Scott Paeth's Daily Blog

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2005-03-01T15:51:00.000-06:00

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Berube Pummels Horowitz

2005-02-25T13:15:00.000-06:00

Berube lands a solid uppercut to Horowitz's ridiculousness in this post. Well, Horowitz deserves it:

Enough of this silly stuff, folks– yes, even I have my limits when it comes to silly stuff! The real issue is this. Some years ago, I referred to David Horowitz as a former member of the “far left.” By this I meant that he stayed with the Panthers for years after every sane leftist in America realized that they’d degenerated into a handful of paramilitary thugs, and now he goes around blaming the rest of the sixties left for his own hideous political judgment. This made him mad, understandably enough, and he insisted to me that he was never a member of the far left, by which he meant groups like the Weathermen. Fine, so be it. Let’s grant David the distinction, and let’s call him a former member of the “almost far left” instead of the “far left.” And yet his database– like so much of his work after the attacks of September 11– is designed not merely to blur the distinction between the far left and the far far far left, but between the far left and goddamn Barack Obama, Barbra Streisand, and Bill Moyers. “It should be obvious,” David writes, “that even the otherwise innocent Barbra Streisand shares negative views of the Bush Administration and its mission of liberating Iraq with anti-American jihadists like the aforementioned Zarqawi, even though we are sure that she deplores some of his methods.” So there it is– anyone with negative views of the Bush Administration, anyone who opposed this war, is in cahoots with Zarqawi. You don’t see what’s wrong with that, well, that’s your business, but don’t complain when sane leftists respond to this nonsense with squeals of outrage– or, here on this blog, howls of laughter (read the comments again, David! they’re really very funny. Ishtar of the Internets– damn, I wish I’d said that). Don’t complain when we don’t engage “arguments” that are patently ridiculous. And don’t complain– on your way from the Ohio state legislature to Fox News to the Colorado state legislature, eking out an existence on the very margins of American society– that you aren’t getting more speaking invitations from the very people you insult and slander.

The Attack on Academia: Horowitz Rides Again

2005-02-24T13:30:00.000-06:00

Bopping around the blogosphere, I came across yet more discussion on Horowitz's various schemes to ensure that no realm of American public life is free from enforced domination by the right wing. Of course, the keystone effort in all of this is the "Academic Bill of Rights" that he's been flogging for a while now.

What to make of the ABOR? Horowitz maintains that is an attempt to achieve balance in a university system overrun by radical leftists. And as such, why should any truly liberal-minded person reject it.

Now, I actually agree with the idea that universities should welcome first-rate scholars regardless of their political orientation. I'd have a lot more fun arguing with a smart guy that I disagree with then with a dumb guy I agree with. Obviously, arguments with smart people are generally of a better quality than arguments with dumb people, by and large. And arguments with people you disagree with seem to actually have a point.

But I don't think that most departments make their hiring decisions on the basis of politics. Here's Brian Leiter's perspective:

Here's a pertinent fact, based on 8 years on the Appointments Committee of the Law School here: of the three dozen candidates I actively supported and recruited during this time, I had no idea what the political views were of about half of them; in some cases, I still don't know! There are some fields, and law is often one of them, where candidates wear their politics on their sleeve; but in most fields, including many parts of law, they don't. I've certainly seen politically motivated voting for and against candidates for law teaching positions from the right and the left--both here and at my former institution, San Diego--but I've never seen it, for example, in Philosophy. And Philosophy is plainly more typical of most academic fields: you either have the requisite technical skills or you don't, and one's party registration is basically invisible. Given that the hard sciences, as well as fields like philosophy, have similar ratios of Democrats to Republicans, bias seems an increasingly unlikely explanation for the overall proportions (though it may be more pertinent in some particular areas than others).

Horowitz is either a) lying or b) stupid if he thinks that that ABOR will accomplish the goal of academic diversity. Furthermore, as several commentators have mentioned, is diversity really a genuine academic value? Do we really want a system that will allow anybody to make a claim that they have a "right" to teach in the university system, simply because their viewpoint isn't represented? Leiter again:

The real difficulty, of course, is that if you create rights, you also have to have remedies. And at some point even the genuinely dumb conservatives will notice that the Horowitz proposal will create causes of action for Marxist economists who can't be hired by economics departments, for postmodernists who can't get hired by philosophy departments, and on and on. And what is to stop Intelligent Design creationists from suing biology departments that won't hire them? Or alchemists from suing Chemistry departments? You get the idea.

The problem with which no one wants to come to terms is this: not all ideologies have merit. That there are relatively few Republicans in the universities may simply be co-extensional with the fact that there are relatively few educated people who believe that Iraq attacked the World Trade Center, a belief, as we know, that is widely shared among Bush supporters. Surely this possibility has to be entertained, if one were really serious about the question of bias.

Jack Bauer, Sociopath

2005-02-22T09:08:00.000-06:00

Kevin Drum reads my mind in this post from Washington Monthly, which asks the perennial question, "Seriously, what's going on with 24 and its bizarrely casual use of torture this season?"

Watching the show last night, I had wondered the exact same thing. It's been one bout of torture after another, and it is getting pretty stomach-turning. In previous seasons, there was plenty of torture, but it was almost never Jack performing it, and he was usually as likely to be the recipient as the applicant.

Perhaps this just confirms what my wife thinks, which is that the show is pointlessly brutal. It may be, but Kevin has a novel theory:

At first it looked as though the writers had decided to portray torture as a routine interrogation device for use with terrorists, but now it looks like there's more at work here. The real goal is to convince America that torture is (a) revolting and (b) doesn't work anyway. Clever guys, these writers. I wonder if they'll convince anyone?

I think this is a potentially fruitful theory, but I can't help moving from the question of what the writers are thinking to the question of what Jack, the character, is thinking. In the past, I have used Jack as an example of an ethics of responsibility in my class -- somebody who is willing to take on guilt for the sake of another. I thought of him as a kind of secular verson of Deitrich Bonhoeffer, but with a gun.

However, after several seasons of his exploits, I've begun to have my doubts. The more I watch him, the more it occurs to me that he's really a sociopath, who as a counter-terrorism agent has found a niche in society that will allow him to act out his sociopathic impulses with impunity, as long as he's effective. He's continually disregarding authority, violating the law, murdering, taking drugs, robbing convienience stores (!), all in the name of doing "that which is necessary."

At a certain point, I think we would be justified in asking whether what Jack thinks is necessary has any actual correspondence to what is really necessary.

American Idol

2005-02-22T08:59:00.000-06:00

My wife and I caught American Idol last night. I have to admit it was a very talented crop of guys they had on. Every one of them was a solid singer, but I had to wonder: Don't these guys ever get bored of hearing the same voice coming out of different mouths over and over again? Almost every one of these guys sounded exactly alike.

Once, just once, I'd love to see them get somebody on there with a voice like Tom Waits, who sounds like his voice has been strained through a used coffee filter.

Evil

2005-02-19T09:04:00.000-06:00

While reading my wife some passages from this Salon.com story about the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting this past week (key news-maker: We actually did find WMD in Iraq), she expressed a view that I've heard from a lot of people. "George Bush isn't evil," she said.

Now, to call anyone evil is inflammatory, and it's not even clear to me what it would mean to call a person evil in any sort of absolute sense. I'm with Reinhold Niebuhr in seeing evil mixed into even the highest of human aspirations and ideals, and good into even the basest of human depravity.

And yet, I couldn't help but wonder, what would be materially different about George Bush's policies if he were in fact evil? I don't have to use much imagination to begin thinking of real horrors, of course. But assume that Bush were just ordinarily evil, rather than being super-evil. Would somebody who's just run-of-the-mill evil govern differently than presumptively-good George Bush? And if not, then what would it mean to say that Bush is good but his policies are evil?

This is always a pro blem when it comes to the ugly matters of political expediency and governmental necessity. But does this mean that what we ought to prefer is ordinarily evil governors to genuinely good governors? As long as they're not super-evil, or as long as they extend their evil outward rather than inward, is that morally preferable? After all, nobody ever doubted Jimmy Carter's goodness (Althought according to the Simpsons, he was "history's greatest monster!"), but there are few that would name him among the most effective of presidents.

Discovering the Network

2005-02-17T09:09:00.000-06:00

I have to admit, I've been enjoying reading David Horiwitz's new hysterical conspiricy website, Discover the Network. Really. If I had wanted to create a satire of right-wing crazy-style idenification of liberalism with communism with Islamic fundamentalism, I could not have come up with something better than this. And the funky Java program that allows you to literally follow the links between people and organizations is quite fun. It's like playinc "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," only instead of connecting Chris Farley with Kevin Bacon, you're trying to figure out the relationship between Tom Daschle and Mohammad Atta. Seriously.

This is, of course, yet another example of the right-wing tactic of long standing, which is simply to lump everything left-of-center in with the most stridently radical of perspectives. Of course, the left plays its own version of this game on the right, associating it constantly to fascism and/or nazism. Thus, if I wanted to, I could make up a "visual map" connecting George W. Bush with Adolf Hitler pretty easily. Would that make Bush a nazi? Of course not, though it would convince a few in the wingnut camp that it was so. Horowitz's project has just as much validity.

But then again, I still find it amusing to read the utterly distorted and dishonest biographies of so many of the figures that are cited. And I have to admit that the piece on Jim Wallis is a real howler. It's a great example of how "Antiwar Activist" = Liberal = Democrat = Communist = Islamofascist. My favorite part is when he accuses Wallis of "moral relativism." Har!

But here's my question: How can I get David Horowitz to put me on the network? I've got a website with a dashing picture and my own blog, and I'm obviously simply a knee-jerk member of the elitist academic left. Is there a way to submit my resume? I couldn't find a link on the site.

Alan Keyes' Daughter

2005-02-15T07:28:00.000-06:00

There was a bit of a stir about this last fall, when her website and blog suddenly disappeared from the internet. But it seems that Alan Keyes' daughter, Maya Marcel-Keyes, has come out of the closet publicly as a "liberal queer" (her words). Here's what the article at MSNBC has to say:

The daughter of conservative Republican Alan Keyes referred to herself Monday as a “liberal queer” and urged support for gay and lesbian young people who have been deserted by their families.

Maya Marcel-Keyes, 19, addressed a rally sponsored by the gay-rights group Equality Maryland, saying she was motivated to speak out because of her rocky relationship with her parents and the recent death of a friend who had fallen ill after being thrown out of the house by his family.

Marcel-Keyes told several hundred supporters that her sexuality had created a rift in her relationship with her parents.“Things just came to a head. Liberal queer plus conservative Republican just doesn’t mesh well,” she said. “That was making my life a little bit turbulent.”

Later, Marcel-Keyes told CNN her parents “were not too pleased” when they learned she was a lesbian, but she said she loves them “very much, and they love me. They can’t support my activities.”

Her father, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Illinois last year, created a stir in August when he said during an interview that homosexuality was “selfish hedonism” and that Vice President Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter was a sinner.

In a statement issued Monday night, Keyes said: “My daughter is an adult, and she is responsible for her own actions. What she chooses to do has nothing to do with my work or political activities.”

Marcel-Keyes said she received an outpouring of support when disclosing her sexual orientation, but her friend did not.“Like me, he grew up queer in a conservative household,” she said. But where she got hundreds of e-mails, offers of a place to stay and a college scholarship, “he’d been out there two years and had gotten nothing.”

“And the worst part is, he isn’t the only one,” Marcel-Keyes said.

In the grand scheme of things, this isn't really all that important, although if I wanted to be psychoanalytic about it, I might suggest that it helps explain the vehemence of Keyes' reaction to Mary Cheney at last year's Republican Convention.

But you know, I've got to tell you, as the father of a daughter, I just don't get how a guy can stand up publicly and attack his daughter's sexuality, even if he doesn't approve of it. Keyes made a choice to focus (somewhat obsessively) on homosexuality as an issue. He didn't need to. There were plenty of other culture war issues he could have focused on. Yet he chose to place his emphasis precisely on that area where he would be garaunteed to cause the maximum pain to his daughter. This doesn't suggest fatherly love to me. It suggest's that the man is a bastard of the highest order.

And his statement about his daughter's coming out seems to confirm that: No expression of love. No expression of support. Just a self-serving distancing of himself from her. Well, I said it with my vote in November, and I'll say it again here: Fuck Alan Keyes.

UPDATE: Oy! It's even worse than I thought. From the Washington Post:

Her parents have known that Maya is a lesbian since they found a copy of the Washington Blade, the gay weekly, in her room and confronted her at the end of high school (she went to Oakcrest School for Girls, a Catholic school in McLean run by the church's highly devout Opus Dei movement.) Ever since, Maya says, her parents have told her that her sexuality is wrong and sinful.

"As long as I was quiet about being gay or my politics, we got along," she says. "Then I went to the Counterinaugural," last month's protests in Washington against President Bush. "My father didn't like that."

Maya returned from the demonstration to find that she had been let go from her job at her father's political organization.

She says she was told to leave her father's apartment and not to expect any money toward attending Brown University, where she was admitted but deferred matriculation to spend a year teaching in southern India. "In my father's view, financing my college would be financing my politics, in a sense," Maya says, "because I plan to be an activist after college."

Vile, vile man!

Labor Blogging: Walmart

2005-02-14T15:17:00.000-06:00

Nathan Newman expresses some skepticism about the deal ironed out between Walmart and the Department of Labor:

Here's why the deal smells like rotting corporate sludge:

1) The deal to let the Wal-Mart corporate office look at all minimum wage and overtime complaints was kept secret until the New York Times confronted DOL about it. There was no public announcement prior to this date, despite the fact that the DOL usually announces such compliance deals with great fanfare.

2) As far as anyone can tell, no Wal-Mart employees were informed of the compliance agreement, even though it had been implemented as early as January 10 (see the email).

3) While the headlines talk about child labor violations, the email is much broader and says any information on any fair labor standards violation investigation should be turned over to Wal-Mart.

4) Were Wal-Mart employees ever informed that their complaints about their employer to the DOL were just being passed off to Wal-Mart corporate headquarters in Arkansas? Giving Wal-Mart this information secretly is a recipe for employees to face retaliation. Notably, there is no instruction in the email to assure the confidentiality of the employees who might make a complaint.

5) If the DOL receives a complaint, do they just ask Wal-Mart to fix the problem for the individual worker? There is nothing in the directive that requires the DOL to investigate to make sure workers in similar jobs aren't suffering the same violations. And since the complaints are never made public, they may never hear they have the right to seek legal relief.

6) Wal-Mart agreed to pay $135,000 for nationwide violations, yet the state of Maine alone fined Wal-Mart $205,650 for child labor violations. The DOL fine was obviously chump change-- a lick, not even a slap on the wrist.

And there are just weird things about the timeline. The NY Times reports the deal was signed on January 6, but the AP reports it was signed on January 11. The email above was sent out on January 10. The DOL claims they were waiting 30 days to let Wal-Mart pay the fine, yet they didn't announce it until forced to by the NY Times investigation more than 30 days later.
This is one of the slimiest insider deals possible by one of the largest corporate donors to the GOP.

Irony, Beautiful, Beautiful Irony

2005-02-14T07:25:00.000-06:00

From today's Washington Post:

Iraq Winners Allied With Iran Are the Opposite of U.S. Vision
When the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq two years ago, it envisioned a quick handover to handpicked allies in a secular government that would be the antithesis of Iran's theocracy -- potentially even a foil to Tehran's regional ambitions.

But, in one of the greatest ironies of the U.S. intervention, Iraqis instead went to the polls and elected a government with a strong religious base -- and very close ties to the Islamic republic next door. It is the last thing the administration expected from its costly Iraq policy -- $300 billion and counting, U.S. and regional analysts say.

Yesterday, the White House heralded the election and credited the U.S. role. In a statement, President Bush praised Iraqis "for defying terrorist threats and setting their country on the path of democracy and freedom. And I congratulate every candidate who stood for election and those who will take office once the results are certified."

Yet the top two winning parties -- which together won more than 70 percent of the vote and are expected to name Iraq's new prime minister and president -- are Iran's closest allies in Iraq.
Thousands of members of the United Iraqi Alliance, a Shiite-dominated slate that won almost half of the 8.5 million votes and will name the prime minister, spent decades in exile in Iran. Most of the militia members in its largest faction were trained in Shiite-dominated Iran. And the winning Kurdish alliance, whose co-leader Jalal Talabani is the top nominee for president, has roots in a province abutting Iran, which long served as its economic and political lifeline.

"This is a government that will have very good relations with Iran. The Kurdish victory reinforces this conclusion. Talabani is very close to Tehran," said Juan Cole, a University of Michigan expert on Iraq. "In terms of regional geopolitics, this is not the outcome that the United States was hoping for."

Social Security

2005-02-14T07:24:00.000-06:00

Kevin Drum has a suggestion for private accounts today that I could potentially support. Go read.

The Last Word on Ward Churchill

2005-02-13T22:34:00.000-06:00

Goes to Dalia Lithwick, who I think has it just about right:

If academic tenure means anything at all, it means professors must be allowed to say and write what they choose without fearing removal by popular referendum. That's why the decision to grant someone tenure must be taken so seriously in the first place. One hundred percent of the blame for the Churchill debacle rests with the University of Colorado's board of regents that hired, granted tenure to, and promoted an individual whose scholarship and personal qualifications are now, and must always have been, in serious question. Churchill's silly notions have been in the public domain for years. Firing him only now suggests that Bill O'Reilly, as opposed to his faculty peers, gets the deciding vote on who is allowed to teach our young people.

Churchill's 9/11 comments were patently offensive. But they were not hate speech, they were not treason, and they were not in any sense a call to imminent violence on the part of his listeners. Read in context, his words are the purest form of political speech. Does that mean students have to take his classes? No. Does it mean any university needs to invite him to speak or even hire him in the first place? No. But does it mean that the governor or the board of regents are entitled to remove him now, simply because some "taxpayer money" goes to pay his salary? No. That would make virtually every professorship in the land subject to a heckler's veto.

A few years ago I wrote a piece about the kinds of violent protest witnessed at Hamilton last week—suggesting that when students or community members block an unpopular speaker through riots or death threats, it is they, rather than the speaker, who have crossed the line from protected speech to assault. We've become so persuaded that college students' fragile political sensibilities trump both academic rigor and open discourse that when they silence unpopular ideas through protest or threats of violence, we treat it as their sacred right.

Virtually everyone who has called for Churchill's removal makes the same argument: "What if it was your son/husband/mother killed in the towers?" But that is not an argument for suppressing speech—particularly on college campuses and particularly at a forum ostensibly testing the "limits of dissent." It's an argument for making all political discourse conform to the sensibilities of the most fragile victim. It's an argument for banning any discussions of the American Revolution in history classes because some student may have burnt her tongue on a mug of tea once.

The Attack on Academia: The "Students' Bill of Rights"

2005-02-12T17:34:00.000-06:00

Oy:

Ohio mulls academic "bill of rights"
By Elizabeth DeForest

Feb. 12, 2005
WESTERVILLE, Ohio -- College sophomore Charis Bridgman tends to keep quiet in class if she thinks her professor might disagree with her Christian-influenced ideas. The 19-year-old says schools such as her Otterbein College in suburban Columbus should be a place for open discussion, but she feels some professors make students afraid to speak up. "They might chastise me, or not even listen to my opinion or give me a chance to explain," she said.

Professors would have to include diverse opinions in classrooms under legislation being pushed in Ohio and several other states by conservatives who fear too many professors indoctrinate young minds with liberal propaganda. Such measures have had little success getting approval in the other states.

"I see students coming out having gone in without any ideological leanings one way or another, coming out with an indoctrination of a lot of left-wing issues," said bill sponsor Sen. Larry Mumper, a former high school teacher whose Republican party controls the Legislature.

The proposal in Ohio to create an academic "bill of rights" would prohibit public and private college professors from presenting opinions as fact or penalizing students for expressing their views. Professors would not be allowed to introduce controversial material unrelated to the course.

Professors dismissed the bill as unnecessary and questioned whether its supporters had ulterior motives, such as wanting more conservative professors.

Similar legislation failed in California and Colorado last year, while the Georgia Senate passed a resolution, which is less binding than a bill, that suggests adoption. The California bill, which would affect only public schools, has been reintroduced and faces opposition from professors and student groups. An Indiana bill is nearly identical to Ohio's.

The Ohio legislation is based on principles advocated by Students for Academic Freedom, a Washington, D.C.-based student network founded by conservative activist David Horowitz. "It doesn't matter a professor's viewpoint," Horowitz said in an interview. "They can be a good professor, liberal or conservative, provided they pursue an educational mission and not a political agenda."

Mumper said he is concerned universities are not teaching the values held by taxpaying parents and students.

He questioned why lawmakers should approve funding for universities with "professors who would send some students out in the world to vote against the very public policy that their parents have elected us for."

A faculty group or school committee could oversee complaints from students who believe their grades were affected by a professor's bias, Mumper said.

Joe White, a political science professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said students could use perceived discrimination as an excuse to refuse to learn.

"We're not supposed to teach for their comfort," he said. Other opponents, including the American Association of University Professors, say such bills could stifle debate.

"We see nothing but mischief if we invite people from outside of the university to somehow start monitoring what goes on inside the classroom," said David Patton, an AAUP member and professor emeritus of Ohio State University.

Sen. Teresa Fedor, a Democrat from Toledo, agrees: "Can we say 21st century witch hunt and book burning?"

Where does one start with garbage like this? How about with the idea that, public or private, state survailance of what takes place in the classroom is a bad idea? How about with the fact that I simply don't buy the arguement that says that classrooms are hostile environments for students? Or how about the fact that this entire idea of separating politics out from what takes place in the classroom assumes that in a liberal arts setting knowledge can be compartmentalized and subdivided into vacuum-sealed chambers so that the teacher's political perspective never crosses paths with the "real" nature of their course? All of these could be appropriate places to start.

Let me dwell for a moment on the question of just what it is a student gets in a liberal arts education. The Students' Bill of Rights assumes that education is like grocery shopping. If I go to the store, I should be able to pick up milk without having to browse through potato chips. But that's not how liberal arts education works. Liberal arts education is about the transformation of the person. The goal is to bring the student to a recognition of knowledge as a totality, that affects every dimension of their lives. This even goes for math, where student should be able to discuss the way that budget proposals and tax cuts are mathematically comprehensible. As such, there is no real way that a professor can do his or her job without intersecting with broad social, cultural, and political issues.

I certainly agree that if a professor is being relentlessly partisan and punishing or belittling students for their perspective, then the school administration should take action. That is a violation of the professor's professional role. But that's different from a professor getting up in class and honestly debating issues of policy in class, even issues that they themselves care passionately about.

But the complaint of the student at the head of the article does not really seem to be that she is being abused or punished for her perspective, but that the professor might actually challenge her to think differently about her perspective. Heaven forfend! That's a complaint I have no sympathy with. If a student doesn't want to be challenged in class, or even told that they are wrong from time to time, then they don't understand what they've signed on for in a liberal education. And by the way, complacent left-wing students should be challenged just as vociferously as right-wing students.

But, I can't finish without noting my favoriate quote from the piece:

Mumper said he is concerned universities are not teaching the values held by taxpaying parents and students.
He questioned why lawmakers should approve funding for universities with "professors who would send some students out in the world to vote against the very public policy that their parents have elected us for."

Hey, how about his for an answer: Because a free society values and benefits from the right to dissent. Do we really want professors vetted to ensure that they meet tests of popularity? What would Socrates say, I wonder? I imagine Mumper wouldn't know, because I don't think he got the best results of a liberal arts education.

Hotel Rwanda

2005-02-12T14:31:00.000-06:00

From this week's Sojomail:

Maybe it's because I spent time last summer in Burundi, the poorer twin sister of Rwanda that shares a similar history, tribal makeup, geography, culture, and terrifying undercurrent of genocide. Maybe it's because while I was there, I met Anglican priests serving in Rwanda who told personal stories of the tragedies there - and their efforts to bring healing and reconciliation in the aftermath. Maybe it's because (some readers may be tempted to write me off after reading this sentence) I was so frustrated by last year's promotional hype surrounding Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ - and I was so frustrated by the movie itself, though I know many found it moving and spiritually edifying. Maybe it's because I have deep concerns about the alignment of major sectors of Christianity with "red-state Republicanism," and I worry that a kind of modernist, nationalist neo-fundamentalism is trying to claim all Christian territory as its sovereign domain.

For whatever reason, when I walked out of the 2005 film Hotel Rwanda this thought wouldn't leave me: If we really had the mind and heart of Christ, this is the movie we would be urging people in our churches to see.

Go read the rest. I admit, that daddyhood has pretty much kept me away from the movies recently, but this article certainly makes me want to see the movie.

Trust Fund

2005-02-10T07:44:00.000-06:00

Kevin Drum has a good post on Social Security today that clarifies some of the issues that the President has been working hard to obscure:

The trust fund consists of U.S. treasury bonds. These bonds have been purchased with excess payroll taxes collected since 1983.

Fine. But what is a treasury bond? Easy: it's a call on the future general fund revenue of the United States. People who buy bonds are receiving a promise that they will be repaid (with interest) by U.S. taxpayers in the future.

Who then are the purchasers of the bonds in the trust fund? Answer: the people who paid payroll taxes between 1983-2018.

And who is required to pay them back? Answer: the bonds will be redeemed by the general fund between 2019-2042 (on current estimates, anyway). Since the general fund is financed mostly by personal and corporate income taxes, that means that the people required to pay back the bonds are income tax payers between 2019-2042.

So: are these bonds merely IOUs from one branch of the government to another? Not really. They are IOUs between one set of citizens (payroll tax payers between 1983-2018) and another set of citizens (income tax payers between 2019-2042).

What this means is that the United States really does have a moral obligation to pay back those bonds. Bonds are always paid back by future taxpayers, not all of whom had any say in selling the bonds in the first place. The fact that it's a burden on these future taxpayers is not reason enough to pretend the bonds don't need to be repaid — or don't exist at all.

And make no mistake: redeeming the trust fund will be a burden on future taxpayers — in the same way that paying excess payroll taxes is a burden on current workers. There's no free lunch. The only way to pay back the bonds is either to increase the federal deficit or to increase taxes. My approximate guess is that it will require a phased increase in income taxes totaling about one-fifth. In other words, beginning in 2019, someone paying a 15% tax rate will see their rate slowly increased to 18%.

The bottom line is this: the trust fund is not an accounting trick. It's a genuine obligation, both morally and legally. At the same time, it's not a stack of gold bars, either. Redeeming it will require some kind of tax increase. (It doesn't have to be an increase in personal income taxes of course. It could be anything: corporate taxes, inheritance taxes, carbon taxes, whatever.) There's no point in pretending this tax increase won't be a burden, but equally, there's no point in pretending that our obligation to devote tax revenues to paying back the trust fund bonds is just a fiction.

The president of the United States, of all people, ought to understand that.

Devil's Bread

2005-02-08T14:05:00.000-06:00

As I was finishing up an article over the weekend, George Bush was finishing up the "budget" for the coming year. How are these two issues related? Well, in my reading, I found two (three really) quotes that are apropos of the 2nd Bush administration. The first is from Reinhold Niebuhr's reaction to the 1952 Republican victory:

In short, the election campaign, taken as a laboratory test, reveals political man as capable of rational analysis of our common fate and of moral estimates of his own and his neighbor's rights. But the rational and moral considerations are in every instance colored by interest and passion. The democratic process is, therefore, not so much a meeting of minds in which the truth prevails, as it is a contest of intersts dominated by the fortuitous circumstance and not by rational argument. Democracy must be regarded, on the one hand, as a system of government which men's rational and moral capacities make possible, and on the other hand, as a system of checks and balances which the corruptions by interest and passion make necessary. For these corruptions as revealed in the campaign are precisely those which make life insufferable in a tyrannical regime and whichare robbed of their virulene by the checks and balances of democracy. (Neibuhr, "The Republican Victory" Reprinted in Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr).

As Sojourners editor Jim Wallis is fond of noting, budgets are moral documents. The latest budget by the Bush administration is, in light of that, the most egregiously immoral document to be published by this administration since, well, since the last egregiously immoral document they published. From the perspective of a prophetic Christianity, it violates every mandate of righteousness demanded by Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, and Amos. Far from putting the concerns of the least and the most vulnerable first, it puts them dead last, using a cannard about "effectiveness" as justification, but then offering no plan to come up with more effective policies to aid the impoverished. And it is this that leads to my second quote, from Niebuhr's daughter, Elizabeth Sifton, in her book, The Serenity Prayer:

For the first time in many decades," Pa had confessed, "I feel seriously concerned about the future of this great country, because the two men who seem to be guiding its destiny [Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles] seem both to be stupid. One is amiable and the other not, but the stupidity is equal."

To which Felix Frankfurter replied (per Sifton):

When Reinie speaks of stupidity, reminded him that "Gegen die Dummheit kampfen selbst die Gotter vergebens" [against stupidity eve the gods fight in vain]. And when stupidity is mixed with self-righteousness we have devil's bread.

The Attack on Academia: Brainwashing 101

2005-02-04T14:42:00.000-06:00

Apparently Michael Berube was interviewed by the folks making a video about left-wing bias in academia. Here's what he has to say about the experience:

They said they were independent filmmakers traveling the country making a movie about campus controversies, allegations of liberal bias, and such things, and so naturally I thought, "aha! Independent filmmakers! this means they must be men of the left- no doubt they also run a local food co-op and teach yoga and meditation classes at the People's Center for Peace and Composting in their spare time." I thought I would talk to them for a while about David Horowitz's evil right-wing schemes, and then ask them for recycling tips, like, for example, can I include the hard-plastic orange juice containers with the soft-plastic gallon jugs of cider and the plastic-coated paper clips?

And so, dear readers, lulled into a false sense of complacency, I told them all our secrets about how we keep conservatives off the arts and humanities faculty and brainwash our students into becoming members of the Church of Chomsky! What a fool I was, what a trusting fool!

After flipping the irony switch into its "off" position, he tells the real story, namely, that it was a pleasant enough interview. However:

I have a sinking feeling that I'm just not the kind of lunatic academic leftist the folks behind "Brainwashing 101" are looking for. And why would conservatives and libertarians be looking for lunatic academic leftists? Because LALs have become, in the past three years, one of the right's most reliable recruiting devices, that's why. (Which reminds me: a hearty parenthetical thank you to Big Max for slapping down the Wingnutty Professor's efforts to make Ward Churchill the poster boy for the American Left.) Eerily, just as the PNAC-inspired war in Iraq has swelled the ranks of al-Qaeda recruits instead of peeling away moderate Muslims from Islamist fanatics, so too do the far-left campus blowhards swell the ranks of Bush voters instead of peeling away centrists and independents from the radical neocon/theocon right. Coincidence- or symbiosis? This humble blog is not sure.

Finally, all I can say to Michael's conclusion is, "hear! hear!":

All the same, my "Brainwashed" interview might not be wholly useless. I think my twenty-minute exposition on the relation between deconstruction and queer theory could make for a thrilling theater experience, so I implore Messrs. Maloney and Browning not to leave that segment on their cutting-room floor. I think it screams "Golden Globe," I really do. And finally, though I don't usually go around telling libertarians what to do- it makes them behave so wild and nasty!- I have to say that in my ideal universe, libertarians would not go around complaining that "Curriculums have been transformed to meet the demands of various 'victim groups' with politicized area studies such as Women's Studies, African American Studies, and Queer Studies - while the Western Canon, that body of literature and art thought to consist of the best that has been thought, written and otherwise expressed has been partially jettisoned in an attempt to rid the curriculum of the influence of 'dead white males.'" In my ideal universe, libertarians would support the right of faculty in the arts and humanities to be just as queer, black, and feminist as they wanna be, and they would be a bit more hesitant about championing undergraduates who wear hoods and blackface on Halloween. And, of course, they would not get so hysterical and hyperbolic about a little curriculum revision here and there. Or, at least, if they were serious fans of the Western Canon they invoke, they would insist that the Plato-to-Nietzsche, Beowulf-to-Virginia Woolf surveys be required of the nation's business and engineering majors as well as the left-leaning art-and-literature students who actually care about such things. I think that would be great. I personally love dead white males, and hope to become one myself someday!

The Attack on Universities: Ward Churchill

2005-02-03T09:01:00.000-06:00

I've kind of been half-following the story of Ward Churchill, the professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado. But his story has been heating up in the last few days, and so I thought I'd offer a few reflections.

For those who aren't familiar with the Churchill saga, the New York Times has an article on it today. Here's the story in a nutshell:

The uproar concerns a three-year-old essay by Professor Churchill, who teaches ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In it, he called the workers killed in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 "little Eichmanns," technocrats who had a role in their country's economic power and its foreign policy, which included the 1991 gulf war.
The Colorado governor, Bill Owens, has called for the university to fire Professor Churchill, but yesterday, Michael Carrigan, a newly elected member of the University of Colorado Board of Regents, said it was unlikely that any action would be taken when the board holds an emergency meeting today. "He can be fired, but not tomorrow," Mr. Carrigan said yesterday.
Professor Churchill said in an interview yesterday that he would sue if fired. "I am on firm legal ground," he said, adding that several lawyers who specialize in free speech have already contacted him. He said he had received more than 100 death threats.
The essay surfaced only after Professor Churchill accepted an invitation to speak at Hamilton College, near Utica, N.Y., about his area of expertise, American Indian activism.
After the essay was brought to light, Hamilton College said it had to honor its invitation in the interests of free speech, though the college president, Joan Hinde Stewart, said she found the remarks personally repugnant. The college received thousands of e-mail messages and telephone calls protesting the planned panel discussion. On Tuesday, it abruptly canceled the discussion, which had been scheduled for tonight, after a caller threatened to bring a gun to the event and the local police said they could not guarantee Professor Churchill's safety.
At the University of Colorado, Professor Churchill resigned as chairman of the ethnic studies department on Monday but remains a teacher. Some students have protested his remarks, though he said more support him.
In his essay, Professor Churchill wrote of what he saw as the tie between the trade center victims and the deaths of Iraqis in the 1991 war, and after. "They were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cellphones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants," he wrote.
"If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it," he added.

Ugh. What to say about this whole story? It seems to me that there are a number of different issues that are being conflated in the uproar over this issue. I count at least four separate issues that ought to be separated from one another.

First is the question of whether Ward Churchill is an idiot. It seems clear that, on the basis of the rhetoric of his speech, that if he's not an idiot in general terms, at the very least he exercised excrably poor judgment in this case. "Little Eichmanns?" Please. There are so many ways that this comparison is wrong that I simply don't have the time to enumerate them all. To then celebrate their immolation with the kind of self-congratulatory glee that Churchill portrays in the quotes above is beyond comprehension.

Underlying Churchill's rhetoric however, is a serious and debatable point, having to do with the consequences of U. S. foreign policy and the question of collective guilt. If we accept the premise that U. S. foreign policy creates misery throughout the world (a debatable premise in its own right), must we then accept the conclusion that we are collectively responsible and guilty for that suffering? And even if we accept that we are collectively responsible, does that mean that the mass execution by plane-bomb undertaken at the World Trade Center was therefore justified?

I find that final point to be the most morally dubious, to the point of really considering it an illegitimate move. But the first two points: on U. S. Foreign policy and collective guilt are important questions that ought to be debated. It seems to me that Churchill was making a poorly worded attempt to offer one approach to that question -- namely to affirm both of those assertions -- our policies do produce misery and we are collectively guilty. I think I'd be inclined to go a long way down that path with Churchill, but I couldn't follow him to his conclusion, which journeys far beyond the moral pale.

So, if it is possible to put his rhetoric aside, it next needs to be asked whether Churchill's ideas fall within the boundaries of academic freedom. Given his field of expertise and his public profile as a scholar, it seems to me that they do. They may be wrong, but they aren't nonsense. Therefore, I can't support the attempts being made to remove him from his position. I've always maintained that the best remedy for bad ideas is good ideas. And it seems to me that what Churchill is presenting is a worthy topic for academic debate.

There is another dimension to this as well, which is the ability of political officials to define what is and what isn't acceptable discourse on public university campuses. It's a sad fact of life that public universities are always subject to this kind of political pressure. And insofar as radical professors will frequently find themselves working for state institutions, these pressures are likely to continue.

It's bad news when universities come under such pressure, and it's particularly problematic when David Horowitz is running around promoting his so-called "Academic Bill of Rights," but it doesn't help when scholars who should know better use such irresponsible rhetoric to make a point. At some point, the academic left has to learn that tenure and academic freedom aren't a license to say any foolish thing that enters one's head. The surest way to lose academic freedom and tenure is to abuse them. Unless society recognizes a value in preserving these traditions within academia, they will soon be gone.

Another aspect of this is the question of what use rhetoric such as Church's is in the first place. Rhetoric is understood to be persuasive discourse. Yet, rhetoric such as Churchill's is custom designed to alienate the vast majority of people who hear him or read him. Sure, it may speak well to a small minority of radical academics, but even among academics it will be unpersuasive, if not patently offensive. So, what is gained through the use of such rhetoric. Again, I think it comes down to the idea that academics use such rhetoric because they think they can. Actually persuading people or changing the terms of political discourse in this country doesn't matter to them, perhaps because they think that the U. S. Is beyond repair in the first place. The only way this rhetoric changes the terms of discourse is by discrediting those of us on the left.

Incidentally, I can't help noting the irony of the topic that he was being invited to Hamilton to speak on: "The Limits of Dissent." It seems to me that for many people, Churchill's comments have defined them.

Promoting Abstinance? Apparently Not.

2005-02-01T13:33:00.000-06:00

From MSNBC:

Abstinence-only sex education programs, a major plank in President George W. Bush’s education plan, have had no impact on teenagers’ behavior in his home state of Texas, according to a new study.

Despite taking courses emphasizing abstinence-only themes, teenagers in 29 high schools became increasingly sexually active, mirroring the overall state trends, according to the study conducted by researchers at Texas A&M University.

“We didn’t see any strong indications that these programs were having an impact in the direction desired,” said Dr. Buzz Pruitt, who directed the study.

The study was delivered to the Texas Department of State Health Services, which commissioned it.

The federal government is expected to spend about $130 million to fund programs advocating abstinence in 2005, despite a lack of evidence that they work, Pruitt said.

“The jury is still out, but most of what we’ve discovered shows there’s no evidence the large amount of money spent is having an effect,” he said.

A Convergence of Stupid Ideas

2005-01-31T13:44:00.000-06:00

What do you get when you combine legalized prostitution with compulsory work for the unemployed? Compulsory prostitution!

Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.
The government had considered making brothels an exception on moral grounds, but decided that it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars. As a result, job centres must treat employers looking for a prostitute in the same way as those looking for a dental nurse.

When the waitress looked into suing the job centre, she found out that it had not broken the law. Job centres that refuse to penalise people who turn down a job by cutting their benefits face legal action from the potential employer.

"There is now nothing in the law to stop women from being sent into the sex industry," said Merchthild Garweg, a lawyer from Hamburg who specialises in such cases. "The new regulations say that working in the sex industry is not immoral any more, and so jobs cannot be turned down without a risk to benefits."

The Global Poor

2005-01-31T07:13:00.000-06:00

An interesting article at Slate.com over the weekend about Hernando DeSoto's proposal about how to end world poverty:

De Soto's vision of the Third World is instinctively appealing. He sees industrious, entrepreneurial slum-dwellers, toiling with boundless ingenuity, yet living in homes and owning businesses that are theirs only by de facto possession and jury-rigged local agreements, not by de jure deed and title. De Soto calls all this informally held property "dead capital," because it can't be leveraged to produce growth—it can't be mortgaged, because it lacks a proper title to guarantee it as collateral. He says there are gobs and gobs of this dead stuff out there: $9.3 trillion worth, by his estimate, skulking in the ghetto.

This is an intriguing idea. The question of how to allow for the possibility of participation for the poorest members of society is extraordinarily vexing in a world committed to unfettered free markets. Of course, it may be that there need to be additional approaches to the market, but go find economists with the ear of the government who are proposing such things these days.

There are problems with DeSoto's plan though:

From the field, the verdicts are rolling in: In some corners of the world, the land-titling programs inspired by de Soto's work are proving merely ineffective. In other places, they are showing themselves to be downright harmful to the poor people they set out to help.
First, the merely useless:
In various parts of the Third World, newly legalized squatters on the outskirts of cities are discovering that a property title supplies little of the benefit de Soto projects. Government studies out of de Soto's native Peru suggest that titles don't actually increase access to credit much after all. Out of the 200,313 Lima households awarded land titles in 1998 and 1999, only about 24 percent had gotten any kind of financing by 2002—and in that group, financing from private banks was almost nil. In other words, the only capital infusion—which was itself modest—was coming from the state.
Reports from Turkey, Mexico, South Africa, and Colombia suggest similar trends. "In Bogota's self-help settlements," writes Alan Gilbert, a London professor of geography who has done extensive research on land issues in Colombia and other parts of Latin America, "property titles seem to have brought neither a healthy housing market nor a regular supply of formal credit."
This is probably because banks realize they don't stand to gain much from repossessing shanties in rotten locations. Faced with a massive surge in legalized but tenuous properties owned by poor people, banks have simply adjusted their criteria for lending, and in some cases care more about stable employment than a land title. Not only that, but the actual real estate markets in many of these shantytowns on urban outskirts are stagnant, which puts a serious damper on any potential gains on
capital—live or dead.
"You cannot accumulate capital if there is no market in which to trade your asset," Gilbert writes.
Now for the downright harmful:
In places where real estate markets are buoyant, titles turn out to be quite a hot commodity. Too hot, in fact. In June of 2002, for example, the World Bank kicked off a several-year project to distribute over a million titles throughout Cambodia. In Phnom Penh, the capital, untitled land near the city center has been selling for about $20 to $30 per square meter over the past few years. Titled properties nearby have been selling for around 10 times that much. For a poor squatter in the middle of the capital city, the promise of a title would seem to be a road to riches. In practice, it's more like a sign taped to his back that says, "Kick me."
In the nine months or so leading up to the project kickoff, a devastating series of slum fires and forced evictions purged 23,000 squatters from tracts of untitled land in the heart of Phnom Penh. These squatters were then plopped onto dusty relocation sites several miles outside of the city, where there were no jobs and where the price of commuting to and from central Phnom Penh (about $2 per day) surpassed whatever daily wage they had been earning in town before the fires. Meanwhile, the burned-out inner city land passed immediately to some of the wealthiest property developers in the country. (Prominent among them was this guy, Cambodia's richest thug.)
Since then, a similar pattern has continued elsewhere in the city, says Alain Durand-Lasserve, a land-management expert who has worked in Cambodia during the last couple of years. Investors have been buying squatter-occupied state land from various government officials in Phnom Penh, who pocket the money, thus looting the land both from the state and from the poor. In other cases in Phnom Penh—and also in Manila, in the Philippines—speculators or middle-income groups went out before titling programs took effect and bought land at slightly better than informal prices directly from the squatters, who happily sold off for a bit of cash. Then the investors just waited for the titling program—and the attendant leap in value and legal security—to come their way.
It turns out that titling is more useful to elite and middle-income groups who can afford to bother with financial leverage, risk, and real estate markets. For very poor squatters in the inner city—who care most about day-to-day survival, direct access to livelihood, and keeping costs down—titles make comparatively little sense. These poorer groups either fall prey to eviction or they sell out, assuming they'll find some other affordable pocket of informality that they can settle into. The problem is, with titling programs on the march, such informal pockets are disappearing fast. So, the poor sell cheap or are evicted, then can't find a decent new place to settle, losing the crucial geographic advantage they once had in the labor market.

Well, this sucks. Is there anything that can be done? It turns out there's at least one suggestion on the floor:

What to do? Here's one idea: Geoffrey Payne, a British urban planning consultant with years of experience working on land-tenure issues in Cambodia and elsewhere, recommends temporarily insulating slums from the commercial land market by granting informal neighborhoods groups land rights for some period of time. During that period, he says, the neighborhood can be upgraded and basic services brought in, allowing land values to inch up toward parity with the surrounding real estate market. Then, after a number of years, the neighborhood gets a full, group land title, which can then be subdivided into individual titles if people are willing to take on the costs. By taking these incremental steps, he says, you shelter the poor from the shock of a titling gold rush.

This sounds like a possibility. How is it being received? Not well, it turns out:

But sadly, the Davos set doesn't have a crush on Geoffrey Payne, and de Soto has never sat down for a debate with him. Nor, in fact, does de Soto seem to pay attention to any of the lawyers, urban planners, geographers, sociologists, or economic development experts who have catalogued the real-life flaws in his ideas.
I did catch up with de Soto myself just after Davos a couple of years ago, and I asked him for his own solution to the squeeze on poor squatters brought on by normalization. He told me wealthy land-grabbers should know that it's in their best interests to have the productive power of the poor brought into the economy. When I replied that those elites don't seem to be aware of that, de Soto simply offered: "I can make them aware."

This is hardly the kind of hardnosed analytical style that one expects from economists, who tend to have little confidence in peoples' ability to act for the common good, even if it is in their long-term self-interest. It smacks more of ideological ferver to me than of solid economic thinking. I'd be interested in exploring the issue of whether Payne's approach has legs, but of course it cuts against the free market ideology of the WTO, IMF, and World Bank. The fact that it might actually be a workable strategy is secondary to the fact that it seems to put boudaries around the free market. Alas for us unless we can begin to recognize markets as a means rather than an end in themselves.

Social Security Privatization - the Latest Pretext

2005-01-28T06:42:00.000-06:00

From Paul Krugman today, responding to the latest Bush administration claims that Social Security is unfair to African Americans:

Put it all together, and the deal African-Americans get from Social Security turns out, according to various calculations, to be either about the same as that for whites or somewhat better. Hispanics, by the way, clearly do better than either.

So the claim that Social Security is unfair to blacks is just false. And the fact that privatizers keep making that claim, after their calculations have repeatedly been shown to be wrong, is yet another indicator of the fundamental dishonesty of their sales pitch.

What's really shameful about Mr. Bush's exploitation of the black death rate, however, is what it takes for granted.

The persistent gap in life expectancy between African-Americans and whites is one measure of the deep inequalities that remain in our society - including highly unequal access to good-quality health care. We ought to be trying to diminish that gap, especially given the fact that black infants are two and half times as likely as white babies to die in their first year.

Now nobody can expect instant progress in reducing health inequalities. But the benefits of Social Security privatization, if any, won't materialize for many decades. By using blacks' low life expectancy as an argument for privatization, Mr. Bush is in effect taking it as a given that 40 or 50 years from now, large numbers of African-Americans will still be dying before their time.

Is this an example of what Mr. Bush famously called "the soft bigotry of low expectations?" Maybe not: it isn't particularly soft to treat premature black deaths not as a tragedy we must end but as just another way to push your ideological agenda. But bigotry - yes, that sounds like the right word.

Social Security

2005-01-27T07:01:00.000-06:00

Kevin Drum has been working on this issue alot, and he's got a good post today explaining just what the relationship of payroll and income taxes to the "deficit" is:

SOCIAL SECURITY BONDS....In 2018 (approximately), payroll taxes will no longer be enough to cover Social Security payments. To make up the difference, treasury bonds from Social Security's trust fund will be sold back to the government, and in order to pay for those bonds income taxes will have to be raised.

Is this fiscal Armageddon? Hardly. As I say in Thursday's Christian Science Monitor, middle-class workers have been subsidizing high earners for over 20 years as part of the bargain crafted in the Greenspan/Reagan reforms of 1983:
For more than two decades, low- and middle-income Americans have kept their part of the bargain, paying more in payroll taxes than Social Security needs and helping to keep income taxes low. In return, beginning in 2018, high earners are expected to start paying a bit more in income taxes in order to help keep payroll taxes low.
The key point here is that payroll taxes are mostly paid by middle and low income workers — and they've been overpaying for years. Income taxes are mostly paid by the well off, and the extra money from payroll taxes has allowed them to underpay for years. In 2018 that reverses, so paying back those bonds isn't just a moral obligation between generations, it's also a moral obligation between the wealthy and the middle class.

New Feature: Labor Blogging

2005-01-26T09:16:00.000-06:00

Henry at Crooked Timber comments on the absence of blogging on labor issues, and then draws our attention to a recent Human Rights Watch report on union busting in the meat-packing industry:

The report also concluded that packing companies violated human and labor rights by suppressing their employees’ efforts to organize by, for example, often firing employees who support a union. The report asserted that slaughterhouse and packing plants also flouted international rules by taking advantage of workers’ immigration status - in some plants two-thirds of the workers are illegal immigrants - to subject them to inferior treatment.

In light of this, I'm inaugurating another new feature here at Scott Paeth's Daily Blog, vis: Labor Blogging. Whenever I come across an interesting news item regarding labor unions and the fight to organize, I'll post it here. Solidarity forever!

Anthony Flew

2005-01-25T13:16:00.000-06:00

This is an interesting development in philosophy of religion. Aparently renowned British philosopher and atheist Anthony Flew has converted to a form of Deism, coming to believe in the existence of a creator God, though not necessarily the God of Christianity and other theistic religions. I've found some references to the story at The Panda's Thumb.

Anthony Flew's Conversion to Deism

Anthony Flew's Converstion to Deism: An Update

Flew's Flawed Science

The Young Anthony Flew

Flew's perspective, as I understand it, is rooted in a strong evidentialist position which asserts that we are never justified in believing anything unless we have sufficient evidence for it. As I understand his new position, which I am still examining, it seems that he still holds to a strong evidentialist perspective, but now feels that, based on his reading of the literature of Intelligent Design, there is sufficient evidence to support the existence of a creator God.

This understandably upsets some of the folks at the Panda's Thumb, for whom Intelligent Design is simply bad science overlaying bad religion. I agree with them, but I would disagree both with Flew and with many of the Panda's Thumb folks in that I think the problem is with a strong evientialist perspective, not with the amount of evidence that currently exists for God's existence.

In the famous debate between Flew and Basil Mitchell, I am firmly on Mitchell's side. What evidence, exactly, would be necessary for one to be justified in believing they have an ally in the enemy camp? To extend the question, what evidence do I need to support the assertion "my mother loves me"? Is belief in God of this kind, or is it of the kind that is necessary to support the statement "water freezes as 0 degrees celcius?

More on this as things develop. It's so rare that there is breaking news in the philosophy world!

Terry Jones

2005-01-23T09:04:00.000-06:00

Good article at Salon.com today. Here's my favorite quote:

Contemplating the likelihood of significant civilian casualties just before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he writes, "Mr. Bush says that one of the reasons he wants to kill a lot of Iraqis is because Saddam Hussein has also been killing them. Is there some rivalry here?" Nevertheless, "you can bet that if George W. Bush is going for the record he's going to beat Saddam Hussein hands down."

24 - Someone doesn't know it's fiction

2005-01-21T08:04:00.000-06:00

And it's Cal Thomas:

The Fox broadcast network is carrying a remarkable series called "24," which brilliantly and persuasively warns America about a secret terrorist family embedded in this country for years. The family blends into a quiet neighborhood until the call to action is sounded and the defense secretary is kidnapped and threatened with beheading.

Just how effective this fictitious show could be in awakening docile Americans to reality is evident from the reaction by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which asked Fox to send public relations spots to stations carrying the show. The spots say all Muslims are not terrorists. All Muslims don't have to be terrorists. The ones who are and who are among us are sufficient to bring more death and damage to this country.

I mean, are you kidding me?

The Attack On Universities

2005-01-19T23:23:00.000-06:00

From Left2Right, referencing the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Last month, members of the Appropriations Committee of the North Carolina House of Representatives voted to use the power of the state budget to block the assignment of a book to all freshmen and transfer students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations (White Cloud Press, 1999), by Michael Sells, a professor of religion at Haverford College. Denying public funds to the reading program unless "all other known religions were offered in an equal or incremental way," they stipulated that their prohibition "is not intended to interfere with academic freedom, but to ensure that all religions are taught in a nondiscriminatory fashion."
lawmakers in Minnesota and Missouri responded to pedophilia scandals by taking swipes at university budgets. In April, a Minnesota legislator proposed removing financial support from the University of Minnesota Press for its publication of Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex, by Judith Levine.
More recently, the University of Missouri System's appropriation was docked some $150,000 in reaction to the decision by the director of the public-television station on the Columbia campus to prevent personnel from wearing flag pins on camera, and in reaction to the work of Harris Mirkin, a professor on the Kansas City campus. In a letter to the University of Missouri's president, Manuel Pacheco, the instigating legislator worried about Professor Mirkin's "thought patterns" in writing "The Pattern of Sexual Politics: Feminism, Homosexuality, and Pedophilia."

I have to admit, I'd love to know the methodology of that last course. I'm not so naive as to believe that there aren't some wild and crazy courses out there, but the title tells me nothing about what's really going on in the course. I gave a lecture today that I told a colleague was entitlted "Slavery, Cannibalism and Clitorectomies." Wild subject right? Well, maybe, but my point was to engage the students about what they considered to be beyond the pale morally, so that I could begin talking about moral relativism compared to various theories of moral normativity.

A lot of these problems are exacerbated by the fact that they're taking place at state universities, and so they're subject to more political pressure than my institution would be (he said anxiously). Is there anything that can be done about this? Quoth Left2Right:

A version of the Academic Bill of Rights, with minor editorial changes and a suitably solemn sprinkling of Whereases, was introduced into the US House of Representatives and sent off to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on 10/30/'03. As far as I know it still languishes in committee. Happily, the version incorporated this language from the academic bill of rights: "nor should the legislature impose any ... orthodoxy through its control of the university budget." Yeah, but what about imposing their own version of diversity?

He who pays the piper calls the tune? If that means the state is entitled to attach whatever conditions it likes, it sounds like the market fundamentalism I vigorously reject. (Constitutional law rejects it too, though the issues surrounding unconstitutional conditions and subsidies in first amendment jurisprudence are difficult.) There's lots more going on here than a contractual exchange and purchase of services. (Students pay tuition, but they can't buy good grades. We don't judge how good scholarship is by seeing how many copies it sells, either.) If it means that inevitably the state will end up doing whatever it likes, I don't believe it. There's a real political battle, and so far Horowitz is mostly losing. And even though I insist on one state/society distinction after another on this blog, despite being told repeatedly by commenters that the left never does that, on this issue it's (part of) the right that wants the state to cross over the state/society line and restructure things.

Finally, legislatures could simply adopt resolutions exhorting universities to respect the principles of academic freedom. Legislatures adopt such resolutions all the time. (I don't know if there's an official National Pickle Week, but there might as well be.) Indeed, the same day the House referred the resolution on the Academic Bill of Rights to committee, they also referred one congratulating my old dean on becoming the president of Cornell. Given how ordinary such legislative exhortation is, I'm not inclined to fret too much about it as long as it's toothless. Make that, as long as it's gummy and slobbering.

Speaking Truth to Power?

2005-01-19T08:02:00.001-06:00

Kevin Drum's got a good point:

I would like to lead a crusade to forever ban the phrase "speaking truth to power," especially in academic settings. It's always uttered in tones that imply vast moral courage for doing so, and in Stalinist Russia that would have been true. In the 21st century American university system, however, most academics do nothing but speak truth to power, as loudly and as frequently as they can. Their punishment? Tenure, usually.

Of course, the fact that this was not a junior faculty member questioning Summers, but a fellow university president, makes it all the more ridiculous. Disagree all you want, folks, but let's please not pose as the second coming of Nelson Mandela while doing it.

When Economists Argue

2005-01-19T08:02:00.000-06:00

From the Wall Street Journal, we have a debate on Social Security reform between Arnold Kling and Max Sawicky. It's well worth reading.

New Feature: The Attack on Universities

2005-01-18T07:55:00.000-06:00

Having demolished every venue of reasonable discourse in this country crying "liberal bias," thus forcing all electronic and print media to sing the Republican song, conservatives are now beginning to turn their attack on the universities.

Well, now that the assault has officially begun, there probably is no way to prevent the deluge, but at least I can go down swinging. Therefore, I announce a new feature of Scott Paeth's Daily Blog: "The Attack on Universities". Here I will chronical the attempts of the right wing to paint colleges as bastions of left-wing kookiness. Naturally, you can expect David Horowitz to make frequent appearances here.

However, for today's taste treat, I want to draw your attention to the blogger buzz going on around this guy, a Kuwaiti student whose apparent inability to write an essay is being made into the example of liberal bias in academia du jour. The paper itself is purportedly here. Here are two professors who have given their own evaluations of the paper. Verdict: It's a lousy paper. F and D- respectively. I tend to be a pretty generous grader myself, but I think on my best day I wouldn't have given it more than a C-, and that's if I knew the student well and thought I could divine some coherent point in it.

On the question of whether the professor said the student should seek psychiatric help, well, I'm just not buying it. Absent a fuller vetting of the facts in the case, I'm going to call this as just another example of academia as the newest right-wing whipping boy.

Note: Edited for coherence in the first paragraph. That's what I get for posting first thing in the morning.

Not that he ever believed in accountablity anyway

2005-01-17T07:16:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

President Bush said the public's decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath.

"We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. "The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me."

A Bloody Mess

2005-01-14T07:57:00.000-06:00

From Paul Krugman:

Many Britons were sold badly designed retirement plans on false pretenses. Companies guilty of "mis-selling" were eventually forced to pay about $20 billion in compensation. Fraud aside, the fees paid to financial managers have been a major problem: "Reductions in yield resulting from providers' charges," the Pensions Commission says, "can absorb 20-30 percent of an individual's pension savings."

American privatizers extol the virtues of personal choice, and often accuse skeptics of being elitists who believe that the government makes better choices than individuals. Yet when one brings up Britain's experience, their story suddenly changes: they promise to hold costs down by tightly restricting the investments individuals can make, and by carefully regulating the money managers. So much for trusting the people.

Never mind; their promises aren't credible. Even if the initial legislation tightly regulated investments by private accounts, it would immediately be followed by intense lobbying to loosen the rules. This lobbying would come both from the usual ideologues and from financial companies eager for fees. In fact, the lobbying has already started: the financial services industry has contributed lavishly to next week's inaugural celebrations.

Meanwhile, there is a growing consensus in Britain that privatization must be partly reversed. The Confederation of British Industry - the equivalent of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce - has called for an increase in guaranteed benefits to retirees, even if taxes have to be raised to pay for that increase. And the chief executive of Britain's National Association of Pension Funds speaks with admiration about a foreign system that "delivers efficiencies of scale that most companies would die for."

The foreign country that, in the view of well-informed Britons, does it right is the United States. The system that delivers efficiencies to die for is Social Security.

More on Death Squads

2005-01-13T17:21:00.000-06:00

From Alicublog:

NOTHING MATTERS AND SO WHAT IF IT DID. "I have no doubt that opposition to the 'death squads' was also based on revulsion at some of their excesses." -- Jonah Goldberg. Yeah, see, those excesses are why they're called "death squads." Though we could as easily call them "nun-raping squads," among other things.

Goldberg, however, points out that the mayhem was all done in the name of anti-Communism, so bringing up this disgusting chapter in American history, and its possible revival, is in his view a big arrow-down for liberals.

The Ole Perfesser of course sides with Goldberg, wondering "if making comparisons to Central America will help the Left, or simply bring up a lot of things that a lot of people would rather gloss over today." I don't know if anything could help the Left these days, but speaking for myself, I don't find an anti-death-squad position particularly embarrassing. But these are the same guys who just got through telling us that we should be careful about denouncing torture, so I don't expect their threshold of embarrassment to be anything like my own.

I stress that this a separate issue from that of the reliability of reports that death squads are currently under consideration for Iraq. (Though I will say that a denial from Rumsfeld is, for obvious reasons, less than meaningless.) It is more interesting to me that their Truth Squad's first line of defense is, essentially, that we shouldn't judge too harshly the concept of using vicious, secret paramilitary terrorist groups as instruments of American foreign policy.
It seems these guys have tumbled to an exciting new idea: rather than propagandizing for specific policies, it may be more effective to work on inverting certain of our traditional values -- that torture is un-American, that support for foreign paramilitary criminals is un-American, etc. -- so that, over time, we begin to question what we had once considered moral certainties about violence and fair play. That way, in future, pangs of conscience will not trouble us when something repulsive is proposed. Hell, next time they want to invade someplace, they may not even have to pretend to have a reason; a simple "yee-haw" will do. If torture and death squads aren't wrong, then what is?

Why Do We Have Social Security

2005-01-13T14:28:00.000-06:00

Thus speaks Adam Smith (not the Adam Smith, but the one currently in Congress):

"Social Security is a safety net. That's what it's there for. It's there to be the safest portion of your portfolio. It's a guaranteed benefit for a reason, and, for that reason, I don't support private accounts ... I think there is broad consensus among New Democrats that you must not privatize the system."

Thanks to Josh Marshall for the quote.

24

2005-01-12T07:48:00.000-06:00

Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum aren't impressed by 24 so far this season. Matt's issue is Jack's resort to torture yet again to extract information from a suspect. Kevin think's that it's just the same damn thing one more time. I think they're both right (although, contrary to Matt, I think knowing that the Secretary of Defense is going to be kidnapped could be considered useful intel).

I've frequently used Jack Bauer as an example of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer referred to as the "man of free responsibility" -- somebody who transgresses preconceived moral boundaries for the sake of protecting the innocent, or who is willing to "take on guilt for the sake of another." Obviously Jack Bauer is fictional and has writers to put him in the midst of impossible moral dilemmas, while Bonhoeffer's decision to participate in the plot to assassinate Hitler was a horribly real moral dilemma.

But here's my critique of the series. Nice as it is to see the woman who used to be on 3rd Watch playing his new girlfriend, I've got to wonder if Jack is capable of developing any sense of urgency about a terrorist plot if his loved ones aren't involved. The truth is, his boss was right to fire him prior to the beginning of this season, not because he was a heroin addict, but because he is a loose cannon who seems perfectly comfortable using brutality under the cover of anti-terrorism to protect his family. This is a problem.

Death Squads

2005-01-10T21:58:00.000-06:00

From TAPPED:

BRING ON THE DEATH SQUADS. National security analysts far and wide have spent months contemplating what sort of policy shifts might be able to drain Sunni Arab support for the Iraqi insurgency. Yesterday, Newsweek reported that the administration has come up with the idea I've long anticipated from Ambassador John Negroponte: death squads. The idea, in part, is simply to get more effective at killing insurgents. But as everyone who's been watching can see, the military is already very good at killing insurgents. The death squads have a broader mission:
[Iraq National Intelligence Service Director Muhammad Abdallah al-hahwani] said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."
The goal, in other words, is to terrorize the Sunni Arab civilian population. As the hawks and death squad enthusiasts at Stratagy Page explain (via Jim Henley) "Family members will be arrested and held hostage" which is okay because it's "a traditional Iraqi, and Middle Eastern, technique for getting fugitives to surrender." Of course, we've already been doing a good deal of that sort of thing, in violation of international law. Nevertheless, "in the past, only people who were obviously guilty were sought. But now, the known allies and kinfolk will be rounded up."

Newsweek is unsure whether we're looking at "a policy of assassination or so-called 'snatch' operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation," but I think it's safe to assume that both would take place. The plan they're reporting on is called the "Salvador model" after the tactics adopted by the American-backed rightwing dictatorship there, and they found time to kill and kidnap. Meanwhile, what do you suppose is going to be going on in those secret interrogation facilities?

I've been frustrated lately by everyone's tendency to pretend their ethical beliefs and their pragmatic ones just happen to line up all the time, so I won't deny that this may well "work" in some sense. Indeed, in light of the fact that the best alternative plans I've seen put on the table call for the deployment of hundreds of thousands of additional troops who won't be forthcoming (and who in many instances don't even exist) this plan at least has a sort of cold-blooded realism about it. What it won't achieve, of course, is any of the Iraq War's ex post goals now that we know the WMD threat was 90 percent hype. This isn't much of a way to run a humanitarian intervention, nor is anyone in the world's Sunni Muslim population going to be dissuaded from jihad by the knowledge that the American method of democracy-promotion involves unleashing U.S.-trained Kurdish and Shiite assassination squads against people who are not "obviously guilty."

Yep. I remember this from the 1980s and early '90s. This is why there are still protests every year at the School of the Americas. Just because it's not in the news the way it was at the time doesn't mean that the training of killers isn't still happening.

And, lest we forget: Archbishop Oscar Romero, The Four Church Women killed on a road on the way from the Airport, The Six Jesuit Priests, their maid, and her daughter, and the thousands killed by salvadoran death squads in the 1980s.

Saving Social Security?

2005-01-06T09:30:00.000-06:00

Josh Marshall discusses a memo written by one of Rove's lieutenants that was leaked this week. Here's Josh's summary of what it means:

So now you can see from memos emerging from the White House itself that this isn't about 'saving' Social Security. If it were, what would that sentence mean -- ("For the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we can win")? The first time in six decades they can save it?

Clearly, this isn't about 'saving' Social Security. It is a battle to end Social Security and replace with something that Wehner clearly understands is very different, indeed the antithesis of Social Security.

This entire debate is about ideology -- between people who believe in the benefits Social Security has brought America in the last three-quarters of a century and those who think it was a bad idea from the start. There is an honest debate to have on this point, a values debate. Only, the White House understands that the belief that Social Security was always a bad program isn't widely shared by Americans. So they have to wrap their effort in a package of lies, harnessing Americans' desire to save Social Security in their own effort to destroy it.

What do you believe that you can't prove

2005-01-04T09:01:00.000-06:00

An interesting article at the New York Times today. One interesting dimension of the discussion is the frankness with which many scientists will note that their commitment to atheism as as dogmatic as many Christians' dedication to belief in God. For example:

Robert SapolskyNeuroscientist, Stanford University, author, "A Primate's Memoir"

Mine would be a fairly simple, straightforward case of an unjustifiable belief, namely that there is no god(s) or such a thing as a soul (whatever the religiously inclined of the right persuasion mean by that word). ...

I'm taken with religious folks who argue that you not only can, but should believe without requiring proof. Mine is to not believe without requiring proof. Mind you, it would be perfectly fine with me if there were a proof that there is no god. Some might view this as a potential public health problem, given the number of people who would then run damagingly amok. But it's obvious that there's no shortage of folks running amok thanks to their belief. So that wouldn't be a problem and, all things considered, such a proof would be a relief - many physicists, especially astrophysicists, seem weirdly willing to go on about their communing with god about the Big Bang, but in my world of biologists, the god concept gets mighty infuriating when you spend your time thinking about, say, untreatably aggressive childhood leukemia.

If anyone gets too close to us we fucking waste them

2005-01-02T16:12:00.000-06:00

James Wolcott quotes The Economist:

From The Economist, January 1st-7th 2005 (registration required; oh just go out and buy the damn thing):

"There is only one traffic law in Ramadi these days: when Americans approach, Iraqis scatter. Horns blaring, brakes screaming, the midday traffic skids to the side of the road as a line of Humvee jeeps ferrying American marines rolls the wrong way up the main street. Every vehicle, that is, except one beat-up old taxi. Its elderly driver, flapping his outstretched hands, seems, amazingly, to be trying to turn the convoy back. Gun turrets swivel and lock on to him, as a hefty marine sargeant leaps into the road, levels an assault rifle at his turbanned head, and screams: 'Back this bitch up, motherfucker!'

"The old man should have read the bilingual notices that American soldiers tack to their rear bumpers in Iraq: 'Keep 50m or deadly force will be applied.' In Ramadi, the capital of central Anbar province, where 17 suicide-bombs struck American forces during the month-long Muslim fast of Ramadan in the autumn, the marines are jumpy. Sometimes, they say, they fire on vehicles encroaching with 30 metres, sometimes they fire at 20 metres: 'If anyone gets too close to us we fucking waste them,' says a bullish lieutenant. 'It's kind of a shame, because it means we've killed a lot of innocent people.'"

Kind of a shame, killing the people you're trying to democratize, but after awhile, says the same lieutenant, "It gets to the point where you can't wait to see guys with guns, so you start shooting everybody..."

With characteristic dry English understatement, The Economist's embedded reporter (Economist pieces are unbylined) notes, "[W]hen America's well-drilled and well-fed fighters attempt subtler tasks than killing people, problems arise." Their contempt for Iraqis is undisguised and dramatically expressed: a soldier, confronted by "jeering schoolchildren," fires canisters of buckshot from his grenade-launcher at them, and marines busting down doors in Ramadi scream at trembling middle-aged women: "Bitch, where's the guns?" Small wonder, ventures the correspondent, that "many Iraqis are probably more scared of American troops than of insurgents."
The last grafs of the report recount a big whoopy-do operation in the smugglers' haven of Baij involving a convoy of 1000 troops supported by Apache attack helicopters targeting three houses that had been linked to Zarquawi's terrorist band, according to a local informant. There was no one in the houses except women and children. Rather than return to base empty, they pay homage to the last reel of Casablanca and round up the usual suspects.

"...they detained 70 men from districts indentified by their informant as 'bad.' In near-freezing conditions, they sat hooded and bound in their pyjamas. They shivered uncontrollably. One wetted himself in fear. Most had been detained at random; several had been held because they had a Kalashnikov rifle, which is legal. The evidence against one man was some anti-American literature, a meat cleaver, and a tin whistle. American intelligence officers moved through the ranks of detainees, raising their hoods to take mugshots: 'One, two, three, jihaaad!' A middle-tier officer commented on the mission: 'When we do this,' he said. 'We lose.'"

There's a Peter Cook-Dudley Moore routine, one of their woolgathering dialogues, where Dud asks Pete, "So would you say you've learned from your mistakes?" and Pete replies: "Oh yes, I'm certain I could repeat them exactly." That seems to have been the Bush administration's approach to Iraq. Take the mistakes of Vietnam and
repeat them exactly.

And at that you can't say they haven't succeeded.

Appalling as these reports are, I want to be very careful about laying a lot of blame on the soldiers on the ground. I am of the opinion that we should never have been there in the first place, and I think it's unconscienable that we've forced our young men and women into yet another situation of guerilla war in a region where we are widely hated and mistrusted. It didn't have to be this way, and it is hard for me as a civilian to see what these soldiers could credibly be doing differently if they want to survive their tours.

But folks, what the hell are we doing!?! It's more than simply taking the mistakes of Vietnam and repeating them exactly. It's as though the Bush administration decided that they were going to take on a nearly impossible task, and then completely and utterly screw it up. If they had set out from day one to fail, they could not have done a better job. Argh. Repeat the mistakes of Vietnam indeed!

Back from Vacation

2005-01-02T16:08:00.000-06:00

Greetings all,

Well, I'm back from my vacation. We had a nice time, first in Albuquerque for Thanksgiving, and then in Connecticut to visit my parents for Christmas. Of course, we all promptly got sick in time for New Year. Now with the Winter Quarter starting at DePaul, I'm hoping to get into a more regular blogging schedule. One of my (informal) New Year's Resolutions was to blog at least once a day. We'll see how well I keep THAT.

By the way, have you noticed that I follow my own weird rules of capitalization?

Why Responsible Americans are Democrats

2004-12-16T13:25:00.000-06:00

From Brad DeLong today:

Robert Samuelson rants against entitlement spending while once again ignoring the elephant in the living room. The elephant? It's this fact: for the last 25 years, the Democratic Party has consistently worked to improve America's fiscal situation and to diminish the gap between the government's long-run financing and its long-run spending plans. The Republican Party has consistently worked to turn America into a northern-hemisphere Argentina.

Via Dolorosa

2004-12-16T10:00:00.000-06:00

Frank Rich has a good column in the New York Times today about how this is the "year of The Passion." The article isn't just about The Passion, but about the way in which religion and culture are intersecting in the early days of the Bush II/2 era. Here are some snippets:

In the latest and most bizarre twist on this theme, even Christmas is now said to be a target of the anti-Christian mob. "Are we going to abolish the word Christmas?" asked Newt Gingrich, warning that "it absolutely can happen here." Among those courageously leading the fight to save the holiday from its enemies is Bill O'Reilly, who has taken to calling the Anti-Defamation League "an extremist group" and put the threat this way: "Remember, more than 90 percent of American homes celebrate Christmas. But the small minority that is trying to impose its will on the majority is so vicious, so dishonest — and has to be dealt with."

If more than 90 percent of American households celebrate Christmas, you have to wonder why the guy is whining. The only evidence of what Pat Buchanan has called Christmas-season "hate crimes against Christianity" consists of a few ridiculous and isolated incidents, like the banishment of a religious float from a parade in Denver and of religious songs from a high school band concert in New Jersey. (In scale, this is nothing compared with the refusal of the world's largest retailer, Wal- Mart, to stock George Carlin's new best seller, "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?," whose cover depicts its author at the Last Supper.) Yet the hysteria is being pumped up daily by Fox News, newspapers like The New York Post and The Washington Times, and Web sites like savemerrychristmas.org. Mr. O'Reilly and Jerry Falwell have gone so far as to name Michael Bloomberg an anti-Christmas conspirator because the mayor referred to the Christmas tree as a "holiday tree" in the lighting ceremony at
Rockefeller Center.

What is this about? How can those in this country's overwhelming religious majority maintain that they are victims in a fiery battle with forces of darkness? It is certainly not about actual victimization. Christmas is as pervasive as it has ever been in America, where it wasn't even declared a federal holiday until after the Civil War. What's really going on here is yet another example of a post-Election-Day winner-takes-all power grab by the "moral values" brigade. As Mr. Gibson shrewdly contrived his own crucifixion all the way to the bank, trumping up nonexistent threats to his movie to hype it, so the creation of imagined enemies and exaggerated threats to Christianity by "moral values" mongers of the right has its own secular purpose. The idea is to intimidate and marginalize anyone who objects to their efforts to impose the most conservative of Christian dogma on public policy. If you're against their views, you don't have a differing opinion — you're anti-Christian (even if you are a Christian).

The power of this minority within the Christian majority comes from its exaggerated claims on the Bush election victory. It is enhanced further by a news culture, especially on television, that gives the Mel Gibson wing of Christianity more say than other Christian voices and that usually ignores minority religions altogether. This is not just a Fox phenomenon. Something is off when NBC's "Meet the Press" and ABC's "This Week," mainstream TV shows both, invite religious leaders to discuss "values" in the aftermath of the election and limit that discussion to all-male panels composed exclusively of either evangelical ministers or politicians with pseudo-spiritual credentials. Does Mr. Falwell, who after 9/11 blamed Al Qaeda's attack partly on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians," speak for any sizable group of American Christians? Does the Rev. Al Sharpton, booked on TV as a "balance" to Mr. Falwell, do so either? Mr. Sharpton doesn't even have a congregation; like Mr. Falwell, he is a politician first, a religious leader second (or maybe fourth or fifth).

Gary Bauer and James Dobson are also secular political figures, not religious leaders, yet they are more frequently called upon to play them on television than actual clergy are. "It's theological correctness," says the Rev. Debra Haffner, a Unitarian Universalist minister who directs a national interfaith group, the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing, and is one of the rare progressive religious voices to get any TV time. She detects an overall "understanding" in the media that religion "is one voice — fundamentalist." That understanding may have little to do with the beliefs of television news producers — or even the beliefs of fundamentalists themselves — and more to do with the raw, secular political power that the press has
attributed to "values" crusaders since the election. "There is the belief that the conservative view won, and the media are more interested in winners," says Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice.

Even more important than inflated notions of the fundamentalists' power may be their entertainment value. As Ms. Kissling points out, the 50 million Americans who belong to progressive religious organizations are rarely represented on television because "progressive religious leaders are so tolerant that they don't make good TV." The Rev. Bob Chase of the United Church of Christ agrees: "We're not exciting guests." His church's recent ad trumpeting its inclusion of gay couples was rejected by the same networks that routinely give a forum to the far more dramatic anti-gay views of Mr. Falwell. Ms. Kissling laments that contemporary progressive Christians lack an intellectual star to rival Reinhold Niebuhr or William Sloane Coffin, but adds that today "Jesus Christ would have a tough time getting covered by TV if he didn't get arrested."

Of course, Bill Coffin often managed to get himself arrested, but also has the advantage of being a dynamic and lucid speaker. As for Reinhold Niebuhr, it's not clear to me how he'd hold up in the contemporary televsion-driven environment. He was a subtle and dialectical thinker, and I'm not sure that he would have done well in the midst of the cable shouting match shows. He had a flair for the dramatic turn of phrase, and he knew how to be a polemicist as well. But at core, he was more intersted in finding solutions than exacerbating problems, a trait that is in short supply among the contemporary punditocracy.

Are we incurably ignorant? Or is there a cure?

2004-12-15T13:25:00.000-06:00

This post on Left2Right raises some interesting questions, although I'm not sure of what the answers are. Here's a selection:

In a 1920s exchange that would be repeated endlessly, Walter Lippmann argued that "The world we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind." People have to rely on what they're told. Politics is far away, not of everyday concern, threatening too, and so individuals fall back on stereotypes, codes, comforting blind spots, and the like. In The Public and Its Problems, which alas seems not to be online, John Dewey made his usual wonderful move, and argued that instead of seeing brute facts of human psychology, we should see contingent social practices. What kinds of changes, he asked, would make people better informed, more politically intelligent? Alas, Dewey made the argument in his usual curious dialect, noticed with hilarious derision by Mencken before he turned to his take-no-prisoners attack on Thorstein Veblen. But it's still a good argument. Better, surely, than throwing in the towel.
So how could we be smarter? Here are some baldly peremptory assertions, to kick off discussion. One: the news media could and should do much better. Instead of the more or less constant intensive focus on the day's breaking news, whatever has just changed, they could and should more often set events in context, remind the reader of basic facts, and so on. And the media is often confused about objectivity. They should firmly embrace a Weberian conception and dig up facts embarrassing any and all partisan points of view, instead of presenting us with putative experts who disagree and then saying nothing in their own voice.
Two: political campaigns play to the world according to Lippmann, and the game has become contemptibly Pavlovian. Check those focus groups: which catchphrases will trigger the desired response? ("It's hard work," "I have a plan," yadayada.) This helps make us stupider by giving us every reason to tune out. Little-d democratic politics deserves better.

The Spirit of the Season

2004-12-13T13:07:00.000-06:00

From SullyWatch:

Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas (1951)

In this hour-long radio drama, Santa struggles with the increasing demands of providing gifts for millions of spoiled, ungrateful brats across the world, until a single elf, in the engineering department of his workshop, convinces Santa to go on strike. The special ends with the entropic collapse of the civilization of takers and the spectacle of children trudging across the bitterly cold, dark tundra to offer Santa cash for his services, acknowledging at last that his genius makes the gifts — and therefore Christmas — possible.

Prior to broadcast, Mutual Broadcast System executives raised objections to the radio play, noting that 56 minutes of the hour-long broadcast went to a philosophical manifesto by the elf and of the four remaining minutes, three went to a love scene between Santa and the cold, practical Mrs. Claus that was rendered into radio through the use of grunts and the shattering of several dozen whiskey tumblers. In later letters, Rand sneeringly described these executives as “anti-life.”

Social Security Con-Job

2004-12-10T09:31:00.000-06:00

Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times today is worth a read. Here are some key paragraphs:

Once you realize that privatization really means government borrowing to speculate on stocks, it doesn't sound too responsible, does it? But the details make it considerably worse.
First, financial markets would, correctly, treat the reality of huge deficits today as a much more important indicator of the government's fiscal health than the mere promise that government could save money by cutting benefits in the distant future.
After all, a government bond is a legally binding promise to pay, while a benefits formula that supposedly cuts costs 40 years from now is nothing more than a suggestion to future Congresses. Social Security rules aren't immutable: in the past, Congress has changed things like the retirement age and the tax treatment of benefits. If a privatization plan passed in 2005 called for steep benefit cuts in 2045, what are the odds that those cuts would really happen?
Second, a system of personal accounts, even though it would mainly be an indirect way for the government to speculate in the stock market, would pay huge brokerage fees. Of course, from Wall Street's point of view that's a benefit, not a cost.
There is, by the way, a precedent for Bush-style privatization. One major reason for Argentina's rapid debt buildup in the 1990's was a pension reform involving a switch to individual accounts - a switch that President Carlos Menem, like President Bush, decided to finance with borrowing rather than taxes. So Mr. Bush intends to emulate a plan that helped set the stage for Argentina's economic crisis.
If Mr. Bush were to say in plain English that his plan to solve our fiscal problems is to borrow trillions, put the money into stocks and hope for the best, everyone would denounce that plan as the height of irresponsibility. The fact that this plan has an elaborate disguise, one that would add considerably to its costs, makes it worse.

Proof of Liberal Conspiracy in Academia!

2004-12-09T10:44:00.000-06:00

Michael Berube finally fesses up:

First of all, you have to understand that there are literally thousands of politically conservative Ph.D. candidates in the field of English language and literature, just as there are untold thousands of political conservatives applying for academic jobs in the visual arts, in special education, and in philosophy. Over the last ten years, we’ve tried to head them off at the pass by telling them that graduate school involves anywhere from five to ten years of rigorous study culminating in the production of a 300-page work of original research, and that when they’ve completed all that while living hand-to-mouth on stipends or taking out student loans, then they get to go on
the academic job market with the knowledge that they have about a one-in-three chance of landing a tenure-track job and making somewhere in the high 40s. But they just won’t listen. These bright young twenty-something conservatives just will not be deterred from the pursuit of scholarship in the arts and humanities, and they’ve been clogging our graduate schools to the point at which we’ve simply had to institute hiring quotas to keep them from joining the professorial ranks and eventually overrunning us.
So don’t believe any of my liberal and leftist colleagues when they say (a) they never inquire into the voting records of prospective job candidates, (b) they don’t believe that a candidate’s voting record is a reliable predictor of, say, his position on the Habermas-Lyotard debate or her understanding of the intersection of postcolonial theory and eighteenth-century studies, or (c) they can’t tell the candidate’s politics from the application materials alone. Of course a professor’s voting record is important, of course it’s a reliable index of his or her intellectual interests, and of course you can tell from the application materials. Take for example the candidate who claims to be studying “the rhetoric of individual agency and national identity in discourses of republicanism in post-Revolutionary America.” The word "republicanism” is the tipoff, folks, and so that dossier goes right in the circular file. Or take the letter of application that says, “my work concerns the emergence of the
ideology of the domestic ‘subject’ in early Victorian England.” The code word there is “emergence,” and if you have to ask why, you ain’t never gonna know. 86’d.
Sometimes it’s not so easy as this, though-- sometimes you need to hold the paper itself up to the light and check for the watermark. But most of the time, the conservatives give themselves away long before the interview stage. And that’s why liberals dominate departments like mine. Next topic: how my liberal friends in the theater industry are keeping conservatives out of off-Broadway productions of The Music Man!

Public Reason and Religion

2004-12-09T09:23:00.000-06:00

This is a topic in which I have a lot of interest, seeing as how it's the basis of my dissertation and all. My advisor, Max Stackhouse, has spent a lot of time struggling with these issues as well. So, I was interested in the following comments in Reason and Liberty:

I recently came across a powerful article by Professor Robert Audi, much of whose career has been devoted to wrestling with questions of religious commitment and secular reason. The article is "The Place of Religious Argument in a Free and democratic Society," 30 San Diego Law Review 677 (1993).
Audi explains why the use of secular arguments (those "whose normative force [do] not evidently depend on the existence of God or on theological considerations, or on the pronouncements of a person or institution qua religious authority") must be the basis for sociopolitical decision in a liberal democracy, and why that does not require the abandonment or disparagement of religious belief.Audi's argument assumes a full place for religious believers in democratic decision making. All it requires is that those believers recognize that it is unethical for them to coerce others who don't share their beliefs. When it comes to advocating for laws and policies, religious arguments are not illegitimate. They are simply insufficient without an accompanying secular purpose.
What's important about Audi's argument, I think, is that it does not embrace secularism as some form of anti-religious truth. This blunts the retort that "secular" laws and policies (like teaching evolution) represent their own form of coercion against religious believers. A law or policy is secular only to the extent it derives its legitimacy from its appeal to human reasoning, the only true common denominator in a diverse and democratic society. To bring this down to earth, I assume an example would be an obligation to show some sort of objective harm that results from allowing same-sex couples to marry or gay people to adopt children.

I'm inclined to agree in broad terms with this, although Steve of Reason and Liberty often seems to assume that religious reason are innately irrational (as indeed, he does later in this same post). The real challenge in liberal society is to recognize a diversity of substantive moral commitments that have implications for public life, and yet find a way to live together in the midst of those differences.

It might be awfully difficult to demonstrate that, for example, gay couples marrying (or "civilly unionizing," as the case may be) produces some objective harm, but the situation becomes more (much more) complex when the issue is abortion. Certainly if you believe that abortion is murder, then there is an objective harm that is inflicted on the abortee, and the solution to the problem depends on core commitments that can't be contained in a "thin" conception of the good. It's insufficient to the one who thinks abortion is murder to simply say to them "well, we don't have a broad social consensus on this, and so your opinion doesn't count, publicly."

Of course, one answer to this problem is for the person who believes this to engage in a process of public argumentation and persuasion, but this is a painfully slow process for the one who believes that thousands of murders are taking place unaccountably every week. Yet, to take Audi seriously does seem to imply that it's only through such a process of broad persuasion that such changes can take place.

More on this later.

Red State Porn

2004-12-07T10:23:00.000-06:00

Andrew Sullivan links to an LA Times story today on the prevalance of porn superstores in the Red States. Here's a quote from the story:

Adult "superstores" like this are popping up all over rural America — brightly lighted, clean, as well-organized and well-stocked as a Wal-Mart.Remote freeway offramps are X-rated in Quaker City, Ohio (pop. 563), and Nelson, Mo. (pop. 212), in Montrose, Ill., and Perry, Mich. The Lion's Den chain operates 29 stores in the Midwest, including this one in Abilene, off Exit 272, near the cows and hay bales of Dickinson County.

I raise this because, during my cross-country trip from New Mexico to Chicago last week, I was shocked (shocked!) at the frequency of these "adult superstores" that pop up off the highway every 100 miles or so. I've lived in Blue States most of my life, including the infamous "Massachusetts," and while porn is surely easy enough to get your hands on there, I've never seen anything like the prevalance of giant stores selling nothing but porn the way I did on this drive. My inner anthropologist had to ask some questions about the disconnect between the trumpeting of "family values" in these red states and their seeming obsession with vast quantities of porn. What's going on here?

It would be easy to simply chalk this up as another example of the hypocrisy of the right, as represented in their red-state bastions. Yet, I wonder if there's more going on here. What could it be, though? Perhaps a means of sublimating frustrated sexual desire by access to an enormous stash of trash? Perhaps it is an example of the conflict that could rip the Republican party apart in the future -- free market ideology versus the desire to restrain the worst human passions?

On the other hand, sometimes a huge knobby vibrator is just a huge knobby vibrator.

Good Questions

2004-12-07T09:35:00.000-06:00

Kevin Drum asks a few good questions.

A FEW WEE QUESTIONS....I'm sure that conservative bloggers are feeling pretty smug about the Beinart-Drum-Atrios-Yglesias tiff regarding liberals and national security, but if I could have a moment of your time before you bust a collective gut over this, I'd like to suggest that you could all stand to have a brutally honest conversation about a few things yourselves. Just to get you started, here are a few questions — numbered for easy reference:
Considering how Iraq has gone so far, do you still think that American military power is a good way to promote tolerance and democracy in the Middle East? Has your position on this changed in any way over the past two years?
Shortly after 9/11, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson said publicly that they thought the attacks were well-deserved retribution from God in response to moral decay — as personified by gays, feminists, the ACLU, and NOW. Do you worry that Falwell and Robertson are identified by many as the face of the Republican party? Do you think President Bush has sufficiently distanced himself from them and their followers?
Is democracy promotion really one of your core concerns? Just how far are you willing to go to demonstrate your credibility on this subject? Note: President Bush's policy toward either Pakistan or Saudi Arabia would be excellent case studies to bring this question to life.
On a related note, which do you think is more important to the Bush administration in the short term: preservation of a stable oil supply from the Middle East or spreading freedom and liberty throughout the region? Would you be interested in seeing the records of Dick Cheney's 2001 energy task force to verify this? Please be extra honest with this question.
A substantial part of the Christian right opposes any compromise with Palestinians because they believe that Jewish domination of the region west of the Jordan River is a precondition for the Second Coming. Is this a reasonable belief? Or do you think these people qualify as loons who should be purged from the Republican party?
Yes or no: do you think we should invade Iran if it becomes clear — despite our best efforts — that they are continuing to build nuclear weapons? If this requires a military draft, would you be in favor?
If President Bush decides to substantially draw down our troop presence in Iraq after the January 30 elections, will you support that decision? Please answer this question prior to January 30.
Would you agree that people who accept Laurie Mylroie's crackpot theories about Saddam Hussein's involvement in 9/11 might be taking the threat of terrorism a little too seriously? What do you think should be done with them?
And you know what? These aren't even the most embarrassing questions I could ask. But hey — that's just the moderate, civil-discourse-loving kind of guy that I am.
But I'll bet Beinart and Atrios and Yglesias could come up with a few more if they wanted to. And they might not be as nice as me.

Parvez Mushariff -- Champion of Democracy

2004-12-06T13:29:00.000-06:00

From the New Republic:

PRESIDENT BUSH: I think the long-term vision is one that is a relationship which is very mature in this sense: that there is a commercial relationship which is fair and balanced, mutually beneficial to both people; a defense relationship which is one in which there is close collaboration and complementary efforts based upon the true threats of the 21st century. And thirdly, there's a relationship in which I can call upon my friend to help deal with international issues, such as the development of a Palestinian state, one in which the aspirations of the Palestinian people are met and listened to, because democracy has taken hold.
One of the interesting lessons that the world can look at is Pakistan. You see, there are some in the world who do not believe that a Muslim society can self-govern. Some believe that the only solution for government in parts of the world is for there to be tyranny or despotism. I don't believe that. The Pakistan people have proven that those cynics are wrong. And where President Musharraf can help in world peace is to help remind people what is possible. And the solution in the Middle East is for there to be a world effort to help the Palestinians develop a state that is truly free--one that's got an independent judiciary, one that's got a civil society, one that's got the capacity to fight off the terrorists, one that allows for dissent, one in which people can vote. And President Musharraf can play a big role in helping achieve that objective.

Update: Kevin Drum writes:

If conservatives wonder why liberals laugh at the notion that George Bush is genuinely interested in spreading freedom and democracy in the Islamic world, this is why. If we have to deal with these guys, then we have to deal with them. That's life. But could we at least refrain from pretending that Pervez Musharraf is one the century's great lovers of democracy?

Bophal 20 Years Later

2004-12-04T13:09:00.000-06:00

Link:

On the night her world changed forever, Rashida Bee was 28 years old and had already been married for more than half her life. Her parents, traditional Muslims, had selected her husband for her when she was 13. He worked as a tailor, and they lived together in her parents' modest home in the industrial city of Bhopal, in central India. Bee hadn't learned to read or write, and she ventured out of the house only when escorted by a male relative. It was nevertheless a full life; her extended family of siblings, nieces and nephews numbered 37 in all.

The fateful night came on a Sunday. Bee and her family had gone to bed after sharing a simple supper. But shortly after midnight, in the early hours of Dec. 3, 1984, Bee was awakened by the sound of violent coughing. It was coming from the children's room. "They said they felt like they were being choked," Bee later told the online environmental magazine Grist, "and we [adults] felt that way too. One of the children opened the door and a cloud came inside. We all started coughing violently, as if our lungs were on fire."

From out on the street came the sound of shouting. In the light of a street lamp, Bee saw crowds of shadowy figures running past the house. "Run," they yelled. "A warehouse of red chilies is on fire. Run!"

A few blocks away, a woman who would later become a dear friend of Bee's was also running for her life. Champa Devi Shukla, a 32-year-old Hindu, lived down the street from the pesticide factory owned by Union Carbide. She knew better than to believe the rumors about a warehouse fire. "We knew this smell because Union Carbide often used to release these gases from the factory late at night," Shukla later told me. "But this time it went on longer and stronger."

Shukla was right. An explosion inside the Union Carbide factory had sent 27 tons of methyl isocyanate gas wafting over the city's shantytowns. "The panic was so great," said Shukla, "that as people ran, mothers were leaving their children behind to escape the gas."

In the pandemonium, Bee too was separated from most of her family. She found herself running with her husband and father, but they didn't get far. "Our eyes were so swollen that we could not open them," she recalled. "After running half a kilometer we had to rest. We were too breathless to run, and my father had started vomiting blood, so we sat down."

The scene around them was apocalyptic. There were corpses everywhere, many of them children. Those people still alive were bent over double or splayed on the ground, retching uncontrollably or frothing at the mouth. Some had lost control of their bowels, and feces streamed down their legs.Exactly how many people died that night will never be known; many corpses were disposed of in emergency mass burials or cremations without documentation. Bee remembers that as she searched for family members in the following days, "I had to look at thousands of dead bodies to find out if they were among the dead."

The Walmartization of America

2004-12-04T11:59:00.000-06:00

From today's New York Review of Books:

With its deliberate understaffing, its obsession about time theft, its management spies, and its arbitrary punishments, Wal-Mart is a workplace where management's suspicion can affect the morale of even the best employees, creating a discrepancy between their objective record of high productivity and how they come to regard their performance on the job as a result of their day-to-day dealings with management. This discrepancy helps keep wages and benefits low at Wal-Mart.

One of the most telling of all the criticisms of Wal-Mart is to be found in a February 2004 report by the Democratic Staff of the House Education and Workforce Committee. In analyzing Wal-Mart's success in holding employee compensation at low levels, the report assesses the costs to US taxpayers of employees who are so badly paid that they qualify for government assistance even under the less than generous rules of the federal welfare system. For a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store, the government is spending $108,000 a year for children's health care; $125,000 a year in tax credits and deductions for low-income families; and $42,000 a year in housing assistance. The report estimates that a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store costs federal taxpayers $420,000 a year, or about $2,103 per Wal-Mart employee. That translates into a total annual welfare bill of $2.5 billion for Wal-Mart's 1.2 million US employees.

Wal-Mart is also a burden on state governments. According to a study by the Institute for Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2003 California taxpayers subsidized $20.5 million worth of medical care for Wal-Mart employees. In Georgia ten thousand children of Wal-Mart employees were enrolled in the state's program for needy children in 2003, with one in four Wal-Mart employees having a child in the program.

Scalia on Church and State

2004-12-02T10:46:00.000-06:00

Via Slacktivist:

Justice Antonin Scalia, the Jerusalem Post reports, thinks the government ought to do more to support religion:
US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia used an appearance at an Orthodox synagogue in New York to assail the notion that the US government should maintain a neutral stance toward religion, saying it has always supported religion and the courts should not try to change that. ...
"There is something wrong with the principle of neutrality," said Scalia, considered among the court's staunchest conservatives. Neutrality as envisioned by the founding fathers, Scalia said, "is not neutrality between religiousness and nonreligiousness; it is between denominations of religion." ...
Scalia said expunging religion from public life would be bad for America, and that the courts, instead, should come around to most Americans' way of thinking. ...
"I suggest that our jurisprudence should comport with our actions," he said. Remember when it was conservatives like Scalia who railed against what they called "relativism"? Now he advocates interpreting the Constitution according to majority opinion. Odd, that.
Scalia argues that the First Amendment does not require "neutrality between religiousness and nonreligiousness; [but] between denominations of religion." Scalia's implied distinction here is between legitimate and illegitimate "religiousness." Once such a distinction is allowed, the next question is who gets to decide which "religiousnesses" are legitimate and which are not?
The justice provides a strong hint of which religions he views as legitimate in his use of the word "denominations." That's an oddly Protestant word for a Roman Catholic to be using in an Orthodox synagogue.
While the term also has generic denotations referring to religious structures in general, it cannot escape it's overwhelmingly Protestant connotations. The ELCA, the PCUSA and the UMC are "denominations" in a way that the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church are not. (Nor are the various Baptist conventions denominations. When I worked for the American Baptist Churches, it was considered taboo to refer to our convention with the D-word.) And while the word may be elastic enough to be applied to Orthodox Judaism, or Sikhism, or Sufi Islam, it does not fit such traditions as comfortably as it does the various Protestant sects.
Inevitably, Scalia's interdenominational version of neutrality leads to bias against "nonreligiousness." And just as inevitably, the category of "nonreligiousness" will expand to include those viewed (by Scalia or whoever else is acting as Caesar's pearly gatekeeper) as insufficiently religious, or religious in the wrong way.

In fact, if you look at Scalia's judicial opinions on Church & State matters, you get an even better sense of what counts as "legitimate" to him. Stephen Carter has pointed this out in The Culture of Disbelief and God's Name in Vain. Scalia has consistently ruled in favor of the rights of churches to be free of government interference, as long as they are churches that are powerful and have numerous adherents. If your church is small, then from Scalia's perspective, it doesn't deserve constitutional protection. So, for example, the rights of the state trump the rights of native american churches to use peyote or to have their holy sites protected. But, if you happen to be Roman Catholic, then you are likely to have a very reliable ally in Scalia, particularly since he has strong ties to organizations like Opus Dei.

Alan Dershowitz wrote something recently, which I can't seem to find on the net, about Scalia's predilections with regard to the state. We ordinarily peg him as a conservative, but he's not a "state's rights" kind of conservative. He's an Italian nationalist, pro-mussolini kind of conservative. His father, apparently, was very active in pro-fascist politics in the 1930s, and Scalia has inherited that viewpoint. "He's a statist" says the Dershowitz quote (I'll post the link if I find it). He's in favor of using government power on behalf of causes that Scalia favors, but he's not in favor of simply "keeping government out of our lives," as Reagan used to put it.

Gays in the Church

2004-12-01T08:46:00.000-06:00

From Atrios:

That Liberal Media This is pretty stunning. The networks won't run an ad by the UCC which says "like Jesus -- the United Church of Christ seeks to welcome all people, regardless of ability, age, race, economic circumstance or sexual orientation."And their justification?

the Executive Branch has recently proposed a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, this spot is unacceptable for broadcast on the [CBS and UPN] networks
So, because Bush doesn't want federal or state recognition of marriage, a church can't even advertise that they welcome anyone in their doors?
This is so fucked up.

There is a lot of controversy in the UCC about the extent of our welcoming of gays and lesbians. Many folks feel we go to far in allowing for the ordination of homosexuals. Others feel that UCC churches that marry gays and lesbians are over the line, but I don't know anyone who thinks that it's wrong of the UCC to welcome gays and lesbians to attend and become members of their churches. Indeed, the default position of most Christian denominations is that gays and lesbians are welcome, even if the church doesn't approve of their "lifestyle."

And yet, an acquaintance of mine recently informed me that her church has left the mainline denomination that it belongs to and joined a conservative offshoot denomination specifically over the issue of whether or not non-practicing gays and lesbians ought to be allowed to be ordained. This is not, as with the UCC or with the recent controversey in the Episcopal Church, the question of whether sexually active gays and lesbians ought to be ordained. This church (and the offshoot it joined, apparently), believe that it is the very orientation that should be condemned.

I find this amazing. I thought that the question about which we were all arguing was whether gay and lesbian relationships and behavior were acceptable for Christians. I thought that the question of orientation was dead letter, at least among responsible dialogue partners. It seems not. There are still plenty of people out there willing to condemn gays and lesbians just for being gay.

Noam Chomsky

2004-11-17T13:34:00.000-06:00

I've been trying to figure out just why the right gets into such a froth about Noam Chomsky. The latest public round of frothing started as a result of Bill Maher's interview with him on "Real Time with Bill Maher." Eric Altermann recently wrote about it, and Atrios picked it up:

Speaking of people offering a lot of free advice, I suppose Andy Sullivan is not really a slobbering, muttering idiot in real life but he sure does play one on TV. I’ve never seen Bill Maher’s show before—and thankfully, the Time Warner DVR stopped taping before he started grabbing his ass, but I was embarrassed for Andy, if that can be believed, when he started screaming nonsensical insults at an absent Noam Chomsky, (with whom I strongly disagree on almost everything, for the record).
I didn’t take notes but I recall Andy whining about Chomsky’s speaking fees—hey it’s just the free market that makes them so much higher than Andy’s—and mine, for that matter. And his screaming that there can be no debate over the meaning of words like “freedom” and “democracy” was so silly it refutes itself. Also unfortunate for Andy was his insistence that, and again, I paraphrase, “no one in the world accepts the figure of 100,000 Iraqis dead,” which Chomsky used in his interview with Maher.
Well, actually, if you look at Little Roy's blog today, you’ll see that the only peer reviewed study of the issue—given the fact that the U.S. government refuses even to attempt this count—gives just that figure. Today, Andy is a bit more circumspect in his language and calls the figure “a little fishy.” The Economist is also critical. To tell you the truth, I think it’s high too. But the “no one in the world” quote is simple idiocy and cedes the argument to Chomsky, since he actually has a source and Andy only has his insults.

After reading this, I found myself in Barnes & Noble the other day, and noticed The Anti-Chomsky Reader. I hesitate to link to it since it's such a screed, but, in the interests of open inquiry, there it is. The fact that David Horowitz is an editor should be a big clue as to what kind of a book it is. The main thesis, ironic again, given that Horowitz is involved, is that Chomsky is fundamentally disingenuous and evil. But where does the desire to write entire books refuting Chomsky come from?

One explanation is his enormous popularity in some circles. There are a lot of people who cite chapter and verse from the gospel according to Noam, and I think it must drive the wingers nuts.

But he also serves as a useful tool for the right. I noticed this particularly when I was reading Jean Bethke Elshtain's Just War Against Terror, in which she holds Chomsky up to scorn as a stand-in for the "academic left." As I pointed out in a review of the book for Koinonia Journal, there's no doubt that he's of the left (far left) and no doubt that he's an academic, but he's hardly emblematic of either the majority of academics or even the majority of left-wingers out there in the world. But he takes his arguments just far enough to sound outrageous at first glance, and so he provides a useful foil.

My take? I like Chomsky, but not because I agree with him, or at least not much. I think he's got a basic insight on the way media bais in this coutnry works that's worth hearing. I also think that when he points to the way U.S. hegemony serves both to support elite power in this country, and alienate much of the world, he's on to something very right. The movie that was done about him is interesting as well as entertaining. But as many have pointed out, he loves his insights so much that he seldom allows the facts to interfere with them. Eric Alterman, with whom all this began, concludes it well:

Overall, the criticism I share amounts to the following: Chomsky does pay attention to facts that others ignore; but he uses them in ways that cannot be intellectually justified. This is truer of his diplomatic history than his media criticism, but there’s enough of it in both to make it impossible for me to take any of his claims at face value. Chomsky also does not allow for alternative interpretations other than his own, which is the sign of a closed mind. His research can be, and has been quite useful and he deserves credit for that and for the doggedness of his intellectual pursuits, which did the world quite a lot of good vis-a-vis East Timor. But his analysis is fundamentally flawed, in my opinion, by ideological zeal, much like that of Andy or Horowitz. And his judgment in matters like the Robert Faurisson case is so silly as to be hardly believable. How can a Holocaust denier be a “relatively apolitical liberal.” A Holocaust denier is an idiot at best and more likely, a moral and intellectual criminal. (For the record, this “apolitical liberal” wrote, “The alleged massacre in gas chambers and the genocide of the Jews is part of one and the same lie, a gigantic political and financial racket for the benefit of Israel and international Zionism.") I don’t have the time or space to go into all the other examples, be they Cambodia or the Sudan, to point out that it is one thing to be wrong—it happens to all of us--but another to be obstinately, obtusely wrong in the face of mountains of contrary evidence, and to be wrong always in the same ideological direction.
One might argue that Chomsky is a useful corrective in a debate dominated by his deological opposite. I used to agree with that view. But now I think his persistent weaknesses lend the bad guys a sword and diverts our own from battles that can actually be won.

Life Satirizes itself

2004-11-17T08:13:00.000-06:00

From Slacktivist:

The folks at the American Family Association are all lathered up again.
That's hardly news -- it doesn't take much to get Don Wildmon's knickers in a twist. But what's newsworthy this time is the target of Wildmon's wrath -- ABC television's Veterans Day broadcast of Saving Private Ryan. (See here for more context and commentary.)
AFA is urging its members to e-mail the FCC objecting to the broadcast of such anti-family smut.
"File an indecency complaint against ABC for 'f' word and 's' word," AFA says in its "Action Alert" for members. Private Ryan, apparently, has "at least 20 'f' words and 12 's' words." (Yes, of course the AFA counted them. That's what they do. They protect families by quantifying profanity.)
Because the film contains such vile language, AFA calls on members to, "File a formal complaint against ABC for airing indecent language during the November 11 ABC movie, Saving Private Ryan.."
But here's the fun part, the Action Alert goes on to include the following warning:
WARNING: Because your complaint MUST CONTAIN the actual language used during the broadcast of Saving Private Ryan, it is included in the email text box below.
Sure enough, follow the link to the ready-to-send astroturf e-mail page and the "formal complaint" the AFA has prepared for your use contains examples of the offensive dialogue from the film -- including 7 'f' words and 4 's' words.

Yesserie. If this stuff weren't real, it would make good satire, except that even as satire it would seem to stretch credibility.

2004-11-04T21:50:00.000-06:00

Slacktivist made me laugh today:

Who made Steve?

In the third grade at Timothy Christian School, we learned a variation of the children's catechism. I don't remember most of it any longer, but I've always treasured the first three questions.
Recently, however, I've come to realize that these three questions do not accurately represent what it is that many American Christians believe. I have amended them
to bring them into line with current practice and teaching:
Q: Who made you?
A: God made me.
Q: What else did God make?
A: God made me and all things -- except Steve.
Q: Why did God make all things except Steve?
A: God made all things except Steve for His own glory.
"Steve" has emerged as a central figure in American theology. He even played a significant role in the recent national elections. Yet despite his enormous influence, we know little about Steve aside from a single reference to him in our holy texts. This reference is, like the catechism, extra-canonical but considered authoritative: "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve."
This oft-quoted text presents a mystery. If God did not make Steve, then where did this uncreature come from? How did Steve come to be? God did not make Steve, therefore we must also assume that Steve was never born. If Steve had been born, after all, then he would be "begotten, not made." Surely we are not meant to conclude that Steve is a little-known fourth member of the Trinity.
Thus again we come to mystery. Steve was neither made nor begotten; yet Steve is.
What can we do in the face of such mystery? It is beyond our ken. We cannot hope to understand, we can only drop to our knees to sing a bewildered hymn of praise to the Creator of all things except Steve.
I have taken to doing exactly this whenever anyone recites this particular sacred text in my hearing.

What Next

2004-11-03T09:40:00.000-06:00

I'm going to steal a page from Slacktivist today and try to keep some semblance of hope in the face of the prospects for another four years. The truth is, life goes on:

Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. ... Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper. ...

Yes, this is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: "Do not let the prophets and diviners among you deceive you. Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have. They are prophesying lies to you in my name. I have not sent them," declares the Lord. ... "For I know the plans I have for you ... plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."

Stan Hauerwas likes to talk about Christians as being "resident aliens" in the modern world. But I tend to prefer Jurgen Moltmann's way of referring to Christians as constituting an "exodus church" that journies in the midst of society in search of a home. We should continue our inner-worldly pilgrimage. We may be exiles right now, but we're looking forward to the day when we arrive at our destination, and plant our fields in a land that flows with rightousness and justice.

Election Day

2004-11-02T08:06:00.000-06:00

The wife's out votin' right now, while I'm on baby duty. I'm planning to vote on my way in to work today. Meanwhile, here's your moment of zen:

"Conservative bloggers have been busy lately convincing themselves that if John Kerry wins, it will be due solely to — wait for it — the drumbeat of support he's gotten from the mainstream media."

I'm Back

2004-10-28T09:15:00.000-05:00

Well, it's been a while since my last post, hasn't it. Bad Scott! Bad Blogger! No Sushi for you!

But at any rate, I'm back and will try to post more regularly for the sake of my reader out there. Little did I know how time consuming the life of a junior professor would be. Silly me.

Hopeful Signs

2004-09-23T08:56:00.000-05:00

Well, the polling numbers look pretty good if you consider the ARG numbers. Kevin Drum has the story:

PROBLEMS WITH POLLING....ARG has finished their massive nationwide poll of 600 people in each state (plus DC), a total of 30,600 respondents. Here are the basic results:
Nationwide, Bush leads Kerry 47% to 46%.
Kerry has the lead in 20 states with 270 electoral votes.
Bush has the lead in 29 states with 253 electoral votes.
Two states are tied (Wisconsin and West Virginia).

Keep up the good work! We can change those numbers in Kerry's favor. But regardless, right now he's leading the electoral college. How much do you want to be that if Kerry wins the electoral vote but not the popular vote, the republicans will do everything possible to destroy his legitimacy? Democrats may not have been happy about Bush's electoral victory, but by and large we swallowed hard and waited for him to prove himself. The Repubs will never give Kerry that chance.

Threatening Signs

2004-09-22T10:24:00.000-05:00

From Slate:

On Friday, the antiwar-T-shirt-clad mother of a slain soldier was pulled out of a Laura Bush speech in New Jersey and threatened with arrest. A West Virginia couple was detained by the Secret Service for wearing anti-Bush T-shirts at a
July 4 rally—they filed a lawsuit last week—and AIDS activists were removed and kept away from reporters at a Sept. 9 presidential event in Pennsylvania. Most notably, some 1,800 protesters, monitors, and passersby were jailed in indiscriminate raids during the Republican Convention in New York, while several hecklers were dragged off the Madison Square Garden convention floor. All were arrested or threatened with arrest, and hundreds expect to stand trial. And that's why Bursey's is not the story of an isolated troublemaker, but a harbinger of what protesters might expect in the future.

The strange catalyst here is a new weapon in the federal antiprotest arsenal or—more precisely—a previously unused one. The government nailed Bursey with an arcane 1970 Secret Service provision—Title 18, Section 1752(a)(1)(ii) of the U.S. Code—which makes it a federal crime to "knowingly and willfully" enter an area restricted by the Secret Service during a presidential visit. The law was originally drafted by legislators scarred by the assassinations of the 1960s, in the hopes of preventing the next attempt on the life of a president. Turns out the law can be used to prevent criticism as well.

Fighting the War on Terror, One Musician at a Time

2004-09-22T07:52:00.001-05:00

Everybody hop up on the peace train:

WASHINGTON - A London-to-Washington flight was diverted to Maine when it was discovered that passenger Yusuf Islam — formerly known as singer Cat Stevens (news) — was on a government watch list and barred from entering the country.

United Airlines Flight 919 was en route to Dulles International Airport when the match was made Tuesday between a passenger and a name on the watch list, said Nico Melendez, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration.

The plane was met by federal agents at Maine's Bangor International Airport around 3 p.m., Melendez said.

Homeland Security Department spokesman Dennis Murphy identified the passenger as Islam. "He was interviewed and denied admission to the United States on national security grounds," Murphy said.

He said Islam would be put on the first available flight out of the country Wednesday. Officials had no details about why the peace activist might be considered a risk to the United States. Islam had visited New York in May for a charity event and to promote a DVD of his 1976 MajiKat tour.

One official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Islam, 56, was identified by the Advanced Passenger Information System, which requires airlines to send passenger information to Customs and Border Protection's National Targeting Center. The Transportation Security Administration then was contacted and requested that the plane land at the nearest airport, that official said.

Melendez said Islam was questioned by FBI (news - web sites) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

Another federal official, who is in law enforcement and spoke anonymously because of agency policy, said that after the interview, Customs officials decided to deny Islam entry into the United States.

Flight 919 continued on to Dulles after Islam was removed from the flight. Islam, who was born Stephen Georgiou, took Cat Stevens as a stage name and had a string of hits in the 1960s and '70s, including "Wild World" and "Morning Has Broken." Last year he released two songs, including a re-recording of his '70s hit "Peace Train," to express his opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq (news - web sites).

He abandoned his music career in the late 1970s and changed his name after being persuaded by orthodox Muslim teachers that his lifestyle was forbidden by Islamic law. He later became a teacher and an advocate for his religion, founding a Muslim school in London in 1983. Islam founded Islamia Primary school in London in 1983. In 1998, it became the first Muslim school in Britain to receive government support, on the same basis as Christian and other sectarian schools.

A statement posted on a fan-supported Web site where his music is promoted said Islam being on a watch list "is certainly an error."

"It's also a very sad state of affairs when a man best known as a peace loving pop star can be grouped into the same category Osama Bin Laden just because of his chosen faith," the statement said.

Islam drew some negative attention in the late 1980s when he supported the Ayatollah Khomeini's death sentence against Salman Rushdie, author of "The Satanic Verses." Recently, though, Islam has criticized terrorist acts, including the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the school seizure in Beslan, Russia, earlier this month that left more than 300 dead, nearly half of them children.

In a statement on his Web site, he wrote, "Crimes against innocent bystanders taken hostage in any circumstance have no foundation whatsoever in the life of Islam and the model example of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him."

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Islam issued a statement saying: "No right thinking follower of Islam could possibly condone such an action: The Quran equates the murder of one innocent person with the murder of the whole of humanity."

Energy, Credit and Poverty Again

2004-09-22T07:52:00.000-05:00

More from Slacktivist, who's been following this issue:

Keeping Score

The good news, for now, is that TXU Energy, the largest electric utility in Texas, has postponed its plan to use "credit scoring" for setting its rates.

Get used to hearing about credit scoring. It's the wave of the future for utilities, insurance companies -- even for phone, cable and Internet providers.

The basic idea is to charge different rates to different customers based on customers' FICO scores. The upshot will be that poor people, young people, the retired and the recently widowed will be charged more than other, wealthier people for an array of services.

This is indefensible.

A FICO score is an imprecise attempt to quantify the quality of creditworthiness. The use of such a score is understandable for lenders extending non-collateralized credit, such as credit cards. For collateralized home or auto loans, the overreliance on such dodgy formulas makes less sense.

The claim that this very rough measure of risk has any relationship to how insurers or utility companies ought to set their rates makes no sense at all.

Consumer advocates in Texas raised enough of a stink to delay TXU's plans to fleece the poor, but the delay is likely only temporary.

The real reasons for the delay may have more to do with TXU hoping to avoid paying fines for failing to fully disclose the impact of credit scoring on its new rates. As the Dallas Business Journal reports:

The company, which began notifying South Texas customers about their new rates last month, didn't tell customers who fell into the lowest credit ratings that they were being treated differently.

That can get you in trouble with the FTC, as Loren Steffy notes in The Houston Chronicle:
On [Sept. 10], the Federal Trade Commission said Sprint and AT&T agreed to pay almost $1.5 million to settle charges that they failed to notify applicants for phone service that credit reports were used.

You'll notice that the phone companies got spanked for not telling potential customers about the practice, not for the practice itself.

Steffy doesn't think much of the practice itself:

Other industries already are developing perverse uses for credit scoring. ... The justification for using credit scoring for non-credit purposes is that there's a "correlation" between our credit histories and other behavior, like filing fewer auto claims. Bensema is proof those correlations are flimsy suppositions.

Credit bureaus say scoring has created a impartial numerical guide for granting credit by removing human error from the process.
Actually, it removes all humanity from the process. It creates a veil behind which companies can hide without taking responsibility.

"Bensema" is Howard Bensema, 74, who was born during the Depression and has made a lifelong habit of avoiding any kind of debt. The man paid cash for his house. As Steffy reports, this has resulted in him getting charged more for his homeowner's insurance:

While Bensema's habits are laudable, even inspiring, in our debt-laden times, in the eyes of his insurance company, they make him a credit risk.

Since the first of the year, he's been wrangling with his insurer and the state insurance commission.

Given his history, he feels he deserves the lowest possible rate, but he's not getting it. The problem is that Bensema has no recent history of borrowing money and paying it back. That means he has no verifiable credit and a minuscule credit score. In citing its reason for denying him a better rate, his insurer listed the reason as "total credit less than optimum."
At one point, he was told "optimum" credit in his case would be debt of $128,000.
So because his debt is zero, Bensema pays more for insurance than those in hock.

It's not only the poor, but the prudent who are punished by FICO foolishness.
No reasonable banker would hesitate to extend credit to a customer like Howard Bensema. But bankers are no longer allowed to be reasonable. They must instead mechanically apply the crooked measures of FICO scores, whose many shortcomings include their inability to account for people like Bensema.

I often turn for ethical guidance to the great Hebrew prophets. Usually when I do so I have to abstract general principles of fairness and justice from their denunciations of the specific evils of the ancient world in which they lived. Yet here, in the case of TXU and the many insurance companies and others rushing to embrace credit scoring, I find the literal words of the prophets to be precisely accurate:

Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive
decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. (Isaiah 10:1-2)

Do not have two differing weights in your bag-one heavy, one light. Do not have two differing measures in your house-one large, one small. You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. For the Lord your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly. (Deuteronomy 25:13-16)

Hear this, you who trample the needy and do away with the poor of the land, saying, "When will the New Moon be over that we may sell grain, and the Sabbath be ended that we may market wheat?" -- skimping the measure, boosting the price and cheating with dishonest scales, buying the poor with silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, selling even the sweepings with the wheat. The Lord has sworn by the Pride of Jacob: "I will never forget anything they have done." Will not the land tremble for this, and all who live in it mourn? (Amos 8:4-8)

TXU shouldn't be worried about fines from the FTC. They should be worried about earthquakes, famine and death at the hands of the Assyrians.

Contradiction

2004-09-20T21:45:00.000-05:00

Beware making contradictory statements. In my class it may affect your grade. In the presidential race ... well, er ... it really doesn't seem to have much effect. From Atrios:

Although Bush said Kerry's Iraq proposals mirrored his own, his campaign put out a strongly worded - and contradictory - statement. "John Kerry's latest position on Iraq is to advocate retreat and defeat in the face of terror," said spokesman Steve Schmidt.

Moral Relativism

2004-09-18T18:56:00.000-05:00

There's an interesting debate on the nature of moral relativism taking place in the blogosphere. I'll simply link to Majiktheise for the summary:

Eugene Volokh argues that liberals aren't really moral relativists and Matt Yglesias follows up with a thoughtful reply. See Brian Weatherson's post at Crooked Timber for further commentary.

I think what we're trying to do is explain an odd phenonomenon, namely the tendency of conservatives believe that liberals are moral relativists. It is odd that some conservatives believe both that liberals are moral relativists and that they are scheming to foist their gay/vegetarian/pacifist/socialist moral agenda on everyone else.

There are several explanations for the perceived link between liberalism and relativism. Matt already talked about the observed correlation between secularism and relativism. Conservatives may have observed that people who abandon religion sometimes become relativists instead of adopting a secular moral theory. Alternatively, if they believe that their religion is the source of all morality, and that liberals are overwhelmingly secular or ecumenical, then they may conclude that liberals lack absolute moral standards and must therefore be relativists.

I think there's a deeper explanation for the confusion, though. Liberal ethics is sometimes confused with relativism because the two theories give the same advice in some cases, albeit for very different reasons. The conservative bogeyman relativist is someone who thinks that everyone creates their own "moral reality" and that nobody can judge anybody. When speaking casually, liberals sometimes say things that could be uncharitably construed as relativistic. We say things like "Who are you to judge what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home?" or "How dare those religious fanatics impose their morality on me?" These statements aren't really relativistic because they're backed by unarticulated premises. When liberals don't accept the argument for the moral superiority of one option over another, they counsel people to choose whichever one they like. This, to conservatives, may sound like relativism.

Let's say a conservative is arguing that gay sex is wrong. As a non-relativist liberal, I dispute that claim. I'm not taking a relativist position that gay sex is wrong for him, but right for other people. Instead, I'm claiming that the conservative has his moral facts wrong. In this non-relativistic vein, I will offer arguments to to show that consensual gay sex and consensual straight sex are morally equivalent. If neither option is morally preferable, it follows that individuals should be free to make whatever choices they want. Superficiallly, this position might look like relativism because it offers no moral guidance in choosing what kind of sex to have. Likewise with abortion. Liberals argue that a woman has the right to decide to terminate her
pregnancy. The standard line is that the choice between early abortion and gestation is a choice between morally equivalent alternatives. Unlike relativists, liberals maintain the moral equivalence holds regardless of the prevailing cultural norms or the preferences of the individual.

Pro-lifers are taking the position that gestation is right and abortion is wrong. Pro-choice liberals argue non-relativistically that both abortion and gestation are morally permissible, and further, that that the pregnant woman has the right to make the final decision about her pregnancy. A relativist might say that a mother's desires determine whether an abortion is the right thing for her to do. Liberals argue that a mother has an objective right to choose (even if she doesn't believe it), and that she has this right in virtue of the non-relative fact that abortion is morally equivalent to gestation.

I largely agree with this assessment, although I would add two nuances to it. It is possible to view two acts as both being morally permissible in the context of a free and pluralistic society without necessarily viewing them as morally equivalent. Obviously, one might conclude that of two morally permissible actions, one ought to do the one that is the morally better of the two, but that does not mean that both aren't morally permissible. To take one of Lindsey's examples. I may believe that abortion is a morally inferior option in most cases to the decision to carry a pregenancy to term. Nevertheless, I may view it as being morally permissible in light of a number of other related issues, for example, the impossibility of coming to a reasonable consensus on the question of when life begins, or the variety of exigent circumstances that might lead a woman to prefer abortion. I may thus say that abortion is permissible, but morally inferior to gestation.

The second twist is this. I am reminded of Jeff Stouts argument in Ethics After Babel about the fragmentation of tongues in moral discourse. Suppose that I believe an action or set of beliefs to be morally wrong. To what degree am I able to make a case for my moral position in light of the diversity of moral points of view held within society. Is it even possible for me to talk about moral difference with somebody who differs from me? Stout suggests that it is both possible to exercise moral judgements across cultural lines (while at the same time refraining from condemning those who simply don't know any better), and to talk across moral languages about our differences. How we do so is a matter of great importance.

9/11 Widows

2004-09-15T07:49:00.000-05:00

Ouch! This has got to sting:

Sept. 15, 2004 WASHINGTON -- Over the last three years, the group of 9/11 widows turned activists dubbed the "Jersey Girls" have become a fixture on the Washington political scene. Some of them are Republicans, others Democrats or independents. But they are all determined to hold official Washington accountable for the attacks that killed their husbands and nearly 3,000 others. They have held news conferences, lobbied members of Congress, pored over documents, and forced the White House to accept an independent commission to investigate the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Along the way, the women have learned about coverups, obfuscation, political cowardice, deceptions and the dangers of eschewing international alliances for a go-it-alone foreign policy.
And their conclusion: For the sake of the country's future, John Kerry must replace George W. Bush.

Politics and Religion

2004-09-14T13:53:00.000-05:00

MSNBC has an online article about the role of religion in the 2004 race. Here's the link.

It's always worth reminding ourselves how the president understands his religion:

In June 2003, Mahmoud Abbas, then the Palestinian prime minister, said that in a conversation with Bush, the president told him: “God told me to strike at al-Qaida, and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.”

Brad DeLong -- H. P. Lovecraft Fan

2004-09-14T11:44:00.000-05:00

Who knew?

Leading neoconservative Francis Fukuyama is shrill. The Bush's administration's latest Big Lie has pushed him over the edge, into shrill unholy madness. Fukuyama is not only shrill, he is the new Grand Heresiarch of the Order of the Shrill--as he asks the Bush administration, "Just what part of 'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Fukuyama R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn!' don't you understand?"

Divine Intervention?

2004-09-14T08:23:00.000-05:00

Interesting article in Slate today on the religious dimensions of W.'s presidency:

Of course, it's always possible God did put George W. Bush in the White House. But if He did, it doesn't theologically follow that He wants him to have a second term. Even those who believe that God controls world events usually concede it is hard for humans to divine the intent of the Divine.
After all, in the Bible, God is described as doing things for all sorts of inexplicable reasons—sometimes as a reward to the people, and sometimes as a punishment.

Charging the Poor More for Electricity?

2004-09-13T07:27:00.000-05:00

From Slacktivist:

In a new rate-setting tactic for electric utilities, the unit of Dallas-based TXU Corp. plans bigger rate increases for customers with low "credit scores," which are numeric rankings that take into account customer histories of paying electricity, phone and cable bills, the Wall Street Journal reported.
I'm not sure whether this is more evil or stupid, but it's a whole lot of both.
Your "credit score" can be lowered for many reasons -- some legitimate, some arbitrary, many which you are helpless to change regardless of how responsible you may be. One variable which inevitably results in a lower credit score is a lower income.That's hardship enough for lower-income families when a credit score is only being used for its intended purpose -- deciding whether or not to extend credit. But as credit scores begin to be used for purposes like this it is simple cruelty. This is simply a way to take advantage of the poor and powerless because they are poor and powerless and you can take from them whatever you like.
Credit scores are already being used now to deny people health and auto insurance, or to charge them a higher rate. They are being used by employers, to make sure they don't hire anybody who's unemployed. And now the poor will face regressive pay scales even for their heat and electricity.
And what happens when this portion of these low-income families' monthly budget increases? That's right -- their credit scores will go down. This is obscene. A clumsy measure of wealth is being used as though it were a precise measure of virtue and responsibility.
The bottom line is this: TXU wants to charge poor people a higher rate than they charge rich people. Why? Because those poor people were having trouble paying the lower rate. This ain't a bank loan, it's the freaking utility bill.

Remember when we used to at least pretend that there was a social contract? I miss those days.

Running on a Mistake

2004-09-08T14:26:00.000-05:00

Via Atrios, a segment from a bit by Bill Maher:

And finally, New Rule: You can't run on a mistake. Franklin Roosevelt didn't run for re-election claiming Pearl Harbor was his finest hour. Abe Lincoln was a great president, but the high point of his second term wasn't theater security. 9/11 wasn't a triumph of the human spirit. It was a fuck-up by a guy on vacation.
Now, don't get me wrong, Mr. President. I'm not blaming you for 9/11. We have blue-ribbon commissions to do that. And I'm not saying there was anything improper about your immediate response to the attacks. Someone had to stay in that classroom and protect those kids from Chechen rebels. But by the looks of your convention, you'd think that the worst thing that ever happened to us was the best thing that ever happened to you. You just can't keep celebrating the deadliest attack ever as if it's your personal rendezvous with greatness.
You don't see old men who were shot down during World War II jumping out of a plane every year. I mean, other than your dad. ...So I say, if you absolutely must win an election on the backs of dead people, do it like they do in Chicago, and have them actually vote for you.

What Would Jesus Do (in the Illinois election)?

2004-09-08T07:47:00.000-05:00

Well, according to Keyes, he woudn't vote for Obama:

Keyes Says Christ Would Not Vote For Obama Republican Candidate Says 'Spanking' Comment Insulting

CHICAGO -- Illinois Republican U.S. Senate candidate Alan Keyes injected religion into his race against Democratic candidate Barack Obama on Tuesday.

According to a list of quotes put out by the Democratic candidate, Keyes said in a radio interview at the Republican National Convention that Jesus would not vote for Obama. The quote was part of a list Obama sent reporters of Keyes' accusations and epithets about him since Keyes became a candidate, NBC5 political editor Dick Kay said.

Kay also reported that Keyes called Obama a "socialist and a liar" on a cable access news show on Monday. Obama said he wants to win big to give Keyes a spanking because Keyes wages a scorched earth campaign. Keyes then went into a very long analysis of the word "spanking" and suggested it might be related to slavery and insulting to African- Americans. He would not answer when asked directly if he was insulted.

Reporters also pointed out that Obama had said Bobby Rush had spanked Obama in the Congressional race when Obama ran against Rush in 2000. Obama said Tuesday night it was tongue-in-cheek and that everyone knows he wants to win the race for working people. He also said no one has run a more positive campaign than he.

Keyes, who has focused his campaign on abortion, said that his statement about whom Jesus would vote for was based on Obama's pro-choice votes in the Illinois Senate. "Christ would not stand idly by while an infant child in that situation died," Keyes said. "And I'm not the only person, obviously, who thinks if you are a representative of me, I cannot vote for you if you would ignore the dignity and claims of that child's life. So, yes, I did respond quite logically -- you'll see it's quite logical, right -- with the conclusion that Christ would not vote for Barack Obama, because Barack Obama has voted to behave in a way that it is inconceivable for Christ to have behaved."

Keyes, who will be greatly outspent, relies on free media in his campaign against Obama, Kay reported. As a result, he frequently calls news conferences to respond to responses. First, he criticizes Obama. When Obama responds, Keyes calls a news conference to respond, which is what he did on Tuesday.

The Catholic Vote

2004-09-07T19:42:00.000-05:00

Kevin Drum points to a couple of new items on the issue of Catholics and politics. It's worth checking out.

Here's a few lines from Cardinal Ratzinger's statement:

In essence, a vote for a pro-choice politician is not necessarily sinful if a Catholic, who is also against abortion, believes the candidate's other positions outweigh the politician's support for abortion rights, Ratzinger said. He heads the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Rev. Thomas Reese, a longtime Vatican observer and Jesuit priest who edits America magazine, said:
"If the voter says 'I like this candidate only because he or she is pro-abortion,' that's clearly a no-no. If, on the other hand, the voter says, 'and I like this candidate because he or she supports everything I like, but is wrong on abortion, and I've decided to vote for the person on these other issues,' that's alright."

I'm shocked and amazed that this ever became an issue. But then, I'm a protestant teaching at a Catholic school, so what do I know? At any rate, what are the chances that this will put the issue to bed? It's not like this is a fire-breathing liberal or left wing theologian saying this. This is Ratzinger. Here's hoping that his opinion means something to conservative Catholics, 'cause it's about time we put a skewer through this non-issue.

CORRECTION: It was Amy Sullivan, writing in Kevin's blog, that linked to those articles. My bad.

Andrew Sullivan (sort of) Endorses Kerry

2004-09-06T10:35:00.000-05:00

Well, as I said, sort of. Here's the relevant quote from his blog:

I will add one thing more. And that is the personal sadness I feel that this president who praises freedom wishes to take it away from a whole group of Americans who might otherwise support many parts of his agenda. To see the second family tableau with one family member missing because of her sexual orientation pains me to the core. And the president made it clear that discriminating against gay people, keeping them from full civic dignity and equality, is now a core value for him and his party. The opposite is a core value for me. Some things you can trade away. Some things you can compromise on. Some things you can give any politician a pass on. But there are other values - of basic human dignity and equality - that cannot be sacrificed without losing your integrity itself. That's why, despite my deep admiration for some of what this president has done to defeat terror, and my affection for him as a human being, I cannot support his candidacy. Not only would I be abandoning the small government conservatism I hold dear, and the hope of freedom at home as well as abroad, I would be betraying the people I love. And that I won't do.

Yes, he's not supporting Bush, but he can't quite bring himself to support Kerry. It will be interesting to see whether, by the time November comes around, he finds a way of voting for Bush without "supporting" him.

Gone Fishin'

2004-09-04T09:22:00.000-05:00

Well, not really, but I've been really busy this week. Sorry for the lack of posts. I'll be back on the ball next week.

Winning the War on Terror? Not According to Bush!

2004-08-31T08:54:00.000-05:00

In case you missed it, yesterday El Presidente announced that the war on terrorism is unwinnable. Lest you think I'm exagerating or distorting, here's the exact quote:

"I don't think you can win it," Mr. Bush replied. "But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."

Slacktivist has a good time with this by counterpointing it with the Republican convention coverage. Here's a bit:

GIULIANI: So long as George Bush is our president, is there any doubt [terrorists] will continue to hear from us until we defeat global terrorism?
BUSH: "I don't think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."
McCAIN: My friends in the Democratic Party -- and I'm fortunate to call many of them my friends -- assure us they share the conviction that winning the war against terrorism is our government's most important obligation.
BUSH: "I don't think you can win it."
GIULIANI: The president announced the Bush Doctrine, when he said, "Our war on terror begins with al-Qaida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated."
BUSH: "I don't think you can win it."
McCAIN: But an absence of complacency should not provoke an absence of confidence.
BUSH: "I don't think you can win it."
GIULIANI: We have won many battles in this war on terror, at home and abroad. But as President Bush told us way back on September 20, 2001, it will take a long-term determined effort to prevail.
BUSH: "I don't think you can win it."
McCAIN: We must learn from our mistakes, improve on our successes, and vanquish this unpardonable enemy.
BUSH: "I don't think you can win it."
GIULIANI: Don't be discouraged. Don't be cynical. We'll see an end to global terrorism. I can see it. I believe it. I know it will happen.
BUSH: "I don't think you can win it."
McCAIN: And this president will not rest until America is stronger and safer still and this hateful iniquity is vanquished.
BUSH: "I don't think you can win it."
JOHN KERRY: We need a strong military and we need to lead strong alliances. And then, with confidence and determination, we will be able to tell the terrorists: You will lose and we will win.
BUSH: "I don't think you can win it."

William Sloane Coffin

2004-08-29T23:02:00.000-05:00

A very good segment about William Sloane Coffin on Religion and Ethics Newsweekly this week. For those of you who don't know who he is, he was the chaplain at Yale University for a logn time, the pastor of Riverside Church in New York City, and the director of Sane/Freeze in the 1980s. He's one of my personal heros. Definitely check out the article, as well as this one from Bill Moyers' Now.

In Hot Water (Or Cool AC?)

2004-08-28T11:15:00.000-05:00

Alex Tabarrok follows up on his earlier comment about hot water (about which there was much discussion, including here), with a comment about whether this would change if the feature in question was Air Conditioning.

I'd actually like to see the economic big brains comment on this point. Alex is right that we take things like hot water for granted (suggesting that his original example wasn't so well chosen), but air conditioning is much more variable, as my wife and I discovered when we moved here to Chicago and discovered that most of the places we were considering renting didn't include AC.

What set of criteria go into the determination that hot water ought to be supplied but not necessarily air conditioning? It seems like some level of social expectation is involved -- at a certain point, you simply can't credibly rent a place that doesn't have certain ammenities. But then is this simply the market at work. Should there be laws enforcing the supply of such amenities.

And again, is there a segment of the market that would rent dwellings without hot water if such dwellings were available? And as a society, do we want to encourage the existence of such a market segment, or do we want to ensure that there are minimum services that are available to all renters, and below which, landlords cannot go? And why is this?

Pro-Choice Republican Catholics

2004-08-27T19:44:00.000-05:00

From Washington Monthly:

The dirty little secret about these groups is that they don't demand that Catholic politicians -- who, according to church teaching, should be held to a higher standard because of their visible status -- conform to all church positions on issues like the death penalty or war or immigration reform or combatting poverty. And they don't really care if PCRCs stray from church teaching on abortion (sounds like you need to read Evangelium Vitae a bit more carefully, guys...)
What they do care about is defeating Democrats. Some of them don't even try to gloss over that fact. Deal Hudson (the now-disgraced and resigned former head of Catholic outreach for the Bush/Cheney campaign) told the Washington Post last spring that "he believes the denial of Communion should begin, and end, with Kerry."

Go read the rest.

Who got Bush in the National Guard?

2004-08-27T19:40:00.000-05:00

This guy.

And the Keyes Saga Rolls On

2004-08-27T19:37:00.000-05:00

Well, aparently there was some dispute earlier today about whether Keyes was legally allowed on the Illinois ballot, but it seems to have been resolved.

Chuckie Watch

2004-08-26T13:38:00.000-05:00

Oh, this is just priceless.

Chapter IX: In Which I Watch Economists Argue

2004-08-23T09:51:00.000-05:00

It should be no surprise that I would likely lose an argument about economics with an economist. I expect that an economist would lose an argument with me about theology. But there is a place where economics and theology touch (albeit at a tangent), which is ethics.

One struggle that I have with economics, both in following it and in evaluating it, is that it portrays itself as a value-neutral discipline, in which moral questions are sidelined as unhelpful in determining the most efficient and productive means of producing and distributing resources. Yet, when one reads economics, one finds that the moral and ideological dispositions of economists are tatooed all over their writing (after all, I imagine that Robert Nozick is very popular among a particular brand of libertarian economist). As a result, I find that I gravitate to economists who approximate my own political leanings, such as Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong, and I avoid those who don't, like Milton Friedman. All of this leads me to be rather dubious about the "value-neutrality" of economics.

But again, when it comes to the details of economic theory, I usually just stand aside and let the economist talk. In this light, an exchange over the last few days among some economists and bolder non-economists has caught my attention.

It all begins with this post by Alax Tabarrok, wherein he makes the following statement:

Today, I begin teaching the Economic Foundations of Law in the GMU Law
School. To illustrate the importance of economics for the study of law I begin
with a simple example due to David Friedman. There is in the law what is called
"a nonwaivable warranty of habitability," which is a fancy way of saying that a
dwelling must have certain features such as heating, hot water, sometimes even
air conditioning, whether or not such terms are in the lease and even if the
lease explicitly excludes such terms. I ask my students who is made better off
and who is made worse off by a legal doctrine that says tenants must have hot
water? Invariably, the students answer that the doctrine makes tenants better
off and landlords worse off. But is this so? Think about it and then read the extension for more.

After explaining that, when the government monkeys about with rents by making such laws, it makes both the tenant and the landlord worse off, he goes on to say:

The lesson here is that a contract is multi-dimensional so if the government
changes one dimension of a contract the other dimensions will adjust towards
offsetting that change.

The implication of this, in classic libertarian form, is that in the long run the government can do little or nothing to improve the lives of citizens that the market acting on its own could not do better.

Enter Atrios, who writes:

The first reasons we can talk about are the costs of obtaining information andwriting contracts. When I go and look for an apartment, I don't have to spend the time to determine whether every apartment I visit has a working toilet, has hot water, has a working and safe electrical and heating system, and a whole set of charateristics which are roughly what we consider to be the basic necessities for modern life. In addition, there are the costs of writing and understanding a contract which spells out in great detail what the landlord will and won't guarantee. Having some bare minimum set of characteristics for an apartment takes all that off the table.
Anothe reason is the cost of settling disputes. Libertarians love contracts, but tend to ignore the actual time and cost of, you know, going to court and proving that there's a contract violation and obtaining some remedy. Having some regulatory agency with some teeth which is responsible for determining not whether the landlord is in violation of some idiosyncratic contract, but in violation of the well-understood city housing codes, can greatly reduce the time and costs involved with such things.
Does that mean all regulations are good? No, of course not. But, requiring a working hot water heater doesn't seem to be all that ridiculous.More broadly - such regulations can indeed benefit both tenant and landlord, reducing information, bargaining, transaction, and enforcement costs.

Now Brad DeLong comes in:

But I cannot help but note that Alex's future-lawyer-students have missed even
more: they badly need to be trained to think like economist--as Alex is in fact
teaching them to do. The ideas that the state's action does not just shift the
terms of already-made bargains in the direction of the tenant but (after enough
time has passed for adjustment) leads to changes in behavior that shift the
terms of the rental bargains made; that the question, "What, exactly, is the
market failure here?" always needs to be asked; and that the question, "How,
exactly, does this policy reduce the magnitude of the market failure without
causing bigger government failures?" always needs to be answered--these
questions are almost always of crucial importance.
It is because these questions are almost always of crucial importance that I believe--as a general rule, there are exceptions--that only economists* who are left-of-center and have spent significant time working in a bureaucracy are qualified to express
opinions on matters of public policy.
If you're not an economist, then (as a rule) you don't ask any of the three questions. If you're an economist but not a left-of-center one you don't believe in market failures, and don't ask question 2. If you're a left-of-center economist who has never worked in a bureaucracy, you don't believe in government failures and don't ask question 3.

This strikes me as intuitively correct. Atrios rightly points out that government regulation can benefit economic actors in ways that Tabarrok's equations don't take into account, and Brad DeLong notes the very practical truism that human endeavors are always fallible, including economic and governmental endeavors. The "invisible hand" of Adam Smith may exist, but it's an invisible human not an invisible divine hand, and therefore is not infallible. As a result, we need to account for the failures that take place in our social life as a result of the failures of both governments and markets. It is here that ethics comes in, but I'll have more to say about that, and the larger question of public goods, in a future post.

Pissed Liberals

2004-08-22T09:20:00.000-05:00

Matt Yglesias is pissed, too.

This is good, but surprising. The Republicans have spent the last decade frothing and spewing and people have been treating them as though they were inexplicably serious. But this Swift Boat smear is the first time I've actually seen liberals get pubically pissed at something.

Sure, we were against the war. Sure, we said so vocally. Sure, we thought the tax cuts were a bad idea, though we didn't do much about them. Sure, we think the deficits are attrocious, but we haven't made hay about it. And of course, we thought that Bush stole the election, but it wasn't the liberals rioting outside the offices where the recount was taking place.

Frothing and spewing aren't the answer, I'll agree. But some good healthy impatient anger is good for the circulatory system. Plus, it might convince people that we actually care about where the country is going.

Now if we can channel that anger from the Swift Boat smear to things that actually matter .....

Bill Kristol is a Jerk

2004-08-20T19:00:00.000-05:00

News Hour again. This time it was Bill Kristol vs. Mark Shields. And it was Sheilds who was pissed. I'm actually surprised at how incensed the liberal commentators on New Hour have been these last two nights. They're genuinly angry over the Swift Boat slurs.

But Kristol, grrrrr. He made me madder than Shields. Usually on News Hour, there's a relatively amiable exchange where one commentator makes a point, and then the other responds. But Kristol fillibustered and inturrupted like he was on MSBNC or Fox. Aside from being irritating and rude, it was a violation of that which makes Public Television different from those other stations. Ok, so I'm a public TV nut. Given what else is out there for news, can you blame me?

And all of this in service of lies and deceit. Yup, Bill Kristol's a Jerk.

Just venting there.

More on Desert

2004-08-20T18:59:00.000-05:00

Majikthise has another post on desert that's well worth reading. Check it out.

New York Times on the Swift Vets

2004-08-20T10:05:00.000-05:00

The New York Times has a piece today on the various misrepresentations and fabrications of the Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth." It's well worth a read.

I've also been thinking about the SBV claim that Kerry's wound was "self-inflicted." John O'Neill said last night on Lehrer that he doesn't believe that Kerry inflicted the wound intentionally, but simply that it was the result of his own grenade fire. This led me to wonder: "what are the requirements for a purple heart. So I looked it up.

a. The Purple Heart is awarded in the name of the President of the United
States to any member of an Armed Force or any civilian national of the United
States who, while serving under competent authority in any capacity with one of
the U.S. Armed Services after 5 April 1917, has been wounded or killed, or who
has died or may hereafter die after being wounded-
(1) In any action against an enemy of the United States.
(2) In any action with an opposing armed force of a foreign country in which the Armed Forces of the United States are or have been engaged.
(3) While serving with friendly foreign forces engaged in an armed conflict against an opposing armed force in which the United States is not a belligerent party.
(4) As a result of an act of any such enemy of opposing armed forces.
(5) As the result of an act of any hostile foreign force
(6) After 28 March 1973, as a result of an international terrorist attack against the United States or a foreign nation friendly to the United States, recognized as such an attack by the Secretary of the Army, or jointly by the Secretaries of the separate armed services concerned if persons from more than one service are wounded in the attack.
(7) After 28 March 1973, as a result of military operations while serving outside the territory of the United States as part of a peacekeeping force.

b. While clearly an individual decoration, the Purple Heart differs from all other decorations in that an individual is not "recommended" for the decoration; rather he or she is entitled to it upon meeting specific criteria.
(1) A Purple Heart is authorized for the first wound suffered under conditions indicated above, but for each subsequent award an Oak Leaf Cluster will be awarded to be worn on the medal or ribbon. Not more than one award will be made for more than one wound or injury received at the same instant or from the same missile, force, explosion, or agent.
(2) A wound is defined as an injury to any part of the body from an
outside force or agent sustained under one or more of the conditions listed above. A physical lesion is not required, however, the wound for which the award is made must have required treatment by a medical officer and records of medical treatment for wounds or injuries received in action must have been made a matter of official record.
(3) When contemplating an award of this decoration, the key issue that commanders must take into consideration is the degree to which the enemy caused the injury. The fact that the proposed recipient was participating in direct or indirect combat operations is a necessary prerequisite, but is not sole justification for award.
(4) Examples of enemy-related injuries which clearly justify award of the Purple Heart are as follows:
(a) Injury caused by enemy bullet, shrapnel, or other projectile created by enemy action.
(b) Injury caused by enemy placed mine or trap.
(c) Injury caused by enemy released chemical, biological, or nuclear agent.
(d) Injury caused by vehicle or aircraft accident resulting from enemy fire.
(e) Concussion injuries caused as a result of enemy generated
explosions.
So, what if the injury is "self-inflicted" (e.g., you're firing a grenade at the enemy and some of the shrapnel gets you)?

(5) Examples of injuries or wounds which clearly do not qualify for award of the Purple Heart are as follows:
(h) Self-inflicted wounds, except when in the heat of battle, and not involving gross negligence. [Italics Mine]

Oliphant on News Hour

2004-08-19T22:05:00.000-05:00

I don't know if anyone caught this, but I've never seen Tom Oliphant this angry. If you saw it, you know that Oliphant was arguing with John O'Neill of the Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth." O'Neill was repeating the same cannards that have already been discredited from one end of the country to the other. Oliphant utterly mopped the floor with him. But the usually composed Oliphant was pissed. You could see it when the camera cut to a long shot. Oliphant would be sitting there grimmacing and staring straight ahead.

To his credit, whenever it was his turn to speak, he very politely and very civilly repeated that John O'Neill is full of shit (though of course, not in those words).

Oliphant's main points came down to three:

1) The Swifties have no credibility, because of their ties to republican operatives and inconsistencies in their reports (e.g, one soldier's version of events is contradicted by his own bronze star citation, from the same firefight).

2) The Swifties are making allegations that are in principle unprovable and scurrilous.

3) Every reliable piece of evidence (i.e., official documentation from the Navy and other sources), confirms John Kerry's version of events.

Therefore, there is nothing, I mean nothing to this. It's really a pity that the SCLM have treated this with any credance at all, and that Kerry had to address it. It's the kind of garbage that's not worthy of a political campaign where there are actual issues of importance to address. I can see why Oliphant was so angry.

And by the way, where is the president these days. Should he be denouncing these Swift Boat Vets ads the way that Kerry denounced the MoveOn ad that questions Bush's service?

Korn (not the band) on Keyes

2004-08-19T08:09:00.000-05:00

Ok, I'm getting tired of my "K" jokes, too. I promise I'll stop. But I did want to draw your attention to a couple of good articles by David Corn on Allan Keyes. Please, read and enjoy:

Keyes is a Nut (In Case You Didn't Know)

Let Keyes Speak (At the Republican Convention)

Boycott the Boss? Hell, no!

2004-08-16T23:10:00.000-05:00

From the Syracuse Post-Standard:

Dr. Marilyn O'Grady, Conservative Party US Senate candidate against liberal Chuck Schumer, today launched a new TV commercial that hits Bruce Springsteen for his concert campaign to defeat President Bush. The ad urges Bush supporters to "Boycott the Boss." "Mr. Springsteen has a right to say what he thinks, but we have an equal right to speak. Mr. Springsteen's antics have been criticized by major papers here in New York before. Now that he's moved onto the political stage to bash my President, it is entirely fair to respond," O'Grady explained, adding "I have to speak up for President Bush -- the Republican running for Senate seems afraid to even mention the President's name."
Set to air on Fox News Channel as part of her month-old, statewide advertising effort, O'Grady's ad says: "Bruce Springsteen is doing a concert tour to dump President Bush. What's new? Springsteen criticized Reagan, bashed the New York
police and said Bush should be impeached. "He thinks making millions with a song-and-dance routine allows him to tell you how to vote. Here's my vote: Boycott the Boss. If you don't buy his politics, don't buy his music."
"I'm Marilyn O'Grady. I approved this message because I stand with President Bush and it's time to tame the liberal elite."

Those damn liberals, always singing and stuff. Well, I've been putting off buying The Rising, and this strikes me as a good excuse to give the Boss some of my money. Feel free to climb on the bandwagon.

Justice and Desert

2004-08-16T21:37:00.000-05:00

There's an interesting exchange going on on Brad Delong's website. It's worth checking out. The thrust of it is an argument going on in the blogosphere about whether there intrinsic moral reasons to believe that people who make more money deserve it. The Rawlsian argument is that inequalities in reward are justifiable only insofar as they produce a greater social good for all (e.g., we pay doctors more because becoming a doctor is hard and we need them).

Apparently it was Matt Yglesias and Max Sawicky who started this. Matt writes:

Lately Max Sawicky and I have been disagreeing a lot, but we find common ground in the insight that equality of opportunity and the cult of the self-made man is an utter fraud both empirically and morally. Meritocracy is an appalling ideal. Being born with the inclination and ability to become financially successful is no more morally praiseworthy than being born with the inclination and ability to inherit a large fortune. It's chance all the way down either way. There are reasons to structure incentives so as to encourage a certain amount of hard work so as to increase overall prosperity, but this is a question of pragmatics not desert, and only worth doing if overall prosperity is being managed so as to cause widespread prosperity.

In other words, there is no intrinsic right to the fruit of our labor. We reward hard work because society tends to work better that way, not because there is a natural or god-given obligation to do so.

Matt notes the objection that:

Once you realize that the poor are on unequal footing not only because poor people tend to attent ill-funded schools but also because poverty per se is a cause of ill-health and has deleterious consequences on emotional and cognitive development then equality of opportunity becomes a reason to pursue a measure of equality of outcome. What measure? Well, it all just depends how equal you want the opportunities to be. True equality of opportunity will require true equality of outcome.

Yet he notes that "we could stand to go a good way further down the path than we've gone so far, so we may as well set our compasses to reach it for now." And he's got a good point. The logical conclusion of a completely consistent application of a theory need not lead us to conclude that we can't apply the theory in a relative sense in order to increase overall equality of opportunity, without necessarily falling into the trap of believing we need equality of outcome. Public life is a constant measuring of the relative more and less of the application of our ideas. The goal ought to be to strike that balance whereby we maximize the positive effect of our policies while minimizing the negative effects. This can be done without necessarily buying the the whole lot.

This can be seen, for example, in the arguments about minimum wages and living wages. A living wage is one that ought to allow a family to have their basic necessities covered plus a bit extra. Such a living wage need not be huge, and it need not be so big as to increase unemployment significantly. But it involves very careful policy analysis to min/max the result.

Back to the debate. Things then move on over to Tech Central Station where Will Wilkinson writes:

When you think about it, it would be pretty surprising if the link between effective effort and desert wasn't etched deeply into our moral psyche and reflected in our daily judgments and choices for precisely the pragmatic reasons Yglesias cites. The argument that people are motivated by the prospect of keeping what they have gained by hard work, and that even the worst off can do better in a society that allows relatively large degree of inequality, can be easily converted into a compelling story of the evolutionary origins of our judgments about fairness and desert. A population of proto-humans inclined to distribute the fruits of social cooperation according to the value of each proto-person's contribution to the joint enterprise, and to regard this as fair, would likely crowd out competing groups with more egalitarian intuitions about fair distribution. The argument that there is instrumental, pragmatic value in "structuring incentives" as if people deserve what they have worked to achieve is awkwardly close in form to the argument that a conception of desert and fairness linking work to reward is precisely the conception we would expect actual people to have -- the conception we would expect to see reflected in the judgments of moral common sense.

So, it turns out that our considered judgments about what it takes to deserve are rather contrary to Rawls' sense of the matter. And even if it is chance all the way down, this fact fails to provide any justifying foundation for coercive redistribution, for it also undermines any possibility of justifying the inequalities implicit in coercive political power.

Will then goes on to argue that it isn't chance all the way down, as Rawls suggests.

(Actually, Rawls doesn't suggest that. In A Theory of Justice is he trying to offer a hypothetical account of what we would consider to be a fair distribution of resources if it were chance all the way down. His argument is that if we would choose a particular state of affairs to maximize our self-interest and minimize our risk from a condition of ignorance, that gives us good guidance about what justice really looks like.).

Chris Bertram picks it up there:

There are no doubt one or two sentences in A Theory of Justice that encourage
such an interpretation. But, as Wilkinson surely knows, the argument in which
Rawls asserts that “no one deserves his place in the distribution of natural endowments, any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place in society”
(which Wilkinson cites, selectively, from the first edition of ToJ) concerns the
choice of a co-operative scheme for a whole society.1 In the passage in question Rawls is not addressing the question of whether those who are better-endowed with natural assets or who have “superior character” ought to get more within a co-operative scheme, he’s writing about whether their better endowment ought to be reflected in the choice of scheme under which they co-operate with others.2 And his answer is, that no, the more talented have no special right to have their interests given greater weight than those others.

There are two basic Rawlsian objections to the idea that distribution should reflect moral desert or deservingness. First, that it seems impossible to establish a workable public standard of deservingness because of the fact of reasonable pluralism; second, that even if we could establish such a standard, it would be impossible to contrive an economic system to track it.3 (One might expect, given Wilkinson’s endorsement elsewhere of “political” libertarianism, that he would be at one with Rawls on this.) Given these objections, Rawls sets aside reward according to desert and proceeds to consider other options.Rawls’s preferred option, democratic equality and the difference principle, doesn’t endorse or track any particular standard of desert or merit. But the point here is that neither does the economic system Wilkinson himself appears to favour: there’s no good reason to believe that a system of free-market and private property is anything close to a merit-based system. Some people work hard on worthy projects for their whole lives or take exceptional risks on society’s behalf and nevertheless remain comparatively poor; others, through being lucky or rich, get to be as rich as Croesus. Is Warren Buffet more morally deserving than the firefighters on 9/11? Of course not. He doesn’t think so, they don’t think so, we don’t think so, and Will Wilkinson doesn’t think
so.4

Brad DeLong comes in at this point:

What Yglesias is asking is a different question. Given that we have powerful instrumental reasons to favor a society in which ability, industriousness, discipline, and effort are rewarded--because such incentives are powerful instruments for making a greater society--is there anything more?Is there any extra reason, over and above the instrumental benefits in making a greater society, for those who chose the right parents (for their genes) and chose the right circumstances (for their environment) and wound up talented and industrious to have an even greater proportion of the pie than incentives' usefulness as instruments would suggest?
Matthew Yglesias says, "No." The reasons for rewarding talent, skill, industry, discipline, and effort are instrumental ones. In his view, we say that it is useful for these incentives to provide them with such rewards--we don't say that they deserve these rewards (or if we say they do deserve them, we aren't thinking clearly).

Next into the fray comes Majikthise:

The instrumentalist position needs to be supplemented with a non-metaphysical theory of desert. It turns out that a contractual/procedural theory of desert explains our intuitions just as well. We don't have to argue desert in terms of free will and moral responsibility. Sometimes promises beget desert. Our society wisely promises people that they will be rewarded if they work hard and contribute a lot. So, justice demands that we make good on that promise by rewarding the high achievers. Instrumentalism explains why it is a good idea to make that promise.

"Promises beget desert" is a good phrase and offers good food for thought. Being an Analytic philosopher, it's understandable why she would not be willing to dive into metaphysical theories of free will, but I think that even for those of us who aren't rooted in the analytic philosophical tradition, there is a great deal that can be made of this. Indeed, it can be expanded beyond its original Rawlsian basis and made the ground for a philosophical justification of a strong social support system.

Certainly the fact that society has, since the 1930s, made representations that the government can and should -- to a degree -- protect people from the vagaries of chance and misfortune, and that taxes are leveed in order to support social programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Head Start (all of which serve the end of equality of opportunity in society), can provide a basis for saying that government now has an obligation to provide those services, or at least the functional equivalent of those services. It may not be obligated to offer Head Start or School Lunch programs in the same way they were offered when my brothers were in Head Start and we all got reduced lunches at school, but it is obligated to offer some such services.

When it comes to public education, the implications come screaming into relief. For over a century in this country we have made universal public education a central social promise. Therefore, every child in the United States now deserves a good, well-funded, competent public education. Not every child needs to take advantage of it (that's what private schools are for), but every child is entitled to it. What's more, the obligation implied by this point further means that society doesn't have an obligation to subsidize private education. A good public education system is what every child is promised, and thus what every child deserves.

More to come.

UPDATE: Majikthise has sent me another post that she's written on the subject.

Keyes: The People Can't Be Trusted to Elect Senators

2004-08-14T12:36:00.000-05:00

From the wire services today:

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/08/14/keyes/index.html

If Keyes actually gets elected to the Senate, I might actually begin to think he has a point.

Keyes vs. Klinton

2004-08-12T19:57:00.000-05:00

When CNN's Candy Crowley asked Keyes why his out-of-state run in Illinois was any different from that of Hillary Clinton in New York, he pointed out the as-yet-unexplored 9/11 connection ...

Well, I think I have addressed the issue of the very deep differences between what I am doing and Hillary Clinton. She used the state of New York as a platform for her own personal ambition. I had no thought of coming to Illinois to run until the people here in the state party decided there was a need. Just as people faced with a flood, or people in the case of 9/11, would call on folks, firefighters and others to help them deal with the crisis that they were faced with. The people in Illinois have called on me to help deal with what they regard as a crisis.
Alan Keyes: Ambassador, Talk Show Host, First-Responder ...

Thanks to Josh Marshall.

Keyes' Konservative Kredentials

2004-08-10T16:06:00.000-05:00

From TNR Online:

Alan Keyes's opinion of himself and the universe's opinion of him have fatally parted company.

Heavenly Amnesia

2004-08-09T23:34:00.000-05:00

Slactivist has another Left Behind post today. Even more astonishing than the discovery that Jerry Jenkins can apparently churn out novels of such remarkable quality in a mere 21 days is the self-giving love of Tim Lahaye for the souls of those many, many, many billions who would be condemned to hell if his vision of the eschaton were true. Here's the key quote, from the New York Times:

The eschatological problem Kristof mentioned of believers mourning the lost in the next life is a subject that bothered me for years until I found Revelation 21:4, which informs us that in His mercy God will wipe away all tears from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. Somehow the memory of all who reject Christ will be mercifully eradicated from our memories.

This appalling in so many waysthat it makes my head hurt just to think about it. But let's begin with the simple fact that this completely undermines any claim of God's unconditional love for creation. God treats those whom he has created as no better than tissue paper, to be disposed of once it has served it's purpose. And those precious few whom God has chosen for salvation, well, not to worry, you won't remember the damned anyhow.

This gives me an opportunity to return to my old theology teacher, Dan Migliore, and his book Faith Seeking Understanding. He makes several statements about the kind of theology exemplified by Lahaye and Jenkins (or, at the time the book was written, Hal Lindsey). I'm going to quote at length:

The Lindsey version of Christian hope feeds on the fears of people. He offers to allay those fears by describing the exact timetable of ht ecoming awful events of the end as ordained by God and predicted by the Bible. ... From this period of terrible tribulation, believers will be rescued or "raptured" -- that is, snatched out of a world plunging toward destruction. The return of Jesus Christ ans the rapture that will accompany it "is the real hope for the Christian, the blessed hope of true believers." The assertion that the true church will not have to experience the horrors of the tribution period provides considerable incentive for becoming a Christian. By God's plan, the responsibility for evangelizing the earth during those years will be assigned to 144,000 converted Jews. Lindsey predicts that all this will happen in teh lifetime of his readers. What is wrong with this brand of apocalypticism?

a. It is a crass manipulation of blibical texts. The life, ministry, deathand resurreciton of Christ become quite secondary to Lindsey's arbitrary speculation about the final events of history. Lindsey plays apoaclyptic roulette with the Bible, ripping texts out of their historical context and fitting them into his own schema.

b. Lindsey's apocalyptic timetable is highly deterministic. The wheel of apoaclyptic destiny spins out of human control. Hence Linsey's followers have no sense of responsibility for the future. Knowing that they will be exempted from teh terrors to come, they can be mere observers of world events and calmly await their rapture.

c. What Christians really hope for in this eschatoloy is the rapture. Lindsey terrifies his readers with his desciptions of nuclear holocaust, seas of blood running six feet deep, and thelike. Then he tells them: "Believe in Jesus Christ and you will be raptured. You will escape all of these horrors." This is nothing less than "apocalyptic terrorism," entirely lacking in any sense of solidarity with creation and with humankind groaning for emancipation from sin, suffering, and death.

d. Lindsey's rendition of Christian hope lacks a theology of the cross. Eschatology and the cross are torn apart. Suffering and hope are severed. The church will be safe in heaven when hall hell breaks loose. Witnessing for God on the earth in these coming awful days will be the task of the Jews. One can imagine the fullyjustified sarcasm of death-camp survivors should they be asked to respond to this picture of the future: "The self-centered and complacent church never was around when helpless victims were machine-gunned, men and women gassed, the heads of children bashed in by rifle butts. So it will not be a surprise when this church again is not around when all those things happen once more. Then, as before, faithful Jews and Christians will be left alone to bear a terrible witness to God." The signatureof New Testament hope is not the rapture, as in Lindsey's book, but hte resurrection of the crucified Jesus." pp. 236-237.

Amen, and amen.

What makes Keyes Krazy

2004-08-09T17:20:00.000-05:00

Michael Berube has excerpts from a speech by Alan Keyes on the "homosexual agenda."

I was listening to Keyes on the radio this morning and he made essentially the same point, in addition to arguing that a vote for Barak Obama is a vote for the triumph of despotism and dictatorship.

Listening to him, I had to ask myself just what it was about what he was saying that qualified it as crazy rather than simply wrong. The thing about Keyes is that what he says does make sense once you enter his world. So, what then is the world of Alan Keyes.

It is a world both simple and complex simultaneously. On the one hand, there is a direct relationship between the kinds of liberties that we grant to individuals and the triumph either of democracy or tyranny. There are no complex social forces in play, and there is no sphere of ambiguity between the personal and the social. Individual choices, if they are socially supported or accepted, lead directly and without detour to deep political ramifications.

At the same time, his worldview is as complex as the most paranoid of conspiricy theorists. In Keyes' world, there are links within links within links of different micro-level events and the fate of the country or world as a whole. He can make a leap, as Berube notes, from homosexuality to Tyranny through a series of conclusions, each of which individually is dubious, and all of which together are absolutely incredible.

To be a conservative is not to be crazy. But the way that Alan Keyes does conservatism is so freighed with his personal demons and quirky political absolutism that crazy is the only term that seems appropriate for it.

Church, State, and the 2004 Election

2004-08-09T09:06:00.000-05:00

The New York Times today has a story about the role of conservative churches in the 2004 election. The Bush campaign seems to be making an unprecedented effort to rally evangelical Christians to vote Republican this year. This has involved mobilizing from within conservative churches and even trying to obtain church mailing list.

Since churches receive tax-exempt status as long as they don't involve themselves in partisan politics, this has raised both eyebrows and hackles. But the issue is terribly complex. As Stephen Carter has pointed out in God's Name in Vain, the "wall of separation" between church and state was designed to limit state interference with church, not church interference in public life. In fact, Carter argues, "religion has no sphere," and no area into which it must confine itself. Rather, religion overflows all boundaries and mounts all walls in the name of the things it values. I think that Carter is largely right, and so I'm hesitant to climb on the bandwagon with those who say that churches should keep their noses out of politics.

On the other hand, Carter also points out that churches that engage in politics do so at the price of the co-optation of their values and aims. If a church chooses to endorse a candidate, Carter believes that they should be able to do so. But in doing so, they should be aware that they risk simply becoming an organ of their chosen political party. This is the risk that I fear the Southern Baptist Convention and other conservative denominations have been running increasingly recklessly for the past 20 years. If Bush pushes them over the edge this year, it's likely to cause these churches to be viewed as wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Republican Party for at least a generation.

But another issue has to do with the question of what political values Christians should endorse. The New York Times article points to opposition to abortion and gay marriage as "biblical values." On the one hand, I have a problem with this because it seems to define Christian values negatively, on the basis of what they're against. The reply to this would then be to express these concerns positively: "We're in favor of 'life' and 'family values.'" Yet these terms are so vague that they don't give much concrete guidance on matters of policy. "Stop abortion" and "stop gay marriage" on the other hand, are very concrete policies.

It's worthwhile to wonder what Christians are actually for. In defining Christianity on the basis of what it's (allegedy) against for the past 25 years, the religious right has given the sense that Christianity has no positive agenda for the future. But there are resources in Christianity for developing a positive social agenda. I for one would point to Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Martin Luther King as offering a positive conception of Christian social responsibility. Conservative Christians and liberal Christians might find common ground in these figures for developing a positive social agenda for the United States, even if they disagree on the hot button issues of abortion and gay marriage.

shoddy and cynical

2004-08-09T08:26:00.000-05:00

Josh Marshall has more on Keyes' senatorial suicide mission.