Monday
"I am the Lord your God" isn't a source of U.S. law
I'm trying to put together a good legal post prior to the Supreme Court hearings on the related cases of the 10 Commandments in-between the Texas state legislature and the Texas Supreme Court, and the copies of the 10 Commandments on the walls in two Kentucky court houses. But I haven't gotten around to reading the lower court opinions yet, and I haven't had a class in law school yet which would really prepare me to comment on the Supreme Court's Establishment clause jurisprudence.
But one funny bit, from the Texas Attorney General's Op-Ed in the Houston Chronicle: Among those commemorations is a replica of the Ten Commandments. The six-foot, red granite marker was donated in 1961 "to the youth and people of Texas" as a way to combat juvenile delinquency and promote a personal code of conduct for youth. In that spirit, the Legislature accepted the monument and placed it halfway between the Capitol and the State Supreme Court building, signifying the secular impact the Ten Commandments have had on the state's legal institutions.
What's funny about that, you ask? The word secular. It's funny because it does all the work in the argument. If you want to write an unbiased piece (and I would also say a credible piece), you don't modify the word impact with anything, and the paragraph doesn't lose it's ability to communicate. If you're arguing the other side, you can take the same paragraph and replace "secular" with "spiritual" or "religious." Those words fit the preceding sentences just as well. Now, the Attorney General is on one side of the case, so maybe asking for him to be unbiased isn't reasonable. But really the problem I have is that he's only writing a piece designed to persuade someone who thinks he's right. I'm far more interested in an article written to persuade me. More on this topic later after I've brushed up on it.
Proportionality
1) A tenured university professor saying, ex post, that a vicious terrorist attack that killed thousands was entirely justified and demonstrated considerable restraint considering what was actually deserved. Also, the same professor has engaged in academic fraud.
2) A sitting member of the House of Representatives saying, ex ante, that he personally wants to drop nuclear bombs on Syria and that, "We won't have to worry about Syria anymore." Oh, and he claims to have said this to the President.
Number one is of course Ward Churchill, who has been embroiled in controversy for weeks. Number two, Representative Sam Johnson, just made his remarks this weekend. Hopefully this will get some attention as well. Two caveats: The story about Johnson is new, so it's not very well developed and more could come out about it. Also, Johnson, as a member of the House of Representatives, has access to intelligence I don't. From the actual remarks he made, he appears to be saying that because the Weapons of Mass Destruction which weren't found in Iraq are now in Syria (which could, in principle, be based on intelligence he has access to, though I doubt the intelligence would first be released in this manner), it would be a good idea to drop nuclear bombs on them. This second part is a moral and strategic claim, and is pure nonsense.
Update: Yglesias calls the Representative's office here.
Update: I'm trying to find out about how many people would be killed by the small (nuclear) bombs which an F-15 would be able to carry. This has some bearing on whose statement is more outrageous, though it's not dispositive.
Sunday
Oscars live-blogging
2) They appear to be going incredibly fast.
3) Good for Morgan Freeman. I think this cements Jamie Foxx for best actor.
4) The Pepsi/Spartacus ad was better than any commercial at the Super Bowl, and the Cadillac one wasn't half-bad either.
5) Robin Williams just provided a welcome contrast to Rock's weak opening, though I would not want to see Williams doing that shtick for the length of the show.
6) I didn't say Shark Tail and don't plan on it, but Incredibles was head and shoulders better than Shrek 2. In fact, that's understating the difference.
7) This man on the street skit isn't bad. The line about DiCaprio and The Beach was good. And Albert Brooks is excellent. But this skit is funny even when Leno does it, and Leno isn't very good, so I don't know how much credit to give Chris Rock for it.
8) "...boring us to death with his politics." The Tim Robbins introduction was very funny.
9) I have no opinion on Best Supporting Actress, I haven't seen enough of those films.
10) I haven't seen the Aviator, but given her reputation, how could Thelma lose?
11) This Counting Crows song is really good...for me to poop on!
12) See the Teleprompter leads to them saying really inappropriate comments because Catherine Zeta-Jones isn't really there. Isn't that clever.
13) Sunset clearly deserves this.
14) Man, an award where I've actually seen enough of the candidates to have an opinion, and they get it wrong. Sideways is good, but the script for Before Sunset is clearly superior.
15) Lumet movies I've seen, ranked:
1. Network
2. Dog Day Afternoon
3. 12 Angry Men
4. Murder on the Orient Express
5. Night Falls on Manhattan
6. Family Business
The drop off between four and five is the biggest, though I also think one is much better than two. Notably, I've never seen: Serpico, the Verdict, the Pawnbroker, or Fail-Safe.
16) Question to those who for some reason chose to see the film version of Phantom of the Opera: Where does that song fit into the narrative?
17) "Dog's bollocks" is now the phrase of the week. Try to work it into conversation.
18) Both giving some awards out in the audience area and having all of the nominees on the stage for some awards are interesting changes from the standard format. I think they're both good ideas, but I'd have to think more about it.
19) I'll bet you Dan Drezner loved that Selma Hayek joke.
20) The set for this song would have been too cheesy for Spinal Tap. And I had no idea Antonio Banderas could sing.
21) Travolta being on stage reminds me: I officially predict that Be Cool will be disappointing. Not just that it will obviously be worse than Get Shorty, but that given the capabilites of the ensemble and re-uniting Travolta and Uma, it will pretty much be bad.
22) This is a rough year for film deaths, and getting Yo Yo Ma to perform is a very tasteful way of commemorating it.
23) Singing the winning song was the most interesting acceptance speech of the night.
24) The speech Sean Penn just made was reminiscint of people who say, "Behind every good man is a great woman." This is sort of a sexist idea. And his "defense" of Jude Law, which seemed quite sincere, demonstrates rather thin skin, though loyalty is a nice trait also.
25) Kate Winslet should have won.
26) Classy speech by Swank though.
27) That joke about Gwyneth breastfeeding an apple went over my head. Until further notice, I assume she named a child Apple, or Macintosh, or possibly Golden Delicious. Anyone want to enlighten me?
28) Nice job Charlie Kaufmann, you deserve that one.
29) I'm done with this, I'll update tomorrow on the other awards.
Canadian troops in vietnam
Update: Damn research. Canadian troops weren't fighting in Vietnam under Canada's flag, but they were there. Which makes this much less funny, since Coulter wasn't really wrong.
Saturday
A Different kind of rhetorical excess
"I am shocked the Labour Party finds it remotely clever or amusing to impose the faces of probably the two highest-profile Jewish politicians onto flying pigs," said Andrew Mennear, Tory candidate for Finchley and Golders Green. "There is nothing more distasteful for a Jew than being associated with a pig."
I am aware of the existence of the rhetorical device of hyperbole, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. In that spirit, here is a list of some things this Jew finds more distasteful than being associated with a pig.
1) Tomatoes
2) Being killed
3) Necrophilia
4) Bestiality
5) Pederasty
6) Being tarred and feathered
7) Some combination of 3-5.
On the march
Now please stop trying to destroy Social Security and renounce torture.
Friday
More odd posts about words
What in the world does the term "pre-funding" mean as opposed to "funding?" The temporal element is exactly the same. It's generally used for when you're paying for something in advance of when you in particular are going to be using it, but funding does all the work necessary there. For instance, look at this sentence: Then the appropriate thing to do is start pre-funding a health care system for our retirement.
Now imagine that sentence without the prefix "pre." It would mean exactly the same thing. I cannot recall having ever seen the phrase pre-funding used where funding wouldn't have worked just as well. Please don't use the word pre-funding.
Google returns 65,000 hits on the word, including a company with the name. I gather that it's a term of art in discussions of Social Security and other pension systems, but I still fail to see a situation where "funding" wouldn't be able to do the same work.
Fun with homophones
Thursday
Desalinisation
This episode featured far more of the ensemble than any episode since Josh left to run Santos's campaign. With all of the campaigns back in Washington, the show was able to divide it's time between characters far more effectively than, for instance, the campaign episodes which feature Josh, Donna, Will, Santos, and Russell, almost exclusively. I've said before that those episodes force them to spend too much time with those characters at the expense of the episode as a whole, and the quality of this one really demonstrates that. By not spending too much time for any given character, and coming up with interesting plot lines for almost everyone (except Jed), the show was able to create a far more entertaining balance.
The show also very effectively moved back and forth in time, without using title cards to indicate when things were. Since title cards are annoying, this was pretty great. This is mostly because all of the sequences out of straightforward chronology were in one location, so that any events in that location were obviously outside of the time sequence.
Josh and Toby fighting was not implausible. I can understand people saying that physical violence is very different from anything that has previously happened on the show. This is true in the sense that it has never before been shown. But, Josh, Toby, and Charlie have threatend violence more than once, and there is no question Toby has been in a fight, offscreen. So the issue isn't whether or not Josh and Toby would get into a fist fight (they would), but whether or not they'd fight each other. To that, the most imporant issue is that Toby wants to fight his brother. His brother gave up by killing himself, and Toby equates Josh to his brother in that situation, on multiple levels. Both the surrender and the brotherhood are there between the two of them. Furthermore, Josh is realizing that he made some mistakes in picking Santos and the Campaign in general. Both of them have many reasons to be angry and, more importantly, reasons to direct their anger at each other.
Richard Schiff deserves an award based on that episode. But Allison Janney deserves one even more based on everything she's ever done for the show.
Grade: A.
Wednesday
That went swimmingly
On a lighter note, on tonight's Futurama, Fry says, "Every Christmas my mom would get a fresh goose - for goose burgers. And my dad'd whip up his special eggnog out of bourbon and ice cubes." Note to self: Running very low on Knob Creek 'eggnog.'
Quibbling
- Cost of Civil War to North: $140 per capita (including only economic damages for dead and wounded)
- Cost of Civil War to South: $340 per capita (including only economic damages for dead and wounded)
- "Indirect" additional cost of Civil War to South: $450 per capita.
Cost to buy and free all the slaves? $90 per capita.
Yes, but the institution of slavery would still have been in place. The people to whom the $90 had been paid to would find a way to buy more slaves. I know that the transatlantic slave trade had been illegal since 1807, but smuggling was ongoing and there is no way the skyrocketing demand wouldn't have led to an upsurge in smuggling. So it's not clear what the $90 would have bought.
Big government is bad (when it's banning booze)
The Agitator, being opposed to essentially all laws that make restrictions whose rationale is avoiding someone harming their own health, is opposed to these potential laws. I am too, but primarily because as of yet their is no evidence whether there are any new health risks with this machine that don't go with plain old alcohol. Multiple opponents claim it will lead to increased underaged drinking and drunk driving, but there is no causal mechanism proposed for how it would actually increase either of those. And, according to Wikipedia, the machine has previously been available in Europe and Asia. So if there were increases of these problems, statistics from some country or another in those two continents should be available to demonstrate the phenomenon. Oh, the most disturbing thing about this machine, at least to me, is that the people selling it claim you have to inhale the vapors for twenty minutes to get the equivalent of one shot. That's much too long to get one shot.
Further Adventures of Dutch Wagenbach
Tuesday
Clampdown
Some possibilities:
The civil rights movement was very successful, after success it stopped being such a visible target.
Security has improved at a faster rate than the ability of assassins.
Despite a lot of talk otherwise, the country isn't nearly as divided as it was in the late 60's and far fewer people consider assassination a possible way of achieving their political goals.
The Illuminati has strongly cracked down on assassinations after too much back and forth killing decimated their ranks.
Not sure if that last part works as a joke, since most American assassination victims can't be plausibly imagined, even in a fictional Illuminati run world, as being on opposing sides of a massive conspiracy.
Unhappily, yea?
In a discussion of the role of Howard Dean's wife, K-Lo from The Corner says, "I've actually thought more than once that one of the useful aspects of West Wing is to show how influential a political wife can be (i.e. not always for the good)--Bartlett’s is quite the activist when it comes to her issues, sometimes making him more radical than he would have been." Sadly, No! responds by coming up with absurd examples of what they learned about the real world from watching TV shows. For instance, I always thought one of the most useful aspects of Sabrina the Teenage Witch is to show that with sufficient intelligence and training, cats can master the intricacies of English grammar and be extremely funny at the same time." That's laugh out loud funny, but they also say that K-Lo can't tell the difference between fiction and reality and generally come up with other examples as if her point was laughably stupid. But of course, there are things you can learn about the real world by watching fictional television. In particular, the relationships between fictional characters can be very interesting and teach you things about the possible dynamics of relationships in the real world.
I think Carmela and Tony's relationship on the Sopranos can shed some light on many issues.
Josh and Donna's relationship on West Wing clearly makes some interesting comments on fear of committment, power imbalances, and a couple of other things.
On Gilmore Girls, Rory and Lorelai and Lorelai's mother can teach you real things about parent-child relationships and how difficult they are to maintain. There are many more examples.
I can't resist throwning out by attempt at absurd one though. I've actually thought more than once that one of the most useful aspects of The Simpsons is to show that people almost never remember what happened to them last week, and stay the same age forever.
From the Annals of Traffic Court
How could this have failed? "A man was accused of making an illegal turn. He confessed but insisted it was not his fault. He couldn't help it, he said. The poisonous airborne fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union arrived in New York and hit his elbow, which was sticking out his driver-side window, and this distraction caused him to turn his car accidentally. The defense failed. So the man produced a doctor's note saying that he had eaten bad turkey."
That excellent argument seems analagous to saying that because a country can’t prove their lack of weapons of mass destruction, they should be invaded. When that argument fails, point out that there hasn't been an attack by Islamic terrorists in the United States since September 11th, therefore the war is a good idea.
Also, I like this judge: One driver swore that he was certain of his speed because his fiancée happened to be eye-level with the speedometer. "Obviously not brilliant," the judge said.
This one seems similar to arguing that you know you came to a full stop at a stop sign because the nun you ran down two hundred feet before really slowed you down.
And the one that worked: Mr. Levine, an affable Bronx native who said he once worked as a night manager of a Howard Johnson's restaurant in Buffalo, likes to tell about one of his cases that has become a traffic court legend. His client, who had been going 95 miles an hour at 2:30 a.m. on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, claimed that he was a gold dealer making a delivery to a Brooklyn jeweler and that he was being followed by a would-be thief. (A gold dealer, really? "He had an invoice!" Mr. Levine said.) Not entirely trusting his client's version of things, though, Mr. Levine braced himself for the trial. But when the police officer presented his case, it turned out that a strange car had been following the defendant. "I was shocked!" Mr. Levine said. "You could have knocked me over with a feather." Still, the judge was not convinced. He found "the whole thing about the gold" to be incredible, Mr. Levine said. "He cross-examines like crazy." But his client had an answer for every question, and the judge, unable to shake his story, acquitted him.
All excerpts taken from here.
(sort of) Altruism
Important semantics
Monday
But I'll be sober in the morning
Because the AARP is opposed to Social Security privatization, they are being smeared with the accusation that they're pro gay-marriage. Note both the lack of concern for the truth in making accusations about ones opponents and the use of homophobia as a wedge issue. The people behind this campaign know that some will respond to the bare association with gay marriage with irrational disgust, causing them to switch sides. Remind you of anyone's election strategy? Unfortunately, this indicates that it will work.
Also, a commenter at Unfogged made an allusion to a great Churchill (Winston, not Ward) quote. Churchill had recieved a very critical letter, and he wrote: "Dear Sir, I am in the smallest room of the house and your letter is before me. Very soon it will be behind me." Actually, atribution of this quote to Churchill may be apocryphal, but I'm going to stick with it for now.
I'm confused by the meaning of the phrase, 'on the latch' in the following excerpt, I think it's British idiom but it could just be a phrase I've never seen. "Cordelia had no premonition of tragedy as she pushed open the street door which was kept perpetually on the latch for the convenience of the secretive and mysterious tenants and their equally mysterious visitors." Does 'on the latch' just mean 'open'? That almost works in the context, but doesn't quite go with the repeated mentions of 'mysterious'? Does anyone know?
I'll put together a piece on this weekend's Ethicist column later.
Friday
Help
Mark Kleinman has posted a Rebus puzzle, but I don't get it. I get: hippopotamus, rubber ducky wearing makeup, two picture which I think are llama's faces but could be gerbils really close up, hippopotamus, rubber ducky, two pictures of whatever animal that is, hippopotamus, ducky, buck deer, dancer I don't recognize (is it Astaire?), hippopotamus, ducky, same llamas. Someone please solve this for me. For some reason I feel like Lisa on the Simpsons where she thinks she has a gene for stupidity.
I fear for the world
Thursday
Circumventing "don't ask don't tell"
The idea is that as its seen that the inclusive units are no less effective than the exclusive ones, future soldiers will be more likely to join the inclusive ones. Eventually, all units will be inclusive. I have a couple of questions about this plan, any or all of which may be addressed in their complete article.
Most obviously, what if very few soldiers do choose the inclusive groups? If this were to take place, it seems like it would actually reinforce don't ask don't tell, since it would show that most soldiers don't want an integrated unit. Another problem would be the military setting up this program in bad faith, purposely assigning commanding officers such that the inclusive units are less successful than exclusive ones. But even assuming that a good number of soldiers do choose inclusive units and the military acts in good faith and (as seems extremely likely) the inclusive units are as effective, I think there could still be a problem here. Couldn't setting up the choice between inclusive and exclusive in the military cause that option to become widespread, or at least widespread within government? If it's acceptable to organize the armed forces that way, why can't parents demand the choice for exclusive or inclusive schools? That would be very bad, and it's not totally clear to me that making this acceptable in the one situation wouldn't lead to it being seen as increasingly acceptable in others.
Update: A commenter at Balkinization notes that major exercises, inclusive units would have to work with exclusive ones. This would lead to a plethora of problems with Ayres proposal.
In conclusion, the military has to stop discriminating based on sexual orientation. Supposed problems with unit cohesion where combat effectiveness is damaged by sexual relationships or jealousy all assume that the current system completely prevents homosexual relationships between combat soldiers, rather than just driving them underground and penalizing soldiers who engage in them.
Wednesday
Life imitates disturbing art
(hat tip: Unfogged)
Perverse covenant incentives
I’ve never given any thought to the concept of covenant marriage until today, and I’m trying to get a grasp on it despite not knowing a bit of family law. In particular, I don’t see how it actually makes divorce importantly more difficult than no-fault, other than through additional delay and an unspecified amount of counseling. One of the six legal grounds for divorce in the Louisiana version of the statute is, “The other spouse has abandoned the matrimonial domicile for a period of one year and constantly refuses to return.” La. R.S. 9:307 (a)(3).
So one spouse can just decide to leave, go anywhere they want to for a year, come back, agree to counseling, and then they can get a divorce. Or at least, this is what I thought at first. But it turns out that if the other spouse doesn't care about your abandonment enough to ask for a divorce, you have no grounds to get it. Similarly, I thought originally that the statute created a perverse incentive to commit adultery ((a)(1)), since adultery creates grounds for divorce. But I was wrong, one's own adultery is never a ground for them to request a divorce. Instead, it creates an even worse incentive to be caught committing adultery, and to do so so flagrantly that eventually your spouse can't tolerate it and asks for a divorce themselves. Or commits adultery or a felony in response to your adultery. Are these really the sorts of incentives we want to create?
Is there a change from no-fault as far as the likelihood of the non-covenant breaching party receiving a more economically valuable marriage settlement and more custody rights? There’s nothing about marriage settlements in the material I read. If one accepts the stated goals of people in the covenant marriage movement to avoid creating single-parent or dysfunctional families for the benefit of the children, it's not cleat that the actual institution disincentivizes that in a meaningful way. It seems to just create a way for a supremely tolerant and most likely supremely miserable spouse to avoid divorce forever?
All of the above not withstanding, I think it should be available to people who want it. None of the above negatives overcome a presumption that people should be able to come to voluntary arrangements about their relationship to each other, though there are always issues of what is and is not truly voluntary. Of course if you're the first person who wants it in a particular state, it make take a while for the legislature to pass it.
Also, a point inspired by what Will and Phoebe had to say about covenant marriage: it seems likely that covenant marriage will make normal marriages less special or less sacred or cause whatever devaluation of marriage that gay marriage supposedly would cause.
Very cleverly, Sam Heldman makes the point that being asked to enter a covenant marriage is really insulting, since it means the person asking you thinks their future self is going to need extra special restraints to keep them in the marriage.
Finally, Waddling Thunder adds some historical perspective on the gradations of legal marriage in ancient Rome.
Tuesday
What is free speech?
There's more to free speech than whether the government engages in censorship. Campaigning in 1984, Ronald Reagan remarked,
I think that the current leadership of the Democratic Party, the leadership that we saw last week in San Francisco — I think their instructions for getting to the convention were: Go west to San Francisco, and then turn left. They've gone so far left that they've left the mainstream.
Walter Mondale, beyond the pale? Oh please. It's crucial that contenders in liberal democracies respect the role of a loyal opposition. [My emphasis] So it's worse than worrisome that popular commentators cash in by trampling on that respect. Anne Coulter flouts that norm when she writes,
Liberals promote the right of Islamic fanatics for the same reason they promote the rights of adulterers, pornographers, abortionists, criminals, and Communists. They instinctively root for anarchy against civilization. The inevitable logic of the liberal position is to be for treason.
And Michael Moore flouts that norm when he writes in an open letter to the president,
As Bill Maher said last week, how bad do you have to suck to lose a popularity contest with Saddam Hussein? The whole world is against you, Mr. Bush. Count your fellow Americans among them.
Does free speech mean that Reagan, Coulter, and Moore have the right to talk this way? Absolutely, if that means it would be outrageous for the government to try to sanction them. But they are still damaging liberal democracy, making a mockery of government by discussion. Their language isn't sharply focused criticism of anything in particular. It's mere invective, designed to banish the opponent from public discussion. The more shrill, the more polarized, the more contemptuous the public debate, the less we can listen to and learn from each other. Yes, politics is a continuation of war by other means. And yes, it's always easy to claim that the other guys started it. And yes, the line between hard-hitting argument and hitting below the belt is sometimes hazy. But if you permit yourself a secret — or public — snicker when "your" side gets off a good sharp nasty salvo of contempt, or if you fasten on the "other" side's nastiest rhetoric and refuse to hear what else they're saying, you're part of the problem, too. The cleavage that matters here is not left/right. It's the one between those of us intent on keeping political debate constructive and those engaged in hurling mud. On this issue — not how radical our views are, but how stridently we support them — I'm inclined to quip: extremism in the pursuit of moderation is no vice.
One-liners
You're going to get some very unusual requests: kissing, hugging, talking, medical procedures," Detective James Held of the Vice Division told his November class, adding that none of those requests was a crime. He offered an example: "What if someone comes up to you and says: 'Do you know what I want you to do? I want you to dress up like a girl and I want to go back to a hotel room, and I want you to paint my toenails. I'll pay you a thousand dollars for the hour."
"I'll bring the nail polish!" called out Tisjé Golden, an officer from the 25th Precinct in East Harlem. Laughter rippled outward from her seat and spread though the audience.
Still, Detective Held clarified, that's not a crime. Prostitution is not like a game of horseshoes. Close isn't good enough. To determine whether a suspect's behavior is illegal, officers must consult a rigorous recipe. The first ingredient is a sexual act, whether promised or performed.
My reaction to this was to try to come up with jokes comparing prositution and horse shoes. I came up with three of these, and had three other, mostly better, ones submitted by a friend.
Q: What's the difference between prostitution and a game of horseshoes?
A: People are embarrassed to be caught involved in one and the other involves paying for sex.
Q: How is prostitution like a game of horseshoes?
A: They both involve catching something loosely on a pole.
Q: How do you tell the difference between prostitution and a game of horseshoes?
A: One's fun and the other involves throwing metal rings at a stick.
Q: How is prostitution like a game of horseshoes?
A: They are both something your dad does in the backyard.
A: Both can be done by local blacksmith for a nominal charge.
Q: How do you tell the difference between prostitution and a game of horseshoes?
A: I'll tell you later.
Monday
Inside (academia) baseball
On to the main point, I guess it's lateral hiring time for next year. Brian Leiter reports that UPenn has lured Steven Perry away from my current institution and that the latter is trying to take two professors, Cynthia Estlund and Samuel Issacharoff off of Columbia. Leiter further notes that, "this would be the first time in memory (perhaps ever) that NYU successfully recruited faculty away from Columbia." I don't know precisely what this means for some visiting professors that I have, since I don't know what their goals or expectations were about being hired, nor whether NYU will be making more offers. Still, I'll be on the lookout for professors in not so great moods this week. And hope that they aren't reading this, or don't mind me writing it if they are. I find this surprisingly similar to the baseball trading deadline.
OxBlog gets Left Behind
Up with blogs!
Have you heard that blogs are a new and important medium? No? Well after reading today's Times, you'll have heard that. The NYTimes has a story today about how conservative bloggers got Eason Jordan (head of CNN's news division) fired. There is a lot of invective I'd like to say about this involving different standards of truthfulness for people on one's side as opposed to one's opponents. Because if, for instance, Rush Limbaugh, could lose his job for making false statements and not fully retracting them, he should be fired every day. But I don't want to make an argument generalizing about everyone on one side of the political spectrum. Instead I'm going to talk about a more interesting article about affirmative actions in law schools.
This article is also, at least in my mind, blog-related. The law review article which the report is based on argues that affirmative action causes lower bar passage rates among African-Americans and therefore fewer total African-American lawyers than there would be without affirmative action. This report, which was in the NYTimes yesterday, was blogged about by the professor who wrote the original article beginning on the fifth of November. Prof. Jim Lindgren, who also writes on the Volokh Conspiracy, was quoted in the Times article. So was Ian Ayres, who blogs over at Balkinization. Basically my point is that anyone who's anyone has a blog now.
If you do follow that link over to Balkin, and then read the Bruce Ackerman article cited to in the second post down, try to figure out what kind of idiosyncratic meaning of "neoconservative" he's using, because I honestly don't know why he thinkgs neoconservative describes Justices Scalia or Thomas. It normally has a lot to do with people's views on foreign policy, but that can't be how he means it there.
Asked and Answered
Sunday
Unacceptable rhetoric
I also recommend their very reasonable descriptions of Hillary Clinton (Liberal NY Carpetbagger She-Devil Senator), Michael Stipe (Athens GA Hate Rocker), and George Soros (Satan Personified). I'm not going to make the claim that calling your political opponents traitors shows how degraded our poltical discourse has become, since someone could probably go back and find one of the Founding Fathers calling another Founding Father a traitor, or some similar historical example of respected figure X calling respected figure Y a traitor. But I do want to suggest that anyone who does it should be ignored, shunned, and otherwise kept out of any discussion. If I were to call someone a traitor, my meaning would include, "That person should be tried for a crime, the potential penalty for which is death" (see 18 USCS §2381). Now these people hopefully don't honestly believe that their political opponents should be executed, but then they shouldn't be eager to throw around the term traitor so casually. Doing so makes it harder to describe someone who, "owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere." ( 18 USCS §2381). You'd probably have to call such a person "double plus traitor," since you've decided that traitor just means, "Advocates ideas I am opposed to."
Because I'm wary of turning a blind-eye to rhetorical problems on the left, I should note that if you're willng to call members of the administration "War Criminals," you're accusing them of a very serious crime and suggesting that putting them to death would not be out of the question. This is an equivalent rhetorical excess unless followed up by citing the specific war crimes that you think administration members should be charged with and the evidence which would be used to convict them. Using myself as an example, I take it that most liberals are pretty far from thinking that George W. Bush should be jailed, let alone anything more serious than that. Therefore, don't call him a war criminal. Same goes with describing political opponents as murderers. Sticking to "idiots" or "evil" or "liars" or "power-mad" doesn't have these particular problems, though depending on who you're describing that way there could be other difficulties.
Google has about 75,300 hits for ("John Kerry" traitor) and about 55,400 hits for ("George Bush" "war criminal"). If you're willing to accept that these are equally factually inaccurate and that zero of the hits are referring to Bush 41 (which is pretty unlikely), and that this measure is a proxy for the right's rhetorical excess versus the left's, you find that the right is only 1.36 times worse. Surely we can do better than that. Or you can just deny that one or both of those claims is un-true, but to do so sincerely you have to be committed to imprisoning the person, and possibly to executing them. So don't do that.
If only I was a photo-blogger
1) Aesthetics: You might think they're really pretty. One of the gates by itself isn't that impressive, but at certain points in the park where many of them are visible at once, especially where multiple paths are converging, it's quite impressive.
2) Effort/planning: If you don't find the Gates aesthetically pleasing, it's worth contemplating all the work that went into them. In particular, they had to map out all of the pathways through the park in advance, since the width of the gates changes with the width of the trail you're walking on. Consider the number of person-hours that went into this project and redeem your belief in the power of volunteer work.
3) Walking in Central Park is a good thing all by itself. As long as you don't find the Gates actively displeasing, which I find hard to imagine, you still get the positives of just wandering around a nice park and seeing what people are up to. I was there on the first day of the exhibit and the additional crowds weren't an issue at all in my enjoyment, I don't think future days, especially weekdays, will be worse.
Gothamist has been doing a lot of Gates blogging, they started talking about the project months ago.
Saturday
Effecient Markets Hypothesis
Friday
Nickeled and Millionaired
I started reading two books in Barnes & Noble today, both of which I plan to read in full and have heard fairly-to-very good things about. And yet within ten minutes of starting each one I noticed them making claims that struck me as being a mixture of odd, misleading, and plain wrong.
On the third page of the introduction to Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich cites the statistic that, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, "in 1998...it took, on average nationwide, an hourly wage of $8.89 to afford a one bed-room apartment, and the Preamble Center for Public Policy was estimating that the odds against a typical welfare recipient's [sic] landing a job at such a "living wage" were about 97 to 1." Having not done studies on housing affordability in 1998, I obviously won't say that this is wrong. But it seems designed to mislead, since what it measures isn't really relevant. I think this is pretty well known, but I'll briefly explain that Ehrenreich's project was to go out and get a series of around minimum wage jobs, and write up the experience as investigative journalism. Part of the inspiration for that was changes that were going on in the welfare system which would lead to many former recipients having to go it alone. But the studies above aren't going to help figure that out, I think. The problem is using a national average to measure people who will be systematically and predictably not average. The issue isn't whether or not the people going off of welfare can afford the average nationwide one-bedroom apartment, but whether or not they'll be able to afford apartments in areas where low-income people tend to live. Since that isn't the average area, I would think that using those studies in this way disguises more than it illuminates.
The other book is James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. It's about how by aggregating the information of groups, you can, with certain types of questions, get more intelligent answers than if you were to ask the smartest members of the group. He has lots of good anecdotal evidence for this, and I've only read the introduction and the start of the first chapter, so I'm sure there's plenty more evidence to come. But one piece of evidence he used is wrong. On the third and fourth pages of the first chapter, he discusses the show "Who Want to be a Millionaire?" and the different "lifelines" which were available on the show. He describes the friend in the "phone a friend" lifeline as, "a person whom, before the show, she had singled out as one of the smartest she knew, and ask him or her for the answer" and the audience in the "ask the audience" lifeline as, "random crowds of people with nothing better to do on a weekday afternoon than sit in a TV studio." If you were a regular viewer of the show and understand the thesis of his book, you should already know where this going and why it's wrong. He goes on to give the percentage of questions the friends got right (65%) and the audience (91%). Surowiecki then graciously admits that these results, "wouldn't stand up to scientific scrutiny. We don't know how smart the experts were, so we don't know how impressive outperforming them was. And since the experts and the audience didn't always answer the same questions, it's possible, though not likely, that the audiences were asked easier questions." There are a couple of problems with this last part.
First, while it is true that if something happened almost never that thing also happened "not always," it's odd to say it that way. While contestants could use two lifelines on one question, using ask the audience and phone a friend together was exceedingly rare. I don't have access to the actual numbers, but trust me. I watched the show a lot. Furthermore, he claims that it is not likely that the friend questions were harder than audience questions, while I think it is nearly certainly the case. Based on my extensive viewing of the show, I would wager a large sum that "phone a friend" was systematically used later on in the questioning than "ask the audience". Since the questions got more difficult as the show progresses, this means that the experts were getting more difficult questions. That was also the strategy that I always advocated for contestants who I watched, since the early questions were more likely to be general knowledge or pop culture, while the later ones tended towards specific sub-fields. Since the experts really were answering harder questions the vast majority of the time, the difference in rates of success proves nothing.
Friday reading list
The last two posts from The Decembrist have both been really worth reading. The latest, "Too Many Evenings" is excellent. They're partially about tying together disparate progressive groups, like environmentalists, anti-war advocates, pro-choice movement members, and labor unions, under a common ideology. One reaction to this might be: most of the anti-war people I know are pro-choice, pro-labor, environmentalists. But there are a lot of people who are very committed to one of those issues and don't really care about the others. The environmental movement is in some ways a paradigm of this.
The post is also about how to turn those specific groups into a more viable unified political movement, taking into account what Mark calls the "transactional" model of group membership. This model talks about how people no longer identify as deeply with a particular group, instead moving in, doing some work on it, and moving on. If more and more progressives looking for this model, structuring groups to take advantage of it will have obvious benefits.
If you found the tort reform post from yesterday interesting, there is a great conversation going on about it in comments at Washington Monthly. Kevin updated his original post in response to an e-mail I sent last night, and now smarter people in comments are explaining why I'm wrong. The comment thread has a shockingly high signal-to-noise ratio. See especially Sam Heldman's comments.
Also, see Yglesias on looking at other countries for some perspective on the problems in our own. To put it briefly, Russia is really screwed up.
Next. Dan Drezner, who I don't link to enough, on different responses to North Korea's nuclear weapons announcement yesterday. He thinks stepped up sanctions by Japan will be effective in bringing North Korea back to negotiations. Also, does China like having a mad-man running a nearby country who makes trouble so as to distract world attention from the Chinese government's own problems? Because if China were to drastically cut their economic ties with North Korea, they could get them to do most anything. I'm sure there's more to it than that though.
Finally, Alex Tabarrok on the market for restaurant reservations.
Thursday
Rule 23
One quote from the NYTimes says that, "But critics of the bill have said it may effectively create an impossible situation for many plaintiffs, since federal courts are barred under a 1985 Supreme Court ruling from considering class actions in which there are "material" differences in the laws among the affected states. Thus, the critics say, the law may create a "Catch-22" in which class-action plaintiffs find both federal and state courthouse doors locked." As far as I can tell, this isn't true. The bill doesn't strip state courts of their jurisdiction, and indeed I don't know where Congress would get the power to do that. So if the Federal courts are unable to hear an action, presumably the state courts will. Lending credence to this is that the bill provides guidelines for when Federal courts may, and when they must, remand cases to the state court they were filed in. The bill also makes some changes in how attorneys fees will be measured in cases where the settlement involves coupons.
There's another line in the Times which really rubs me the wrong way. It says, "The Senate vote this afternoon followed repeated attempts by some Democrats to enact amendments curbing the effects of the measure. They were beaten back in part because some Democrats had also seen problems in the current state of the law." Everyone sees problems in the current state of the law, the issue is whether or not this bill fixes them. Implying that some Democrats think the status quo is perfect is false, and possibly malicious.
Rationality
Blogroll update
Eduwonk is fairly self-explanatory, they cover news on education policy in a brief but witty manner. Three related topics which they frequently discuss are charter schools, battles with (and within) the teachers union, and testing.
Will is a libertarian with a philosophical bent. He tends to focus less on current events than most blogs and more on philosophical arguments.
The Poor Man is hard to describe. It's a liberal general commentary blog, focusing (lateyl) on events in the news, intra-blogosphere spats and sports. They just did a really nice re-design on the site. One of their regular features is mocking extreme right wingers. It's mean, but hilarious.
Last time I updated the list I put on Belgravia Dispatch, which is mostly focused on the war in Iraq, terrorism, and other events in the middle east. He's more to the right, at least on foreign affairs issues, than a lot of my other links. He's also extremely knowledegable.
I also added Unfogged last time, but they're hard to explain. Two of the four bloggers there go by the pseudonyms Unf and Ogged, though Unf has fallen off the face of the earth. Usually good for quick, funny posts, though also some more philosophical material.
Wednesday
Oh, Phuket
1) She is planning on passively resisting by going back to Jed and getting him to over rule or ignore C.J. This is somewhat reinforced by her refusal to go to the opera. It wasn't a direct reproach of what Claudia Jean asked for, but it was more her taking it out on Jed he is perfectly willing to risk his health for his job, plus just unleashing some anger.
2) She knew that C.J. should be making decisions like that, not her, and was just testing her limts.
Obviously, the dicussion of setting up a constitution for Belarus is meant to contrast with showing how the day to day workings of the office don't include people like C.J. exercising a great deal of power, while the President is limited by his illness. They made this somewhat less subtle by specifically mentioning the emergency powers provision.
What was going on with the Christopher Lloyd character, a law professor helping to write the Belarussian constitution, being named Lawrence Lessig? Lessig is of course, a real live law professor who is renowned for his work on internet law, copyright law, and work relating to the intersection between the two. He has a column in Wired, is a key member of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, etc. (apologies to readers who can't imagine not knowing who Lessig is). The Lloyd character wasn't anything like him, as far as I know, other than also being a law professor. And it's just weird doing an homage like that to a real, live, fairly well known person. It took me out of the show's reality for a couple of minutes.
I was happy to have Lord John Marbury back. He's a little grating, but he also serves as a pleasant reminder of the show's past greatness.
The ending fight between Abby and Jed should have been shown, since both actors do great work off of each other.
Leo's reaction to the Ms. World contestant was great.
I don't want to give this episode an A-, but it was a good deal better than the other two episodes I've graded, so imagine that I'm downgrading both of those when I give this a B+.
Standards of living
Currently, social security benefits are indexed to wages, not prices. There is a fairly complex method behind this, involving "bend points" and other things not worth getting into right now, but overall the rate of growth of social security benefits is faster than inflation, because wages rise faster. In order to lower the future growth of benefits and avoid funding problems sometime in the middle of this century, the Bush administration has publicly discussed indexing benefits to prices, so that they would grow at the same rate as inflation.
As a counter-argument to this view, it is pointed out that indexing to prices freezes the standard of living. If social security was indexed to wages in the 1930's, the elderly would only be getting enough of a social security benefit to pay for a 1930's standard of living, ie., no indoor plumbing in most of the country. I thought this was a very solid argument, but Tyler Cowen's post today has me thinking that a gradual process of switching to price indexing is the way to go. One of the great things about Tyler is that he uses both economic and ethical arguments quite well. His discussion of absolute versus relative standard of living is key and quite worth reading.
Just Deserts
The death penalty risks making us morally complicit in the deaths of innocents. If that seems too simple, keep reading. I'm opposed to the death penalty and hope that New York does not decide to reinstate it. This is not because I don't think there is any crime so heinous that the perpetrator deserves to die. I think there are crimes serious enough that the person committing it has forfeited their right to stay alive. How that makes it acceptable for the government to kill them is a difficult question, analogous to asking, after it's been established that one doesn't have a moral right to their income, why the government then has a right to take it. If I was making a pro death penalty case, I'd have to address that, but I'm not.
If I accept that there are crimes severe enough that person committing it deserves to die, why am I opposed to the death penalty? This may seem really obvious, but I'm opposed to it because of mistakes. The criminal justice system is an imperfect institution. It makes errors. It fails to punish guilty people and punishes innocent ones. It also makes mistakes about severity of guilt. For instance, we read a case yesterday in which the Supreme Court said it was constitutionally permissible to sentence someone to life in prison without the possibility of parole for possession of 672 grams of cocaine. Whether or not that is correct constitutionally, it seems obviously disproportionate morally. Since the system makes mistakes both about who to punish and how much to punish them, it is vitally important to make sure that mistake isn't made via killing them. Death is irrevocable, all other forms of criminal punishment are revocable (accept for the aspect of being labeled a criminal, which can persist even if one is found to be innocent). If the system is willing to risk irrevocable mistakes of this severity, people at large will, and should, see the system as less legitimate and be less willing to accept its authority and participate in it when needed. So the death penalty hurts the institutional viability of the criminal justice system. Oh, it also risks making us morally complicit in the deaths of innocents.
Coming distractions
First, addressing a conversation about the connection between supporting a war and being willing to fight in that war. There is a great thread on this at unfogged (see comments, the post is less than half of the interesting material).
Also, more on the death penalty in New York.
Sort of Super Bowl blogging
-Conan O'Brien, five minutes ago
Tuesday
Cuomo and Packwood
One of Cuomo's points which is worth repeating was that the New York State legislature is currently debating whether or not New York state should have the death penalty, and it's getting no media attention at all. He illustrated the point about no media attention by asking the audience to name the important issue which the New York State assembly is currently debating. No one answered immediately, and death penalty was eventually the second or third answer the audience proffered. Next, he asked the audience if New York if New York state currently has the death penalty. The audience was split pretty evenly between yes/no/and didn't want to answer. The answer is no, and I got it wrong (that'll probably blow my credibility for a while). I was under the impression that New York State had reenacted the death penalty in 1994 when Pataki was elected, but had not executed anyone since sometime in early 70's. That part was right, but I missed the New York State Court of Appeals decision in June which found the current form of the death penalty unconstitutional under the state constitution.
For evidence, other than my ignorance, of the assembly death penalty debate not being in the news, I ran a couple of searches. A google news search on New York death penalty gets hits, but a quick scan shows very few of them are actually on point. Another search on Pataki death penalty assembly only fifteen relevant hits.
Packwood, a socially liberal (pro-choice, pro gay marriage) Republican, had quite a few interesting things to say. Gay marriage was actually a big topic of discussion, with both of them predicting it would be non-controversial in between twenty and forty years. When asked about people in politics he admired, he talked about his meetings with Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. Following a 1982 massacre in a refugee camp in Lebanon, Shamir came to the United States and met with some Senators. Sen. Joseph Biden asked him how he felt about the massacre, in a somewhat accusatory manner. Shamir said he felt horrible about it, just like you (Biden) did. Then he said it was inappropriate for Biden to question him like this. Biden responded, "No it ain't," and then said something about the "bill" the United States has paid for Israel. Packwood said that Shamir responded, "we have fought, we have bled, we have died for our country, and we will fight, we will bleed, we will die for our country, whether or not you pay a bill." Packwood said that he was hugely impressed by Shamir's courage, since the U.S. does give Israel a lot of aid. The above is all a paraphrase of Packwood's telling, so it's third hand. Packwood did emphasize the word "ain't" though, it seemed to stick out in his mind that Biden used it. Also, this isn't meant to be (and I don't think it comes off as) an anti-Biden story.
They also each told stories about Daniel Partick Moynihan. Packwood said Moynihan had once tried to have a bill passed banning the word "reform" from appearing in the name of any bill. Packwood told a couple of other stories about Moynihan, who he seemed to have a deep admiration for. Cuomo told a story about how when he was managing his father's gubernatorial campaign, Moynihan's press secretary was Tim Russert. Apparently, Russert did a great Moynihan impression and would call people up and convince them he was Moynihan.
There was a small protest outside of the auditorium when I walked in. The protest was because of Packwood's sexual harassment while he was in the Senate. According to the flier they handed out, Packwood's sexual harassment involved at least nineteen victims. Along with the flier they gave out stickers with the slogan "I oppose sexual harassment," and I think other stickers with other slogans, though I'm not sure. I didn't count, but I'm fairly sure a majority of the audience was wearing one of those stickers. I know I was.
While I understand and agree with protesting to point out Packwood's misdeeds, the protesters also seemed to think that the people who were going to listen to the talk were doing something wrong. If that was there view, I disagree. I don't see how going to see someone speak communicates support for their views or acceptance of their past wrongdoing. For instance, if I went to go see Ted Kennedy speech, would I be committed to the view that he did nothing wrong in the Chappaquidick incident? Would going to see the Unabomber speak show support for his bombings or for his manifesto? It is entirely possible that I got the wrong idea, and the protest was just a useful reminder of the dangers of sexual harassment, in which case I apologize for saying anything bad about it. But I got the impression that the protesters thought there was something wrong with seeing the speech.
Monday
Dowd, Medved, Million Dollar Baby
*SPOILER WARNING* This post will specifically discuss the ending of Million Dollar Baby after this point. If you don't know the ending, stop reading it now. And definitely don't read the linked Maureen Down column, which also discusses the ending and of course does not employ a spoiler warning, since mainstream opinion journalism hasn't adopted that convention. *SPOILER WARNING*
Maureen Dowd gets criticized a lot in blogs both left and right. I think her column yesterday was fairly good, with a bunch of filler mixed in. The column addresses the controversy over the ending of Million Dollar Baby. The controversy is because the film features the assisted suicide of a character after they become paralyzed in a boxing match. Actually, screw being coy after a spoiler warning. It features Clint Eastwood's fictional character unplugging Hillary Swank's fictional character's life support apparatus and I forgot what exactly he does, but he takes some positive step to cause her death. There's been criticism of this from Rush Limbaugh and Michael Medved.
Actually, I have no idea what Rush said about the film other than calling it the "million-dollar euthanasia movie" in which case he deserves criticism for spoiling the plot, but not for making a stupid argument about the film itself. Medved, on the other hand, says, "It is being sold as a feel good boxing movie, where it's actually a movie with a very, very strong assisted suicide theme that unequivocally portrays assisted suicide as a heroic act. There's no question that there is an agenda going on here and the agenda is consistently the opposite of what anyone would describe as a pro-life agenda." Disability rights groups are also protesting the film, in what I see as an odd alliance.
Dowd decided to devote a column to arguing against the Medved / Limbaugh position. My problem is that the actual rebuttal, while present and accurate, fills up very little of the column. It consists of this line, "The culture cops are unmoved that Clint Eastwood's crepuscular boxing manager, Frankie, is a Catholic who goes to Mass every day and agonizes about the morality of his actions." And this concluding paragraph, "[Art's purpose is] just to tell a story, move people and provoke ideas. Mr. Eastwood's critics don't even understand what art is. Politics - not art - is about finding consensus with the majority of the audience. Art is not about avoiding controversy or ensuring that everyone leaves feeling morally uplifted." All of that's exactly right, but it's really weird that she spends a lot of the article talking about how Shakespeare plays feature lots of suicide.
See, those plays are among his tragedies and the ending via suicide is tragic. The particular objection these people are making to Million Dollar Baby is that the ending portrays assisted suicide heroically, that it's tragic enough. Now this makes them idiots, because the ending is very morally ambiguous, shows Eastwood having a terribly difficult time with the choice, and the emotional consequences he suffers are clearly shown (he abandons everyone he knows and his whole life). But it doesn't mean that bringing up Shakespeare is a good point. Shakespeare is an interesting illustration of why it would be wrong if they were saying, "Movies should never feature suicide." They're making the different, but equally moronic claim, "Movies should never feature suicide in anything but an unambiguously negative light." Since many of the suicides in Shakespeare are unambiguously negative, they're irrelevant to her article.
Also, while I agree there was no W.M.D. crisis in Iraq and there certainly isn't a Social Security crisis, I am still amazed that she managed to make the last paragraph of the article about those things. Her transition by mentioning that those are better things to be complaining about is very out of the blue and had nothing to do with the earlier parts of the article. Sorry, I'm not sure if there was much of a point to this piece, I thought I had more disagreement with Dowd until I looked at the column more carefully.
*SPOILER WARNING* The above post specifically discusses the ending of Million Dollar Baby above this point. If you don't know the ending, stop reading it now. And definitely don't read the linked Maureen Down column, which also discusses the ending and of course does not employ a spoiler warning, since mainstream opinion journalism hasn't adopted that convention. *SPOILER WARNING*
Redistricting on the horizon?
One senior Republican Party strategist, who did not want to be identified given the sensitivity of the issue, warned that while Mr. Schwarzenegger's proposal could help Republicans in California, it could have unwanted consequences if states where Republicans now have an edge follow California's lead.
Farm fascination, budget bull, and annoying alliteration
A HEAD FAKE, NOT A FLIP-FLOP. I would strongly caution everyone to interpret the news of massive cuts to farm subsidies in the president's budget proposal very, very skeptically. From people I've talked to who are gearing up for the budget fight this year (and it is indeed going to be a huge fight), it's pretty clear that the proposed cuts to farm subsidies are a perfect example of what Mark Schmitt has described as cuts that are dead on arrival and that the administration knows are dead on arrival. They're fake. The administration has no intention of pushing for cuts in the very farm subsidies it expanded in the president's first term; this is meant merely as a cosmetic demonstration of the president's seriousness about deficit reduction and fiscal austerity. Farm subsidies may be a weak claim, but they're backed by a strong client, and they're not going anywhere.Indeed, beyond the fake cuts the administration has specified in today's budget proposal, you might very well hear more about measures meant to limit farm subsidies as the House and Senate work on their budget resolutions in the coming months. Those limits will be fake as well. It might work like this: The congressional budget resolution may include entitlement caps in the reconciliation instructions it sends to all appropriate committees. So the Senate Agricultural Committee may need to cut a specified amount of money from the mandatory spending programs in its jurisdiction. That includes farm subsidies, which will be what everyone writes about when covering the budget process. But what is another entitlement program that falls under the Ag Committee's auspices? Food stamps. Take a guess which program -- food stamps or farm subsidies -- will get hit harder if committee chairman Saxby Chambliss of Georgia is faced with a required entitlement cap. You get the picture.
UPDATE: I now see that Ed Kilgore had this covered yesterday. As a general rule of thumb, for both the president's proposal and the future congressional budget resolution, the structural budget process rules they manage to slip in -- entitlement caps, global spending caps, one-sided PAYGO measures, and the like -- are where the real action will be. Those rules will be worth paying attention to, because the really painful and long-lasting cuts are going to come from them down the road, leaving no lawmakers' fingerprints on the destruction.
Sunday
Ethicist on oaths
Update: Hello to everyone being linked here my Higher Ed. My response to the current ethicist column, as opposed to the one below from a month ago, is here.
This week Randy does a decent job on a tough question. His conclusion is correct, and one of his reasons for it is too. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The anonymous questioner asks whether or not it is ethical for him (a third year law student) to take an oath to uphold the constitution of Ohio. He has to take such an oath to gain entrance to the bar, but the constitution includes an amendment banning gay marriage. The writer regards the amendment as, "...discriminatory and immoral and a violation of the U.S. constitution." I'm not personally convinced of the constitutional claim (though I am hopeful, especially since Jack Balkin just posted sketches of a couple of rather persuasive constitutional arguments), but I agree with the first two. Also, I'm unclear as to why the writer thinks it's only a problem with the Ohio constitution. The Ohio oath says (Rule I Section 8(a)), "I, ____________________, hereby (swear or affirm) that I will support the Constitution and the laws of the United States and the Constitution and the laws of Ohio..." If the writer is really worried that opposition to the gay marriage amendment is a violation of the oath, it seems to follow that opposition to any law of Ohio or the United States is a violation. That's neither here nor there though.
The Ethicist responds by pointing out a slew of rather loopy amendments which are included in state constitutions, and that the version of the U.S. constitution which Lincoln swore to uphold as President had multiple pro-Slavery provisions. From this, Randy concludes that the oaths "... are not endorsing every distasteful feature of these Constitutions. Rather, you are making a general pledge to uphold the rule of law and constitutional government. (So don't let me catch you launching some kind of insurrection.) And note that these Constitutions include the means by which they may be amended."
I think the last point about the means of amendment is important. But the earlier one about Lincoln and odd constitutional provisions doesn't get you much, it's wholly possible that Lincoln violated his oath and it's just question begging to suggest that because constitutions have odd provisions one isn't agreeing to support them, the issue is whether or not one swears to uphold the whole of the constitution. It's also not totally clear to me that the ethical issue is the degree to which one is bound by the oath, so much as whether or not one is tacitly approving of discrimination by not calling attention to this amendment while taking the oath. Randy basically punts on that question, though he does give the useful piece of advice that one could, "[take] the bar in a nearby state that has a reciprocal arrangement with yours but lacks the offensive amendment."
I think the conclusion that taking the oath is ethically fine is correct. I think this because all one is taking an oath to do is to avoid extra-legal opposition to the laws and Constitution. The oath taker is not forswearing any legal means to change the content of the law. All members of the Senate (and other Federal level elected and appointed officials) take a similar oath, saying, "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic..." Yet it would be absurd to say that by taking this oath they are giving up their constitutional power to amend the Constitution. It is absurd, but not because it is impossible that every time the Senate has acted to amend the Constitution they have violated an oath. Rather, the problem is that the Senate wrote the oath themselves, without ever intending to give up their ability to amend the Constitution. Since there are multiple possible meanings which the words of the oath will bear, it is worthwhile asking what meaning the people who wrote the oath and who take the oath meant it to have. Since they did not mean it to have the effect of opposing changes to the Constitution, it follows by analogy that the same language as applied to state and federal laws and to state constitutions does not create any obligation to support the laws exactly as they currently are, but rather an obligation to support law in general. I don't really like that I used an intentionalist argument here, since I think intentionalism is not the best form of legal interpretation, but I don't want to write any more.
This piece, besides the obvious source material from Randy Cohen, was inspired by some of Will Baude's musings from last year about the Oath of Citizenship which immigrants take. Though he comes to different, extremely textual, conclusions than I do.
My mind is blown
Monday Update: No one who I've seen blogging on this story from any political perspective thinks the cuts will actually happen. In particular, both Prof. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution and pratlike of LiberalsAgainstTerrorism express grave doubts that farm subsidies will be cut.
Saturday
An interesting contrast
From Kleinman:
As part of the effort to sell his plan, President Bush, who doesn't like to "fine-tune [his] messages based upon polls," has begun referring only to "personal accounts," because it "polls better than the phrase 'private accounts.'" Yesterday, during "Ask the White House" with Treasury Secretary John Snow, Jim from Colorado Springs took a ThinkProgress reader's advice and asked, "What is the difference between the personal account now proposed by President Bush and private accounts he was talking about a month ago?" Snow responded, "The President has always referred to personal accounts, but some often mischaracterize them as 'private accounts.'" By Snow's analysis, Bush and his top aides have "mischaracterized" the president's plan several times. Here's our favorite, via Talking Points Memo, from a Bush-Cheney '04 rally last September: "I believe younger workers ought to be able to take some of their own money, set aside a personal savings account that will help Social Security fulfill its promise, a private account that they can call their own, a private account they can pass on to the next generation and a private account that Government can't take away."What's really scary is not so much that we're ruled by such a bunch of shameless liars, but that we're ruled by a bunch of shameless liars who clearly believe -- correctly, to date -- that they can get away with this sort of crap.
While DeLong says:
The President's Council of Economic Advisors is ordered to write that faster productivity growth will not improve the outlook for Social Security. And they do what they are told:
...While [faster] economic growth makes it easier to sustain some government spending programs, this does not apply to Social Security... (Council of Economic Advisors, "Three Questions About Social Security," February 4, 2005.)
But they engage in a form of passive resistance to the demands of their political masters. For three paragraphs further down, the CEA writes that:
Simulations in the [2004] Report [of the Social Security Trustees] indicate that an 0.5 percentage point increase in real wage growth would improve the 75-year actuarial balance... mean a 75-year deficit of 1.35... instead of... 1.89 percent of taxable payroll.... The date of Trust Fund exhaustion would be pushed back from 2042 to 2048.
On the normal definition of "easier to sustain," pushing back the date of required benefit cuts or tax increases by six years and reducing the long-run deficit by 0.54 percent of taxable payroll would qualify as making Social Security "easier to sustain."
Friday
Friday roundup
Also, lots of interesting Social Security discussion at DeLong's, Drum's, and Yglesias's.
And an NYTimes review of a Sushi restaurant which serves dishes composed of pictures of Sushi printed on edible paper without any actual fish involved. As Tyler Cowen might say: there are markets in everything.
Update: In the interest of painting a more rounded picture, I would like to note that Reynolds thinks Ward Churchill should not be fired. Though in the course of saying so, he quotes a blog, which he frequently cites supportively, saying that Churchill provides a glimpse of the, "Leftist demimonde."
Thursday
Fun with judicial opinions
|Asymmetrical bargaining power
There was a story from yesterday's news that I can't quite get a grip on. A company in Michigan has enacted a blanket anti-smoking rule, disallowing employees from smoking in their private lives. Four of their employees have resigned in protest. Their argument is that it raises the company's health insurance costs because smokers are more likely to need health care. There are some conflicting issues here, but first I want to add the part where the company looks sort of good. The company is paying for any steps smokers want to take to quit smoking for no cost, and some employees have quit smoking in order to avoid losing their jobs.
The first thing to take into account is that most employment in the United States is at-will. This is interesting, because in at-will employment it is totally (legally) permissible to terminate people for no reason at all, but not for certain specified reasons (race, gender, other groups covered by anti-discrimination law). In some states, one of the reasons you can't fire someone is lifestyle issues like smoking, but only two states have laws fully barring lifestyle discrimination, and many states, including Michigan, don't bar it at all.
So this is legally permissible, but I think there are real ethical problems with the extent to which an employer can control their workers actions in the workers' private lives. If you can regulate smoking due to health reasons, the most obvious area to move to is the eating and exercise behavior, but really under at-will employment you can fire for any reason which hasn't been specifically legally prohibited. While in general I'm in favor of agents being able to come to and enforce voluntary agreements, there are always worries about unequal bargaining power in employment contracts. People tend to really need jobs and are willing to agree to many things in order to get them, and in general there is a greater supply of labor than there is a demand for labor (that last was an empirical claim which I have no basis for, but challenge anyone to disprove).
Issues like this are why I'm a big fan of unions, they tend to bring bargaining power closer to equilibrium. If many workers contracts are being negotiated at once, the company needs to agree almost as much, or possibly more, than the workers do. So unions can negotiate contracts where people can only be fired for cause, stipulate what sorts of things count as causes (not doing your job properly should count as a good cause, liking eggplant parmigiana shouldn't be). Unions are able to negotiate better contracts because, among others, they're negotiating for the company's best workers as well as the worst. So all the company's workers can, theoretically, get a contract that's not as good as what the company would be willing to offer to keep their best workers, but better than the minimal terms which they're willing to offer their worst. So I suggest that the employees of Weyco unionize, if they aren't part of one, and negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement which forbids being fired for smoking and other behavior outside of work.
Polygamous relations
Tyler Cowen reads a paper on the relationship between polygamy and poverty on a national level, disagrees, discusses the economic costs and benefits of polygamy. Since the quoted summary's main point appears to be that the father's economic resources are spread too thinly among his offspring, I'm unclear if his reply that the child gets the benefit of "papa's good genes and full-time attention from mama," is actually responsive. The best claim from the summary is: polygamy has only died out in the west because multiple wives are too expensive for the middle class.
Henry Farrell discusses recent shifts in EU policy towards what could charitably be described as democracy-indifference, speculates on causes of these changes. At least on Cuba, I would argue the EU policy is just foolish. I'm not an International Relations scholar (or even an IR student), but I do know that Castro is really old. Why is now a good time to improve relations with the Cuban government? The EU's China and Iran policies are both arguably merited, and I'm not sure how much of an explanation they require.
Wednesday
Standing Ovations
UPDATE: A discussion of moderate Republicans who don't completely approve of the President's agenda and how they showed their disapproval by either not standing to applaud or via other body language implies that the ovations aren't a misue of a valuable time, but serve an important communicative function. In the middle of the story, it says,
"Bush's speech was scheduled to last 40 minutes, not including the applause. But the reactions, which filled 10 or 15 minutes more, were in some ways the most important part -- an applause meter for members of Congress to demonstrate to the country how much, or how little, they support the president's objectives."
Three points
This rather long article about signs of the North Korean government weakening is good news, though it doesn't give any indication of what might replace that government if it does fall apart. Via OxBlog.
I will definetly not be posting any thoughts post The State of the Union. I predict my thoughts will mostly be, "Man, I am depressed. I think I'll get back to my law school reading. It's not as aggravating, and there are far fewer standing ovations."
Pseudo-Ethicist on Churchill at Hamilton
On numerous occasions I’ve suggested that Randy Cohen doesn’t do a particularly good job at being an ethicist. Atticus Finch suggested that you should put yourself in someone else’s shoes before you judge them, and today I’m going to attempt that. Since no one ever sends me ethical questions to answer, so I’m going to answer a question ripped from today’s headlines.
I am the President of a liberal arts college in upstate New York, near Utica. Five days ago, a news story broke about a Professor at another school who we had invited to speak to the students here. It turns out he had written an essay arguing that the 9/11 attackers were completely justified. In response to this news, there have been many calls to cancel the speech. In addition, threatening letters have been sent to me, the Professor in question, and other staff at my school. Also, some donors withdrew pledges and some students renounced their interest in matriculating. I found his essay “repellent,” but his speech was going to be about Native American activism, which is at best tangentially related to the essay. I cancelled the speech, saying, “but the point came that I simply felt that this threat was too large for us to handle.” Still, I feel like I’ve important violated free speech principles. What should I have done?
In order to answer I read through the essay he wrote, and you’re quite right to find it repellent. For one thing, he makes claims about the attackers responding to the death’s of Iraqis from the first Gulf War which are wholly unsubstantiated. For another, his whole argument comes down to, “The United States has done terrible things in the past, including killing a great many people. It is therefore justifiable to kill any citizen of the United States, at least up to the number of people who have been killed by United States military operations.” Among the many flaws in this argument, one apparent one is that it, out of hand, treats every military action by the U.S. as unjustified. Also, its notion of collective guilt is both false and dangerous. Collective guilt was one of the primary justifications for Stalinist purges. He brings up collective guilt by noting that the German population was held collectively responsible for the Nazi government’s actions, but fails to note that the remedy for their supposed guilt was nothing, outside of a very few people who were tried as war criminals. I am getting all of this out of the way first because it is far easier to explain what’s wrong with Prof. Churchill’s argument than to advise you on how to respond to it.
While your college’s commitment to presenting a diversity of views is excellent, it is obviously not an absolute obligation. But since you had already made a commitment to have Prof. Churchill speak, the question is under what circumstances should a speech be cancelled due to unrelated statements the speaker has made. I would suggest that once an agreement has already been made, the fact that the speaker has made statements that are false, controversial, and deeply hurtful isn’t a good reason to cancel the speech. In fact it would probably make the whole experience more interesting for the students, giving them a chance to confront his arguments and understand for themselves that they are wrong (or not, some students may come away thinking what he says is true).
However, you have obligations besides the one to establish an environment where a variety of ideas (even false and pernicious ones) can be heard and possibly flourish. I therefore think that the downturns in donations and applications are sufficient reasons to cancel the event, depending on how severe there long term affect on the college may be. The idea that you are canceling the event due to threats of violence is of course worrisome, since it incentiveizes future threats of violence to obstruct other speakers which people find objectionable. I’m therefore fairly certain that even if the threats were the real reason you cancelled, it was a mistake to say so. I would have gone with a statement that the considerable outrage it sparked among alumni made you reconsider. And I would have cancelled the speech, not because of how disgusting Churchill’s remarks are, but in spite of them.
I also don’t think anyone who disagrees with Mr. Churchill’s views, now that they are known, has an obligation to help him disseminate them. But that’s a separate issue about whether or not you should have booked him if you had known what he was likely to say. I recognize this response may be under-attentive to the hurt his statements have caused people who lost friends and loved-ones in the 9/11, and while those people have every right to be angry with him, I don’t think that would have been a sufficient reason to cancel.
Tuesday
Overheard at Chipotle
NYU Film Student 1: So the idea for my film is about how post 9/11 even the most free-thinking open-minded people take extra notice when an olive-skinned person is getting on an airplane with them.
NYU Film Student 2: Oh, that reminds me of (Repeats news story about how Arab-American and Moslem-American groups have been angered by the current season of 24.)
Student 1: (Agrees that this asinine story is somehow relevant) And this one woman is boarding a plane and sees an olive-skinned man (Editor's note: My repeated use of the term olive-skinned has nothing to do with any problem I have with the word Arab or any other non-prejudicial ethnic identifier, but olive-skinned was the only word I heard Student 1 use to describe this person) who's on the security line with her. And we keep seeing her point-of-view being drawn back to him. So they're on the security line and the guards pay extra attention to the olive-skinned man, they check him over twice and don't find anything suspicious. And the woman keeps looking at him.
Student 2: Right, so she's being really paranoid. (Tells another story about how the villains in the book the Sum of All Fears were Islamic extremists, but in the movie they changed the villains to neo-Nazis).
Me: (Continues reading my law textbook, wonders what he was thinking sharing another pointless story).
Student 1: Yeah, and then they're on the plane and she keeps looking back, she makes eye contact with him and stuff. And then there's a dream sequence, except you don't know it's a dream sequence. In the dream sequence, she looks back, and the olive-skinned man is not in his seat...
Me: (Imagines a man whose skin is actually the some consistency as the outside of olive. Nearly vomits).
Student 1 (cont.): So she gets out of her seat to look around, and she walks down the aisle and pulls back the curtain to the stewardesses' station, but doesn't see anyone. So she makes her way to the cockpit and knocks on the cockpit door, and the Olive-skinned man opens it!!! And then she wakes up, and looks back, and... ... he's not in his seat! And she gets up again, and pulls back the curtain again, and sees a stewardess, so she thinks everything is fine. And then the stewardess falls down and we see the olive-skinned man coming right towards her. Fade to black.
Me: (Bites my arm off trying not to laugh in his face)
Student 2: But I thought the message you were trying to send was that people were being oversensitive.
Student 1: Or are they?
There were also two alternate endings pitched, one where the olive-skinned man surprises her while she's waiting for a cab after the flight and offers her his number, because she kept looking at him. The other one was where there's a swat team waiting for the plane when it lands, but it turns out they're waiting for some third person on the plane who wasn't the woman or the olive-skinned man. I hope this isn't a "You had to be there" story.
Comment on West Wing 4-22
Eternal Return
Bad Education
Also, the last paragraph talks about how "scriptural literalists" (but doesn't name any particular group or person) are moving past challenging evolution to challenging geological claims about the age of the Earth and claims from physics about, for instance the Big Bang. The hopeful way to read this is that science classes will do more to lay out the evidence for these phenomena and teach children more about evidence based reasoning. The problem with that hopeful reading is that the evidence for the big bang requires understanding things about background levels of cosmic microwave radiation, which might be hard to teach to some high school students.
The scary way to read it is that we're rerunning the uniformitarianism versus catastrophism debate in geology, which Lyell and uniformitarianism won in the mid-1830's. So we have people who want to push science back to where it was in the early 1800's.
Minority Rights
But this is only a defense of the form, "We're no worse than the other guy." Maybe it's why Democrats lose, but I want their behavior to be better than the other guy's. So what I want from Drum is a defense of the filibuster in principle, why someone should support it when their out of power because it leads to better results system wide. I think there is a possible justification based on the model of deliberative democracy, but I'd like to see it really worked out. So I'm not sure how much value there is to the editorial, even though I agree with conclusion.
Also, Drum's last line is great: Legislators should keep in mind the question posed by Thomas More in "A Man for All Seasons" when his daughter's suitor says he would cut down every last law to get at the Devil. "And when the last law was down," More asks, "and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide?"
