with Liddy. Indeed, I'm not defending McCain at all. I would rather have McCain as president than Obama, but neither is fit for the job, and so I'm not going to be voting for either of them in November. One could, I suppose, make the case that Ayers' particular brand of political criminality might have cost some innocents their lives, whereas Liddy was only ruining political careers. But I think at that point we're playing with too many "what-ifs." Liddy had the potential to do real damage to the Constitutional order - if he'd been found not guilty of the charges against him. But he wasn't, and so he (ironically) ended up affirming that order. As did the Weather Underground, in their way. Most of the charges against them had to be dropped because the FBI had overstepped its bounds during the investigations, and they went free.

There is a quality of grasping at straws about the Reason piece.

And Liddy's penchant for extreme solutions has not abated. In 1994, after the disastrous federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, [Liddy] gave some advice to his [radio show] listeners: "Now if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they're going to be wearing bulletproof vests. ... Kill the sons of bitches."

Well, yeah - that's a position any Libertarian should be able to defend, actually. If the police storm into your home on an illegal raid without saying who they even are, much less producing a warrant to justify their presence, you ABSOLUTELY fuckin' shoot them! That's what the Second Amendment is largely for. I find it really ironic that someone writing a column equating Liddy's Watergate breakin with the Weather Underground's terrorism on the grounds that "Liddy was in the thick of the biggest political scandal in American history - and one of the greatest threats to the rule of law" fails to see the Waco raid for what it was - a completely unjustified and unconstitutional federal abuse of authority. Liddy, defending that statement, puts it best when he says:

I was talking about a situation in which law enforced agents comes smashing into a house, doesn't say who they are, and their guns are out, they're shooting, and they're in the wrong place. This has happened time and time again. The ATF has gone in and gotten the wrong guy in the wrong place. The law is that if somebody is shooting at you, using deadly force, the mere fact that they are a law enforcement officer, if they are in the wrong, does not mean you are obliged to allow yourself to be killed so your kinfolk can have a wrongful death action.

Right.

Chapman continues:

If that wasn't enough to inflame any nut cases, he mentioned labeling targets "Bill" and "Hillary" when he practiced shooting.

Oh, the HORROR! After all the stuff that Ayers has said about Bush, it's supposed to be shocking that people like Liddy shoot at pinups of the Clintons for kicks? Wow, McCain must really be a scum to associate with someone who engages in totally routine political humor!

Liddy's a colorful character. But if you want to derail someone's presidential campaign because someone he associates with puts pictures of his political opponents on his dartboard, you're really being a bit puritain about things.

I'm on record saying that Obama's association with Ayers doesn't bother me too much. You might say I dislike it, but it's not a dealbreaker, and I wouldn't favor McCain bringing it up unless Obama started slinging mud at McCain about past associations. So it's a bit ironic that Chapman ends his column thus:

McCain thinks Obama should apologize for associating with a criminal extremist. To which Obama might reply: After you.

Well, yes, he might. But he's sort of already blown that gasket by responding in a Q&A session that his association with Ayers shouldn't matter because he was 8 when the bombings happened. Yeah, and McCain was in a POW camp being tortured when Watergate went down, so I 'spose he's off the hook too, by that logic.

How does McCain explain his howling hypocrisy on the subject? He doesn't. I made repeated inquiries to his campaign aides, which they refused to acknowledge, much less answer. On this topic, the pilot of the Straight Talk Express would rather stay parked in the garage.

Oh, Chapman, you hard-hitting journalist you! Look at the big man talkin' truth to power! McCain is hypocritical on this, I suppose, but not "howlingly" so. Because the issue in question wasn't really one of Obama's national security creds, but one of his patriotism, and maybe a followup question about just how far left this self-styled "unifier" actually is. There have been reasons to doubt his word on both counts, and Ayers, as an unpatriotic marxist, is a major one of those reasons. Liddy would be relevant to the question of whether McCain intends to be bound by Contitutional restrictions on his executive power - a question that hasn't really been asked yet, but to which I think we know the answer. And that is that McCain will not be too bothered by Constitutional restrictions on executive power if they get in the way of "fighting terror." McCain himself wouldn't put it in exactly those terms, of course, but he's running on a national security platform, and his voting record on war powers in the Seante is a matter of public record. So yes, it's hypocritical of McCain to associate with a convicted political criminal if that's really what he objects to about Obama's association with Ayers. But that isn't exactly a fair characterization of what McCain's objection to Ayers is. McCain objects to Ayers because he's an enemy of the United States, and associating with him betrays leftist sympathies in Obama that are in stark contrast to the image he's presented to the public. Nothing about associating with Liddy contradicts anything McCain wants the public to think about him. In fact, it makes perfect sense - and from that point of view it isn't hypocritical at all.

I'm not sure what questioning McCain about his appearances on Liddy's talk show is supposed to achieve. It's going to reveal ... what, exactly? That McCain is exactly who he says he is? That national security is a hugely important issue to him, and that he favors a strong executive branch? That he might go so far as to overstep his powers if he thought it was necessary to defend the nation? Done!

I agree that we need to be wary - very wary - of McCain's heavy-handed approach to the War on Terror. Everything about McCain's war powers voting record scares me. I'm just saying that dredging up an association with Liddy for McCain doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know, whereas dredging up an assocation between Obama and Ayers at least suggests that the face Obama presents to the public isn't too close to the real guy wearing it. We don't need Liddy to know where McCain stands on the relevant issues. We need Ayers - and anything, really - to tell us where Obama stands on any issues at all. And where associating with Liddy is at least patriotic, in a sense, associating with Ayers just plain isn't.

In Malcom X's terms -

The shrewd capitalists, the shrewd imperialists, knew that the only way people would run towards the fox (Johnson) would be if you showed them the wolf (Goldwater). So they created a ghastly alternative. And at that moment Johnson had troops invading the Congo and South Vietnam.

McCain is the wolf - the devil we know - and Obama is the fox - the devil we don't. If it comes down to a McCain/Obama election, I suppose you could say it all depends on where you fall on "wolf/fox" questions. Malcolm X's advice on that was to vote "none of the above." Which is exactly what I'll be doing. But for my part, I like wolves better than foxes. If you're going to be bad for the country, I'd at least like to have an idea what's in store so I can plan ahead.

This is hyperbole, anyway. McCain is better than Obama period. Dragging up Liddy just demonstrates why that is on so many levels. If McCain and Obama are both evils, McCain is definitely the lesser. In exactly the same way that, while it's better not to be friends with Liddy or Ayers at all, if you have to choose one to have over for drinks in your living room, it's no contest: Liddy.

Dem Day

2008-05-06T02:34:00.000-07:00

Well, today is the big day. The Democratic primaries in Indiana and North Carolina - two of the states least likely to matter in a presidential contest ever - will in all likelihood decide the Democratic nominee for 2008.

Yes, I'm aware that there aren't enough delegates between the two states (NC has 115, IN 72) to put either Obama - with 1736 - or Clinton - with 1599 - over the critical 2205 mark. But these are the last primaries that matter. West Virginia - the next primary on the 13th - has only 28 delegates to offer. There are a total of just over 100 available on the 20th, when Oregon and Kentucky vote, and then a 55-delegate cherry on top when Puerto Rico has its say on June 1. But let's be realistic - everyone is tired of this, and especially the folks at the DNC who have a national election to run that they were hoping would have been well underway by late March. Someone needs to stand - or more likely be politely shoved - aside, and since these are the last couple of "big-stakes" states in the contest, now is the time to make it happen.

I'm going to stick my neck out and call it for Hillary. Yes, I'm all too aware of how dedicated some of Obama's followers can be. I know that he has a more comfortable lead in the bigger prize of North Carolina than Hillary has in Indiana. And we've all heard about the high-profile superdelegate defections of the last couple of days.

It's this last point that's the stickler. It's ultimately the party elite, and not the gumshoe voters, who are going to crown the nominee. The popular vote is so convincingly split, and the remaining delegates up for grabs so paltry, that it's unlikely one or the other can pull ahead the good-ol-fashioned way at this point. So it's up to the party core - and I'm guessing they're hoping for Hillary.

Why? Several reasons. First, in spite of Obama's delegate count, she's the more convincing winner. Obama's current position is a product of the Democrats' bizzarro eletions process more than a convincing show of popular support. The Democrats do a lot of delegate-splitting, which should, in theory, mean a more reflective process. But they also have a lot of caucuses, and it's in these that Obama initially pulled ahead. The proportional representation system means that he was able to keep afloat once the big states started voting - but those states, the ones that matter in November, mostly went for Hillary.

The one thing that Obama's got going for him is the black vote. This is the Democratic bedrock. Blacks vote Democrat by almost unbelievable margins. Ah, but do they turn out to do it? That's always the big question. Being so solid for the Democrats was a good idea back when the Dems were unquestionably the majority party - but now that America is less of a one-party state (which it never was convincingly anyway), it turns into a liability. Blacks can be trusted to vote Democrat, which means the DNC has little incentive to cater to them. And recently, Obama's huge support from the black community has been something of a liability with the rest of the voters. This whole "Jeremiah Wright" thing has been singularly putting Hillary back in play.

The trouble is that black community leaders can't be trusted to stand behind Obama - as the Wright fiasco displays in spectacular fashion, but even so this isn't news. Obama's had trouble picking up key black endorsements from day one. As much as the DNC wants black voters to actually turn out - which presumably they would with an Obama on the ticket - it's not worth it if their candidate has skeletons in his closet that frighten off everyone else, and especially not worth it if the very black leaders they need to line up the troops insist on being accomplices in exposing them.

There have been a couple of conspicuous superdelegate defections to Obama's camp in the last couple of days, but none of them felt like DNC setups. What it felt more like was individuals jumping ship based on their personal predictions to promote their political careers. There's huge incentive to do this now: being kingmaker to the eventual nominee looks really good on the resume when that person is in charge.

But here's what I think's happening in the smoke-filled back rooms of the DNC even as I type this. The other superdelegates will more or less all declare after today, and they'll want to declare for Hillary if at all possible. All she has to do is give them an excuse to do so. If she wins Indiana and gives Obama a run for his money in North Carolina, I think that will be enough. If she manages to win both states (and both, let's not forget, are statistical ties at this point, so it's possible), it's DEFINITELY over, and the superdelegates will hand it to her. By contrast, I think Obama has to win Indiana (chances are still good he'll win NC regardless) outright to get the same effect. And even then, I think you'll see some willingness to hang on to the next round in some quarters.

Of course I don't know. And I realize this is a risky prediction. But I think it will go for Hillary. I think today she will give the DNC the excuse it needs to crown her.

How to Watch a Great Show (One in Particular)

2008-05-05T17:15:00.000-07:00

As I've made clear before, I'm a big fan of Blake's 7, the late-70s cult BBC space opera that time forgot - what I've seen of it, anyway. So I thought I'd post a hat-tip to this excellent article on how to appreciate it for newbies.

Yes, yes, I know - any series that needs to tell you how to love it is a bit suspect, right? Well, right - but I think I'm with Mark Steyn when he writes that

The past may be, as L. P. Hartley wrote, another country, but it's rarely as foreign as Britain in the 1970s.

There is, simply put, a huge cultural divide to get over with Blake's 7. Like Space: 1999, my absolute favorite show (well, if you ignore the disastrous second season, which I emphatically do), it's the kind of thing that could only have been made in the 70s. Strange but true: it's a hopeless product of its time that nevertheless deserves to be a classic. It's sort of the way you need an education to appreciate Shakespeare - even though those plays were marketed to the lowest common denominator back in the 1600s. Blake's 7 may have been a cheaply-made timeslot filler, a relic from a weird interlude in 20th century history where everything went wrong or stood still, but it has redeeming qualities in spades to those that can be bothered to see them.

The link goes to an article that's full of helpful pointers - some more interesting than others. Here are those:

Read the Spoilers - In the article of mine I linked earlier, I was polite enough to place a spoiler warning around the whole thing, as it deals with my interpretation of the final episode. The final episode is, to put it mildly, NOT the way fans are accustomed to having these shows end. Just as i09 says, I won't give it away here in case you're one of those types who insists on watching these things in order - but I can definitely see the point in this advice. The show is arguably more interesting if you know how it ends ahead of time, just as a study in how these characters got to where they ended up. And in fact, by pure coincidence, the final episode is the first one I ever saw, and though I didn't watch it through to the end at the time, I knew how it came out before I sat down, years later, to give the series a serious look.

Skip Season One - Nice to hear, since I haven't seen much of it. I'm pretty sure the final episode - Orac - is the only one I saw all the way through.

Season Two was the peak - I've heard this everywhere. No reason to doubt it, I suppose. It's like one of those bands like Iron Maiden where the members keep changing on you - but there's always that classic lineup. Blake's 7 invented the idea of killing off main characters for no good reason, and it was season two that saw the "classic" lineup though.

A nice list of which ones to skip - always valuable for something like this. Given the current dismal state of TV here in the US, where it's all reality shows now, I'm sticking my neck out a bit by saying this, but I think TV has gotten a LOT better recently - if you take "recently" to mean "since 1990." Starting, really, with Twin Peaks and Northern Exposure (to a lesser extent), there was a brief, shining decade-and-a-half where television took itself really seriously and put out some great, cinema-quality stuff. Blake's 7 predates that in sensibilities, and without the special effects and creator's creative control necessary to pull it all off. It tried, but it was ahead of its time, and that means that a great deal of what they produced is stuff you have to polish away to get at the gem underneath.

In any case, thanks to i09 for the interesting read!

Another one of these again already

2008-05-05T14:19:00.000-07:00

For another example of celebirty silliness in the name of Barack Obama, check out Tom Hanks' MySpace endorsement video. This one's notable for actually being articulate and amusingly self-satirical in parts. But that doesn't mean it isn't ultimately silly.

First, Hanks starts off by telling us that Barack Obama would make a great president because he's black, and black people used to only count for 3/5th of a person here. Erm, sure, and homosexuality used to be an official psychological disease, so does that mean every time a homosexual is a shrink it's a stand-up-and-cheer moment for the profession? Or, wait, I got it, women didn't used to be able to vote, so it's like a minor miracle when voting officials let them in the booth, right? Oh, oh, and Greece used to be the cradle of civilization - so now every time a Greek dude does something stupid it's a sign of just how far everyone's come.

Oh, wait, no, just a minute, Hanks doesn't want you to think that he's voting for Obama just because he's black. 'Cause that would be, you know (hushed tone) racist. So we're told that he isn't voting for Barack Obama because he wants to break down barriers, but because Obama is ... wait for it ... a man of vision who will unify us.

WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN TO ME WHAT THIS MEANS?

WHAT is this great vision that Obama has that everyone's so keen on? Let's see ... um ... so far it seems to be gun control, talking to the Iranians, an expensive and ineffective national healthcare system, a program of wasteful foreign aid spending, and a $4000 bonus for getting that college education that's meant to be in your employment interests anyway. See, in addition to benefiting your own future by not having to wait tables forever, you also get ... cha-CHING! ... $4000. Lucky you.

This is "vision," is it? Dang it, I think I might have been using the word wrong. (Maybe I should get some of this education I've been hearing so much about.)

And then Obama's gonna be the next FDR. And Harry Truman. And JFK. And Ronald Reagan, for good measure, because we want to include some Republicans too. So he's the "national greatness" candidate. And so apparently he's gonna - prolong the current recession, chunk out the Constitution and hand down Supreme Court decisions directly, start a pointless and unpopular war for no reason that he doesn't have the balls to finish, sell out some allies, and then get shot by the mob. Great. Let's vote for that guy!

Actually, it will be a good deal better than that because Obama's gonna be a "seismic shift in history," the same way that it was a seismic shift in history when George Washington handed power over to John Adams, and it was the first time ever that that happened without it being a family connection or there being a war or something. THAT's what it's gonna be like when Barack Obama takes power from George W. Bush. The WHOLE FREAKING WORLD will be different! FOREVER!

I can't make this stuff up. Go watch and see for yourself and marvel at the sheer ridiculousness.

Where the Real Men Are

2008-05-05T02:13:00.000-07:00

Conservatives and leftists (I have a hard time calling them liberals because of their fascistic tendencies) have a fundamentally different view of human nature. Leftists see humans as innately good. That is why they think rehabilitation works. It is also why they think the United Nations is a good idea. If people are innately good then, surely, they can talk out their problems without resorting to war.

That's from today's Mike Adams column - and I found it interesting because in addition to being plain dead wrong, I think it's revealing about conservative vanities.

Let's start with what's wrong.

Leftists see humans as good.

Erm, no. In fact, this is one of the main points of disagreement I have with them. I guess if I'm being charitable I can say that I don't really know whether leftists think people are broadly "good" or not, but that they certainly think them selfish and weak. To understand this point you only have to consider that religious conservatives give more to charity than liberals, regardless of income level. In other words, the people who reject the welfare state really are willing to pick up the slack. Now go talk to one of the people who supports it. Generally they'll tell you that charity is great, and that they're all for it, but how are people to get help when charity isn't available? And then you see what I mean. If leftists really thought people were inherently good, this question would never occur to them. They'd assume that for everyone down on his luck, there was someone waiting to give him a hand up. But they don't. They see "someone waiting to give him a hand up" as an unreliable thing. And so it goes with all their policies. Leftists are the people who push for ever more regulations on industry, workplace safety, the environment, international trade, gun ownership, public education, etc. etc. I guess I can't really deduce from all this that they think people are bad, exactly, but you don't support a broad ban on cigarettes if you think people are strong. No - the underlying leftist assumption is that people are weak. For the leftists I can stomach, this takes the form of "people are weak, and they need someone to take care of them; that someone should be the government to ensure that everyone gets taken care of to the extent of his needs, regardless of circumstance." The leftists I absolutely can't stomach and want to pull out a gun to defend myself from on sight are those that say "people are weak and stupid, but if we play our cards right the government can make them better with each passing generation." These are the social engineers, and most of the truly terrible chapters in our history are entirely their fault. But in either case, I don't think leftists are primarily motivated by an underlying belief in the goodness of people.

That is why they think rehabilitation works.

No. Leftists think rehabilitation works because they think people are cogs in a great machine. It is their great vanity - the idea that, whatever it is, "we can fix it." This is another point of objection that I have with leftists. I talk about it most on economic matters, but it applies across the board. In principle, we should have a free economy because people have the right to trade on their own terms. If I own something, then I get to set its price, determine its uses, etc. But a secondary reason we should have a free economy is that planning the economy is a doomed enterprise. This is not because economic planning is doomed (corporations do this all the time), but because planning the economy - the whole shebang - is doomed. Let's leave aside, for a moment, that free market prices are a self-planning mechanism, "the economy" is simply too complex to be planned. There are too many variables, too poorly understood, for any person or group of people to have a prayer trying to consciously manage it all. And that is why socialist economies invariably end in chronic shortages. The Law of Unintended Consequences is NOT a mysterious bit of magic - it's common sense to anyone who understands that you can't control something you don't understand. No matter what you do, there's a variable you didn't consider, and the system reaches equilibrium by switching that parameter in ways you (obviously) didn't anticipate. Well, the same arrogance that allows leftists to believe they can plan the economy makes them think they can rehabilitate people. It isn't that they think people are "good," it's that they think people are manageable. People, to leftists, are things that can be manipulated, repaired and controlled, not too differently from how you deal with a broken car. And the same arrogance that gives them the impulse to put their completely untested economic theories to practice with all our money backing up their gamble is the arrogance that enables them to turn known criminals back out on the streets after some half-baked "treatment." It isn't a belief in the goodness of human nature, it's a faith in their own intelligence - with the key word here being faith because they never bother to test their theory that they know everything before applying it. They just sort of think "in theory, an economy can be planned, and a person can be rebuilt," without bothering to verify that they have the knowledge necessary to accomplish these feats - and, well, history has amply recorded the results.

It is also why they think the United Nations is a good idea. If people are innately good then, surely, they can talk out their problems without resorting to war.

The United Nations IS a good idea. The problem with it is that it's way ahead of its time. It's trying to impose a system of order on a world that doesn't share a common moral understanding. Some nations are less civilized than others, and the problem with the UN is that it pretends that everyone's on equal footing. The world isn't ready for the UN. But I do believe that among civilized nations, it is possible to talk out one's problems without going to war, yes. War is not inevitable - it's just something we haven't grown out of yet. Consider, for a moment, what the chances are of going to war with the UK. Sweden? The Netherlands? Canada? Right, you say, none of those nations are a match for us. Fine, then consider the possibility of Sweden and the Netherlands going to war. Or Sweden and Brazil. It won't happen, because civilized countries are indeed capable of talking through things. Wars happen when a beligerent comes along who can't be reasoned with, and the idea behind organizations like the UN is that they bring enough international pressure to bear on the beligerent that even he can see it's pointless. But it only works if the majority is on the level, and the majority of the planet right now is still pulling itself out of poverty. So the UN is a kind of application of deterrence theory - and deterrence for those who can't talk fair. It doesn't work not because the theory is flawed, but because the cart got put ahead of the horse. It's sort of like expecting lawlessness to go away as soon as you institute a police force. Um - no. The police only maintain order in a society that wants to be ordered. They don't create order, they just prevent a handful of bad seeds from ruining it for everyone else. In a society where half the seeds are bad, then the police force obviously isn't going to make much of a difference because it will itself be hugely corrupt, and therefore ineffective. So it is with the UN. The idea isn't wrong, it's just that it isn't time for it yet. The world isn't yet civilized enough to expect to be able to cooperate on a police force, that's all.

So what does this say about conservative vanities? If the problem with leftists is arrogance, I think the problem with conservatives has always been the cult of "realism." If you're eager for everyone to know that your opponents are the ones who think people good, then you must have some stake in believing people bad, and usually that's because you see, and want everyone else to see, your opponents as naive. There's little more condescending than saying "you have a good heart, but you're just out of your league here." Which is exactly what conservative rhetoric tends to amount to. Let the "big boys" handle it, where the "big boys" always happen to be the ones saying that. If liberals like to see themselves as the good guys, conservatives like to see themselves as the hardened realists.

But conservatives have a more tragic view of human nature. We believe that people with innately destructive tendencies must be held in check. That is why we so frequently speak of traditional values. That is why we also speak of the need to have a punitive criminal justice system, which serves as a back-up plan when traditional values fail. The ideal system would mete out punishment that is swift, certain, and severe.

Why "severe?" Why can't it just be "effective," where by "effective" we mean "good at preventing recidivism?" If you want "severe" because you think it prevents future crimes, then your philosophy is no different from that of the leftists, you just favor a stick rather than a carrot. Both sides think that crime is ultimately eliminable, in other words, they just disagree as to which methods work.

I think the answer is "none of the above." Humanity's problems aren't for the government to fix. The government is a framework that lets us get on with the business of living our lives with minimal interference from everyone else. Utopia will come, or not, when individual people come up with effective ways to solve their problems, or don't. What I don't want is leftists who don't know what they're doing managing the world economy because they read in a science fiction book that it can be done. And I further don't want conservatives living out their "big man" fantasies with the police force, meting out justice that is "swift, certain and severe." What I want is a government that sets out minimal, and clear, guidelines and sticks to them and lets the rest of us well alone to live our own lives in our own ways. I am neither a science project, nor a sounding board for propping up anyone's ego, thanks.

Comedy: the best and worst

2008-05-04T16:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I saw Clue somewhere between 2 and 3 times (I'm not sure exactly how many times I saw each ending). I didn't exactly sit down with that plan in mind, but hey - Clue has that effect on me. It just never gets old. And so it saddens me to read that it only did $14million or so at the box office. People just don't know what's funny.

Really, they don't. I guess no one ever sees 100% eye-to-eye with public taste - but I personally feel this effect with comedy more than any other genre. And so I thought I'd put up a list of the top five comedies that are, in my opinion, conspicuously over- and under-rated.

Let's start with the ones where people just don't know what they're missing.

Clue - The number one all-time underrated comedy. This one is brilliance from beginning to end, and the second-surest sign (see number one in the most over-rated list for the surest sign) that the public doesn't have a goddamned clue what's funny is that this wasn't the top box-office hit of the 80s.

Pee Wee's Big Adventure - OK, not for everyone, I admit. And yeah, with a budget of only $7 million but profits of $40million, and a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I'm almost certainly cheating calling this "underrated." But honestly, how many people have you talked to lately who remember much about it?

The 'Burbs - If I'm cheating on the last one, then definitely not on this one. RT shows a paltry 36% for this dark comedy gem. Roger Ebert, the critic I love to hate and hate to love turns out to be one of the bad guys. Which seriously damages my appreciation for his four-star review of Halloween, I have to say. C'mon, Rog, The 'Burbs is a classic. Misunderstood, granted, but brilliant in its way.

So I Married an Axe Murderer - No, it's not just the Scottish dad, though I admit he's a lot of it. This one was witty, in a charmingly understated way, all the way through. Mike Myers is the very definition of "hit-or-miss." He has a keen eye for things that are ridiculous about pop culture, and so has a good foundation to build on. But the crucial ingredient in comedy is never apologizing for lampooning what you're lampooning (along with its corellary: only lampoon that which truly deserves it). Myers has a tendency to lose his nerve, and to overdo it on purpose just to make sure you know he's not serious. That's the kind of hedge I can't stand in a comedian (it KILLED SouthPark for me - see below), and it's unfortunately omnipresent with Myers. But in his early days he wasn't so skiddish, and he did some really great stuff. This is one of those. The critics hated it, and it underearned its budget, and so stands as proof that the public doesn't know funny when it sees it.

Beavis and Butthead Do America - Sorry, but I had to. While this isn't the funniest comedy ever made, the whole Beavis and Butthead enterprise is a blueprint for others who want to get it right. I'm glad Mike Judge dropped the hatchet on this before it turned into a Simpsons or SouthPark. People talk approvingly of shows like SouthPark that are "equal-opportunity offenders." Piffle. "Equal-opportunity offender" is the LAST thing any self-respecting comedy should be named. Because to offend everyone equally, you pretty much have to force it at points. Real comedy is like Aikido. You find where your opponent has put all his strength and use that against him. Or, in comedic terms, you find things that take themselves too seriously and you use that pomposity against them. If you have to do it equally for everyone, you're doing it wrong. So hats off to this singular series which never once had a moment that felt forced. Everyone who took a black eye from Judge during his B&B days richly deserved it, and that's a badge few are fit to wear. I think Rob Gonsalves his this one on the head when he wrote "At the risk of losing my more refined readers, I must report the truth about 'Beavis and Butt-Head do America.' It's rude, it's twisted, it's hillarious. Unless you're uptight, over 40, or Michael Medved, the movie is funny almost nonstop. Nothing else matters." Right.

And now for the most over-rated.

Twins - The fact that anyone at all - even a single person - found this funny is a sign that our civilization is teetering at the edge of the Abyss. And yet when it was released it was absolutely ubiquitous. Why? I'll never know. I DON'T WANT to know. I just want it to go away.

Knocked Up - See above. And then see my review. There is simply no excuse for the popularity of this stale, formulaic, oh-so-careful feminist wet dream(nightmare) masquerading as "dude humor." The next person who tells me this prudish, mean-spirited morality play is funny loses teeth. Seriously. At least the next three items on this list contain actual jokes that actual people might feel moved to laugh at under the right circumstances. My bone to pick with them is that they're given more credit than they're due. My bone to pick with this one is that it's labeled a comedy at all. You can't call something a comedy if it contains only the feeblest, most cliched attempts at humor.

Austin Powers (all but the first) - I say "all but the first," but even the first one wasn't that great. But at least it was excusable. It had one or two moments that count as "brilliant" enough to carry the weight of the rest of the miserable thing lumbering over the finish line. But the next two were ... just ... horrible. Look - over-the-top antics aren't funny if they're self-conscious. Look to Strange Brew for guidance here. It's funny when the main characters just do their immature moron thing for kicks. It's NOT funny when the movie starts wanting credit for being puerile. And boy does the Austin Powers series ever want credit. Every single scene screams "look at me, I'm being cute!" Worse than that, actually - it's "isn't it terribly ironic how self-consciously cute I'm being?" Sorry, chap, won't work. If you're gonna do comedy, then just do it already. Don't constantly remind us that's what you're doing. Willful suspension of disbelief isn't only for action/adventure.

South Park: The Movie - I admit, I haven't seen it. I don't need to: I've seen the show, and along with The Simpsons it embodies everything that's wrong with modern comedy. Alright, fair enough, that's too harsh. Some episodes of South Park are truly hillarious. Especially in the first two seasons. The thing I've never liked about it is that I get the uneasy feeling that these guys lack balls. They're so careful to offend everyone involved in an issue equally (and in such exaggerated terms) that you can almost see them planning their episodes with a checklist. "Uninspired" is the word that often comes to mind. The thing that made me decide not to go see this one is that I heard all about the Canada thing. See - that's when you know something's just not gonna work - when it makes picking on Canada a central theme. Because there's really only one way that can work out - and that's the way where it comes back to bite you in the ass. There's plenty about Canada to make fun of, don't get me wrong, but the average American doesn't know what any of it is, and so if you're marketing one of these to the American audience you're doing it with a sly wink that says "we're really picking on YOU!" And the only person who goes to a film looking for jokes that come back to bite him is the kind who feels guilty laughing at others - and that's not who great comedy is for. If comedy is going to mock its audience and be good, it has two choices. Either it can be really sly about it - in which case it's really aimed at a small subset of the audience (who is laughing along with it at the majority), or it doesn't pull any punches and goes for the throat. What never works is the kind of thing that's self-consciously clever - you know, it hides it just enough to make everyone feel they're insiders, but not enough that anyone missed the point. There's a word for that: lame.

Blazing Saddles - sorry, I just never got it. I like some of Mel Brooks' stuff (Young Frankenstein, Dracula: Dead and Loving it), but so much of it is like ... well, like this. See item (3) for what's wrong here. Good comedy takes talent, and talent means seeing things that others don't. Talent isn't picking on genres, like westerns, whose flaws are so obvious they practically satirize themselves, seizing on the already-ridiculous aspects and blowing them up larger-than-life. Any old hack can do that - and so in making this movie Mel Brooks comes off looking like just any old hack. I didn't need this movie to "get" what was wrong with westerns. So many westerns are capable of going straight from the reel to MST3K that there's really no need to bother. That he did bother shows he was running out of ideas. And that so many people think this is brilliant shows that they lack imagination.

I'd give a disclaimer, but why don't I not and not say I did. (Although I do SINCERELY APOLOGIZE for the entry on South Park, and for my opinions on South Park in general.) There you have it - my picks for the five most under- and over-rated comedies. Mostly because I wanted to blog about Clue but couldn't think of anything to say. It speaks for itself.

A Tale of Two Rebuttals

2008-05-03T07:49:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of commentary on Expelled, the overwhelming majority of it negative. Of course the Christian lobbyists like it - but aside from them I'm having trouble finding a supporting voice. Even National Review - an enemy of secularism if ever there was one - doesn't like it much. First there was Derbyshire's strong rebuke, and now we have this nice bit by Jim Manzi.

Manzi's is my favorite bit of commentary on the subject, in fact. First and foremost because it doesn't resort to hyperbole. That's important to me because, like with most manufactured issues, this is one where people on both sides tend to get a little goofy. The key word there is manufactured. Make no mistake, this is a controversy that didn't exist before the Discovery Institute dreamt it up as a PR ploy. And that's why I'm embarrassed for people who waste precious calories getting angry about "Teach the Controversy" proponents ... in the same way that I'm embarrassed for gay rights activists who claim that the government's refusal to recognize their recently-invented tradition of marriage constitutes a breach of civil liberties. A marriage certificate isn't a natural right (here's a clue: NOTHING that needs a certificate is a natural right!) - just as ID isn't and never can be a threat to science as we know it. The controversy is overblown.

Derbyshire writes that

The "intelligent design" hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism.

Erm, maybe. Or maybe it's just a controversy made up by a bunch of hucksters who want attention. For my part, as an atheist, I don't really see much difference between religious believers who can stomach Darwin and those who can't. It seems to me that for all their much-talked-about "ignorance," the fundamentalists at least do the rest of us the service of carrying their supersitious worldview to its logical conclusions. This is as opposed to the more mainstream Christians, who constantly hedge on what they believe in in order to soothe their cognitive dissonance.

My point is that anyone who writes about ID as "anti-civilization" is giving it credit for being more than it is. It's no more anti-civilization than Episcopalianism. True that it isn't exactly kosher with orthodox science, but I strongly suspect that ID, like Episcopalianism, is something that we humans will eventually evolve out of. Religion has had its uses in the past as a civilizing force, after all.

So I much prefer Mazni's even-handed treatment. Rather than taking Stein's constant Reductio ad Hitlerum arguments as "a blood libel on Western Civilization," as Derbyshire does, Manzi simply looks the beast in the mouth:

Expelled charges, correctly, that Hitler often couched the logic of the Holocaust in explicitly Darwinian terms. It's also true, however, that we don't know whether Hitler reasoned from Darwin to Dachau, found some psychologically useful justification for his madness, or simply used this as a way to sell his program. Someone capable of murdering millions of people is probably capable of lying to himself and others about why he did it.

There, you see Derbyshire? That's all you have to say. The only reason people still use Reductio ad Hitlerum arguments in the first place is because people like John Derbyshire continue to be shocked, SHOCKED! and offended by them. In fact, all that is required is to calmly call it for the genetic fallacy that it is and move on, as Manzi does here. Call their bluff - for bluff it is, as no one actually believes for a minute, not even the intellectually-challenged Discovery Institute staff, that Hitler would've been unable to dream up the Holocaust without Darwin's helpful book!

And, really, that's all that's required with their main claim - that serious research is being systematically supressed in the name of atheist orthodoxy - as well: just call their bluff. Derbyshire prefers to attack their character:

They overhauled creationism as "intelligent design," roped in a handful of eccentric non-Christian cranks keen for a well-funded vehicle to help them push their own flat-earth theories, and set about presenting themselves to the public as "alternative science" engaged in a "controversy" with a closed-minded, reactionary "science establishment" fearful of new ideas. (Ignoring the fact that without a constant supply of new ideas, there would be nothing for scientists to do.) Nothing to do with religion at all! I think this willful act of deception has corrupted creationism irredeemably. ... Hence the dishonesty and sheer nastiness, even down to plain bad manners, that you keep encountering in ID circles.

No doubt in my mind that this is an accurate characterization, but why spend all the energy psychoanalyzing this crowd? Manzi's calm rebuttal works better:

But the obvious question for ID proponents is never asked: OK, this great science is being suppressed, so please show me the data, lab notebooks, scientific work papers, unpublished manuscripts, and so on that contain all of these amazing discoveries that nobody will confront. But we never see it.

Again, this is the right strategy. We don't need to know what particular subspecies of charlatan ID proponents are to show everyone that they haven't made their case. Manzi takes the right tack: just call their bluff. If this great science is out there and the only reason we haven't seen it is establishment censorship, then you have a whole documentary's worth of time to rectify this and make your case to the public. The fact that you choose instead to spend your two hours showing pictures of Hitler says all we need to know about the actual amount of hard evidence you've been able to scrape together. Done.

The final thing I like about Manzi's column over others I've read is that he throws in a paragraph explaining why ID is fraud even from a religious point of view.

Also, it is true that many people have reasoned from evolution to atheism. But is their reasoning correct? Expelled gives lots of screen time to several prominent scientists, philosophers, and other academics who claim that it is. It doesn't bother to present those who disagree, and believe that evolution is fully compatible with faith: the director of the Human Genome Research Institute, to pick one example, or Pope Benedict. Why would the pope be part of a multidisciplinary conspiracy to promote atheism?

I don't know why the Pope believes in evoution, and I don't personally care. But I do think the point for religious types is well-taken. The thing that continues to mystify me about ID is that Christians bothered to come up with it at all. I will never understand why a worldview that believes in an all-powerful architect of the Entire Universe who cannot be seen or experienced directly, even though He constantly reads everyone's minds for signs of even the slightest deviation from the minutiae of moral orthodoxy (a good bit of which doesn't make sense in the modern era - like why NOT sleep with people before marriage?), and came up with a brilliant plan to save His own creations from their own flawed nature which we're asked to believe isn't His fault, even though he designed everything, and this brilliant plan involves someone dying on a cross, which is meant to have changed everything? People who believe in THIS have their whole worldview threatened if it turns out that natural selection is a good mechanism for explaining biodiversity? REALLY? I should think that if you're in a position to believe that someone's death 2000 years ago means you will live forever as a ghost in another dimension just by saying the magic words "I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior," you should be in a position to - let's put this politely - compartmentalize your brain in such a way that pesky things you learn in biology class don't get in the way. Indeed, why doesn't the Big Bang throw them for equally much of a loop? And yet, no one's gone to the trouble to make an Expelled moaning that Geocentric cosmology is being ignored...

Point being, religion and science operate according to different paradigms and serve different purposes. It is true that Darwin's theories fly in the face of what it literally says in the Bible. But what it literally says in the Bible requires faith to accept in the first place. It requires that you deliberately ignore your daily experience and believe in things you've never seen or experienced. So if you're worried that something empirical contradicts it, then I should think that a complex biological theory would be the low on your list of concerns that need addressing. Things like "I've never seen Jesus in person" would take a higher precedence for me.

No, there's no conflict here, and to the extent that religious types think that there is, they're betraying a total lack of faith in their set of professed beliefs - or at the very least a serious misunderstanding of what those beliefs are based on. If you need empirical observation to verify God's existence, then you're "doing Christianity wrong." And if you think that science can accept as an integral part of a working hypothesis that the mechanism for the things it investigates is inherently unknowable, then you'd better give a darn good reason why (a la quantum field theory), or else you're "doing science wrong." Until we have eliminated naturalistic explanations for thing, it is dishonest and self-defeating for science not to prioritize the materialist version. Explaining things in material terms is, after all, what science does. The religious equivalent of ID would be like asking Christian theologians to honestly entertain the idea that the God of Abraham is a member of the Q Continuum. It's not logically inconsistent, strictly speaking, but surely it is a hypothesis that Christianity should selectively ignore until someone gives it a compelling reason not to? To accept such a thing as a "school of thought" in theology would be - well, "self-defeating" only begins to describe it. So it is with the cosmic watchmaker and science.

So while I don't disagree with the content of anything that Derbyshire says, I much prefer Manzi's tone. Intelligent Design is goofy, whether you are religious or atheist. So let's not give it more credit than it's due. Simply refute it (easily achieved) and move on. Don't do the equivalent of holding up a cross and warding off the evil eye by calling it a "blood libel on Western Civilization." I mean, right, technically I suppose you can get away with that. But why waste the energy? ID is a gnat more than a tarantula. It may bite, but it won't send you to the hospital.

Serenity is a pile of steaming poo

2008-05-02T16:43:00.000-07:00

Geez, where to begin?

You know how there are those times that you watch something, and it's nothing special, but all your friends seem to like it, and so you guess the problem must be with you and you give it a second go and - WOW! - why didn't I notice how great this was the first time? Like with Beavis and Butthead for me. And then you know how there are those other times that no matter how much your friends like something it just doesn't bleedin' matter because you know what you saw, and it was horrible, and you kinda just don't wanna talk about it because you might end up hating your friends for liking it? Yeah - Serenity is this kind of thing.

I won't say it's the worst movie I ever saw - because Jesus still won't let me unsee When Harry Met Sally or Flashback or Knocked Up. But it's certainly low on my list.

The only nice thing I could possibly say about this movie would require me to know, first-hand, that Joss Whedon had made a bet with someone to see how many tired Hollywood cliches he could cram into a 2-hour trainwreck that people would actually pay to see. And even then it would only carry so far, because he left out the mother-of-all-scifi-cliches - the "Hi guys, this is my ex-lover who walked out on me under mysterious circumstances 7 years ago, and did I mention she's now evil?" So he probably lost his bet. But if he did it wasn't for lack of trying.

But who am I kidding? This "film" wasn't made on a dare - it was actually meant to be taken seriously. And I just can't get my mind around that.

So what do we have? Well, on the surface, it looks like the big screen continuation of a show I really enjoyed. We have something that looks kinda like the ship. Check. And then there are all the same actors I remember from before. Granted, they have gratuitious "we're in a movie so we changed our hair" hairdos, but whatever: Check. And they still drop into Mandarin occasionally and say corny-country things like "I aim to misbehave." Check. And the characters all have the same names they did in the TV show, and the character names go with the right faces. Check. And this still thinks it's clever for boldly going where everyone has been before and blending space opera with western. Check. But aside from these superficial similarities, this just ain't Firefly.

Even from the beginning it isn't. We're treated to an insider's view of Simon's rescue of River from the facility, only it just can't have actually happened this way. In the series, "what happened to River?" is sort of the central mystery. Simon doesn't realy know - just that some experiments were done on her. Indeed, the whole McGuffin of the Ariel episode was that Simon needs to sneak into a core world hospital to do a proper brainscan to get his first clue what went on with River. But now we know he could have saved himself the trouble and just let his memory of Expository Dialogue he heard a year ago do all the work for him. Because in this new version of events, Simon just waltzes into the top secret facilities, asks the doctor what's going on, and the doctor tells him - all while his sister's sitting there with a very conspicuous needle in her brain. Christ almighty, Joss Whedon really is liberated from this bourgeouis "continuity" thing, eh? And then there's the idea of Simon - SIMON TAM - pulling off a kidnapping caper. A - HEM. Certainly not the Simon Tam we know from the series. I mean, yeah, wheeled her out through the front door in a wheelchair pretending to be a specialist, sure. But full-on breach-of-security hang-from-the-ceiling and run-past-the-shooting-guards? Don't think so.

But hey, Simon's not even the worst of the lot. Each and every one of the characters we see is an imposter. They look like the characters we know. They sound like them. But they're not them. They're pitiful, one-dimensional stunt doubles who in place of dialogue now speak near-fluent "One-Liner." No evidence is to be found anywhere that Whedon didn't simply have a computer generate the script. Let's cut right to the chase and start with Kaylee - because she's the worst of the botch-jobs on parade here. Since when is Kaylee brave? Kaylee's a sweet kid, and violence absolutely shuts her down, as we saw clearly in War Stories and Objects in Space. Yet suddenly she's a gun-blazing frontierswoman? And yeah, we knew she was horny - but in the series this was done right - because she's very girly about it. She's fixated on Simon, but since Simon constantly drops the ball she'll settle for Tracey in The Message. The point in both cases being that she wants male attention as much as sex, and while she'll flirt and prod, she won't ask. The amazon who's taken her place, though, complains loudly that she hasn't had more than a vibrator in over a year, and all but tells Simon to get his ass in gear. So yeah, the ship's mechanic is still a female who happens to be named Kaywinnit Lee Frye, but she ain't Kaylee. And Mal isn't exactly Mal either. Right, yeah, I got it - it was established in the pilot that Mal has a harsh edge when Inara's not around. And in the pilot, that was an admirably subtle bit of characterization. Here in the movie? He's just a meat-headed bastard who alternates between stock self-congratulatory jokes and yelling at people. And remember the Mal who told Simon in Safe that he went back for him because he was part of the crew?

You're on my crew. Why we still talking about this? (his back to him, as he goes) Chow's in ten. No need to dress.

Yeah, well, that guy's nowhere to be seen. The man in his place is openly resentful of all the trouble that Simon and River have put him through and constantly reminds Simon how much they owe him. Jayne? You know, the walking macho stereotype who as early as the first episode shows signs of complexity when he secretly keeps watch over an injured Kaylee? The "dumb guy" who's sharp enough to be the first one to see through Shepherd's front, even though he doesn't say anything? The "meathead" who sends half his take to his mom and gets genuinely excited when she sends him a goofy home-knitted hat? In the movie, he's just the dumb muscle Rambo-stereotype half of this equation. They went and forgot all the other stuff. And so it goes with character after character. Wash is no longer the happy-go-lucky out-of-place but witty joker. To the extent he has a role, it's mostly to pull off Scotty-maneuvers (you know "Cap'n the engines are gonna blow!" "We're counting on you Mr. Scott." "Ok, done.") and get killed. (OOPS! I mean: spoiler warning!) And Inara? The less said about Inara the better. Aw, hell, even I'm getting tired of this. The characters just aren't the characters we came to know and love.

There is actually a plot, but it doesn't exactly work. The Alliance sends a psychopath (you can tell, 'cause he's a conspicuously BLACK, and in Whedon's universe, that's all you need to know) to track down River. Never mind those dudes with the blue gloves. Pretend you never saw them. Instead, now, we have "The Operative." And in this character we're treated to a main course helping of Joss Whedon's "I'm clever because I included a cracker-jack surprise TWIST in your corn flakes." You see, The Operative is a bad man with a good motive. He wants to build a perfect future, and he's discarded all morality to make it happen. Get it? This is Complexity™. The sad thing is, this is an important theme, and I'm glad to have it in a Hollywood blockbuster. Ideologically, I couldn't possibly agree with this movie more. The leaden Point that it hammers is that Social Engineering = Bad. Right! That's absolutely freaking right. That's the whole core of my politics. So I WANT to like this movie, and I WANT to believe in the Operative as a character because he IS the very model of evil to me.

Unfortunately ...

They destroy all the credibility they built up in a puff of pale blue powder at the end. All it takes is a single video of something nasty the Alliance has done to convince the Operative to change his mind - in the nick of time, no less, saving our heroes from death in a hail of bullets. Bucept this change of heart is COMPLETELY IMPLAUSIBLE for someone who has been killing innocents left and right up to this point just to find one girl. I mean, this guy's whole moral code seems to consist of only "you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs." So the Alliance broke some eggs trying to pacify a population. The experiment failed, granted, but everything the Operative has said up to this point makes clear that he approves of this kind of thing, and would think that a couple of botched jobs are par for the course in the service of History. Something about this one was just special, I guess...

Oh, it's just too much. This movie is a pile of steaming poo, and the best thing I can say about it is I will never, ever, have to sit through it again.

I'm "Happy" to pay more for Gas

2008-05-02T02:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I bought gas, which was at a whopping $3.95 for premium.

In times like this, I think of Bill Clinton bragging about how he "loves to pay taxes." Well, um, sure. I mean, I get the point. If you're a for real leftist, then you're pretty much ipso facto for higher taxes, right? So at least Clinton's being consistent. Still, no one believes that he actually enjoys paying taxes, and that's because no one enjoys paying taxes. Generally when they sell higher taxes at election time, leftists aren't promising to pump up our self-esteem by giving us the opportunity to do this great fun thing every April, right? I think the argument generally goes that even though we mumble and groan about taxes, we should suck it up because we all get something out of it: a better education system, more healthcare, whatever rabbit it is they're promising to pull out of their hats with our hard-earned dosh that season.

The Libertarian version of Bill Clinton "loving to pay taxes" is, I think, "cheering" when prices on certain items rise. I'll be more honest than Clinton - the emotional side of me is never happy when gas prices are higher, because that's just that much less money in my already lint-filled gradstudent pockets. But the rational side of me is indeed happy to see gas prices rising, and that's because this is the only effective way I know to reduce US oil dependence.

Gas is one of those thing that economists say has an inelastic demand curve. Meaning: demand for it in the short term is relatively insensitive to changes in price. This is as opposed to something like shampoo, where if prices rise demand drops - the main reason it remains cheap. So gas is one of those things where the leftist stereotype of greedy capitalists living fat off of the sweat of the rest of us sort of kind of works out, for a little while. The oil companies can raise prices and line their pockets with impunity ... for a little while. But nothing on the market is ever free of the laws of supply and demand - not even in a socialist economy. (In a socialist economy you can pretend that supply and demand aren't functioning, but this always ends in shortages.) Not even things that show inelastic demand.

So what's the incentive for oil companies to keep their prices low? In the short term, nothing. But in the long term? EVERYTHING. If people can't live without oil, what they can do is find ways to use less of it. And once you've cleverly figured out how to do that, it's a rare thing that you'd go back to consuming at your old levels, even if prices went back down. Probably the easiest way to illustrate this is to imagine what effect spiking gas prices have on car buyers. $4/gallon probably isn't stopping the rich kids from buying Hummers, granted. But it is making commuters put a higher premium on gas mileage when they buy new cars. And once you've plunked down $15,000 for an efficient vehicle, you're hardly likely to go back to the dealer and trade your car in for a $30,000 guzzler if prices go back down! At best, you'd buy the $30,000 guzzler as an additional luxury car - for family trips and sunday drives and such - and continue to use the efficient one for your daily commutes - because why pay more for gas when you can pay less?

So the "inelasticity" curve is a double-edged sword. Yes, if you're a supplier of something with inelastic demand you can afford yourself the luxury of sharp price increases if you suddenly want more money. But you pay for it in the long run - because any measures people take to avoid buying your product are more or less permanent. Raise your prices to $4/gallon for a month, let them fall to $3/gallon the next month, and what you find is that you can't recover your old profit scale, because people are using a lot less of your stuff by that point.

For some examples of creative ways around gas use, there's the Treehugger Blog. The link goes to a cool article about some people who got 110 miles-to-the-gallon in a Prius without modifying it. All careful driving. Well, actually they're cheating a bit, of course, because they were in electric mode a good bit of that time and probably weren't figuring in the cost of generating power for the battery - but never mind. Whatever the real figure, it was quite high, and achieved largely though careful driving.

Oh, and be sure to check out the comments for some comedy. One commenter writes:

Heh... something to live up too for all of us Prius owners. :) I have trouble making 50 mpg in Seattle because of all the hills. I get 65 on the way to work (down hill) and like 45 on the way home (all up hill).

...erm, which means you average 55mpg, you moron. But then, we know from Kyoto that environmentalists, on average, aren't the sharpest set of tools in the shed. What I'm saying is that I'm glad gas prices are spiking because this gives INTELLIGENT people the incentive to start thinking outside the box on fuel consumption issues too. ;-)

They Keep Makin' It and We Keep Buyin' It

2008-05-02T01:56:00.001-07:00

FIRE scores another hit on academic censorship - this one close to home. IUPUI has cleared a student employee of all racial harassement charges. His "crime?" Reading a book.

No kidding. The "culprit" was 50-year-old Keith Sampson, a janitor for IUPUI who has been studying for a communication's degree there. He reads books on his break, one of which happened to be Notre Dame vs. The Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan. And of course this is meant to be racial harassment. Sampson, who was briefly confronted over the book by the coworker who filed the complaint but never given a chance to explain to her what it was actually about, received a complaint from the Affirmative Action office that he had been "racially harassing" black co-workers. Just by reading a book about the Klan. Never mind that the book chronicles and celebrates a street fight between Catholics (whom the Klan includes alongside blacks on its list of undesireables) and the Klan, just reading any ol goram book about the Klan at work is meant to be "racial harassment." Of which he was summarily found guilty without ever being given the opportunity to face his accusers, a citation included on his record.

So the good news is that this incident has finally been resolved. Under pressure from the ACLU and FIRE, IUPUI reversed the decision, cleared Sampson's record, and issued an apology. Good.

The bad news is that the root causes of the incident haven't been, and won't be addressed. These are: ridiculous Affirmative Action policies that encourage minorities to behave like spoiled children. Honestly, if I were an employer and this kind of incident came up, it would be the black employee who filed the complaint that ended up with a citation on her record. She is, after all, the one who made an inicdent out of nothing, abusing workplace policies put in place to deal with serious issues in the process. I think it is reasonable to expect adults to behave like adults. If someone is reading something that offends you, and you make that clear to the person, and they try to present their side of the story back to you, then the adult thing to do is at least listen. And if the explanation is that the book in question isn't pro-Klan at all but quite anti-Klan, then the adult thing to do is apologize and get over it. This works one of two ways. Either this woman really was offended by this in the way that she says (unlikely), and in which case is an emotional child who obviously has issues dealing with people and the real world and therefore isn't someone I want on my staff, or she's just causing trouble to cause trouble, and isn't someone I want on my staff. What there isn't is a charitable way of looking at someone who files complaints against her coworkers for reading completely inoffensive books on their breaks.

Affirmative action and programs like it do real damage to our culture. Stop to marvel at the irony. It is forbidden to read even politically correct books at a university - a UNIVERSITY! - because the culture no longer expects adults to behave responsibly. That, folks, is not a trivial issue.

Are we gonna have to go through this every year?

2008-04-30T15:26:00.000-07:00

Goddamnit.

People magazine, which has been getting it wrong for 17 - make that 18 - consecutive years now, considers Kate Hudson attractive. Last year it was Drew Barrymore, which is already bad enough. But at least Drew Barrymore is cute. Kate Hudson?

No, no, no, wrong, and no.

It is well-known, but not widely acknowledged, that the most attractive person in the world is Jennifer Connelly, and has been since about 1986.

Feeling Sorry for Obama

2008-04-30T05:35:00.000-07:00

Out of character though this may sound, I actually feel a bit sorry for Barack Obama in the wake of yesterday's press conference disowning Jeremiah Wright.

Don't get me wrong. Obama's full-scale, and belated, disassociation with Wright means that an unmistakeable hit has been scored. I have no desire to see this substance-free, condescending, feel-good smooth-talker sworn in as the next president of this fine country, so if this controversy is causing him trouble, then good. It helps that the controversy itself has merit. This isn't a Lewisnky "Scandal" redux, where some poor, but essentially private (yes, yes, I know, "sexual harrassment" is illegal, but no one ever managed to convince me that any of what happened was against Lewinsky's will at the time it happened), choices on the part of the president were taken WAY out of context to back him into the corner that resulted the lie that caused his impeachment. That was a setup - and based on things that are ultimately irrelevant to leadership competence. This thing with Obama isn't that.

This thing with Obama, unlike a candidate's private extra-marital affairs, is relevant. It is within the limits of acceptable public scrutiny. This would be the case even if Obama hadn't made it the stuff of public discourse by titling his autobiography after a line in a Wright speech: We the People, knowing that our politicians present false faces to us during election time, are entitled to attempt to infer from a politician's voluntary associations how he will actually behave in office. If you're running for president, your church attendance record is fair public game. And if your church attendance record suggests that you are an unpatriotic bigot - as Obama's unambiguously does - then the public is entitled to hold that against you when it goes to make its choice.

That said, and as much as I agree that Barack Obama is not a good choice to head the executive branch, I would like to make the case that he is, in one sense, a victim of circumstance.

In "The Speech" - in which Obama initially defended his association with Wright in spite of the pastor's inflamatory comments - Obama said that this was an opportunity for the nation to confront realities about race. I agree - though Obama and I are not talking about the same "realities." And when Wright himself said two days ago that attacks on him were attacks on culture of black churches, I agree even more strongly. Where I disagree is that this is an acceptable defense. The culture of whites and white churches has been under attack for some time. Why should black churches be immune?

The fact is that the culture of black churches is rotten in exactly the way Wright's speeches imply. Do I know this first-hand? Not exactly. I have never been a member of a black church. But I did grow up in North Carolina, and after a while the signs are unmistakable. There were too many times in high school when a black person I knew from class would pretend not to recognize me if we crossed paths outside of school and other black people were around. Once or twice and you can explain it away. You know, "the sun was in his eyes" or somthing. When it gets to be a pattern, you come to know that the black community suffers from more "institutional racism" today than whites ever dreamed of. And the pattern is only confirmed when you turn on the TV and watch one Rodney King and Tawana Brawley and Duke Rape Case after another, where prominent members of the black community make statements that carry the unmistakable implication that the facts of the case and the public interest in seeing justice done are somehow less important than black people's feelings.

This is a community failing. It doesn't exist at all on the individual level. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist; Wright's comments two days ago are yet another reason we can't pretend it doesn't.

And so I feel sorry for Barack Obama. In disowning Wright, he did the right thing. It would never have been enough for some people, of course - because for some people nothing ever is. But it would have been enough for me -- if only Wright hadn't forced his hand in the way that he did. The sad thing is, Obama was getting away with it. Some Republicans dragged up some of his mentor's statements - the kind of thing that would have easily buried a less talented speaker. But Obama is quite talented, and he managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in a carefully-worded speech that played on some of the sensitivities of the community. He was getting away with it, until Wright decided not to let him. And one can only assume that Wright decided this. He is, after all, only nationally prominent because a large section of the public objects to Obama's association with him. Going on the air and repeating exactly the kinds of things that put Obama in the hotseat can hardly be something he imagined would help.

Why would Wright want Obama to fail? Why set him up to fail? Why not just wait a couple of months until after the election? Is this all about the spotlight? Wright wants it, saw his chance, and damn the consequences for Obama? Maybe. But Wright has already had a successful career and is retired from it. This isn't exactly the point in one's life where he grabs at the spotlight.

No, I have an alternate theory. This will be objectionable to many, but I do believe it. My theory is that black leaders like Wright - the manic street preachers of the community (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton et al) - are ironically but unmistakeably the interest group in this country that has the most to lose if we elect a black president. One thing that Obama's brain-free college kid supporters get right about him is that his election would send a powerful signal (they like to use hyperbolic adjectives like "powerful" alongside noncommital phrases like "send a signal") that America is putting its racist past behind it. And if that happens, what will the manic street preachers have to talk about? Make no mistake, Wright sold Obama out at a crucial point in the campaign for profit - because the profession he devoted his life to (racialist rabble rousing) becomes obsolete if Obama wins.

So I feel sorry for Obama, just as I feel sorry for anyone who gets stabbed in the back by his erstwhile allies. But I don't feel sorry enough to vote for him. He made a choice when he decided to associate with such people, let him suffer the consequences. If the public can be gullible once, then Wright does us a valuable service by not letting it happen twice.

KINDLY Give me my Cigarettes Now

2008-04-26T17:39:00.000-07:00

CARPE DIEM has two interesting posts on Russia. The first has to do with smoking and obesity. Basically, the author sits around in Moscow looking in vain for a fat man. And also for a non-smoker. And then he wonders whether smoking has something to do with Russian thinness. Indeed. It's funny how obvious things like this sometimes take a really long time to occur to you. But I can remember going to Korea for the first time and being equally shocked by how thin everyone was - and that's saying a lot, really, since I was just off the plane from Japan! One of my Japanese friends and I - when he came to visit - spent a long time puzzling over why, while people are generally thin in Japan, you do occasionally see real lardasses, but there simply aren't any fat people at all in Korea. But IT'S THE SMOKING, STUPID! OF COURSE! In retrospect it seems so obvious. Because while we were busy talking about that, we also noticed that there was a lot more smoking going on than in Japan (which also says a lot). (And yes, there is statistical evidence to back up my claim that Koreans smoke a lot more than Japanese. The link goes to a WHO site that claims a smoking rate of 67% for Korea and 51% for Japan.)

Now here's a comparison between Russia and Spain. The second one has to do with customer service in Russia, which the author claims has not fully recovered from the Soviet era. He starts with an annecdote about the opening of the first McDonald's in 1990 in what was then still the Soviet Union. The elaborate training program focused on customer service, a novel concept in a commuist nation. One teenager in training is supposed to have asked, confused, why he should be nice to the customers since he was the one with the hamburgers!

The Soviet Union has been gone for 17 years now. I was in Barcelona in 1998, 23 years after Franco died - which, if you figure the 2 year transition period, put it at roughly the same timespan. What immediately shocked me was how terrible customer service in general was. I went abroad swearing not to be one of those annoying Americans who constantly complains about how much better things are supposed to be at home - but I just couldn't help it. There's indifference, and then there's downright rude, and these people were the latter. I resolved to keep a stiff upper lip about it, but one of my German friends, when we were out of earshot of any Spaniards, let me off the hook by bringing up the subject himself. He'd been there for two years already and still hadn't gotten used to it - and this is a German we're talking about! He explained to me that it had to do with the Franco period - that in a dictatorship the shoe is totally on the other foot, and since the economy is controlled it's the suppliers who have the upper hand. You get in the habit of bribing shopkeepers for favors, and so the mentality sets in that the shopkeeper is the one keeping the customer afloat, rather than the other way around. At the time I just sort of nodded but couldn't really see the point. Surely even in a dictatorship profits are important, right? But now I read this about Russia and I wonder - because that was exactly the attitude in Barcelona when I was there. When I bought something from someone, it was as if the shopkeeper had done me a favor. Strange.

Which all makes me wonder ... when was Indiana ever a dictatorship? Because damned if that's not exactly the impression I get here a lot of times too. I can remember one time me and all 32 years I'd been on this planet at the time walked into Marsh (a grocery store) wanting to buy beer. The cunt behind the register apparently gets her kicks carding people and wanted to see two forms of ID - which is ridiculous. I get that I look young for my age, but I'm nowhere near looking under 21! At best, she needs to do a cursory check to fulfill her legal obligations, but TWO forms of ID??? So I asked her if she was serious, and she said she was and acted irritated. I held up my license, which is behind a plastic screen in my wallet, and then turned it over to show her my student ID. She insisted that I pull each out and hand them to her. "Are you enjoying this?" I asked. She said "Sir, do you want the alcohol or not?" To which I responded "Do you want my money or not?" Honestly, there are plenty of stores in town that sell beer! But it's constant here. Customer service just blows. I miss the South.

More Pronoun Rankings

2008-04-25T21:16:00.000-07:00

In response to my response to his post on pronouns, Mr. Tweedy has more to say on the subject. Specifically, he acknowledges, based on my evidence, that the underlying problem of pronoun ordering in conjunctive phrases is complex - though of course the point of his original post was just some random observations about certain limited colloquial forms, so no harm no foul.

To get at the solution, he (helpfully) goes through all the combinations of pronouns joined by "and" in subject position - marking each on a well-defined scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is (roughly) "most acceptable" and 5 is "not at all acceptable." (Actually, it's not quite a full factorial typology: he leaves out cases like "I and me" where forms matching in person and number are differentiated by case alone. This is understandable, since discourse situations that involve these forms are rare. If I were going to do a real study on this, I'm not sure whether I would choose to include them or not. Probably I would, for completeness, but there's no doubt they introduce a confound.)

Based on this, he concludes that

It looks like, if you're only going to inflect one, then it's better to put the nominative inflection on the first (and so structurally nearest, if you're assuming a conjunctive phrase joining the second to the first) item and leave it off the second than it is to do it the other way around.

He goes on to add that nominative marking on the first item is optional in colloquial speech, and that nominative can apaprently spread to the second item in a conjunctive phrase, but that it's generally not a good idea to mark the second item nominative if the first item isn't so marked.

But he acknowledges that he still lacks an explanation for why things like "*I and Frank went to the movies" are so terrible. After all, this has a nominative item structurally preceeding an item that's ambiguous for case.

So there are still some pieces missing - and in fact I think I have an idea what they are.

Taking Mr. Tweedy's ratings (though, I hasten to add that I definitely disagree with a number of them - for example (j1) "We and they went to the movies" is REALLY BAD for me, but it gets a clean bill of health from Mr. Tweedy) as input, I wrote a short program in Python to organize the data around features. Specifically, it takes all the input cases and scores a "violation" for the particular ordering based on the rating Mr. Tweedy gave it. So, for example, for "I and him went to the movies" (Mr. Tweedy's item b6), which Mr. Tweedy gives a 5 (I agree), the program adds 5 to the total violation score for 1 >> 3 and n >> o and s >> s- where 1 and 3 are obviously person markers, "n" and "o" are "nominative" and "objective" respectively and "s >> s" just means that a singular form preceeded a singular form. "You" was obviously a bit tricky to handle this way - but since this is just a sweep for fun over a single "subject's" grammaticality judgements, I simply encoded it as "b" (for "both") for singular/plural and nominative/objective. Some more thought is probably warranted there.

In any case, these are the results (where high scores are worse - like in golf).

For singular vs. plural:

b >> s: 7
s >> b: 9
b >> p: 12
p >> b: 14

p >> p: 22
s >> s: 35
s >> p: 36
p >> s: 38

So it doesn't look like there's much of an effect for singular vs. plural. It seems to be better to put singulars before plurals, and "you" before either (maybe?), but the effect isn't very strong. The only thing of interest here is that singular seems to be bad in general. I mean, if you have it paired with a plural, then better to put it first, but best of all is don't have it. So, proposed OT constraints (because I do think this problem warrants a constraint-ranking solution, and NOT a derivational/rule-ordered solution) would be:

(YOU >>) SINGULAR >> PLURAL

*SINGULAR (no idea how this one actually functions, of course!)

For nominative vs. objective:

b >> n: 8
n >> b: 10
b >> o: 11
o >> b: 13

n >> n: 22
o >> o: 25
n >> o: 33
o >> n: 51

So Mr. Tweedy's speculation that the first element should be nominative is CORRECT. However, it seems that better still is just to have both in the same case. So right, nominative before objective, but there is also a case concord preference, and it seems to override the "nominative first" rule. Better to have both items in objective case than the first in nominative and the second in objective. (Note: I'll bet, however, that there's an exception to this → don't have two of the same form one after the other - i.e. no "he and he went...") You was again problematic. It seems best to put "you" before items of either case (stress on "seems;" there's no real way to know what's going on with "you" and case).

(YOU >> ???) NOMINATIVE >> OBJECTIVE

*CASE-CONTOUR

But (and this is the piece of the puzzle that Mr. Tweedy seems to be missing in his most recent analysis) the most striking result had to do with person.

2 >> 3: 7
3 >> 2: 7
2 >> 1: 12
1 >> 2: 16
3 >> 1: 41
1 >> 3: 58

This seems to show the clearest preferences. 2nd and 3rd person don't seem to care which order they come in relative to each other. But both 2nd and 3rd person like to come before 1st person, and this is especially so for 3-1 pairings. If you simply add up the totals for each in the first position, then 2nd scores a 19, 3rd scores a 48, and 1st scores a whopping 74. Of course, if we do it the other way round and look at second position, 2nd has a 23, 3rd a 65, and 1st a 53, so one could make a case the other way (i.e. 3rd strongly dislikes being last, 1st too, and 2nd doesn't much mind). But there are reasons to think that the ranking is, in fact, 2 >> 3 >> 1. This is because, taken as an ordering on pairs, 2 is definitely supposed to come first. It fares better than either 1 or 3 on individual pairings. If you think of it then as a problem of ordering the other two, having established the ranking for 2, then 3 is clearly supposed to precede 1.

And that, in short, is the answer to why "I and Frank went to the movies" is so bad, even though Mr. Tweedy is right that nominative should precede objective (keeping in mind, of course, that we don't really know what case "Frank" is in - the point is just that there shouldn't in general be a problem with nominative forms coming first). Because there's another constraint that says "don't put 1st person in front of 3rd person." This equally explains cases like "He and I went to the movies" being acceptable whereas "I and he went to the movies" is bad, even though both are nominative-marked. It's also, presumably, why I would have given "We and they went to the movies" a 5 (though I admit I'm puzzled why "They and we went to the movies" is so terrible - a 4 on my personal scale). I suspect Mr. Tweedy actually agrees. Marking that sentence 1 was no doubt a case of hypercorrection on his part (after all, these constraints are based on HIS judgments).

I'm willing to bet, in fact, that the constraint on person is more important than the constraint on case. But I'm hitting my lazy zone, so I'm going to leave it aside for now.

A couple of things to keep in mind with all this. First, these ratings really only reflect Mr. Tweedy's personal grammar. Since he is a native English speaker, it's highly likely that it agrees in large part with everyone else's grammars - but of course the only way to tell for sure is to survey a bunch of people. That is, in fact, something that I would like to do eventually - but not just now. Second, this is only the tip of the iceberg. There are other conjunctions besides "and," for example, and I wonder whether it's different for different conjunctions? Third, no care was taken here to balance out the typology. To do this kind of survey for real, I would have to make sure that each form showed up in the test the same number of times - which is obviously a headache when you're dealing with hugely ambiguous forms like "you."

But it's nothing if not interesting. I declare the problem solved to my personal satisfaction. Nominative should precede objective, 2nd person should precede third person which precedes first, and the person ordering is more important than the case ordering, and the ban on case contours explains cases like "He and me went to the movies" being worse than "He and I went to the movies." The rock in my craw is "They and we went to the movies," which is just BAD. Better than "We and they...," but honestly not by much. However, I think there's an obvious explanation for this one that has nothing to do with the constraint ranking: simple semantics. "We and they" implies "we," and so most people no doubt choose to say "we" (or possibly "we all") in these cases. The constraint here is just *POINTLESS CONSTRUCTIONS.

A Use for Facebook

2008-04-23T21:13:00.000-07:00

So it turns out Facebook is useful for something. A friend sends in an email link to the "Lexicon" function, which tracks word frequencies over time. I tried it for "center" vs. "centre" and got an interesting sort of result. The two words show a frequency curve that pretty much exactly matches, with "center" being more frequent than "centre" - except at one random point last November "centre" was briefly more popular. I account for the striking similar curves by chalking instances of "centre" up mostly to typos. But that doesn't explain last November. Sudden influx of Brits onto Facebook that month?

The next one I did was "color" vs. "colour." Nothing to report there: both hold steady, with "colour" significantly less frequent. When I tried with "tire" vs. "tyre," it didn't even return a result.

Sociolinguists must think this is the cat's meow.

Eine kleine Nachtsyntax

2008-04-21T18:25:00.000-07:00

Mr. Tweedy has an interesting entry today on language use. Well, 1/3 of it is interesting, anyway - the part about the use of 'I' vs. 'me' in formal and informal English.

I seize on this because it happens to be one of my biggest pet peeves about the way some people speak English (no surprise to anyone - for all we Linguists go on about being anti-prescriptivists, we ALL find ways to justify nevertheless being annoyed at how some people speak). Namely - people who overuse 'I' rank in at just barely more tolerable than those who overuse 'whom' in my registry of demons.

On the whole, I agree with Mr. Tweedy's analysis - so jump over and have a look if you have the time. The gist of it is this:

Frank and I (subject)- fine in both formal and informal English

Me and Frank (subject)- fine in both formal and informal English, though the form in (1) is preferred in formal contexts

Frank and me (subject)- bad in formal English - strangely worse than (2) informal English as well

When in object position - 'I' form is NEVER acceptable

The data is(are, whatever) correct, of course - but I'd honestly never noticed the 'Frank and me' vs. 'Me and Frank' effect - whereby the first is somehow worse than the second - in informal English before. And in fact, if you'd asked my opinion without pointing that out to me, I would've predicted just the opposite. Reason being - as Mr. Tweedy points out (though not in precisely these terms) - accusative (more properly, 'objective') case seems to be the default case in English. When someone asks you "Who wants candy?" your response is invariably 'me,' rather than 'I.' Now, as Tweedy points out, it's natural to say 'I do' (and in fact, 'me do' is completely ungrammatical) - presumably because the tensed verb(-placeholder) 'do' assigns nominative case to 'I.' Meaning that as a standalone lexical item - the first person singular pronoun is probably 'me,' and it only changes to 'I' in a specifically case-marked form; objective case is default in English.

So in a conjuntive phrase, I would rather expect the second member to be the unmarked one.

Mr. Tweedy thinks differently, and argues for an "end of phrase" effect for case marking. Basically - the second item in a phrase is more likely to be marked. So if it's "Me and Frank went to the movies," then "Frank" gets marked because it's second, but of course this marking is vacuous for proper names (indeed, any specified nouns) in English. And if it's the other way around, then "me" gets marked, and this time we can see the marking: it turns up as "I."

I think he would've been on more solid ground arguing for a "closest conjunct" effect (basically, whichever is closer to the verb gets marked), and here's why.

First of all - let me take issue with the second part of his justification. As (further) evidence for his "end of phrases get marked" thesis, he cites the case of "Jon's and Bob's car" vs. "Jon and Bob's car." Both are OK - point being, we mark the end of the phrase obligatorily, the first member optionally. Actually, I think this is a misanalysis of this particular case. In fact, in the "Jon's and Bob's car" case, it's that BOTH "Jon" and "Bob" have phrasal status. Witness things like "The king's money" vs. "The king of France's money" vs. the completely ungrammatical "The king's of France money."
Now try it with "King and queen." "The king's and queen's of France's money" simply won't do. BUT - we can say "The King's and Queen of France's money" - it's just that we understand it to be the case that the King is not the King of France (actually, no one is, but never mind ;-), but rather some other King, and "of France" modifies only "Queen." Why is this so? Well, presumably because "King" and "Queen of France" are members of separate phrases. Reality is that we're allowed only one 's marking per phrase. So if we're coordinating two items with 's on them, we're really coordinating two (single-word, in this case) phrases.

But so far I'm just nit-picking. This still works for Mr. Tweedy's explanation, right? Because in the case of "[Frank and I] went to the movies," then we can analyze "Frank and I" as a phrase and say that only the last item in it is case-marked, right?

Well, yeah, but how, then, do we explain all of this:

OK: He and I went to the movies.

BAD: Him and I went to the movies.

BAD: I and Frank went to the movies.

BAD: Me and he went to the movies.

OK: Me and him went to the movies.

It's easy to see that the whole thing comes tumbling down. Mr. Tweedy's theory, as stated, can get away with number (1) - although I've given reasons to doubt that marking ever shows up (even optionally) on the first item in a phrase. But let it go - he gets an explanation for (1). But if his explanation is right, and the first conjunct can optionally be case-marked, then what's wrong with (3)? Why can we optionally case-mark 'him" as "he" in (1), but not "me" (as "I") in (3)? Likewise, according to this theory, (2) - in which case marking is only on the second conjunct - should actually be better than (1), and yet it's worse. Mr. Tweedy could get around this, maybe, by claiming that "him" isn't the default form of "he" the way "me" is the default form of "I" - but he would still be unable to explain example (4). He would CERTAINLY be unable to explain how (4) is possibly worse than (5) (in which there is no nominative case marking on the second conjunct), and yet (5) is better than (4)!

So Mr. Tweedy's missing some pieces here.

Not that I have an alternate explanation myself. Conjunctive phrases are NOTORIOUSLY difficult to handle in standard Syntax. But here's my oh-so-modern Minimalist suspicion: there is some truth to the idea that pronouns in English are clitic-like. Notice that "order in the phrase" plays a role for what you can and can't get away with, but that it doesn't map onto all pronouns in the same way. That's a big clue that we're dealing with peculiarities of the lexical items themselves, and not any kind of nice syntacitc generalization about English. Rather - it seems to be a PF-level effect. "Pronounce this this way here and some other way elsewhere." And in the case of "I," it's sort of a "pronounce me last" effect. Synactically it's a full member of the conjunct phrase, but phonetically it can only be pronounced last. (Note this holds even in the hypercorrected forms - when people say crap like "I feel the magic between you and I." Even those troglodytes can't get "I feel the magic between I and you!") More evidence: note that (5) gets really bad all of a sudden if you swap places: "BAD: Him and me went to the movies." There are some dialects where you can get away with that, but in the standard dialect it's right out. Again - the ordering effect seems to be a peculiarity of the lexical items - not anything deeper than that. "Me" just likes to be first is all. Still not convinced? Try these two on for size:

He and him are good friends.

Him and he are good friends.

Neither is particularly good, but dontcha like (1) A LOT better than (2)?

I'm telling you - all it is is an ordering effect, no different from, say, the fact that in Romanian, all the object clitics go in front of the auxilliary - bucept the feminine one, which randomly goes after the main verb.

L-am vazut.

N-am vazut pe nimeni.

Am vazut-o

(1) and (3) are "I saw him/her" (respectively). (2) is "I didn't see anyone." It's there just to show that clitics in general go in front of the auxilliary - it's only the feminine (accusative) one that's weird and goes after the main verb.

I think something similar is at work with pronouns in English. There are no revealing syntactic principles at work here - just like there is no deep reason why the feminine clitic is the odd "man" out in Romanian. It is that way ... because it just bleedin' IS that way! The solution for English pronouns in conjunctive phrases is a simple PF-side constraint ranking problem. It's one of those times when Optimality Theory really is the way to go in Syntax.

Oh, NOW it's bad...

2008-04-21T16:59:00.000-07:00

Under today's "Are you fucking kidding me?" category: Stephane Dion is hot under the collar because the Tories were caught overspending their elections limit by $1million - aprox. 5.5%.

Don't get me wrong - it all seems very shady. The way I understand it, party headquarters tranfered funds to the coffers of 67 or so local candidates who were under their spending limits. I don't know much about elections law in Canada, but I gather that would've been OK if the candidates had spent the money on their own campaigns. Instead, they claimed deductions on the surplus and then transfered it right back. Somehow this was supposed to escape the RCMP's notice...don't ask, doesn't make much sense to me. Sounds like the kind of thing that would've easily turned up on any run-of-the-mill government audit - but this is a new story, so I guess details will surface as it goes on.

I would just like to say that, wrongdoing or no, it's awfully rich of the LIBERAL Party to be whining about this.

Dion said the money could have influenced the outcome of the January 2006 election, which saw the Grits ousted from power and the Tories form a minority government.

"Yes, it may have had an effect," Dion said. "We'll never know for sure, but you don't cheat for nothing. You cheat because you want to have an effect. You want to have more voters for you in an illegal way."

I'm scratching my head trying to figure out how a measly million dollars is supposed to have been decisive in an election that the Tories were winning handily until the last couple of weeks. More than that, I'm scratching my head trying to figure out how the "Sponsorship Scandal" and "You had an option, sir" Party suddenly grew a conscience about these things?

I will make a prediction, though. In the end this hurts Harper and the Conservatives ... not one whit.

Who's Joe Queenan?

2008-04-19T18:07:00.000-07:00

I was generally unaware of who Joe Queenan was before I read Samizdata today. What an oversight!

The link goes to an interview with a guy full of great one-liners spitting vitriol about things I, too, love to hate. In fact, my bone to pick with the Samizdata piece is that they zeroed in on the wrong quote. Surely it should've been this one instead:

But, Bill Clinton has all of the hypocrisy of baby boomers and all of the false sense that if you simply say the right thing, it's like you did something.

Quoted for the bit about saying the right thing, not the specific reference to Clinton (whom Queenan goes on to defend a bit). Right on! Ok, ok, I realize it's bit rich to be saying this on a blog - but that's hit the nail right on the head about what's wrong with political discourse these days.

One of these days I'll sit down and write a compendium of all the undergraduate writing errors that slowly eat away at the precious time I have on this beautiful planet by poisoning me with a bitter vinegar hatred of everything living. The number one worst thing that an undergraduate can do, and of course therefore never fails to do, is use the word "utilize" every goram time. As though there were some phonological process in English whereby taking an ordinary verb and using its meta-aspectual form rendered your writing sophisticated. [-ize] → [+ize]/ [+ intellectual], or something. But if that's number one, then number two is surely clawing for moral approbation from your reader by using ever-stronger adjectives. Like when people say of a racist "I believe in free speech, so I defend his right to spout his vile and disgusing opinions." Just fucking tell me about your support for free speech you twit - I don't have to know that you, like 99.99% of everyone else on the planet, actually takes the extremely normal position of disapproving of racism to even greater heights to get the point there, sport. Call it Tori Spelling syndrome - because my favorite mass media example (with "Islam is a religion of peace" in close second) comes from her gushing about the gay wedding she officiated.

"It was so beautiful as I united Tony and Dex as life partners in love. They wrote their own beautiful vows and there was so much love surrounding them that there wasn't a dry eye in the driveway! ... It was a magical evening of pure love."

So you're saying it was beautiful? And that there was love?

In second place for Queenan's cool lines is this one:

But, [Katherine Powers] really, really hated ["Balsamic Dreams"]. And when I saw her review I thought, "Bingo. This is great. This is really cool. I hit the target. Some old lefty, movement person in Boston hates the book because I made fun of Jimmy Carter or the old hippies." It's better than people liking it. That's an exhilarating feeling.

Eff-n right it is. I would much rather watch some smug leftist sputter with indignation than I would get applause from a room full of the like-minded. Some people deserve to be made angry.

So, maybe I'll pick up one of his books someday. Though I strongly suspect I'm too lazy...

Whoop Dee Doo isn't a Platform

2008-04-19T18:05:00.000-07:00

Sometimes people you hate say things you like. The link goes to an article about the campaign in Pennsylvania, where Hillary Clinton was taking a swipe at Barack Obama by promising

"I don't want to just show up and give one of those whoop-dee-do speeches and get everybody whipped up," she said. "I want everyone thinking."

OK, so we all have our guilty pleasures. I don't mean to suggest any kind of support for Hillary Clinton, but Barack Obama seriously gets on my nerves - and for exactly that reason.

There's a bumper sticker from the last campaign that I think of when I hear Barack Obama speak. It reads "'Yee-Haw!' is not a foreign policy" - a criticism of Bush, obviously. The idea being that you can't just say "freedom" endlessly and talk about how great America is and expect things to work out. At some point you have to get your hands dirty and work with the world as it really is - and that's a complicated thing that doesn't admit of a one-size-fits-all solution. Well, that's more or less how I feel about Barack Obama. You can't just say "hope" and "unity" endlessly and expect things to work out. At some point, it doesn't hurt to outline a program.

I wonder, actually, how many people with those "Yee-Haw" bumper stickers are now canvassing for Obama? Wouldn't it be fun to know?

Chivalry's Dead Beacuse YOU Killed It

2008-04-18T13:22:00.000-07:00

I firmly believe that the main reason why feminism isn't taken seriously is that it's so often oblivious to its own double standards. If there's one complaint that men have made loudly, clearly, and consistently about feminists since the 70s, it's that they are singularly incapable of playing fair about "liberation." For example - although there are notable exceptions, it's a rare thing for a feminist organization to seriously campaign for the inclusion of women in Selective Service registration. Another thing you rarely hear is complaints from feminists about the "underrepresentation" of women in professions like trash collection and sewer line maintenance. Again, no doubt there are some feminists of integrity who consider this an issue on par with the corporate glass ceiling, but for the most part it's hard to divorce oneself from the idea that women's organizations are simply gunning for more privilege.

In pop politics, we usually hear this complaint in the context of chivalry. Men are rightly confused here: women get angry when we whistle at them, and yet they still expect us to do the asking for dates. We're not expected to pay for everything anymore, but generally speaking, you're expected to pay for the first couple of outings. What gives?

This attitude was on full display in today's paper. The link goes to a column by Rachael Goldberg that is a muddled mass of contradictions essentially amount to "I want chivalry when I want it, not when I don't."

She takes as her starting point an incident when she was shopping with one of her male friends. He'd put some water bottles on the bottom ledge of the shopping cart, and she politely asked him to lift them for her. He politely asked her to do it herself, which she did - much to the chagrin of the checkout girl, who commented that chivalry was truly dead.

"Honey, did that boy just make you put that up there?" I nodded sadly. "Yes, yes he did." And the cashier replied, "Wow. Chivalry really is dead."

Now - let me go on record saying that I definitely don't mind lifting water for girls. My problem here isn't with the assumption that men should do these things, but rather with the double standard Goldberg goes on to express.

Being chivalrous can include all these horrible masculine stereotypes of men needing to be strong and needing to protect and save women. This in turn implies that women must be weak and need protecting. And you know me: The eternal gender-rights advocate does not support any of that.

Well, one wonders, if you're an "eternal gender-rights advocate" who can't abide those "horrible masculine stereotypes of men needing to be strong and needing to protect and save women," then WHY THE HELL DID YOU ASK THE GUY TO LIFT THE WATER FOR YOU IN THE FIRST PLACE?

While I don't mind lifting water bottles - my arms are strong enough for it - an offer to help out would have been appreciated.

Why? If you don't mind lifting water bottles, then why not just do it? On what basis should he have offered to help? Apparently, if this is to be believed, because it's "common courtesy."

It's not about being weak or strong. It's just about being a nice person who is considerate of others. And in such a misogynistic society, being considerate of women is something that's always needed.

In other words, what we're in the presence of here is someone who wants her water bottles lifted for her without the assumption that men are stronger than women.

Well, sorry, but NO. It doesn't work that way. If we're in a situation where a man and a woman are in the grocery store, and the woman is closer to the water bottles, and we have no underlying assumptions about the relative body strength of men and women, then we go to the default system: the closest person in a state of physical health does the lifting. That's how it would work among an all-male group, that's how it would work among an all-female group, and if we're true believers in equality, that's how it works in mixed groups as well. If, however, we're in a mixed group and the rule shifts from "nearest person does the lifting" to "nearest male does the lifting," then we're implicity adopting social roles. Again, for the record, I don't have any particular problem with these social roles. What I have a problem with is my having to keep up the shit end of the stick while Miss Princess gets to pretend that we're completely equal.

Equality means "same standards apply." It doesn't mean "standards apply and don't according to the whims of the female." It CERTAINLY doesn't mean "standards apply and don't according to the whims of the female, and she reserves the right to make moral judgements about her friends based on standards she hasn't made clear to them."

So - Rachel Goldberg: get over yourself. I think you'll find that chivalry is far from dead - it's just that it's dead for you. And that's as it should be: chivalry is a system for people with manners - something that derives from social expectations. If your social expectations are "people do nice things for me, and I am inconsiderate of them," then you have completely failed to internalize the system. We - all of us - get to pick one of two attitudes to chivalry. Either we like and expect it, and thereby consent, to some non-trivial degree, to the social roles that give rise to it, or we don't like and don't accept it, and thus we carry our own water. Even the women.

Excuses, Excuses

2008-04-17T14:07:00.000-07:00

As we've all heard, Pope Benedict has been in town, and has apparently spent the last three days apologizing for all the sex abuse scandals we've been hearing so much about. To that exent - kudos. It's certainly an improvement from his predecessor.

Let me go ahead and get this out of the way: while I do believe that Catholic priests are significantly more likely to sexually abuse children than other segments of the population, I do not believe the problem is nearly as severe as the media has made it out to be. Investigations have shown that the rate of abuse in the United States is slightly higher than that for the population in general: about 4% of all priests are believed to have been involved in abuse. There are, of course, two good reasons to assume it is probably a bit higher. One is the usual suspicion that reports of this kind tend to understate the scope of the problem. This is no fault of theirs - simply a consequence of the methodology. The other is the nature of the priesthood itself. Normal people do not commit to a life of celibacy. This isn't to say that a good many (the overwhelming majority, one assumes) of priests do not embrace celibacy for the "right" reasons (for the record, I'm with George Michael on this one: "Sex is natural, sex is good; not everybody does it, but everybody should."). But it's also reasonable to assume that this is a profession that is likely to attract paedophiles, as it affords an opportunity to associate with children, an explanation of one's bachelor status, and it used to also afford relative freedom from suspicion for exactly this kind of wrongdoing (though this last point has obviously changed quite a bit in recent years). People with normal sexual appetites obviously face a much higher bar to entry into the priesthood, and so one can assume that they are less likely to be "called."

Still, it's likely that the scandal has been overblown. The rate of estimated priestly abuse is only a bit higher than that for the general population, and for obvious reasons the stories of priestly abuse are more likely to be sensationalized in the media than stories of abuse by people from other walks of life. Abuse by a priest is a huge, and uniquely hypocritical, betrayal of trust: it makes for good copy.

No, the real offense of the scandal isn't that there are paedophiles in the priesthood (of course there are!), but the fact that the Church's reaction has largely focused on controlling the PR fallout more than addressing the problem. In that sense, Benedict's "profuse" apologies are too little, too late, even if welcome.

But there's also another, more important, sense in which his apologies strike one as a bit insincere, and that's in his insistence that the problems needs to be viewed in the wider context of secularism and the over-sexualization of America.

This response from the Church is wearing thin (it was a favorite of John-Paul II's). It's singularly inappropriate for this scandal, and people need to start saying so. Here's why.

First - the Church can hardly afford itself the luxury of styling itself a "victim" of secularization. Its mission statement is to resist this trend, after all. It's a bit like a prostitute complaining that all she ever does is fuck. Well, right - that's your job. If you're looking to form meaningful relationships with your clients, you're in the wrong line of work. Likewise, if you're a "victim" of secularization, you need to see a priest, not be one. Ditto the "over-sexualization of America." What does this have to do with anything? I suppose next if a priest turns out to be dealing drugs to teenagers, the Church will blame this on the American "drug culture?"

There's a reason we hold people claiming to be moral authorities on subjects to a higher standard. It's the same reason I've argued that Hillary doesn't get a free pass for faulty memory. It isn't that her claim that she "misremembered" the incident in Bosnia is automatically false (though I admit I suspect it is). It's that she's in a position where she doesn't get the luxury of using this excuse. Priests are the same way. If your job description involves telling other people how to live their lives, then you don't get to be "one of us," sorry. It's the same way that I, as a linguist, can't be forgiven for assuming that everyone who speaks with a southern accent is an uneducated. I know better. It's my job to know better. Some yokel from Michigan who thinks this can plausibly claim to have been misled by the ignorant stereotypes that characterize his community, right. But not if he's gone to school and studied the subject!

Now, I get why the Church doesn't wanna defrock the people involved in these scandals. By the goofy parameters of their belief system, being a priest is a calling from God - no grounds to question it. Fine. Likewise, they're committed to a hugely pessimistic view of humanity in which we're all inherently flawed creatures; they actually expect everyone to screw up. So when priests do it, no big deal to them, right? Right BUT - whatever you believe about a person's calling and whatever you believe about sin and redemption, surely it's in line with Church doctrine that someone who shows he has a proclivity for a particular kind of sin be judged weak in the face of relevant temptations? And surely there's nothing "unchristian" in worrying about the safety of potential victims? Rape isn't a sin like any other, after all. It's not something like lying, that pretty much everyone does semi-regularly. Rape is an extraordinary thing - and especially so when children are the victims.

Maybe Benedict's profuse apologies signal an actual change in intent and policy. Maybe. But if he's taking up the tired line that "society" is to blame, I think it's more likely that he just talks better than the other fellow.

Letter to a Christian Apologist

2008-04-17T09:26:00.000-07:00

For the past couple of weeks, Mike Adams has been publishing a series of anti-atheist columns - especially a series in response to Sam Harris and his book Letter to a Christian Nation. It is, in particular, the third installment that I want to take issue with.

Dr. Adams references a number of statements by Harris that are, admittedly, a little dopey, if taken at face value - in particular, this one:

Consider:every devout Muslim has the same reasons for being a Muslim that you have for being a Christian.

It isn't too difficult for Adams to point out the differences between Christianity and Islam, not only in terms of their fundamental beliefs about God and the Universe, but also in terms of how the two religions view each other. But it's here that I think Adams has missed the point - and indeed, that I think a lot of modern defenders of Christianity have missed the point. It's true enough that Islam, as written, is much more violent and less tolerant than Christianity. And it's equally true that the reality of the two religions today is that Christianity is much less violent and more tolerant in practice than Islam. Let's make no bones about it: I would MUCH rather live in a Christian nation than a Muslim nation. But the operative word in the previous sentence was "today." It hasn't always been the case that Christianity was generally peaceful and relatively tolerant, and this despite its much-vaunted teachings.

Adams writes:

Indeed, for many Muslims the decision is made out of fear of the consequences of rejecting Islam. Many are not even familiar with basic Christian arguments or the evidence supporting them.

Accepting Christianity, on the other hand, is far more likely to have come from a rational appraisal of the evidence. And it is far less likely to have come from the threat of the sword.

Ah, but it wasn't too long ago that this simply wasn't the case. And no, we don't have to dig all the way back to the Middle Ages to find examples. Indigenous peoples were being forcibly converted to Christianity less than 100 years ago. Even in Europe, where such practices had ostensibly ceased, the cases of people who made public conversions in the 1800s and early 1900s out of fears for their careers and social standing are numerous. The point being: whatever Dr. Adams thinks it says in the Bible hasn't stopped Christians from behaving like savages in the past. It didn't even stop renowned scholars of the Bible from advocating savage treatment for non-believers. Consider this passage from St. Thomas Aquinas:

With regard to heretics there are two points to be observed, one on their side, the other on the side of the Church. As for heretics their sin deserves banishment, not only from the Church by excommunication, but also from this world by death. To corrupt the faith, whereby the soul lives, is much graver than to counterfeit money, which supports temporal life. Since forgers and other malefactors are summarily condemned to death by the civil authorities, with much more reason may heretics as soon as they are convicted of heresy be not only excommunicated, but also justly be put to death. (source)

Aquinas goes on to say that the Church is merciful, and that a man can be forgiven for rejecting its teachings - BUT

...wherefore [the Church] condemns not at once, but "after the first and second admonition," as the Apostle directs: after that, if he is yet stubborn, the Church no longer hoping for his conversion, looks to the salvation of others, by excommunicating him and separating him from the Church, and furthermore delivers him to the secular tribunal to be exterminated thereby from the world by death.

Have a look at the link and you will see that this is based on reasoned Biblical argument. And why not? Jesus himself, in the Parable of the Pounds, seems to advocate the killing of those who reject the Church's teachings. Specifically, Luke 19:27 warns:

But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.

Granted, this is the King in the story speaking, not Jesus directly, but it is hard to read this parable any other way than that the King is a stand-in for Jesus. Most interpretations would have this death order apply only after the Second Coming, when the Kingdom of God is manifest. That is, only to those who reject Jesus once they are certain He is real. Fair enough. But this is nevertheless a scare tactic of the kind Harris was talking about when he said that Muslims and Christians have the same reasons for believing in their respective religions. Harris wasn't, one presumes, asserting, as Mike Adams disingenuously imples here, that Christians and Muslims have exactly the same beliefs about Jesus. Obviously such an assertion would be nonsense. But he seems to be CORRECT that both religions rely on scare tactics and ghost stories to keep the faithful in the fold.

Another statement of Harris' that allows Adams to claim he is speaking in contradictions is this one:

The Jains preach a doctrine of utter non-violence. While the Jains believe many improbable things about the universe,they do not believe the sorts of things that lit the fires of the Inquisition.

Adams points out that Harris stated earlier in the book that all religions are on the same footing for him - he rejects Christianity and Islam equally. Here, however, Harris seems to be claiming a kind of moral superiority for Jainism - something inconsistent with his earlier blanket rejection of religion.

Or is it?

Technically, yes, I suppose it is. And to the extent that Harris' earlier claim was meant to say that all religions are equally bad, let me go ahead and publicly disagree with him. Some religions are better than others. But I think I understand what Harris is getting at with this point, and I agree with it, so let me defend it. It's true that some religions are better than others, but it doesn't follow from that that any of them are ultimately good for humanity. It's rather like if you go to any lower-middle class street in the US and have a look at everyone's bank accounts, you will find that some people on the street are better-off than others, but that none of them are exactly wealthy. Jainism can be more peaceful than Christianity and still a bad idea - because it leads people to believe goofy things about the universe without reason (or, as Harris charitably puts it, "...Jains believe many improbable things about the universe..."). But I think the real point here is to serve as a preemptive response to the kind of argument that Adams just gave: i.e. that Christianity and Islam are not equivalent because Christianity, as written, is less violent than Islam. And since we just saw Dr. Adams give exactly that argument, we would really want to know what his response to this is. So, Dr. Adams, if Christianity is better than Islam because it does not convert people through threat of violence as Islam does (never mind that it did just that for large portions of its history), then why is Jainism not better than Christianity by this standard? That was a clear question put to you, the believer, by Harris, which I notice you have sidestepped.

Now, I imagine what Dr. Adams will eventually be reduced to saying is simply "Jainism isn't true; Christianity is. That's why Christianity is better." But of course this is a completely useless response to anyone who hasn't experienced some kind of revelation. And that, indeed, is precisely Harris' earlier point when he says that Christians are Christians and Muslims are Muslims for the same reason. That reason is a wilful belief in things for which they have no independent evidence.

Indeed, Adams flatly contradicts himself on exactly this point not two paragraphs later. Taking this quote from Harris:

Anyone who believes that the Bible offers the best guidance we have on questions of morality has some very strange ideas either about guidance or morality.

Adams responds

The two key words are "best" and "we." There is, therefore, a superior moral code by which "we" can all live. But it does not come from God. So what is the source of this superior moral code to which we may all subscribe?

In other words, Adams' earlier statements to the effect that Christianity was superior to Islam because it left believers free to their own conscience turn out to be the kind of things that, by his own code, he cannot direct at non-believers anyway. That is because - if this response is to be believed - Adams thinks that people who have no religion (who do not know God) have no basis for moral judgement. What's good for the goose isn't, apparently, good for the gander. It's fine for Adams to assert, based on the moral code that comes from his belief in God, that Christianity is superior, and for him to couch this in objective terms that non-believers can presumably also relate to, but when it comes time for a non-believer to criticize Christianity, then suddenly morality is something that only Christians have, because it "comes from God." Of course, it's possible that Adams believes that morality comes from God, and that all people, as God's creations, have an inkling in their internal makeup as to what its precepts are, and that they can judge religions on this basis and come to the conclusion that Christianity is the True one. That would be a respectable, Kantian approach. But in that case, the criticism still applies: Harris, as a creation of God under Adams' belief system, presumably has access to this set of standards, whether or not he acknowledges that it comes from God.

Of course, I suppose Adams' point here is to offer some kind of sly "proof" that God exists - by asserting that moral truth can only come from God, and that if Harris is basing his position on moral truths then either he covertly believes in God or he has some difficult questions to answer about where morality comes from. Which is far enough as far as it goes - just that it doesn't go very far. Just because an atheist has difficulty explaining where something like morality comes from, ultimately, is hardly an argument against atheism. Religion has it easy here: whatever in the universe is unexplained can be brushed away with reference to "God," despite no knowledge on the believer's part of the mechanism that underlies it. If we asked Adams where moral precepts come from, he would no doubt say they are the "Will of God." But this is useless. Knowing that moral precepts are "God's Will" tells us nothing about how they work or why they are the way they are. Adams and people like him simply push their explanation onto something external-but-mysterious. "It is not for us to question God." To the extent that he can give indepdent justification for why God chose this or that moral over another, then Adams believes in some kind of standard outside God by which to judge morality, and thus must admit that he and Harris can have a discussion about it. If he reduces all morality to God's whims, then his source of morality is no less mysterious than Harris', and this is therefore not a valid basis for criticism.
But I'm being too charitable. Mike Adams, simply put, is trying to have his cake and eat it too. Morality is objective, available to everyone whether or not he shares' Adams' belief system so long as Adams needs it to be to convince them of Christianity's superiority, but once they turn it back on him, suddenly morality is something only Christians really have access to. This is exactly the behavior I was talking about a couple of days ago with regard to Frank Turek and his book "I don't have Enough Faith to be an Atheist." It's a typical believer's trick - because on a level playing field they don't have a chance in a battle of rationality and they know it.

The last trick up Adams' sleeve is another common deceptive tactic that Christians pull.

Sam Harris' opposition to slavery is due to the role the God-inspired Bible has played in shaping our Christian nation. Christianity taught America that slavery is wrong,and America taught Sam Harris that slavery is wrong.

Technically, I suppose this is a form of the genetic fallacy. If cultural opposition to slavery in the US has its roots in Christian teaching (which, fair enough, it does), then it cannot have been the case that there are other plausible sources of moral opposition to slavery? I cannot for a minute accept that Adams honestly believes this. More to the point, Adams is deliberately ignoring the role that Christianity also played in justifying slavery. Using the Bible passages that Harris quotes, no small number of Christians came to the conclusion that God had no particular objection to the institution. More accurate would be to say that certain subsects of Christians were behind the anti-slavery movement, not necessarily the bulk of the religion as a whole. Which is true, really, of just about any number of other policies in American history, both good and bad. Adams, of course, would prefer to cite only those instances where Christianity has informed modern moral consensus, such as in slavery, and ignore those instances where it was on the other side, such as in Prohibition or subjugation of natives, etc. Again with the tilted playing field.

For what it's worth - I agree with Adams that Christianity deserves more credit for its pivotal role in ending slavery from modern liberals. To listen to a lot of them, you would think that Christianity were the Source of All Racism - which it clearly is not. My main bone to pick here is that you cannot conclude inevitability from historical fact. In layman's terms - it may well have been the case that Christianity played a role in getting slavery abolished, but one can hardly conclude from this that Christianity was necessary to the Abolition of slavery, or that Abolition would never have happened without it. More likely is just that when you're confronted with a situation where the overwhelming majority of the population is Christian, then you more or less have to speak in Christian terms to get them to behave as you want. Let's imagine, for a minute, that we go to Africa and want to persuade people not to forcibly mutilate their daughters' genitals, as is the custom in some Islamic regions. Well, since these regions are heavily Islamic, then we can hardly make a moral appeal to the practitioners without invoking Islam. We would have to couch our arguments in Muslim terms in order to be heard, it's safe to say. Let's say we're successful in persuading the population, by use of some Koran-based argument, that genital mutilation is not what Allah wants. Now flash-foward 100 years. What Dr. Adams is doing with slavery is essentially what anyone in these countries would be doing in response to an atheist on the subject of genital mutilation. The atheist quotes whatever scripture it was that seemed to have justified the practice to people in the past, and the Dr. Adams-analogue responds by saying "Ah, but it was ISLAM that stamped out the practice" - completely ignoring the role that Islam played in justifying the practice for so many years before it decided to switch sides. So it probably is with slavery.

In any case, Dr. Adams' diatribe here is poorly reasoned, as usual for his Christian rants.

The point of interest to take away, of course, is the same as a couple of days ago. Christians seem to be suddenly concerned about their image as irrationals. This was not always the case. Indeed, in the past, the line was always that reason would only take you so far - a leap of faith was necessary for real salvation. Now they're selling off faith and attempting to present themselves as the reasonable parties - picking on people like Harris in the hopes that the public will come to see atheists as the unreasonable party. To the extent that this strategy is successful, it plants the seeds for its own failure. Few, if any, Chrsitians come to the faith by process of reason, for the very obvious reason that God is NOT obviously manifest in the world and it is NOT obviously true that Jesus raised from the dead to redeem the world from sin. There is no rational argument which leads one to this set of beliefs, nor is there even a rational mechanism by which Jesus' death would accomplish such a feat. The belief system itself is not internally consistent once accepted, and there is no process of reason that even leads one to accept it to the exclusion of others in the first place. If Christianity is now trying to appeal to our reason, it is playing a losing game - something I hardly think it would do if it were not showing signs of getting desperate.

When Bad Slippery Slope Arguments are Good

2008-04-16T11:16:00.000-07:00

From today's paper: a story that demonstrates why "bad slippery slope" arguments are not always bad.

Actually, to be fair, I should say that very few philosophers and students of rhetoric consider slippery slope arguments to be ATB bad. It's just that the slippery slope argument is similar enough to the continuum fallacy that "bad slippery slope" arguments are easy to make. Fair enough, I agree, so no intention to dispute that point here. It's just that in online discussion groups, I see the phrase "bad slippery slope" argument used as a synonym for "slippery slope argument" often enough that I do wonder whether the average citizen thinks there is a such a thing as a "slippery slope fallacy?"

But I digress. The article in question is about yet another Second Amendment Foe using the anniversary of the VATech massacre as a platform. In this case it's IU alumnus (alumnus!) Jeffrey Schauss organizing what he calls two "Time of Remembrance" events - one of which is on campus.

He claims the events are "non-political," but OF COURSE they're political. You hardly organize a memorial for people you don't know unless this matters to you in some way, and it's hard to see in what way this matters to anyone not directly affected unless it's out of some kind of concern for public safety. That concern can take many forms - but there are two main ones: there is my position (make guns legal on campus so that students have time to respond faster than the clearly ineffective campus police, saving lives), and there is Schauss' (ban guns because gun bans are known to be effective against psychotic students bent on massacre ... wha???). I like to think of them charitably as the "reasoned" and "emotional" positions. And any gullible instinct you may have to take Schauss at his word that he's "just remembering" and "not advocating" are laid to rest by statements like these:

"This is a community coming together to say 'We want peace, we want safety, we want to support our law enforcement,' Schauss said. 'People are interested in community safety; they're interested in making sure dangerous people don't get dangerous weapons."

Any time someone is speaking for what "the community" (whoever THEY are) wants, you know he's pushing an agenda. And it's no accident that his reading of what "the community" wants is "to support our law enforcement" and "making sure dangerous people don't get dangerous weapons." Because you see, in my case (and I assume I'm a member of the community?), both of those statements are true only with HUGE qualifications. For one thing, I don't support "our law enforcement" taking away constitutional liberties, nor do I support them enforcing a policy which leaves me essentially defenseless against attacks from the likes of Cho Seung-Hui. It's the same way I don't support law enforcement doing random searches of the property or person of people not under reasonable suspicion of lawbreaking - like, say, at seatbelt checkpoins. Effective law enforcement is a sine qua non of a free society, but it is even more so of a totalitarian society. Someone has to watch the watchers; Schauss is glossing over non-trivial issues here. Ditto that bit about "making sure dangerous people don't get dangerous weapons." Right, ideally, dangerous people wouldn't have dangerous weapons. But what a facile thing to say! While we're floating on clouds and dreaming about the way things ought to be, we might as well say we have an interest in "making sure there are no dangerous people." If taking weapons away from dangerous people makes them less effective - a point which can hardly be denied - then it is equally true that taking weapons away from law-abiding people makes them less effective. So right, to the extent that we can keep dangerous people away from dangerous weapons without compromising my right to defend myself against - you guessed it! - dangerous people, then I'm all for it. But dang if that ain't a huge qualifier!

Then there's clincher:

"When you realize that this is something gun laws might have made a difference on, it really tears at your heart," Helmke said. "We make it harder to buy Sudafed at the grocery store than to buy a gun. We make it harder to get a job at McDonald's than to buy a gun."

That's not Schauss, but rather his friend, Paul Helmke, a Brady advocate.

I could skip over the obvious - but why, when it's so much fun? "When you realize that this is something gun laws might have made a difference on..." HOW, exactly? What do gun laws do to prevent school massacres? Nada. Nothing about the restriction against guns on campus (which was in effect at the time of the massacre) stopped Cho. It's been argued that people with Cho's mental condition should be prohibited from purchasing guns - so maybe it is in this sense that Helmke means that gun laws might have prevented the massacre. Well, guess what? Current federal gun laws DO prohibit people like Cho from buying guns. In other words, neither the federal ban on gun purchases by people "adjudicated as a mental defective" nor the unconstitutional Va Tech campus ban managed to prevent this. Score exactly ZERO, NULL, NADA for gun bans, in this case, so no, Mr. Helmke, I don't feel particularly obligated to join you in your fantasy "realization" that "gun laws might have made a difference" here.

The point is his next statement. "We make it harder to buy Sudafed at the grocery store than to buy a gun. We make it harder to get a job at McDonald's than to buy a gun." Alright - let's go ahead and get the obvious out of the way. There is no constitutional right to buy Sudafed at the grocery store. Neither is there a constitutional right to get a job at McDonald's. There IS a constitutional right to own a gun. "...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." They couldn't possibly have made it clearer.

Even so, what comes to my mind when someone points out how hard it is to buy Sudafed at the grocery store and get a job at McDonald's isn't "why isn't it harder to buy guns" so much as "why are these things difficult to begin with?" And indeed, I can't think of a good reason. Ok, granted, I can begin to see why getting a job at McDonald's is more difficult. The manager, after all, will want to make sure he's hiring worthwhile people, which does tend to necessitate checks to disqualify certain individuals. But Sudafed? WHY is it difficult to buy Sudafed? Is it difficult to buy Sudafed? ... ???

In any case, let's imagine that it is, in fact, difficult to buy Sudafed and to get a job at McDonald's because of legal regulations. You see the point. Whenever the hypothetical regulations went into effect, there was someone like me standing around saying "why do we need regulations against Sudafed? Let the government regulate this, and soon they'll be regulating more and more, because we'll have weakened the threshold as to what regulations the public finds acceptable." And there would've been others saying "Please! That's a bad slippery slope argument. Nothing about regulating Sudafed is going to lower the public tolerance for regulation."

But damned if Helmke isn't sitting here right now arguing that the fact that we tolerate (probably imaginary) regulations on Sudafed and jobs at McDonald's should lead us to tolerate regulations on gun ownership too.

There you have it, folks. Slippery slope arguments aren't always bad. Sometimes, it really is the case that people use past wedges in the door as arguments for widening the breach. If regulations on Sudafed, a substance mentioned nowhere in the Constitution, can be used as an argument for restricting a right that is enshrined in the basic law of the land for the very real concerns of self defense and resistance to tyranny, then we are in the presence of sterling proof that slippery slope scenarios sometimes really do come true. Enemies of freedom like Helmke can, do, and will again exploit small steps to argue for more draconian intrusions in the future.

These arguments have, of course, been made before. For the 109-page authoritative version, see (Volokh 2003). For the authoritative version of a bunch of opportunisitc cowards trying to sneak in restrictions on your rights and freedoms by tugging at your heartstrings through a covert political event masquerading as a vigil, be sure and check out Jeffrey Schauss and Paul Helmke at one of their two "Times of Remembrance." Maybe while you're there take the opportunity to remember all the lives guns have saved. Then please, go out, buy a gun, learn how to use it, and remember Va Tech by joining the NRA - the one organization that has done more than any other to keep you protected against people like Schauss and Helmke - and Cho.

I Wish to Register a Complaint!

2008-04-14T11:56:00.000-07:00

Eventually I'll learn to quit while I'm ahead.

So what happened is this. I was trying to install mod_python on my iMac under Leopard. To make a long story short, it appears to be well-known that there are problems with mod_python on Leopard. But the two links go to what appear to be fixes, so no issues, eh? Actually, the page I ended up using was this one, just because it looked more detailed.

It worked.

Initially.

Some background: the problem, in a nutshell, is that Apache2 is set up to be 64-bit capable on Leopard - but the default compilation of mod_python gives you a 32-bit version. Well, more specifically, mod_python itself is happy being 64-bit, but the c compiler will compile relevant portions for 32-bit architecture unless you override it. So, after ./configure-ing in the normal way, you have to monkey with the src/Makefile to get gcc to compile for 64-bit architecture and - presto! It works, right?

Erm - not exactly. Which is to say, yes, it did. But then I ran into two other problems with the particular program that I needed mod_python to run.

The first of these involved _psp.so - something that gets built at compile time for mod_python. This helpful forum link explained how to do it. The problem, and fix, were the same as before: _psp.so needs to be 64-bit, only the default installer doesn't make it that way, so you have to go monkey with the dist/setup.py file as described. It worked, no complaints.

The other problem was specific to my program again - it imports a module called bsddb - a database utility - that while it apparently is installed by default with most Python distributions, it might maybe not be on Leopard.

Rather than use the crazy instructions from the previous link (though I'm regretting it now, let me tell you), I decided just to reintall Python. There's a new version of 2.5 out as of maybe a month ago, and it couldn't hurt, right? After all, the new version on the Python downloads page claimed to include bsddb this time 'round.

Bucept it did hurt. I reintalled Python, and suddenly the clever compile hack of compiling for all three architectures didn't work anymore. Bugger!

And of course, it continues not to work, even though I've pointed my Python simlink back to the old version of Python. So this is completely frustrating. Somewhere along the line something horribly obscure got changed, and I know I'm gonna have a helluva time figuring out just what it was.

All of which goes to show - I should've just quit while I was ahead. I should've been satisfied once I had mod_python itself working, and then worried later about getting the bsddb module installed propertly.

Kicking self.

Although I would just like to add - Apple does have a lot of nerve advertising how well Apache and Python, among other things, supposedly work on the new operating system, and then not including basic things like mod_python and bsddb. It really does sort of defeat the purpose of buying a Mac if even Linux makes it easier to get a LAMP-P-as-in-Python system up and running. The whole point of Mac in the OS X generation is supposed to be that it gives you all power of UNIX with all the niceties of a well-integrated interface. And yet, now that Linux has evolved to the simplicity of the sudo apt-get install program phase, you really start to wonder what all the nice Mac interface is for if it just keeps you cut off, in the end, from the cool open-source stuff (or else makes it a headache to install).