"E pur si muove!"

The Mass Media: Polluters of the Human Soul?

2012-01-12T15:51:00.009-06:00

I've just re-read Ortega's Mission of the University. Interesting stuff, like everything he wrote, but the best part is the last page, which is a blistering attack on the press -- or what we today would call "the mainstream media." When his colleagues at El Sol, a paper for which he wrote, saw it, they wrote a collective editorial bashing him for it. What's most disturbing is how close to the truth it still is today -- probably much closer than it was in 1930, when he wrote it.

Here we are in the midst of a primary election campaign, and there is a huge amount of reporting on who is going to win (though it's fairly obvious who will win), little reporting on the candidates' positions on the issues, and almost non on the issues themselves. That is exactly the sort of "inversion" Ortega talks about below.

Anyway, here is the passage. Scroll down to get my quickie translation:

[H]oy no existe en la vida pública más “poder espiritual” que la Prensa. La vida pública, que es la verdaderamente histórica, necesita siempre ser regida, quiérase o no. Ella, por si, es anónima y ciega, sin dirección autónoma. Ahora bien: a estas fechas han desaparecido los antiguos “poderes espirituales”: la Iglesia, porque ha abandonado el presente, y la vida pública es siempre actualisima; el Estado, porque, triunfante la democracia, no dirige ya a ésta, sino al revés, es gobernado por la opinión pública. En tal situación, la vida pública se ha entregado a la única fuerza espiritual que por oficio se ocupa de la actualidad: la Prensa.

Yo no quisiera molestar en dosis apreciable a los periodistas. Entre otros motivos, porque tal vez yo no sea otra cosa que un periodista. Pero es ilusorio cerrarse a la evidencia con que se presenta la jerarquía de las realidades espirituales. En ella ocupa el periodismo el rango inferior. Y acaece que la
conciencia pública no recibe hoy otra presión ni otro mando que los que le llegan de esa espiritualidad ínfima rezumada por las columnas del periódico. Tan ínfima es a menudo, que casi no llega a ser espiritualidad; que en cierto modo es antiespiritualidad. Por dejación de otros poderes, ha quedado encargado de alimentar y dirigir el alma pública el periodista, que es no sólo una de las clases menos cultas de la sociedad presente, sino que, por causas, espero, transitorias, admite en su gremio a pseudointelectuales chafados, llenos de resentimiento y de odio hacia el verdadero espíritu. Ya su profesión los lleva a entender por realidad del tiempo lo que momentáneamente mete ruido, sea lo
que sea, sin perspectiva ni arquitectura.

La vida real es de cierto pura actualidad; pero la visión periodística deforma esta verdad reduciendo lo actual a lo instantáneo y lo instantáneo a lo resonante. De aquí que en la conciencia pública aparezca hoy el mundo bajo una imagen rigorosamente invertida. Cuanto más importancia sustantiva y perdurante tenga una cosa o persona, menos hablarán de ella los periódicos, y en cambio, destacarán en sus páginas lo que agota su esencia con ser un “suceso” y dar lugar a una noticia. Habrían de no obrar sobre los periódicos los intereses, muchas veces inconfesables, de sus empresas; habría de mantenerse el dinero castamente alejado de influir en la doctrina de los diarios, y bastaría a la Prensa abandonarse a su propia misión para pintar el mundo del revés. No poco del vuelco grotesco que hoy padecen las cosas -Europa camina desde hace tiempo con la cabeza para abajo y los pies pirueteando en lo alto- se debe a ese imperio indiviso de la Prensa, único “poder espiritual”. Es, pues, cuestión de vida o muerte para Europa rectificar tan ridícula situación. Para ello tiene la Universidad que intervenir en la actualidad como tal Universidad, tratando los grandes temas del día desde su punto de vista propio -cultural, profesional o científico.

[T]oday, there is no “spiritual power” in public life, other than the press. Public life, which is the truly historical life, always needs to be governed, like it or not. It is, in itself, anonymous and blind, without autonomous direction. Well, then, in these days the old “spiritual powers” have disappeared: the Church, because it has abandoned the present, and public life is always superlatively current; the State, because, with democracy triumphant, the state does not direct it, but the reverse, as the state is governed by the opinions of the public. In such a situation, public life has handed itself over to the only spiritual power still functioning at present: the press.

I have no great desire to abuse the journalists. Among other reasons, there is the possibility that I am no more than a journalist myself. But to close oneself off to the obvious fact that the spiritual powers present themselves as a hierarchy is to delude oneself. In this hierarchy, journalism occupies the lowest rank. And so it comes to pass that the public consciousness today receives no other pressure nor command than those that arrive from that debased spirituality that drips from the columns of newspapers.

So degraded is it that it often does not attain the level of spirituality at all, being in a certain manner a form of anti-spirituality. Due to the abdication of the other powers, the one left with the charge to nourish and direct the public spirit is the journalist, who is not only one of the least cultivated classes that society presents, but who, for reasons I hope are transitory, admits to his profession unkempt pseudo-intellectuals full of resentment and hatred for the true realm of the spirit. With no sense of perspective or architecture, they take for the reality of the times whatever makes a momentary noise.

Real life is characterized by a certain pure currentness. But journalistic vision deforms this truth, reducing the current to the instantaneous, and the instantaneous to the sensational. Hence the world appears to public consciousness by way of an image rigorously inverted. The more substantial and enduring importance a thing has, the less they speak of it in the press while, on the other hand, they highlight in their pages whatever will be a “success” and bring notoriety. Even if they were freed from motives that in many cases are unspeakable, even if money were to remain chastely aloof from infuencing the opinions of the dailies, they would nonetheless pursue their mission of depicting the world inside-out. No little of the grotesque inversion we see today – for some time now, Europe has been going along with its head below and its feet pirouetting above – is owing to the undivided power of the press, the sole “spiritual power.” It is a matter of life and death that Europe should rectify such an absurd situation. To that end, the university must intervene in current affairs. It must do so as the university, treating the great themes of the day from its proper points of view, cultural, professional, or scientific.

Moral Thinking in the Real World

2012-01-01T15:06:00.004-06:00

This is a very interesting article on the OWS movement by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

I've been following his work at a distance for some years now. He and his colleagues analyse real-world moral thinking based on "six clusters of moral concerns": "care/harm [eg., compassion for the underdog], fairness/cheating [here, distributive justice has a place], liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation."

Among their findings: liberals and libertarians think almost exclusively in terms of the first three clusters. Social conservatives use all six, extensively. We liberals and libertarians, by comparison, live in a morally truncated world. At a fundamental conceptual level, their moral world is much richer.

The signs at Zucotti park, he finds, are extremely typical of the left-liberal Weltanschauung.

The most interesting thing in this particular article is the Machiavellian advice he offers OWS at the end:

[I]f the protesters continue to focus on the gross inequality of outcomes in America, they will get nowhere. There is no equality foundation. Fairness means proportionality, and if Americans generally think that the rich got rich by working harder or by providing goods and services that were valued in a free market, they won’t support redistributionist policies. But if the OWS protesters can better articulate their case that “the 1 percent” got its riches by cheating, rather than by providing something valuable, or that “the 1 percent” abuses its power and oppresses “the 99 percent,” then Occupy Wall Street will find itself standing on a very secure pair of moral foundations.

When I read this I realized that, by George, equality is not to be found in his six "clusters." What you see is fairness, which (pace Rawls) is not the same thing. Haidt thinks of fairness as a matter of proportionality, not equality. Equality means treating everyone the same. Proportionality means treating people in appropriately different ways.

Then another realization hit me: if he is right, academic political philosophy is even more out of touch with the way normal people think than I had thought it was. Whether you look at Arneson or Cohen or Dworkin - or the vast horde of Rawlsians - it is pretty much wall-to-wall egalitarian. Their big issue is: which kind of eqalitarianism is the right one? The one thing they assume is the fundamental moral foundation for political thinking is something that most Americans, and possibly most human beings, don't really care about at all.

Socialist Santa?

2011-12-25T09:40:00.006-06:00

Is is really possible that this Jim Morin person really doesn't understand the fundamental, ethical difference between giving away your own stuff and giving away things you've taken from others? Good Heavens! In case you don't either, let me give you a clue: one is generous, the other is not. Santa does the one thing and not the other. 'Nuff said?

Anyhoo, Merry Christmas everybody!

My Favorite Christmas Albums

2011-12-22T00:05:00.001-06:00

I repost this every year. If I find time, I'll add an update at the end.

Christmas, as Gene Shepherd told is, is the high point of the kid year. It is also one of the high points of the music year, and the food year, a time for comfort food and its musical equivalent. Here are my favorite versions of this musical comfort food.

1. Bobby Darin: The Twentyfifth Day of December Bobby is one of my favorite musicians of all. He was haunted by a fear that a heart condition would take him out relatively early in life (a premonition that turned out to be true). As a result, he tried to make every moment count, and strove to make every artistic project of his something special. This one is no exception. The songs in this collection are from two sources. One is Christmas carols that are essentially hymns (eg., "Adeste Fidelis"), and the other is black spirituals having to do with the Nativity story (like "Go Tell it on the Mountain"). Santa, Frosty, and Rudolph are all conspicuously absent. Though there is nothing "churchy" about it, this is a great album for someone for whom Christmas is not merely a holiday, but a holy day.

2. A Canadian Brass Christmas In purely musical terms, this is probably the finest Christmas album I've heard. The C. B.'s "arranger" (in this album he is very much a composer), Howard Cable, is some kind of genius. His styles range from an eighteenth-century set of theme and variations on "Here We Come A-Wassailing" to a 'forties swing-band version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," all done with great spirit and style. This would be a good album to play at an elegant holiday-season dinner party. Your guests will look at you with respect for your excellent taste.

3. Crash Test Dummies: Jingle All the Way This CD is remarkable for two things: First, a very beautiful version of the haunting native American "Huron Carol." Second, the best version of "Jingle Bells" ever made on planet Earth. It's done for humorous effect and is guaranteed to make you laugh. (Just click on this link and see!)

4. Christmas with the Vienna Choir Boys, Placido Domingo, and Hermann Prey These were some of the greatest musical performers living at the time the recording was made (baritone Prey died in 1998), and this album is as good as it should be. The feeling is very German. There is "O Tannenbaum," of course, but also two hymns by Luther. All very effective.

5. The New Possibility: John Fahey's Guitar Soli Christmas Album The late, great John Fahey taught a generation of steel string, finger-picking acoustic guitarists what amazing things can be done with that instrument. This is fairly late Fahey, so the musical thinking is very advanced. Most of the entries are really variations on a familiar tune, rather than the tune itself, and the variation is some times so remote that it takes a minute or so to figure out which song Fahey is supposed to be playing. However, the effect is profound and powerful. If you want a more "Christmassy" album, try his first Christmas album, which is much more conventional, but still great.

6. Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops: A Christmas Festival I put this one on the list because it contains both Leroy Anderson's "Sleigh Ride" and his "A Christmas Festival," both of which were originally written for the Pops. "Festival" is a splendiferous synthesis of five or six familiar tunes worked up in the manner of a nineteenth or early twentieth century symphony. The syncopated triplets leading into the coda (which is based on "Jingle Bells") remind be of Sibelius.

7 &8 Oh Come all Ye Faithful: Christmas Carols at Kings College, Cambridge and A Traditional Christmas Carol Collection from the Sixteen Harry Christophers Two beautifully traditional albums of choral versions. The Cambridge one is sung in a room made of stone at the command of Henry VIII. You can't get more traditional than that!

9. A Hannukah Celebration I'm not putting this on the list to be PC. It really is a wonderful album of concert hall arrangements, mainly in the Romantic tradition, of classic melodies. One of my favorites on this disk is Samuel Adler's piece, "To Celebrate a Miracle," which suggests the influence of Adler's teacher, Aaron Copland.

10. Bob Dylan: Christmas in the Heart Recent critics have called the 67-year-old Dylan's voice "gravelly." Nietzsche might call it übergravelly. I like this one because the arrangements are so unabashedly retro. Its like a 'forties or 'fifties Christmas album. (The cheesecake picture above is from album art for this recording.)

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

What is "an Act of God"?

2011-12-17T17:56:00.007-06:00

These TV news writers have a bit of fun here with the legal phrase, "act of God," invoked by the city government in order to avoid compensating their victim - who happens to be a minister - for the damage their falling street light did to his car.

Of course, the colorful legal phrase has nothing to do with God. "It was an act of God" doesn't mean "Jesus wrecked your car." It's mainly about forseeability.

More importantly, it seems to my amateur judgement that the City of Forth Worth is misusing the concept as well. As I understand it, an act of God is a natural event that has harmful consequences, which event was a) not forseeable and which b) the plaintiff had no duty to guard against. Nothing like that seems to be going on here.

I think the Rev. should see a lawyer.

A Guilty Pleasure?

2011-12-17T12:14:00.001-06:00

I repost this every year, for the obvious reasons. Siskel and Ebert used to have a feature they called "Guilty Pleasures" in which they talked about movies that they loved despite the fact that they are frankly not artistic masterpieces. This is one of mine. I am sure Hallmark with be re-airing it multiple times between now and Christmas - it is one of the best things they have done. I recommend setting your DVR! (It is also available on DVD.)

This must be one of my favorite movies. Deborah says I've seen "The Christmas Card" (Hallmark, 2006) more times than Vertigo, which is true. By a factor of five or six. She thinks my love of it may be an early sign of approaching insanity.

There is I suppose an interesting question here. It would be hard to deny that I am an educated person. I have taught film at the university level many times, and published on it as well. Why have I watched my DVD of this Hallmark made-for-TV movie so many times?

Part of the reason is purely personal and idiosyncratic. It was filmed entirely on location in one of my favorite places on Earth, beautiful Nevada City, California. (Imagine a pristine New England village moved to the foothills of the Alps.) It is odd that NC has seldom been used as a film location, and except for this film has never "portrayed" itself.

Also, it is the last film made by Lois Nettleton, one of my favorite actresses.

In my defense (aside from the fact that I am not the only one who loves this little film): Though it is a Hallmark feel-good show, it is probably the best one ever. It is almost certainly the most watched, and Edward Asner was nominated for an Emmy for his role in it.

More important, for me, is the fact that NC is perfectly cast and very effectively used for its role in the film. Sgt. Cody Cullen (John Newton) is the sort of person who would be happiest in a place where he can put down roots, enjoying friends and family, with little need to ever wander far from home. But his father is killed in Vietnam when he is a child, and his mother, emotionally shattered, dies shortly after he graduates from high school. He joins the army, thinking that it will be the family he has lost. But people keep dying around him. When he receives a Christmas card as part of a church cards-for-service-people program from the home town of a dead comrade, killed in a rocket attack in Afghanistan, he reads it compulsively until it nearly falls apart. Before long, he comes back to the states and meets the woman who wrote the card (Alice Evans), struggling with the question of whether to reveal to her that for a while now he has been obsessed with the thought of her and her town, the perfect putting-down-roots place, Nevada City.

...

Below is the Joany Kane (right) the writer of "The Chrismas Card" when just this year she visited Nevada City for the first time. For some reason, Hallmark has only produced one more script by Kane though, as she told me in an email exchange, she has submitted a number of others. On the left is the current mayor of NC. Over Herronor's shoulder you can see a picture of NC's historic National Hotel, which appears in the movie. (Hat-tip for picture to the Nevada City Union.)

BTW, here is an article about the lumber company where the work-related scenes of the movie were filmed. Folks who scouted possible locations found that most lumber mills in the area consisted of corrugated metal buildings that were not very photogenic. At last they found this "historic" mill that still does things "the old-fashioned way."

The Militarization of the Police

2011-12-11T11:42:00.015-06:00

[After writing this, I found this video interview. Warning: violent sequence.]

Here is an excellent article by Radley Balko on a very disturbing trend: More and more, police forces across the US are using military-style weapons, tactics, and body armor in raids on the homes and businesses of citizens suspected of breaking the law. To some extent, this trend is powered by the "war" (note the word choice) on drugs, but ...

[P]aramilitary creep has also spread well beyond the drug war. In recent years, SWAT teams have been used to break up neighborhood poker games, including one at an American Legion Hall in Dallas. In 2006, Virginia optometrist Sal Culosi was killed when the Fairfax County Police Department sent a SWAT team to arrest him for gambling on football games. SWAT teams are also now used to arrest people suspected of downloading child pornography. Last year, an Austin, Texas, SWAT team broke down a man's door because he was suspected of stealing koi fish from a botanical garden.

I grew up thinking that the degree of force used by the police is proportional to the threat posed by the suspect. The cops only "come on like Gang Busters" if they are busting an actual gang. But that, Radley explains, was then, and this as now:

The amount of force the government uses to uphold a given law is no longer determined only by the threat to public safety posed by the suspect. Now, it appears to give an indication of how serious the government is about the law being enforced. The DEA sends SWAT teams barreling into the offices of doctors accused of over-prescribing painkillers not because the doctors pose any real threat of violence, but because prescription drug abuse is a hot issue right now. The feds sent SWAT teams into marijuana dispensaries not because medicinal pot merchants are inherently dangerous people, but because officials believe the dispensaries are openly defying federal law. It is, to put it bluntly, a terror tactic. Sending a couple cops with a clipboard to hand out fines and shut down a dispensary doesn't convey a strong message. Sending a bunch of cops dressed like soldiers to point guns at dispensary owners and their customers certainly does.
There's also little evidence that people who consume child pornography pose much of a violent threat to police officers, yet the federal government now routinely sends SWAT teams to apprehend them. The amount of force, again, isn't dictated by the threat posed by the suspect, but by the disgust the government wants to register at the alleged crime.

If he is right about this, this is a very dangerous trend indeed.

If the police are using such tactics in order to intimidate and terrify the suspect, mainly because they hate the alleged offense, then these tactics are in effect part of the suspect's punishment. That is, what we have here is a case of summary punishment by the police, without due process of law. In some societies, the police apprehent people for (possible) punishment by others, in others, your encounter with the cops is actually part of your punishment. Surely, this one of the sharpest differences between a free society and a police state.

It violates or threatens at least two basic principles of a free society:

1. Procedural rights. In a free society, citizens have a right against the state, not merely that they not be punished more than they deserve, but that the question of their desert be decided in the right way. This generally involves a careful weighing of the evidence, a right to defend oneself, and a heavy burden of proof for the acusers. Obviously, if the police have probable cause to look for marijuana in your house, this standard has not been met.

2. The rule of law. This complex idea means a number of different things. It means that the law does not merely constrain the citizens of the state, it constrains the officers of the state as well. It means that when the state inflicts punishment, it is based on legal considerations and not on political ones. If Radley is right, the police are choosing to use these terror tactics on the basis of political considerations like the fact that the populace hates your alleged crime (eg., downloading child pornography) or that your activities threaten the power of politicians to keep their jobs (eg., the OWS demonstrators).

This would be a very big step in a very bad direction.

What I Learned from Climategate

2011-11-29T12:17:00.007-06:00

I am still struck by how many intelligent people, some of whom I respect, say that the Climategate emails are a ho-hum matter. They apparently know a lot more about how "mainstream" climatologists work than I do. I actually learned four things that I did not know before. Apparently, they did know these things. At the risk of boring someone, and in the spirit of getting on the same page, let me list these things:

1. I had thought the the famous hockey stick graph and other global temperature information represented in some direct way readings of actual thermometers in the real world. In fact, these results do not directly report such raw data. Rather, climatologists nudge and tweak the raw data in various ways. This is understandable, in and of itself. After all, there are a great many of these thermometers around the world, and they record their data in a variety of situations. Some sit near air conditioners that spew hot air, others sit on pavement, or on rooftops, or on green grass. Not all have equal value. Adjustments or allowances must be made. This wouldn't be so bad, of course, if these tweaks follow fixed formulas, which are published.

2. In fact, these adjustments in the data do not follow fixed formulas. Well, that is not good, but it wouldn't be so bad if these adjustments in the data are not being made by people who think they know what the results of the data ought to be. However,

3. These adjustments are being made by people who have very strong, even passionate views on what the results are supposed to be. Hm. Well, this doesn't look good. But it's not really, really bad, as far as the science involved is concerned, if the raw data are publicly available and can be checked by others, to see if they get the same results from the same thermometer readings. Science is all about reproducible results, after all! But, no...

4. The raw data are not publicly available. In fact, that is what precipitated Climategate in the first place. Somebody actually had put in a Freedom of Information Act (England has a FOIA, just as the US does) request to see the damn data. Many of the emails involve these climatologists conspiring to continue to conceal this information. Indeed one of the things I learned from Climategate (but didn't seem to surprise certain other people) was that a significant portion of these data had been deliberately destroyed and cannot ever be checked by anyone.

The people who say "this is what academics are like" and "this is how science works" evidently knew all this. I have to confess my ignorance here: I did not. I learned it from the Climategate emails.

I should add the it is also clear that the academics and scientists that these people know are very different from the ones that I have known.

The Lessons of Climategate

2011-11-28T12:33:00.003-06:00

In response to the new load of 5,000 emails from warmist climatologists that were dumped on the public last week, I am reposting the post I did in 2009, when Climategate itself first broke out, with an update.

I've noticed a couple of libertarian economists who have said that the CRU scandal is no big deal. "Nothing much here," says Tyler Cowan. Robin Hanson says " this behavior has long been typical when academics form competing groups, whether the public hears about such groups or not," and that "academia works this way."

I think this last is, quite literally, a bizarre thing to say. (I gather that one of Hanson's projects is the idea of "prediction markets," which is a way of compelling people who opine to be careful and honest -- so he may have a professional reason to think that academics are generally sloppy and dishonest. I don't know what Cowan's problem is.*)

First, let's remember what the "this way" is, in which academia is supposed to work. It includes trying to get a journal editor fired who approves the publication of views with which one disagrees. and trying to accomplish this end by threatening to withhold one's own publications from the journal, as well as organizing a boycott (presumably secret a one) of the journal. (See this.)

One possible objection to what I just said: The evidence I discuss below only shows someone declaring an intention to carry out these abuses, and does not show that he actually did them. My reply: Since these actions would be carried out in secret, we may have no way of knowing whether they have been carried out or not. What we do have is evidence that in a very important section of the pro-AGW (anthropogenic global warming) scientific community such behavior is not considered to be beyond the pale, across the line, off the menu, etc. etc.

There is a very, very good reason why such behavior has to be regarded as beyond the pale. Take a look at the diagram at the top of this page (hat-tip to Watt's Up With That). Do you see a box labeled "make threats" or "organize boycotts"? I don't. Why do you suppose these boxes have been omitted from the diagram?

Short answer: Scientific method is biased in favor of the truth. It cannot be used to support just anything. Threats are biased in favor of the powerful, they cannot be used by just anybody. And if you are powerful, they can be used to support just about anything, true or not.

If the scientific community is to arrive at reliably true results, it is vitally important that this sort of behavior be regarded as off the menu. As far as we can see, when Michael E. Mann (allegedly) wrote the offending email, no one said "Frankly, and with all due respect, what you are proposing would be improper." And that is a real scandal.

________________________
* Update: On second thought, I do have a theory about what Cowan's problem is. Econ and climatology have something in common: both have huge political implications and trillions of dollars and enormous amounts of sheer power are at stake. As a result of this, both disciplines have been corrupted. For that reason, there probably are economists who behave in the deplorable way in which these climatologists are behaving. This is not a fact about academics, but about money and power. Number theorists do not behave that way, nor do metaphysicians.

Anti-Government or Pro-Goverment? Make Up Your Mind!

2011-11-19T13:47:00.010-06:00

Update: Since writing what you see below, I found out that Michelle Fields is actually a libertarian and not a conservative, so she's actually not a good example of the general point I was making here. But of course the point is logically independent of the instance that I ignorantly chose to illustrate it.

Here you see conservative reporter Michelle Fields being shoved to the ground by NYC police. (Hat-tip to Ray Sawhill.) (Earlier this year we at "E pur si murove!" enjoyed her capturing Mat Damon's curious claim about the "shitty salaries" that government school teachers get.)

I'm sure her tears at the end were more a matter of shock and anger than physical pain. But what is she shocked about? Doesn't she know what police do?

There is something here that I've never understood. How can conservatives say they are anti-government, or at least skeptical of government, and yet love the police and the military? What could be more government-y than the police and the military? They are where the government rubber hits the road. They are the hands-on part of the government.

I see the mirror image of this mystery on the other side of the spectrum. Liberals like government. Okay, here there is a problem, because they almost never admit to this. But it does seem clear that they tend to see new government rules and more taxpayer money (and not free markets, free discussion, or ordinary human decency) as the solution to society's problems.

Okay, to avoid being accused of exaggerating, I'll just put it like this. Conservatives: favorable attitude toward police and military, unfavorable attitude toward government. Liberals: unfavorable attitude toward police and military, favorable attitude toward government.

I don't see how this can be denied. And yet it makes no logical sense.

After all, what is government? Government makes rules. There is only one big difference between these rules and other rules - such as the rule that you are supposed to say "you're welcome" when someone says "thank you," or the rule that in English the adjective comes before the noun. Government rules are enforced -- by police of some sort or other. That's it.

If you favor more rules and regulations, you favor the cops -- the government's muscle -- making people do things, whether they want to or not. If you favor fewer of these things, isn't it because you don't want people to be muscled in this way?

Like I say, I don't get it. (HT to Alan Kors for picture.)

Defending the Oxford Comma

2011-11-15T14:35:00.007-06:00

I just got involved in an internet freeforall on this issue, which I've wondered about over the years. Do you say "eggs, toast, and orange juice" or "eggs, toast and orange juice"? I have always put in the "extra" comma, as did Robert Nozick, author of Anarchy, State, [sic] and Utopia.

One commenter spoke of being surprised when the last comma "came into use." Actually, I'm pretty sure The Oxford comma was the original system, gradually it has been disappearing. Take a look at any eighteenth century author, such as David Hume or Dr. Johnson. It's commas all the way down! Over the years, language tends to become simpler. People are "economical." When the process goes too far, we say "lazy. In this case, I think its laziness.

I see two reasons for the Oxford comma: 1) consistency - why should the last two elements of a series be different from the others? 2) the breath rule - commas represent pauses.

Some see the comma itself as inconsistent. Why is there no comma after "eggs" in "I had eggs and toast." The second comment above explains why. Just say "I had eggs and toast" aloud. See? No pause after "eggs."

Some say that the "and" at the end of the series does exactly what the comma does, making the comma redundant. Not so, if only because "and" is sometimes part of the name of one thing, and not part of a series at all. Like every other word, it is ambiguous. Consider how a "no extra comma" person will have to write this sentence: ""His eclectic CD collection included pop, heavy metal, and rhythm and blues." To my eye, the two "ands" become somewhat confusing.

On the other side, the only real argument is economy. That final comma is "extra." But it is a very weak sort of economy -- how much ink is spilled for that little curly mark? It is an argument that vanishes if there are any considerations on the other side. And there are.

(HT to Bella Shortt for picture.)

The "Wacky" Religious Beliefs of Politicians: Should We Care?

2011-10-24T15:52:00.011-05:00

Mitt Romney's Mormonism as inspired a lot of discussion lately about whether we it is okay to vote against a politician because of their religion. As everyone knows, Mormons have beliefs that seem odd to non-Mormons. Now it turns out that Herman Cain has an unusual supernatural-related belief as well: that the number 45 has a special significance in his life, often appearing as a "sign" of important events. Not too surprisingly, this has been discussed in the leftosphere in posts with titles like "Herman Cain is Even Crazier than You Thought." Here is a thoughtful discussion of whether Romney's religion is something we should care about.

Well, should we? I just want to make one point that hasn't been made yet in the discussions I have seen.

A lot of the discussion has been about how "wacky" the religious or supernaturalist beliefs of Cain and Romney supposedly are. My point is this: I don't think that the "wackiness" of a religious belief matters at all. The simple reason is that, in my experience, it does not correlate with anything else, including wackiness of non-religious beliefs.

As a senior in high school, I lived in a town (Santa Rosa, CA) that had a substantial Mormon community. I knew several Mormon teenagers and though I was already an atheist I even attended services in their church a couple of times. (No, I wasn't flirting with Mormon beliefs. I was flirting with a Mormon girl.)

These people, one and all, were as industrious, rational, well-adjusted and decent as anyone you would hope to meet. On the one hand. On the other hand, they believed things like -- that (some) people become gods when they die, that Satan is the estranged brother of Jesus, and that American Indians are descended from the lost tribes of Israel.

Facts of the latter sort seemed to have no effect on facts of the former sort -- unless it was a beneficial effect! .

I see a much more general phenomenon here. I have often noticed that distinctively religious belief, in general, not just the "wackiness" of such beliefs, is curiously insulated from the rest of life, and in particular from beliefs about other things. (This is one of the things that inspired philosopher Georges Rey to write brilliant paper, Meta-Atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-Deception.)

I know scientists who are sincere religious believers, and those beliefs as often as not are as fuzzy and sloppy as their scientific work is clear and rigorous.

Religious belief seems to be a part of a person's life in which they get their crazies out. If this sounds offensive or nutty to you, just interpret it, for the moment, as a sort of thought experiment, as a thesis about religious beliefs different from your own. ... Does that help? Well, just as Romney's "magic underwear" seems wacky to you, so your belief that the Creator of the whole universe cares whether your marriage ends in divorce or not seems wacky to me. I have even heard tell of Christians praying to win at football -- as if the Great Mystery would pick sides in a game!

Religions are full of goofball ideas, and yet that does not seem to cause people to have goofball ideas in other realms. Like those scientists, we use one sort of logic for religion and a completely different one for everything else.

I can think of two possible explanations for this:

This subject-matter is special. Religion is about invisible beings with inexplicable super-powers. It just feels natural to think about them in ways that are paradoxical, paralogical, evidence-free, and obviously wish-fulfilling.

Or how about this:

There are no consequences. If you think irrationally about the stock market and act on those thoughts, reality will punish you for it. But if you think irrationally about an invisible super-being -- making sure that these thoughts do not lead you to make predictions about the real world - reality will not punish you.

Anyway, I'm not worried about the wackiness of a politician's religious beliefs. Except for real-world implications (for instance, regarding abortion or gay rights) their religious thoughts can just run riot as far as I am concerned - which, as often as not, they will.

Sibelius' Second

2011-10-16T10:28:00.008-05:00

The last two movements of Sibelius' Symphony No. 2 in D. The magnificent finale begins at 5:50.

Last night Nat and I heard the Madison Symphony Orchestra play this work.

I guess that it's a testimony to the power and vivdness of this music that people have often felt a strong need to look for some extra-musical meaning for it. According to Michael Allsen's excellent notes for the MSO concerts, there is a long-standing story that Sibelius did confide a "program" for the symphony to a friend of his: "a vaguely defined set of impressions of Finnish culture and politics." Politics!? I find that it gives me images of far northern landscapes: magnificent wastelands of forest, rock, and ice. The anthem-like themes of the finale seem to cry out for words. The brass choir seems to be signing the praise of something or someone. But whom? What? Each listener must supply his or her own sacred object.

As Ayn Rand said in a very interesting if quirky essay, "Art and Cognition":

Music cannot tell a story, it cannot deal with concretes, it cannot convey a specific existential phenomenon, such as a peaceful countryside or a stormy sea. The theme of a composition entitled “Spring Song” is not spring, but the emotions which spring evoked in the composer. Even concepts which, intellectually, belong to a complex level of abstraction, such as “peace,” “revolution,” “religion,” are too specific, too concrete to be expressed in music. All that music can do with such themes is convey the emotions of serenity, or defiance, or exaltation. Liszt’s “St. Francis Walking on the Waters” was inspired by a specific legend, but what it conveys is a passionately dedicated struggle and triumph—by whom and in the name of what, is for each individual listener to supply.

(HT for photo to the C. I. A.)

The Aulaqi Killing and the Law

2011-10-01T22:35:00.021-05:00

As I have said before (here and here), the process by which a liberal democracy decides to kill a particular combatant in the battlefield is very, very different from that in which it decides whether to execute someone accused of a crime. One process is very inaccurate and treats you as having no right to due process, the other is relatively very accurate and treats you as loaded with rights, including due process.

Previously, there were two reasons, that I know of, to be concerned about the US government's avowed intention to treat Aulaqi as an enemy in the field and not a criminal, both of which were debated last year when his father sued to get him taken off the kill-or-capture list: 1) his location in Yemen is not a battlefied, and 2) he is an American citizen (born in New Mexico) and thus entitled to due process.

This article raises a new concern. The administration has revealed that they determined that this killing is indeed legal, and issued a memorandum explaining exactly why it is, but refused to publish it. In other words, the legal justification for their action is a secret.

The concern here is that law and secrecy do not mix.

Lon Fuller wrote a great book, The Morality of Law, in which he argued (among a great many other things) that a secret law is not a law at all. His reasoning was that "law is the process of subjecting human conduct to the governance of rules," and a secret rule cannot be followed: thus it produces no governance. It is simply a means by which tyrants can inflict violence on the unsuspecting and the unoffending.Of course that argument cannot be applied here, at least not directly, since this is a case, not of a secret rule applied to the subject, but of a secret legal justification acted upon by the sovereign. Yet a case might be made for a broader version of Fuller's rule, which would apply to both.

Consider a third case, the secret legal hearing associated with the World War II era Supreme Court decision of ex parte Quirin. Eight German spies (including two American citizens) landed in the US on a mission to commit sabotage against military plants and facilities. Some were immediately spotted by a Coast Guard patrol, who sounded the alarm. This apparently had no effect whatsoever. Two of them, Ernest Burger and George Dasch (pictured above), turned themselves in and informed on the other six. They had considerable difficulty in doing so, however, as the still clueless FBI thought their story was some kink of hoax.

President Roosevelt convened a secret tribunal that, incredibly, sentenced all eight to death. Prompted by appeals from the Attorney General and the FBI Director, FDR commuted the sentences of Burger and Dasch, the two informers, to life and thirty years respectively. This was their reward for taking some trouble to spare the US from a potential disaster -- a result the American law enforcement and counterespionage aparatus probably would have been unable to achieve without their help. (To his credit, Harry Truman had the two men freed and deported after the war was over).

Surely, this tribunal's stunningly unjust treatment of two men who had probably delivered American lives and military resources from destruction had a lot to do with the fact that it was conducted in secret.

Part of the problem is that people tend to behave better when they think that they are being watched, or at least that outsiders will eventually find out what they did and how they did it.

But there is a deeper problem. The system in which Americans live was altered by Quirin the case and the killing of Aulaqi, both of which, as I understand it, were legal innovations. It is part of the democratic conception of justice that such changes be justified to these people.

Indeed, a secret justification has some of the inherent absurdity of a secret rule. The administration has justified killing this man -- to whom? It looks like the answer is: to the people who wanted to kill him. They are not the primary ones who are owed a justification.

Why I am Against the Death Penalty

2011-09-26T20:43:00.005-05:00

In the pro-death-penalty column by Jonah Goldberg that I posted about yesterday, we see this statement:

We hear so much about the innocent people who’ve gotten off death row — thank God — because of new DNA techniques. We hear very little about the criminals who’ve had their guilt confirmed by the same techniques (or who’ve declined DNA testing because they know it will remove all doubt). Death-penalty opponents are less eager to debate such cases because they want to delegitimize “the system.”

This statement seems so strange to me that I am not sure I understand it. For one thing, it should be obvious to Goldberg that the concern for death penalty foes is not exactly the people who got off death row, but what this indicates about the people who did not. So far, the Innocence Project has exonerated 273 convicts with DNA evidence, 17 of whom had been on death row. Since DNA evidence is available in only a fraction of criminal cases, this means that innocent people have been and will be executed in the large number of cases where it is not.

Government does not do anything very efficiently. How efficient do you think it will be at only executing the guilty?

If we have such an institution as capital punishment, we know that we will execute the innocent, just as, when we go to war, we know that we will kill many non-combatants. That is why war can only be justified by the very gravest of reasons -- namely, national self-defense against actual or imminent attack.

What is the reasoning that is supposed to justify capital punishment? Goldberg asks us to consider the many guilty people who are executed.

Maybe the idea is that, while executing the innocent is a bad thing, executing those who deserve it is a good thing. You have to weigh one against the other.

No you don't. He thinks that if we don't have the death penalty, the most heinous offenders will get off easy. They deserve death, but will only get prison time.

Actually, I agree with this statement. But some will get off easy no matter what arrangements we make. After all, aren't some offenders who deserve death a lot worse than others? And yet they get the same punishment -- death. Aren't they getting off easy?

More important, we have no right to maintain a system that we know will execute the innocent, simply in order to inflict a more fitting retribution on those who are not.

On the other hand, maybe I am misinterpreting Goldberg. He might be denying, or merely ignoring, the inevitability of executing the innocent. He says a number of times that his favored policy is to use the death penalty, but only in cases where we are certain of guilt. He does not seem to notice that this is the policy that we actually have. We only execute people when guilt has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt -- and it doesn't work well enough.

The Death Penalty: Bad Arguments on Both Sides

2011-09-25T19:31:00.006-05:00

In the wake of the Troy Davis (pictured) case a lot of people are thinking about capital punishment, including some arguments that seem silly to me. I just read a column by Jonah Goldberg that gives an argument for the death penalty that I find stupefyingly unconvincing.

Before I get to that, I want to point out that he says something about arguments for the other side that is simply not true:

Opponents of the death penalty believe that no one deserves to be executed. Again, it’s an honorable position, but a difficult one to defend politically in a country where the death penalty is popular. So they spend all of their energy cherry-picking cases, gumming up the legal system, and talking about “uncertainty.”

Well, I'm against the death penalty and, to be blunt, the idea that "no one deserves to be executed" has never made any sense to me. It seems to mean that nothing a human being can do is bad enough to deserve death. There seem to be so many obvious counterexamples to that claim that I would feel like I am taking cheap shots by citing one. I'll tell you what: please think of the most loathsome murder you have ever heard of. Surely if the person who did that were to be put to death as painlessly as possible, it would be no more than they deserve: in fact, a lot less.

If it can be just for the state to punish someone at all, if they may rightly in some cases take away all of a person's liberty and property, and for the rest of their lives at that, and subject them to the degradation of life in prison, then why on Earth is it necessarily unjust if they also take a person's life? If they can take away everything that makes life worth living, what is so special, as far as desert is concerned, about taking that extra step? I have never understood that.

... So why am I against the death penalty? And what is the argument of Goldberg's that I think is so bad? I'll try to post about that tomorrow.

Live-Blogging the Second Gary Johnson Debate

2011-09-22T20:04:00.028-05:00

Yep, that's how I think of it. It's the first time since May that millions of people have had an opportunity to hear from the former governor of New Mexico and compare him to the rest of this field.

Wow. Michelle Bachman just said: You earned your income, you should keep it all. That's not the government's money. Is she an anarchist, now?

Santorum just said that public employee unions should not be able to negotiate wages and benefits. God I hate agreeing with him!

Herman Cain has a lot of fans in the audience!

Johnson was just invited to attack Ron Paul and he refused. Instead he promoted himself and endorsed the fair tax.

Romney was asked how you define "rich." He didn't answer. I define as rich everyone who lives on an urban lot so large they cannot possibly be annoyed by their neighbors.

That's the only reason I envy the rich.

Rick Perry just said he does not favor considering giving Social Security to the states. That sure isn't how I remember it.

Oooh. Megan is trying to get Romney to apply the S-word to Obama. He says the one label he wants to hear applied to O is "former President."

Herman Cain likes Chilean models. Well who doesn't?

What? What's that? Oh. Nevermind.

I wish Perry would stop smirking. It's going to give me nightmares tonight.

Gary J. said he would abolish the Dept. of Education. Like Ronald Regan did. Oh, that's right. He only said he would.

Perry accused Romney of favoring O's "Race to the Top." Romney: "Nice try." He says what he favors is retaining teachers based on performance alone.

Did Bachmann just become the fourth one to promise to close the D o E? I lost count!

Republicans sure like fences!

Ouch. Romney just scored a hit agst Gov. Perry. Illegal aliens, he says, get free tuition a the U of Texas, while citizens from other states do not. True?

Perry seems to be saying it is -- and accusing those who do not approve of being heartless. That got both cheers and boos.

Santorum is hammering the same point. Boy, do I hate agreeing with this jerk.

Chris Wallace just confronted Ron Paul with one of those comments of his that makes him remind people of their crazy uncle: in this case it was his claim that a border fence might be used to keep us in as well as keeping others out. He wisely refrained from repeating that rather goofy comment.

Foreign policy: They all love Israel. I think Cain just said that an attack on Israel should be regarded as an attack on us. Yikes.

Johnson favors trade with Cuba. Bachmann claims Cuba is a state sponsor of terror and we don't trade with sponsors of terror (like Pakistan?).

Bachmann favors people practicing their religion in the public square.

Would Santorum bring back "don't ask don't tell"? Yes. It sounds like he said that those heterosexuals in the military should keep their sexuality to themselves, too.

Huh?

Bachmann is invited to revisit her controversial comment on how that Perry vaccine causes mental retardation. She turned it into another attack on Perry.

Perry says he will always err on the side of life. Does that mean he has changed his position on the death penalty?

Cain would be dead if Obamacare had been in effect when he had cancer. Will Wilkinson just blogged: "Because Cain was able to personalise the answer, it was the best of the attacks on Obamacare of all the GOP debates so far."

True.

These people seem to agree about Obama. They are against him.

Johnson just got off the best line of the night: "My neighbor's two dogs have created more shovel-ready jobs than this administration."

I think Perry just imagined Newt and Herman Cain being possible lovers.

It's over!

My verdict: Romney was very smewth, as always. Johnson did well and probably advanced his fortunes. Let's see if he gets a bump in the polls.

Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme?

2011-09-13T07:52:00.003-05:00

Thanks to the Republican debates, the idea the Social Security is a Ponzi scheme is back in the news! I thought I would repost a comment I published on this notion the last time it turned up, during the furor about the Madoff case. Also see my comment on the complexities of this idea here.

Carlo Ponzi had a brilliant idea -- brilliant at any rate by the standards appropriate to judging the intelligence of criminals: Invite people to invest their money in your scheme, and pay them surprisingly large returns. But these payments are merely taken out of the deposits of new customers, who will be payed from deposits of still newer customers. But there really are no investments involved, and they rest of the money isn't going anywhere but into the conman's pockets.

Now that the economic downturn has exposed Bernie Madoff's truly despicable crime, the largest Ponzi in history, such schemes are in the news again, and some libertarians are making the familiar claim that the Social Security Administration is itself a Ponzi pyramid, far larger even than Madoff's . If so, the notion that Madoff's is the biggest such scam ever are in fact wrong. His is merely the largest private one. No one does it like the state.

Is it true that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme? I don't think it is (nor is the related idea true that SS is "insolvent"). I think the comparison does bring out features of the SSA that are ethically problematic, but the ethical problems are rather different from those that consigned Mr. Ponzi to prison (and, were there only such a place, to Hell).

The SSA pays Grampa Jones with money extracted from Jones Jr., who will eventually be paid with money extracted from Jones III. There is that much resemblance to a Ponzi.* The difference of course is that everyone knows from the outset that this is what Social Security is like.

As Nat pointed out to me recently, one of the important features of a Ponzi scheme, very often, is that the swindler sometimes avoids making payments to his victims. "Wow that's a huge dividend! Why don't you just reinvest it for me? I'll make even more!" Why sure, I'll reinvest it for ya. Heh heh. With SS, no beneficiary would ever do that because no one is under the illusion that this is an investment plan.

Social Security is nothing but a conduit by which wealth is extracted from those who produced it and transferred to those who did not. Of course, that is also true of a Ponzi scheme. But the difference is that Pozis do it with fraud, while SS does it with force. Social Security is to a Ponzi scheme as coercion is to deceit.

That is not a morally trivial difference. The people who received dividends from Madoff were benefiting from acts that violated the rights of others. But they were unwitting and innocent beneficiaries. What is Grampa Jones? He may be innocent, but not because he is unwitting. The ethics of his position are more complex and murky than those of Madoff's victims.

There is a particularly vicious sort of coercion involved in the SS system that many others have noticed. Suppose that we the people decide that we want to liquidate the system. What do we do with Grampa? All his working life he has been paying money into this growing, spreading system. Can we abandon him? And where will the money to support him come from? And how will we refund the money that the still-productive who have paid, usually enormous amounts,** into the system? They would have put part of that money into private retirement accounts, but now they can't do so, because the SSA took it from them.

That is why the economic sterility of the system is ethically problematic: not because it is fraudulent, but because it makes it all the more coercive. There is no fund of capital that might have enabled us to liquidate it. The generation that voted SS into being were handcuffing us to a monster. In this way, what they did was profoundly anti-democratic.

Update: Also, see this.
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* Interestingly enough, when Junior pays more that Gramps needs, a trust fund accumulates, but by law this money must be spent on government bonds. In other words, it goes into the pockets of the perpetrator of the scheme. Again, like a Ponzi snow job.

** In 77% of cases, the employee's contribution plus that of the employer (which ultimately comes out of the employee's hide as well) is greater than the entire federal income tax paid by the worker.

Crying Wolf

2011-08-27T12:36:00.006-05:00

As a number of people have pointed out, Hurricane Irene is the Apocalypse that wasn't. Indeed, this article suggests that a substantial number of people simply didn't believe the shrill warnings we got from the politicians and the press in the first place.

It puts one in mind, does it not, of a certain Aesop's fable, known to scholars as number 210 in Curry's catalog. (Okay, I'm a pedant. It's my job. So shoot me.) Here it is:

There was a boy tending the sheep who would continually go up to the embankment and shout, 'Help, there's a wolf!' The farmers would all come running only to find out that what the boy said was not true. Then one day there really was a wolf but when the boy shouted, they didn't believe him and no one came to his aid. The whole flock was eaten by the wolf. [Aesop's Fables. A new translation by Laura Gibbs. Oxford University Press (World's Classics): Oxford, 2002.]

Fear seems to be an abundant and inevitable product of the democratic state. I have commented earlier that this means that, if its leaders have their way, its citizens will live in a permanent state of being more or less scared out of their wits.

I now realize that there is also a down side if they don't have their way, and people just stop believing what they are told. There is a legitimate role for alarms and warnings, if they are overused they will cease to work.

Update: On the crying wolf theme, see the last paragraph of this.

But maybe the best comment is this.

On the Road Again

2011-08-18T22:43:00.004-05:00

Deborah and I are on a camping trip in the Sylvania Wilderness Area, so I won't be posting for several about a week.

Sylvania is an interesting place from the point of view of welfare economics, as I point out here. I posted some pictures from an earlier visit here.

To the left here you see the view from our camp site. We have an entire bay to ourselves!

Our house is being guarded by our son Nat and a pack of attack-trained Shiba Inus.

Jon Stewart on Media Coverage of Ron Paul

2011-08-15T23:30:00.003-05:00

Very funny -- and literally true. Except for the part where he says that Fox ought to like this guy. Nuh-uh. They know what they are doing. They're just bigger fans of perpetual war than you think.

Live-Blogging the Republican Debate

2011-08-11T20:03:00.034-05:00

Well, I expect to hear a lot of Obama-bashing tonight, and it was there already in the first two answers (Bachman and Romney).

Sad to see Gary Johnson again not allowed to participate. I've been following him on Twitter, and I noticed that he seemed depressed. "People will start to notice us," he said. That's not exactly rallying the troops.

Romney, asked if he would have vetoed the budget bill, seemed to dodge the question.

Ron Paul is talking too fast, as usual.

Pawlenty repeated his charge that Bachman's "record of accomplishment in Congress is non-existent." Apparently this means she hasn't written legislation that passed both houses. Isn't that an unfair criticism? The last five years have been bad ones for someone with her ideology to pass legislation. Her answer was that she has been leading the resistance, which seems like the right answer to me.

Chris Wallace asks Gingrich about his staff quitting on him and Gingrich, and Newt gets all huffy. The crowd seems to like it, but I didn't.

Cain: I am learning. Well, good, but Presidential OJT hasn't worked that well for us.

Panel member Byron York: He has 19th-century hair.

Someone once described Rick Santorum as having "a punchable face."

Romney just came out as a tenther! The feds only get to do what the Constitution says they can do. That's his main defense of Romneycare: this ought to be done by the states.

Pawlenty is taking swings at Romney and Bachman, both in the top three. Someone has been telling him to become Macho Man.

Ron Paul says that under the federal Constitution, the states have a right to do bad things (like force people to buy health insurance). True. Then Santorium goes berserk, saying that this means that they have the right to legalize polygamy and impose enforced sterilization. What a complete moron.

Gingrich keeps objecting to tough questions as "gotcha questions." Oh, just answer them, dang it!

Quite a heated exchange between Santorum and Ron Paul on Iran policy! I'm with Paul on this one, as you may know.

Paul points out that Bachman's "no miranda rights for terrorists" involves convicting someone of being a terrorist without due process.

She also would do "anything" to prevent Iran from getting a nuke.

If you thought Afghanistan and Iraq were quagmires, just wait until we invad Iran, Michelle!

I could swear I just heard Santorum say Iran will destroy civilization as we know it. And people used to say the Ronster is the crazy one.

The audience keeps booing tough questions. Bachman has quoted the Bible saying wives should be subissive. Would she be submissive as pres? Her answer is that she interprets the Biblical notion of submissiveness as "respect."

Romney says marriage should be a federal issues. With a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

Paul takes a laissez-faire position on what marriage is. Good!

Now they're fighting about who is the most pro-life. So far, two are in favor of criminal sentences for doctors who perform abortions. Why not the woman? I've never understood that. If it's murder, isn't she at least as guilty as the doctor? The pro-life Weltanschauung is an impenetrable mystery to me.

Gingrich just took a more or less Paulian position on the Federal Reserve. Amazing how much more mainstream Paul is than he was four years ago. And he hasn't moved an inch!

I thought they were going to spend the who evening attacking Obama. No, they mixed it up with each other, plenty.

They are summarizing now. The last event I live-blogged was an hr. long Obama speech. It was excruciatingly boring. This 2-hr. event was much more interesting. Frightening at times, but interesting.

How this debate affected my opinion of the candidates:

Romney: About the same.
Bachman: Lower (on the issues).
Paul: Higher.
Pawlenty: Lower (as a person).
Cain: Higher. Fixed some earlier mistakes.
Santorum: Lower. Much lower. In every way.
Huntsman: Lower (on the issues).
Gingrich: Higher on the issues, lower as a person. At this moment he's being interviewed on TV, and he's still bitching about Chris Wallace's questions.

Cris Wallace: Higher!

The Mystery of the English Riots

2011-08-10T14:37:00.010-05:00

I've been struggling to understand the arson, looting, and senseless violence in England over that last four days. That sort of behavior is so alien to me that this is like understanding beings from another planet. This article, though tainted by the shortcomings of the author's Tory priorities, seemed helpful to me. He says, in effect, these people are not from another planet, they are from the future. The may or may or may not be from your future. For sure they are out of a futuristic novel and movie call A Clockwork Orange. Say hello to Alex and his droogies!

The idea is that the system, one of the wealthiest welfare states on Earth, has created a large underclass of young people with no marketable skills and little or no interest in being productively employed, kept in useless idleness on the dole.

The distinguished political philosopher John Rawls claimed that if we arrange social institutions so that inequalities are in the interest of the least well-off people this will boost their self-esteem because it will show that we care about and value then. He never went into just what institutions fill this bill (with commendable humility, he figured he is not qualified to do this, not being an economist) but it seems to me that for this particular point, he would have to accept as an example of such a system getting a monthly check in the mail of money taken from the most well-off people. The stuff the system gives them, just for being the worst-off brings a convincing message: you are good.

No it doesn't. The message it carries is more like: "So sorry you can't seem to fend for yourself! Well, here's some stuff produced by people who, unlike you, can fend for themselves. Hope things start lookin' up for you! Cheers!" How self-esteem-boosting is that?

Rawls was a brilliant man, but he was a rotten psychologist. Much better were Dostoyevsky (in Notes from the Underground), Nietzche, and Erich Hoffer. These people would tell you that people don't get a sense of dignity and self-worth by being paid for nothing. They get it from a sense of efficacy (that is, power), and this can only come from their own action. And if for some reason they can't or won't act constructively, then they will act destructively, if only to prove that they are still human beings and have to be taken seriously.
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Update: For an interpretation similar to the above-linked article (but in the leftist Guardian) see this.

On the Road

2011-08-08T09:02:00.003-05:00

I'm driving to River Falls, WI to visit my good friend and fellow Nietzsche scholar Imtiaz Moosa, who teaches at the UW campus there.

Here is a web account of a recent trip Imtiaz (who happens to be blind) paddling 700 k. of the Yukon River with entrepreneur/adventurer Howard Fairbank. Imtiaz doesn't get internet in his house (one of several eccentricities) so I may not be posting for a while. See ya!

Hot Speech and Responsibility for Evil

2011-07-28T20:53:00.011-05:00

In the days since the atrocities in Oslo and Utøya, commentators have rushed to associate the killer with ideas they already hate on other grounds. I've already said that a lot of this talk is disingenuous and springs from some very nasty motives, but it does raise an interesting issue.

Obviously, what these talkers are trying to do is make their opponents feel/seem responsible for evil acts committed by others. The theory is that there can be vicarious responsibility via speech and thought. The issue: Can your speech and thoughts make you responsible for evil acts you do not actually commit? If so, when?

Well, clearly I would be responsible for a murder if I

Order it done.
Promise to pay for it being done.
Personally urge the killer to do it.
Publicly advocate it, thereby influencing the eventual killer.

These all seem pretty obvious to me. There is such a thing as vicarious responsibility, and speech and expressed thoughts can create it.

The interesting part is 3 and 4, which bleed over into other categories, where some distinctions have to be made very carefully. Let me give you an illustration. Here is the account of the run-up to the horrific Thirty Years' War in the vol. VII of the Durants' The Story of Civilization:

The struggle between Lutherans and Calvinists was as bitter as between Protestants and Catholics ... for each alteration of roles between persecutors and persecuted left a heritage of hate. ... What Melanchthon called rabies theologorum raged as seldom before or after in history. The Lutheran Pastor Nivander (1581) listed forty characteristics of wolves and showed that these were precisely the distinctive marks of Calvinists. He described [ie., with approval] the dreadful deaths of leading anti-Lutherans; Zwingli, he said, having fallen in battle, "was cut into straps, and the soldiers used his fat -- for he was a corpulent man -- to grease their boots and shoes." Said a Lutheran pamphlet of 1590: "If anybody wishes to be told, in a few words, concerning which articles of the faith we are fighting with the diabolical Calvinistic brood of vipers, the answer is all and every one of them, ... for they are no Christians, but baptized Jews and Mohammedans." ... "These raging theologians," mourned a Protestant writer in 1610, "have so greatly augmented and aggravated the disastrous strife among the Chistians who have seceded from the papacy, that there seems no hope of all this screaming, slandering, abusing damning, anathematizing, etc., coming to an end before the advent of the Last Day.

In these ravings, the rabid theologians are not in so many words urging people to violence, but in depicting their opponents as dangerous subhuman animals (wolves, vipers) and "Mohammedans," they are depicting them as what the Nazis called Leben unwert des Lebens, live unworthy of life. If you talk like this on the eve of murder and mayhem, I think you do share some responsibility for the result. (For another example, scroll to 23:00 in this video: "First, the victims were ridiculed....")

As I say, though, distinctions have to be made. I see a big difference between depicting your opponents as animals, devils, or monsters and, on the other hand, depicting them as murderers, criminals, and thieves -- provided only that you have real evidence that the latter sort of depiction is accurate.

Politics is about force and violence, and that is why any political ideology can become a motive for assassination as long as the ideology is out of power. Politics is a theater of real injustice and real oppression, and it naturally makes people angry. The fact that the Norwegian Muslim-hater read some books by American conservatives does not make them responsible for murder, not even if they somehow caused him to carry out his crimes. It depends on what they said and how they said it. Responsibily requires more than mere causation. It also requires mens rea, a guilty mind. I draw the line between anger and even rage based on considerations of justice on the one hand, and dehumanization on the other.

How the Heck Can Politics Make You Rich (Legally)?

2011-07-28T13:09:00.003-05:00

This video answers a question, albeit with just one sentence, that I have often wondered about. I think of it like this:

Thomas Jefferson's finances were devastated by his two terms as President. His only source of income was his farm, which he had to neglect while in Washington. Meanwhile, he had to pay the salary of at least one staff member out of his own pocket.

Today, on the other hand, politicians often become (by my standards) fabulously rich while in office (yes, this does include Obama).

The question is, how is this possible without breaking the law? Why aren't these guys being led off in leg irons? How do they do it?

The answer, apparently, is by means of practices that in the business world would be called "insider trading."

George Washington Plunkitt called a similar practice "honest graft":

There's an honest graft, and I'm an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin': "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em."

Just let me explain by examples. My party's in power in the city, and it's goin' to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I'm tipped off, say, that they're going to lay out a new park at a certain place.

I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before.

Ain't it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that's honest graft.

Shouldn't this sort of insider trading be illegal? Do the objections to Plunkitt's "honest graft" apply to them?

(Hat-tip to Amy Alkon for the video.)

Seeing Like a Nanny State

2011-07-24T12:37:00.008-05:00

This is Rhonda Kallman, who was driven out of business after months of battling the FDA's ban on caffeinated beer. Meanwhile, the manufacturers of Four Loko have taken the caffeine out of their product like good little slaves and seem to be doing fine. Please read her sad story here.

We've come a long way since Congress -- Congress, not unelected jobholders with lifetime tenure who are answerable to no one -- had to pass a constitutional amendment in order to ban alcohol. In our era, the FDA can do the same thing with a wave of its bureaucratic magic wand. What has happened since 1919 that implies it should be much, much easier than it used to be for the nation-state to tell us what we can and cannot do? Were there no products as "dangerous" as Moonshot to protect us against?

I think what has changed is much more a matter of Weltanschauung than objective fact.

Let's take a look at the thinking behind the ban. How did it get started? Soon after the first of these products came on the market, some college students overindulged and ended up in hospital. One was reported as "almost dying." (See this.)

(BTW, no actual deaths were reported. It would be interesting to find out how many students died from alcohol poisoning [ethanol overdose] during that same period from other beverages. Here is a relevant fact: about 157 people ages 18-23 died from alcohol poisoning between the years of 1999 and 2004.)

The theory was that, with these drinks, you don't feel as drunk as you actually are. Hence there's a tendency to underestimate one's own consumption and so to over consume.

The theory must also involve the idea that people are not going to notice this and learn a new method of gauging how much alcohol they have swallowed (by counting cans rather than proprioception).

How can they justify using coercion against the manufacturers of these products, even driving them out of business in some cases, for the way consumers are using their product? I'm sure the theory goes on like this: These corporations, together with their advertising and the chemical content of their products, cause these young people to overindulge. This is harmful. Causing harm is wrong. Therefore they deserve exactly what they get.

Notice that this is a narrative in which the corporation is active and the young consumer is passive.

According to this narrative, the consumer is a) stupid and b) weak.

One reason I find this world view morally repugnant is: people only ever think this way about others, never about themselves. The people at the FDA do not see themselves as part of the weak and stupid populace. And we seem to agree. That is one of the things that have changed since 1919.
________________________
* She has the same surname as one of my favorite composers. I wonder if they are related. For an explanation of the title of this post, see this.)

A Libertarian Argument for Drug Prohibition?

2011-07-14T16:44:00.002-05:00

Good Lord! Glenn Greenwald (in the second of the two arguments he gives above) presents the worst argument I think I've ever heard for drug legalization. The conservative columnist James Taranto then turns the very same premise into an even worse argument for drug prohibition. Here is Taranto:

This columnist has some sympathy for the libertarian arguments in favor of decriminalizing drugs, but we've never felt comfortable getting fully on board with the idea. Blogress Ann Althouse points to a big reason why. She links to a video in which long-winded leftist Glenn Greenwald makes a case for legalization. Here's Althouse's description of the garrulous Greenwald's argument:
He loves the idea of pulling people into the embrace of government. When drugs are illegal, there is a "wall of fear" separating the people who are drug users from government. But if drugs are legal, "the relationship between the government and the citizenry changes for the better and becomes much more constructive." Tear down that wall, and these people who avoid the grip of government can be enfolded in endless programs. A torrent of ideas for programs spews from the mouth of Greenwald. It's such an exciting idea for lefties: There's a big untapped pool of potential clients for nurturing government services. Let the druggies come to Big Mother government. [Notice there is no counter-argument here. Ann merely restates Greenwald's argument in emotionally loaded language. Althouse is the logical equivalent of Oakland California: There's no there there.]

Libertarians might argue that this would still amount to a net gain for freedom. We suspect they would also point out that they are against both antidrug laws and Greenwaldian nanny government.

The former argument is defensible, but the latter is irrelevant. Since we live in the real world and not Libertarianland, it's unreasonable to think that legalization of drugs would not result in at least some of the sort of government expansion of the sort Greenwald desires. Thus we continue to lean against drug legalization, in part on libertarian grounds.

What's wrong with Greenwald's argument: His main premise is something like this: Drug laws make people fear the state and consequently make the state look bad: so if we do away with them, people will think more positively about the state and favor more social welfare programs. As far as I can tell, the antecedent portion of this hypothetical statement is not true. The war on drugs does not seem to make government look bad, as if we should not trust it to solve our problems. It certainly does not have that effect on the majority of citizens who favor standing drug laws. How about people who use illegal drugs? Well, most of the people I've known who use drugs are welfare statists, like Greenwald himself. In fact, even he does not draw the conclusion that government itself is an untrustworthy institution. Why does he think others would?

I noticed the same phenomenon during the Vietnam era, when I was active in the antiwar movement. Here was a government that basically kidnapped us and shipped us overseas to be shot in rice paddies -- and for no very good reason at that! Well, were the people in the antiwar movement skeptical of government? No! The leadership was mostly authoritarian statists like Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.

People's political views are for the most part like their religious views: not based on facts and the requirements of logic (eg., the requirement of consistency). Their opinions about whether the price of gold will continue to rise, or whether there is any milk left in the refrigerator, or whether their employer will lay them off soon, are indeed based on reasoning. Their trust in the state, like their faith in the church, for the most part is not.

As to Taranto's reverse version of the argument, it is truly beneath contempt. After all, why would the drug war make government look bad to people, if it did? Obviously, because it is bad: current drug laws are cruel, wasteful, and unjust. In other words, he is defending these laws on the grounds that they are cruel, wasteful, unjust. What makes them good is that they are so bad.

How many things are wrong with that argument?

Casey Anthony: (Procedural) Justice Was Served

2011-07-05T17:06:00.007-05:00

Their disappointment is palpable. I almost feel sorry for them, but not quite.

Consider the similarity between this case and the Amanda Knox case in Perugia, Italy. In both cases, a physically attractive but morally unattractive young woman is accused of a bizarre homicide. This triggers a massive media frenzy which feeds off its own multiplying energy, eventually chewing up the woman's character, spitting it out on the ground, and stomping on it. The women make matters worse by behaving badly after the fact and telling reprehensible lies that are eventually exposed. The prosecution had in both cases rather tenuous circumstantial evidence and a narrative that, if true, would explain the evidence and incriminate the accused. Unfortunately, other narratives, at least as facially plausible, would exculpate the accused. Knox is sentenced to 27 years, while Anthony is acquitted of all felony charges.

Why the different results?

I'm sure there are many factors involved, including perhaps the facts of the cases themselves. However, one thing that must have made a big difference is this: in Italy, unlike in the US, juries are not sequestered. Every night, the Italian jury went home and were exposed to the media narrative about what an evil witch the accused was.

Fortunately, the American jurors were kept away from the tabloids and the talk shows, and were able to reach a different conclusion from the one that the people in the above clip have convinced each other is true.

This enables them to reach a conclusion based on evidence and legal rules and definitions, and not on indignation, pity, or mob hatred (or empathy). The system that makes a verdict like this one possible makes me proud to be an American.

Update: I recommend this. There is much wisdom there.

Displaying Old Glory on the Fourth

2011-07-04T00:47:00.000-05:00

I posted this on the Fourth last year. Since the sentiments in it are still mine -- what the heck? I'll post it again!

I took this picture of our front porch this morning. (If you click twice to enlarge you can glimpse at the far right the tail fins of the 57 Imperial.)

I always display flags on occasions like this one, but I have mixed feelings about it.

If you look up the rules for flag etiquette - actually, they seem to be a lot more than mere etiquette - they seem pretty weird. It must never touch the ground. If has to be lowered by sunset, unless an artificial light is shining one it. It must be disposed of properly. Here's the oddest one: If flown with another flag (including my favorite, the Gadsden standard, and yes I often display it as well) - which side must the Stars and Stripes be on? Old Glory must be on "the flag's own right." What? You mean, like the flag has a face and eyeballs? Yes, that's right. (In case you need to know, the flag's right is the viewer's left.) The flag is being treated as if it were a living thing - and in fact there are official statements of the relevant rules that say exactly that, in those very words.

It's as if it were a mystic symbol sacred to the religion of state-worship.

I display the flag because red, white, and blue are such cheery colors. And because it makes my house look a little like the Auvers town hall on Bastille Day, in van Gogh's wonderful painting (click to enlarge). Also, because to me it is a symbol of freedom, and not of any particular government.

On the Road

2011-06-27T14:07:00.003-05:00

I'm on a camping trip in South Dakota so I will be out of touch for a while.

The picture to the left shows where I am headed (image captured in July 2008).

Do Politicians Get a Separate Morality of Their Own?

2011-06-12T15:50:00.008-05:00

This interesting question links to a deeper and broader issue: Does the state -- properly -- work by different moral rules from those that apply to people in the private sector?

In his recent defense of Rep. Anthony Weiner's recent notorious behavior (I linked to it here), Matthew Yglesias made this provocative remark:

It has to be the case that the kind of character that matters for a public official isn’t the same as the kind of character that matters to be a good husband and father. After all, you want a responsible public official to neglect his family and friends (“hard-working”), to display a certain kind of ruthlessness and cunning (“negotiation”), to be a bit of a phony in certain situations (“diplomacy”), and all kinds of other things that don’t carry over straightforwardly from personal life to public affairs.

He is saying that Weiner's recent behavior -- lying copiously, naturally, and fluently for ten days until circumstances forced him to reveal the truth -- indicates a trait that, in a politician, is actually a virtue. As a defense of Weiner this is, of course, very lamest Yglesian sophistry, but there is more than a grain of truth in the underlying principle.

The late Jane Jacobs wrote a brilliant little book in which she argued that those who do "commercial work" -- trading and producing for trade -- and those who "guardian work" -- acquiring, exploiting, and policing territories -- properly do work by rules that are different in several important ways. One of the biggest is that while deception undermines the trust on which commercial work is founded, and must be scrupulously avoided in the commercial realm, it is in guardian work just another weapon, and its effective use can be positively virtuous.

As Will Rogers said, "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie!' until you can find a rock." In warfare, disinformation and misdirection can be more important than brute force.

When being interviewed by police who regard you as a suspect, it is well to remember that, not only do these people not have your best interests at heart, but it may even be permissible for them to lie to you -- both legally and morally permissible (it depends on what the lie is).

(Note to anarchists: all state workers are guardians, but guardian work is an incomparably wider category, coextensive with human life. Generally, hunter-gatherer bands are stateless societies, but they are also guardian organizations. If this is not obvious to you, take another look at the definition of guardian work, above. It is a legitimate and honorable sort of work, even if the state is not a morally legitimate institution.)

But the guardian's right to deceive is limited in two ways. First, the deceit must be for the sake of the guardian task, which typically is to fight off the enemies of the group they are guarding. Second, the guardian prerogative to lie, like its powers to maim and kill, must be rigidly controlled, if at all possible, by an array of other guardian traits, including discipline, obedience, honor, and -- perhaps most importantly -- loyalty. This is an emotional bond with colleagues and constituents which is supposed to deter the guardian from killing, maiming, or lying to them.

Weiner's lies, while revealing a stunningly impressive gift for deceit, were obviously not directed toward a legitimate guardian task and represented a breach of loyalty. They are evidence of his unfitness for this sort of work.

The Private Lives of Politicians: Should We Care?

2011-06-09T16:59:00.006-05:00

Liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias has said that there is no reason to pay any attention to Weiner's private behavior: his record tells you everything you really need to know about his character -- at least the part of it that matters. Above, libertarian columnist Jack Hunter takes, curiously enough, exactly the same position. Of course, there is a big difference: Matt seems to think that Weiner's liberal policies are enough to make him virtuous (in the way that matters) and Jack says that policies that rob the productive in order to reward the unproductive are necessarily morally wrong.

Should a liberal prefer that a privately virtuous conservative be elected over a liberal sleazebag like Weiner, Jack asks? No! Policy trumps character, easily!

I agree that policy trumps character, of course. I also agree that it is a shame that so much time and energy is being wasted on this pathetic jerk while the country continues to drift toward the rim of Niagara. But this does not mean that character does not matter, nor that we should simply ignore information about a politician's private life.

As to the last point, what is in the public record may have more weight, but private stuff, after all, is evidence. Why would you simply ignore evidence? Matt thinks he has enough evidence from the public record. That is nonsense. When it comes to something difficult to penetrate as the human heart, more evidence is always better than less, other things being equal. Always.

Further, the new evidence modifies the old, which should be reinterpreted in light of the new. Before Weiner's weird virtual sex life became known, I had some respect for him for his willingness to frequently appear on Fox to talk to notoriously tough interviewer Bill O'Reilly. Now it looks more like the narcissistic behavior of an unprincipled attention hog.

Finally, though policy trumps character, that is consistent with the idea that better character is always preferable, other things being equal. Given that, as Jack says, if Weiner's district were to vote him out in the primaries, they would simply replace him with another liberal, doesn't that mean that it would be rational for them to want to do precisely that -- on the probability that the next liberal would not be such a lame, laughable disgrace to their cause?

d'Indy: High on Mountain Air

2011-05-30T13:49:00.002-05:00

I've been listening to Vincent d'Indy's Symphony on a French Mountain Air over and over lately. Here is the classic 1958 RCA recording of the first movement with Nicole Henriot-Schweitzer at the piano and the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Charles Munch.

What an adorable work it is! And it's not just pretty -- it has some depths to it!

I'm prejudiced, here, I must admit, because this work is about something that's dear to my heart: mountains, life in the mountains, and mountain-people.

All three movements are based on a single mountain folk song, though the first movement, roughly in sonata allegro form, has a secondary theme as well -- listen for it at 3:10, above. Liner notes sometimes quote music historian Julien Tiersnot concerning this body of traditional music:

The high mountains give to folk that become acclimated to their altitude something of the purity of their atmosphere. It seems as though there were in these mountain songs - they were generally songs of shepherds - something fluid, ethereal, a gentleness that is not found in folk songs of the plains.

I think I hear these qualities in this music. There is a another quality that d'Indy captures brilliantly: mountain life is tremendously stimulating. This comes out especially in the third and last movement (see below).

There are probably several reasons for this. The accelerated heartbeat caused by the thin air might be one. The spicy resinous tang in the air from coniferous trees is clearly another. And the air itself! It is thinner, and like the man said, is more pure: it holds less moisture and dust. There is less in it to filter out the sun's rays, so more of them hit you. On the other hand, water evaporates faster in the thin dry air. That is why mountain plants often have leaves that have evolved into thick pads or dwindled into needles -- like desert plants, and for the same reason: the plant is trying to avoid evaporation. On you, the effect of greater evaporation is a bracing feeling of coolness, at least on the parts of your skin that are shielded from the sun. Those that are not, are roasted with radiant energy. As you move about in the mountain light and air you experience a tingling barrage of sharp, shifting contrasts, so different from the muffling, lulling air of the plains. It wakes you up and raises your consciousness.

Is it a coincidence that the great drug producing regions of the world, whether the opium fields of Afghanistan or the marijuana patches of the Sierra Madre Occidental, are typically in the mountains? My friends the Tarahumara, famous for their use of peyote, are mountain folk. Mountains are naturally high, in both senses.

Here are the other two movements of the symphony:

Photos of d'Indy suggest, by the way, that, like Abraham Lincoln, Oscar Wilde, and this man, he was mildly acromegalic.

Morel Feast!

2011-05-28T17:02:00.005-05:00

Its Morel (Morchella esculenta) season here in southern Wisconsin – in fact, it’s already winding down, so unless you live north of us, this may be your last chance for a year to enjoy the smoky, beefy goodness of these fabulous fungi!

Last weekend we had our annual Morel feast. It was great fun!

On the menu: rib eye steak with a Morel red wine reduction sauce (for the sauce I adapt this recipe). Side dishes were: orange-marinated charcoal grilled asparagus, and a yam puree I invented myself. Here is the recipe for the puree (it is both paleo and can easily be made vegan):

Paleo Yam Puree with Pecans and Maple:

Ingredients:

6 medium yams

½ cup (approx) real maple syrup

½ cup (approx) coconut milk

½ cup (approx) chicken stock

¾ teaspoon curry powder

Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

¼ cup pecan chips (finely chopped but not ground)

additional maple syrup to coat the chips

Heat oven to 400 degrees. Peel and coarsely cube yams. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, and curry powder. Drizzle with sufficient maple syrup to coat, and stir. Place in a cooking pan with raised sides, so that the yams are about two inches deep. Roast yam mixture for 1 hour, or long enough to get some browning (but not burning) on the material at the bottom of the pan. Open the oven and stir the mixture, scraping the bottom of the pan if needed, every 20 minutes.

For pecan topping: Place pecan chips in a small, non-stick pan (I used a miniature bread loaf pan). Stir in sufficient maple syrup to coat chips. Place in oven with yams and cook for about 10 minutes, stirring at least once. (This has to be watched closely or it will burn.) Most of the moisture should cook out, so that the pecans are covered with a maple glaze. Cool and harden in the freezer. A sort of pecan brittle will form, which you can break into individual chips with your fingers.

Take the yams out of the oven and add enough coconut milk and stock to be able to puree it with a blender (I use and immersion blender because I think it’s fun). Puree until smooth. Sprinkle each serving with the glazed separated pecan chips.

Serves 6 paleo eaters or 8 regular people.

Mixed Feelings about the Kochs and Florida State University

2011-05-18T13:51:00.007-05:00

So there is another kerfuffle about the Koch brothers. (Charles Koch pictured here.) They have donated $1.5 million to Florida State University to (here it gets fuzzy - the screechy "reporting" I have managed to find does not treat these sorts of details as important) fund an academic position with a string attached: Though the economics department will make the final hiring decision, a representative of the Koch Foundation will in effect have a veto power over candidates.

The academic left is enraged, while others, like libertarian James S. Taylor, defend the arrangement. I guess I have to say, boring as this might be, that my own response is mixed. On the one hand, I can't think of another arrangement in which a donor has this sort of influence over hiring decisions. On the other, I think Taylor is right in claiming that this is not a threat to academic freedom.

Both FSU and its econ department have freely agreed to this arrangement. How can this violate their freedom? Rather it is the people who are pressuring them to cancel the deal that are attempting to violate someone's freedom.

That's on the one hand. On the other hand, I think there is a principle involved that is one of the elements of academic freedom (though I also think it is useful to distinguish it from academic freedom itself). I think it of as "the principle of disciplinary autonomy." It is the idea that decisions about departmental matters that are based on principles and ideas that are internal to the discipline (eg., what is a proper methodology for the study of X-ology? may it have an ideological coloring and if so what sort might it have? etc.) must be made by the department itself. External agents such as deans, divisional committees, etc. must oversee departmental decisions (eg., in hiring and promotion) but their decisions must be based on considerations that are external to the discipline, in that they apply equally to all disciplines: mainly, such considerations as professional competence and area coverage (eg., does the philosophy department really need another person in ancient?). If they think that some trends in X-ology are promising while others are a passing fad and a waste of time, they must not interfere with departmental decisions based on such considerations. The only people who should be deciding which trends in X-ology ought to be pursued by the department are the people in the department.

Accepting an endowment that has ideological strings or external ideologically motivated oversight attached seems to compromise this principle. I think this is why most departments would reject a gift of this sort. They do not want donors to have this sort of influence.

And yet I don't mind what FSU and the Kochs are doing here. Why not? Mainly because the picture I have just painted, of donors who put money into a process in which their own ideological preferences play no role, is, if you will pardon my French, almost complete bullshit. Leftist donors can easily fund positions that promote their own ideology. All they have to do is endow a chair in environmental ethics, women's studies, or any other discipline with the word "studies" in its title. There is no doubt in anyone's mind about the point of view that they will be promoting by doing so. The principle of disciplinary autonomy offers freedom of choice to leftist donors, while offering non-leftists the pretense of a liberty that they do not possess.

The principle of disciplinary autonomy covers this situation with an appearance of legitimacy that is not completely honest.

The libertarian Koch brothers are trying to beat a system that is rigged against them and in favor of others. Part of me says "good! -- it's a system that deserves an occasional beating."

Commencement High Jinx

2011-05-16T21:48:00.003-05:00

James Franco's Rejected UCLA Commencement Speech from James Franco

This is my favorite commencement address so far. No, not the one above. That's my second favorite. It's the one I've pasted in below.

This was actually a column written by Chicago Trib writer Mary Schmich, meant to show what sort of commencement speech she would give, were she ever invited to give one (gee, I wonder why that never did happen?):

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 1997:
Wear sunscreen.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.
Don't worry about the future. Oh worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 P.M. on some idle Tuesday.
Do one thing every day that scares you.
Sing.
Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.
Floss.
Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.
Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.
Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.
Stretch.
Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.
Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone.
Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself, either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.
Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own.
Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.
Read the directions, even if you don't follow them.

Goodbye to Fat City!

2011-05-16T09:59:00.008-05:00

I have such warm memories of the Stockton California Public Library. The dingy old building had a separate, gleaming remodeled room for kid's books. In the main library, there was a dim. secluded mezzanine alcove with a whole shelf of scientific books about spiders. Nerd heaven! Sprinkled here and there were old men in trench coats muttering to themselves about how "the CIA did this to me." The building was on Market St., said to be "the longest Skid Row in America." This street was the setting and location of the book and film, Fat City. One of these pathetic souls once waylaid me and warned me that if I did not do my homework I would end up like him. I told him that I did do my homework but thank you sir for your advice.

Well, if the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library is indeed the library of the future, I guess we can say goodbye to all that. No more browsing, and no more muttering freaks. Everything will be done for you by robots and computers in surroundings of wholesome antiseptic sterility!

This rather creepy dystopian setup seems to combine ideas from several different university libraries that I have used over the last 4.5 decades. The Milton Eisenhower Library at The Johns Hopkins University is seven stories -- except that they are negative stories, all but one being below ground. At U. C. Berkeley back in the sixties, undergraduates were already not allowed in the stacks. You requested a book and employees (fellow undergraduates on starvation wages) brought it to you. What's new about this setup is replacing shelves with these "bins," an innovation made possible by the advent of computers and bar codes.

This is one solution to a real problem: the sheer number of books, which, like the size of the national debt, only seems to go in one direction. Unlike the other evils men do, books to not disappear when they have been inflicted on us. They accumulate. Mέγα βιβλίον μέγα κακόν, a big book is a great evil, as Kallimachos said. And so are many books. What to do with them all? Here, I suppose, is one answer.

(Hat-tip to Ray Sawhill for the link.)

Conspiracism is not Freedom Friendly

2011-05-14T14:53:00.005-05:00

A propos of the conspiracy theories swarming like pestiferous gnats around the death of bin Laden, John Derbyshire had this to say:

I speak here as a person just temperamentally allergic to conspiracy theories. They belong, in my mind, to that much bigger continent of ideas whose central organizing doctrine is that things are other than they seem, the continent of gnosticism.
Now I know of course that things sometimes are other than what they seem. As a connoisseur of mathematical paradoxes and sometime student of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, I'm very well aware of that.

In human affairs, however, it's not the way to bet. Furthermore, it engenders a suspicious, mistrustful cast of mind that can all too easily tip over into paranoid insanity.

It's especially not the way to bet when discussing government action. Government, most of the time, is a great blind blundering beast, incapable of any kind of subtlety. What you see is what you get, with due allowance for stupidity and incompetence.

This last point is the one that strikes me at the moment. It continues to amaze me that so many libertarians are also conspiracists. True enough, the conspiracy theories they like are not the Nazi kind (It's all a Jewish plot!), nor the Communist kind (It's all a capitalist plot!). They like the kind that, like Huck Finn's Pap, are "agin the gummint".

But that does not mean that these theories are liberty friendly. In fact they are the opposite. One thing that distinguishes conspiracism from serious scholarly thinking about real-world conspiracies (eg., the 19 religious nut-jobs who destroyed the World Trade Center) is that it attributes what I call "superpowers" to the villains of its narratives, capacities that are well beyond the abilities of normal human beings. At the very least, they attribute to the conspiracy the ability to change history by coordinating the efforts of an disparate array of people, without any leaks, without the thing unraveling in mid-process, with no death-bed confessions, and all of this invisible, inaudible -- undetectable to everyone but the conspiracist.

This violates a central tenet of enlightened libertarianism: the proposition that, in the immortal words of Dave Barry, government is stupid.

[For my earlier jottings on the cognitive illness I call "conspiracism," see this.]

The Ethics of the bin Laden Killing

2011-05-11T12:22:00.004-05:00

Note: This post supersedes anything I have previously written on this subject. In case of any inconsistencies, this represents my present view of the matter:

First of all, we do not know exactly what happened at the Abbottabad compound on May 1, and in these matters details are important. In a covert operation, the deception does not cease when the operation in the field is over. Your enemy is eager to know how you operate, and you are equally anxious that they learn all the wrong lessons. Fraud is as essential to the functioning of the state as force is. In the present case, this is complicated by this administration’s inability to get its story straight and its deliberate destruction of or refusal to publish evidence as to what actually happened. However, it is an interesting academic question to ask whether, if the official version is true, the killing of Osama bin Laden was ethically problematic or not.

The official version of the events now seems to include the following allegations and admissions: 1) Special US operatives (SEALs and possibly CIA) went there specifically to kill or capture bin Laden. 2) Only one enemy ever offered armed resistance, and he was killed at the beginning of the operation. 3) Bin Laden was unarmed when he was killed. 4) He was not actively attempting to surrender. 4) The operatives did not request or demand that he surrender. 5) At time he was killed, bin Laden was not living in retirement, but was in fact actively the supreme enemy commander.

Was this justified?

The following plausible ethical principles are relevant: a) In war, there is nothing wrong with targeting an individual enemy. If, during World War II, special forces had invaded the home of a German military commander and killed him, few would deny that this was justified. Further: b) Fighters do not have an obligation to expose themselves to risk for the sole purpose of sparing the lives of legitimate enemy targets. c) There is nothing per se wrong with shooting unarmed enemy combatants. Warfare would be impossible if one could only fire on enemy who were in possession of their weapons at the time. (a), (b), and (c) obviously speak in favor of this operation. However, there are two more principles that are more problematic and seem to me eminently plausible: d) Pure revenge is not a justification, either in war or at any other time. Acts of destruction must be reasonably thought to be the best available way to advance a legitimate military objective (generally, to influence future enemy behavior). e) Other things being equal, taking enemy prisoner is to be preferred to killing them.

(d) and (e) could imply an obligation to ask bin Laden to surrender. It depends on what was actually happening at the time. Suppose that the operatives were reasonably certain that the only people in the compound were wives, children, dead bodies, and enemy who were completely in their control at the time. In that case, I would say, clearly the killing of bin Laden was simply an act of murder and not justified. The same would be true if they went there with orders to kill him, or to prefer killing him to taking him prisoner. Of course, we can imagine other scenarios, also consistent with the alleged facts, that imply a different result. At the moment the operatives confronted and shot bin Laden, there was probably a good deal of chaos at the compound. Did any of this chaos constitute a threat to the operatives? We do not know. It is possible to fill in details in ways that indicate the shooting was a justifiable act of war. What you ought to think of this operation, in my opinion, depends on what you think was happening at the time, on the nature of the risks that the operatives still faced, and on the role shooting bin Laden might have played in controlling these risks.

How bin Laden Won

2011-05-08T18:16:00.003-05:00

In the transcript for John Derbyshire's Friday podcast, you can find some wise observations on the War on Terror. I can do no better than simply quote him. I think of them as a succinct explanation of how bin Laden won. Here are his words (I hope it goes without saying that this does not constitute an endorsement of John's views on any other subject):

Mid-morning on September 11th 2001, as I was watching the Twin Towers burn on my TV screen, I got a phone call from Kathy Lopez at NRO. Could I give her eight hundred words on what had happened? I said I sure could, and went to my computer and knocked out a column, and emailed it in to Kathy. It's there in the NRO archives somewhere, and on my own website.

Here's part of what I wrote, quote:

This is not an easy enemy to confront. This will not be a matter of great troop movements, of trenches and fleets and squadrons and massed charges. This will be small teams of inconceivably brave men and women, working in strange places, unknown and unacknowledged. But is the same enemy, the same truth, of which Kipling spoke: evil, naked and proud: "a crazed and driven foe." This is what humanity has faced before, since our story began to be written down. This is civilization versus barbarism.

Last Sunday's mission, the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, was precisely the kind of thing I was predicting: "small teams of inconceivably brave men and women, working in strange places, unknown and unacknowledged." That's the right way to conduct a War on Terror.

Our government had other ideas. We sent great armies into Afghanistan and Iraq. We spent colossal sums of money — well over a trillion dollars to date. We sacrificed thousands of our military personnel — four and a half thousand in Iraq, one and a half thousand in Afghanistan. Still it goes on: we've had eight combat deaths in Iraq this year, seventy-two in Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden once boasted that his 9/11 operation was the most highly leveraged investment in history. It cost him $500,000, he said, but it had cost the American economy $500 billion — a return on investment of 99,999,900 percent. He was speaking of the operation's effect on Wall Street, on the stock of airline companies and so on.

If you look at the numbers I quoted a moment ago, though, they are just as embarrassing. Those 19 dead martyrs of his led to three thousand American civilian deaths and six thousand military. That's a rate of return of nearly fifty thousand percent. Taking the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan so far as one and a half trillion dollars, that's a return on investment of three hundred million percent. You see why I'm not cheering?

If we had stuck with operations like last Sunday's— the operations I foresaw on 9/11 — supplemented by the kind of diligent intelligence work that makes such operations possible, and further supplemented by the kind of remote drone attacks that have decimated Al Qaeda's senior ranks, there'd be cause for unrestrained jubilation at our victories. As it is, those victories are glowing lights in the shadow of much waste and folly.

Obama, the Kindly Killer

2011-05-05T13:22:00.009-05:00

For centuries, "unlawful combatants" captured in the field, including captured spies and others who pass through military lines out of uniform, were summarily executed in the field. Then civilization progressed further and we developed other procedures for dealing with such foes. On Sunday, the US took a step backwards. After days of garbled, contradictory, and possibly mendacious versions of the events, the administration has admitted that Osama bin Laden was unarmed when he was shot (in view of his young daughter, I might add). Further, the three shots, one to the chest and two to the head, do not sound like they were administered to someone who was putting up any sort of resistance.

So we have gone back to the good old days of summary execution. This, truly, is change I can believe in.

Obama's more hawkish supporters have often pointed out that he has killed more al Qaida than G. W. Bush did in a similar period of time. Everyone is familiar with his fondness for killing people with predator drones (and even joking about it in public).

I have a theory that explains all this -- both the drones and the execution of bin Laden. If Bush killed fewer al Qaida, that is because he wanted to capture them, hold them indefinitely, torture them, extract information, and go after more of these people. Obama on the other hand takes no prisoners. Why? Because he is a ruthless fascist thug? No, for liberal reasons.

His ideology requires him to put combatants who have committed war crimes overseas on civilian trial, with the lavish array of civil liberties that American citizens possess. That doesn't seem to work very well. What to do, then? Well, everyone agrees you can kill enemy in the field so ... What the Hell? Let's just kill them!

Some years ago, Johathan Rauch wrote a great book, Kindly Inquisitors, in which he argued that liberal attitudes (concern for the hurt feeling of oppressed groups) can lead to illiberal policies (censoring speech). We see here another instance of the same phenomenon.

I have long argued that there is a middle ground between the brutality of killing in the field and civilian trials: it is a suitably reformed version of military tribunals. Military tribunals handled Japanese war criminals after World War II. Maybe the US will consider stopping (some of) the killing and trying this method again -- suitably updated, as I've said.

Update: Since I wrote the above, the official version of the raid has "evolved" some more. It now is perfectly consistent with my "Obama does not know what to do with prisoners" theory. Note that the participants do not claim that more than one person ever fired on them, and they say they killed this person at the beginning of the raid. They also do not allege that bin Laden offered any resistance at all. (I like the way, as more embarrassing details emerge, the government's servants in the media have to say things like "none of this diminishes the courage and accomplishment of those blah blah blah...." That is so cute!) Here is NBC's account:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Rhapsody in Blue

2011-05-01T11:23:00.006-05:00

The other night we watched Rhapsody in Blue (dir. Irving Rapper, 1945). It was really quite good.

It was a special treat to see Oscar Levant playing himself. He must have written many of his own lines: "I've got a date with my insomnia [trans.: it's time to go to bed]" "If it wasn't for Gershwin I could've been a pretty good mediocre composer." And then there is:

Oscar: If I had your talent, I'd be a pretty obnoxious fella. What do you call yourself?
George: George Gershwin. It's my real name.
Oscar: Mine's Oscar Levant. I'm thinking of changing it.

Levant's style of humor is unique. Generally, it's the sort of thing that is usually called "self-deprecating," but with a difference. Usually one deprecates one's own intelligence and virtue. In his case, it is mainly his own happiness and health that he deprecates. His trademark is the wry comment on his multitudinous neuroses.

A few years ago I purchased a copy of his autobiographical A Smattering of Ignorance. Maybe I'll read it now!

The musical numbers were beautifully done. As you can see in the above clip, they perform "Rhapsody in Blue" whole! I can't think of another studio-era Hollywood movie that depicts an entire performance of a symphonic movement. True, they seem to have cut some of it (this version is three minutes longer) but even Bernstein sometimes did this piece with cuts, so I am still impressed.

The storyline was less impressive, even though the great Howard Koch, author of my favorite movie ever, was involved. But I can't blame the writers that much. Gershwin was this workaholic who wrote a lot of memorable music, had a decade-long romantic relationship with a female composer whom he never married, and died suddenly at 38 of a brain tumor. Not a lot of a story there. Worse yet, he had a happy childhood and was a nice person who didn't quarrel with people. To get some kind of a story going, they invent a mentor for him, a wise old composer who dies during the Rapsody concert, and two fictional women, both of whom he loves. That, plus worries about whether he will offend both the critics and the public by combining jazz with classical music, and painful symptoms presaging his early death, are about all the dramatic conflict we get.

Robert Alda's performance as Gershwin is sincere and affecting. But what makes is all worth watching is the music -- and the lovably crotchety Oscar.

R & R

2011-04-26T23:02:00.003-05:00

Almost every line of this, except for ones that are needed to give the impression of being part of the narrative, are direct quotations from Sartre. It helps, in viewing this, if you do not understand French. Otherwise you may experience clashing forces in your head. Enjoy! I hope the anguish is not too much for you! (Hat tip to Nat Hunt for the link.)

Wikileaks and Human Rights: Scott Horton to Speak Here Tomorrow

2011-04-21T14:05:00.002-05:00

Human rights litigator Scott Horton will be speaking here tomorrow evening. I will introduce him and moderate the Q and A.

Here is the info:

What: "Wikileaks: The Public's Right to Know and the Government's War on Whistleblowers"
Where: The Inn Wisconsin room, Memorial Union, U. of Wisconsin - Madison
When: Friday April 22, 2011, 7:00 pm

Mr. Horton is a lecturer at Columbia Law School, Senior Editor of Harper's Magazine, and prominent legal blogger. His clients have included Andrei Sakharov and other Soviet dissidents.

Here is a sample of his writings on the Wikileaks controversy:

WikiLeaks’ disclosure of the 91,000 U.S. government documents that it labels the “Afghan War Diary” raises a number of vital issues. Most of the discussion so far has focused on the significance of the documents themselves. They make the intelligence community look not so intelligent, and they make a number of political leaders look like dissemblers, spewing claims about the situation in Afghanistan that can’t really be squared with information in their briefing portfolios. But quite apart from their contents, the WikiLeaks documents are a test for America’s voracious national-security state. Its response to them gives us a sense of how it intends to fight perceived threats to secrecy.
... Field officers of the intelligence community urgently need to play a game of misdirection–relabeling the threat that is presented to them. They will argue that the WikiLeaks disclosures imperil the safety of American forces on the ground, America’s allies, and thus every American citizen sitting at home. They will find few facts to back this contention, but that won’t stop them.

Find the rest of his article here.

Environmental Disasters that Didn't Happen

2011-04-20T16:53:00.000-05:00

This is something I literally do not understand. Why do environmentalists seem unfazed by their mistaken, even grossly and absurdly mistaken, predictions of disaster? Why do individual authors seem unembarrassed by their own mistakes? Why does it not seem to bother them that none of these disasters ever happen? One possible explanation: Maybe these are actually not predictions as we know them in the philosophy of science (attempts to accurately describe future events) but propositions of another sort. But what sort, then?

Blah Blah Blah Royal Wedding Blah Blah Blah Prince William Blah Blah Blah

2011-04-20T08:43:00.004-05:00

Don't you just hate it when people read your brain cells? Me too!

So, anyway, Jerry Seinfeld somehow hacked into my head and read what I think of the upcoming royal wedding that everyone is moistening their knickers about. I have to admit though that he says it much better than I ever could. So I'm posting it here without further comment. None is needed.

Enjoy your day!

Just scroll to 2:00.

April 18, 1906

2011-04-18T09:56:00.000-05:00

This is a repost of one that I posted two years ago. Today is the 105th anniversary

At 5:12 in the morning, 103 years ago, San Francisco photographer Arnold Genthe was awakened by a terrifying sound. His entire collection of Chinese porcelain was pouring out of the shelves onto the floor. One of the worst natural disasters in history had begun. As he remembered late r, he went out to find a man in a swallowtail coat standing dazed in the street. A policeman approached the man: "Say, Mister," he said, "I guess you better put on some pants."

Finding his cameras had all been destroyed, Genthe borrowed a Kodak and, stuffing his pockets with films set out to immortalize the horrors with photos like this one, showing Sacramento Street, looking toward the bay. As he said of it in his memoirs, it

shows, in a pictorially effective composition, the results of the earthquake, the beginning of the fire and the attitude of the people. On the right is a house, the front of which had collapsed into the street. The occupants are sitting on chairs calmly watching the approach of the fire. Groups of people are standing in the street, motionless, gazing at the clouds of smoke. When the fire crept up close, they would just move up a block.

All that was left of the Towne Residence was its entrance. Someone named Genthe's picture of it "The Portals of the Past." When the entrance was moved to Golden Gate Park, that is what it was named. It is mentioned, memorably, in the classic film Vertigo.

Within hours, a committee of wealthy citzens met and asked to mayor to draw checks of any amount to relieve the suffering of the devastated population. They would guarantee the checks.

Soon, another remarkable event began. The rebuilding of the city. While the ruins were still smoking, a sign went up on a collapsed wall: "On this site will be erected a six-story office building to be ready for occupancy in the Fall." A year to the day after the earthquake, the new Fairmont Hotel opened. Within a decade San Franciscans celebrated the rebirth of their city with the Panama Pacific Exposition.

San Francisco is the only American city that has a consistent architectural style. That is no doubt because it had to be built all at once. Luckily, this happened at a moment in history when the styles were particularly elegant and beautiful -- and somehow they seem especially appropriate to a city with its arms open to the sky, the mist, and the sea. The result that beloved white city of bay windows, turrets, and elaborate sawed wood ornamentation.

Happy re-birthday, San Francisco!

The Atlas Shrugged Movie

2011-04-16T14:34:00.008-05:00

I remember the trailers for the movie based on Nabokov's scandalous Lolita. The tag line was "How did they make a movie of Lolita!?" The answer was that they changed the title character from a barely-pubescent girl to a teenager, thus gutting the story of everything that was really shocking and offensive about it.

Thank God the people who made Atlas Shrugged, Part I did not do that. In this I think their small budget worked in their favor. Big budget movies are made by cowards who cringe in fear of losing money by being controversial. A big Hollywood budget with high production values would have killed this thing as dead as John Edwards' presidential ambitions.

The greatest thing about this film is that it was made at all. Sitting in a theater we have been in countless times, Deborah and I were both thinking "Oh my God! I can't believe what I am hearing! Did that character really say what I think she said? Omigod omigod!" (In the comments section of his blog, animation legend Eddie Fitzgerald told me, "I kept expecting the police to come in and shut the film down.") The story of how they managed to slip past the media Borg will probably make an interesting book some day.

Some comments on specific aspects:

Script: I've seen some comments on the web that say that every line of dialogue is from the book. This is completely wrong. The dialogue has been to a significant extent re-written, as it probably should have been. Book dialogue is not movie dialogue. However, some of my favorite lines from Part I are preserved intact ("He said you bore him, Mr. Taggart"). The longest philosophical speech in it lasts, I think, less than thirty seconds. It, though, seems to be word for word from the book, and that, too seems right to me.

Casting: Nobody looks like I imagined them when I read the book. I found out in recent years that Rand said that with the philosopher Hugh Akston she had in mind someone like Ortega y Gasset. This is actually how I had always imagined him: older, balding, dignified. The actor who plays him in the film is nothing like that. I guess I don't mind it, but they clearly weren't even trying for that kind of faithfulness to the text. Making Eddie Willers black was an interesting touch.

Acting: Very good. The biggest single acting challenge I think was projecting sexual chemistry between Dagny and Rearden in business meetings where they were clearly focused on other things. Taylor Schilling and Grant Bowler carry it off with taste and style.

Production values: The things that had to look great (the John Galt line ride and the Wyatt oilfied fire) do look great. Other things (eg., the Taggart Transcontinental Building and Wyatt's house) are skimped on. It has the production values, I would say, of an extremely good made-for-TV-movie.

Cinematography: Very good. There is a fair amount of tight camera work to hide skimpy production values, but that's as it had to be.

Pacing: Very fast. Almost too fast, in a movie that is supposed to make you think.

Overall: As AR says in another context, it's had its face lifted, but not its spine or its spirit.

The Lord High Everything Else

2011-04-14T05:17:00.003-05:00

I've been reading the text of Gilbert and Sullivan's great comic operetta, The Mikado, and I'm amazed at how good it is. Aside from being laugh-out-loud funny, it's a social and political satire, which gives it real depth.

One bit that really made me think is the dialog that comes in at the very end of the above clip. Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner asks advice from Pooh-Bah, The Lord High Everything Else, whether he should raid the treasury for his impending wedding festivities. Because Pooh-Bah holds every office in the city except for that of executioner, he is unable to give a coherent answer. He continually qualifies, contradicts, or overrules himself in a comical process that obviously could go through cycle after cycle forever.

One of the most distinctive principles of liberal democracy is the notion that these jobs should all be held by different people, so that they can check and balance one another.

Hey, wait a minute! Doesn't that mean that a free society will be like Pooh-Bah: confused, unstable, unable to arrive at a final answer?

Yes! It does! But what's so great about stability? After all, what "stability" means is that we have an argument and then one party wins, finally and irrevocably, and gets to lord it over the rest of us. The Hell with that!

If freedom is good, stability is bad. Let Topsyturvydom reign!

The dialogue between Ko-Ko and Pooh-Bah is considerably abridged in this clip. You can find the whole exchange here, at the end of "No. 5" (the fifth scene). Here is another clip, of Groucho singing another song from The Mikado, this time with his daughter:

What Happened to Declarations of War?

2011-04-06T20:59:00.004-05:00

The last country against which we ever declared war was Rumania, in 1942. I have been wondering lately, what happened the requirement, which in the Constitution seems so clear, that Congress is the branch of government that decides whether we are at war or not. Is it somehow obsolete? Is it another of those quaint eighteenth-century ideas that just don't apply to this oh-so-complicated world of ours?

In this essay George Friedman answers these questions and more. He tells the tale of the slithering cowardice and stone-headed arrogance that led to the death of declarations as a Constitutional imperative. He also shows how the new way of doing things has proven to be a moral, political, and -- most surprisingly -- a military disaster.

The genius of the framers' provision was to force the attention of the voters on the horrific nature of what they are about to do and compel a decision -- a real decision with no evasion no ambiguity, and no vagueness -- whether to do it or not. Part of the reason the imperative died, he argues, was that presidents wanted to wage wars for which they knew Congress could not give them a declaration, because voters would not be able to stomach it. So the president went to war without them. One obvious result of this practice, which Friedman does not mention, is that the US inflicts a great deal more slaughter and mayhem on the rest of the world than it otherwise would.

1812! Cannons! Bells! Free Cookies!

2011-04-01T09:03:00.003-05:00

The Madison Community Orchestra (I play in the second violin section) is giving a concert Sunday.

We will be joined by local pianist, Anthony Cao, playing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and a selection of jazz standards. We will also perform Sullivan’s Overture from The Mikado and will finish with a bang, playing Tchaikovsky’s “1812” Overture and very realistic recorded canon and bells.

The concert is this Sunday afternoon, April 3, 2011 at 3:00p.m. in Mitby Theater at MATC (3550 Anderson St., Madison). Admission and parking are FREE – everyone is invited – and there will be a reception after the concert in the Mitby Theater lobby.

At the reception refreshments will be served. I'm planning on making my double chocolate cherry cookies (aka the greatest cookies in the known universe).

I think this will be an exciting concert. If you live in the Madison area, I recommend it!

Eating Animals: A Defense

2011-03-28T15:20:00.000-05:00

My political philosophy class has been discussing Robert Nozick's ethical argument for vegetarianism (IMHO, the best such argument I have seen), so I thought I would repost this essay, which I posted when I was discussing the same argument, with another group of students, four years ago...

I didn't want to post on this question again until after I had finished talking about it in class. And the discussion went on for almost two fifty minute class periods -- way more than I originally intended. People had a lot more ideas about this than I thought they would! The other thing that surprised me was that no one (except for one student, who came up to me after class) tried to answer what I thought was ultimately the real question.

As you may not recall, Nozick asks us:

Suppose then that I enjoy swinging a baseball bat. It happens that in front of the only place to swing it stands a cow. Swinging the bat unfortunately would involve smashing the cow's head. But I wouldn't get fun from doing that; the pleasure comes from exercising my muscles, swinging well, and so on. ... Is there some principle that would allow the killing and eating of animals, but would not allow swinging the bat for the extra pleasure it brings?

I had thought this ultimately boils down to the question of how we should fill in the blank in this sentence: One may kill animals or impose unpleasant living conditions on them in order to provide _____ for humans.

Almost no one tried to answer this question directly. There were some attempts to reject the question. One person suggested, following in the footsteps of Descartes and Malebranche, that animals simply don't have mental states. (This is a philosophy class, after all!) Another suggested that since eating animals is an activity that rests on pain and death it is morally tainted and the question of whether there is something good about it that is good enough to justify the death and pain involved is simply inconceivable. Another wanted to divide the question (killing animals raises different issues from making them suffer). Others had skeptical doubts about whether we can know the kinds of things that would be required for answering this question. There was also a lot of discussion of side issues that popped up here and there. I declared that eating at MacDonald's is immoral, "unless the alternative is starving to death," and some wanted to defend MacDonald's. And so on.

I'm sufficiently impressed with the fact that almost no one filled in my blank that I offer my own attempt with some hesitation. I assume the reason for this is that it seems like an impossible task. Which of course is Nozick's point.

The one student who came up after class suggested trying to use John Stuart Mill's idea of higher and lower pleasures. Also, he suggested changing Nozick's question: What if hitting the cow is the only action you can ever perform? This is roughly the sort of approach I would take. I guess my question would be: What if, if people didn't do things like this to the cow, the game of baseball would be wiped off the earth? That of course involves values (and even pleasures) that are very different from the pleasure of swinging the bat.

Nozick's question (or more exactly his principled refusal to answer it) supposes that the value of Peking duck is simply a pleasure, conceived as a mere sensation, like the sensation in one's muscles while swinging a stick. It ignores the existence of cuisine. Cuisine is a rich, complex artifact of human history, like baseball. And like certain other rich, complex artifacts of history, it produces results that in some sense are like works of art. Results like Peking duck. The pleasure of eating it, I submit, is in a completely and qualitatively different category from the pleasure of swinging a stick. Peking duck is an ancient dish. Like all high art, it was originally meant only for the rich and powerful few but now, thanks to the miracle of democratic capitalism, is available to all. It originated during the Yuan Dynasty (coinciding with our High Middle Ages) and was perfected during the Qing Dynasty (late nineteenth century). I would say that it is a thing of beauty, except that for some reason we reserve this word for the sense-modalities of sight and sound, rather than taste, smell, and textural discrimination.

Of all the great cuisines on earth, only one of them as far as I know is "vegetarian" in any sense of the word. This is one of the cuisines of India (which has an ancient tradition of not killing animals). And it is very far from being vegan. It swims in milk, cream, butter, ghee (clairified butter), and yogurt. All of the other great cuisines -- French, Italian, Japanese, the regional cuisines of China and Mexico -- are very meat-centric.

If we all became vegans today, many of the great ideas of Escoffier, Carême, and the achievements of thousands of unsung geniuses who have created the cuisines of the world, would be wiped out overnight. This would be a horrible loss to the human spirit.

Of course, something that you could call cuisine could continue to exist. But the loss would still be horrific. Consider again Peking duck. Recipes for Peking duck focus on the skin. Some call for inflating the duck's skin with air (one reason for leaving its head on). One often sees directions like "hang in a cool, windy place for six hours." The point is to achieve a certain level of crispness and in some cases a jewel-like glaze.

You just can't do that with a pumpkin. Or boiled barley. Or tofu. Forget it!

So I'm not sure exactly how I would fill in my blank, but it's obvious there are lots of ways that include eating Peking duck but exclude hitting the cow.

But there still is an important moral residue to the exercise that Nozick has let us into here. The way we treat animals does have to be justified -- which means we have to treat them in justifiable ways. And that doesn't include just any old thing. The chance that what we do to animals is justified is increased if we increase the probability that the bad of what we do to them is less than the good of what we get out of it. This probability is increased if we depress the badness of the bad. Which means treating animals more humanely. It is also increased if we enhance the goodness of what they do for us. There is a moral responsibility on us as cooks to make the most of our animal ingredients. The next time you bite into a bland, gray fast food hamburger, remember that some cow died so you can do this. Did that cow die in vain?

Why are Government Workers So "Entitled"?

2011-03-20T09:29:00.010-05:00

Government workers in Greece, faced with austerity measures, rioted and firebombed a bank, burning to death three human beings trapped inside. In New Jersey the Governor responded to a severe recession by denying government school teachers their expected annual raise (a raise, during a recession) and the reaction from public sector unions was screaming, white-faced rage. Here in Wisconsin, the Governor is trying to limit the collective bargaining rights of state workers -- a measure that would leave them with roughly the same rights that federal workers have -- and the reactions from the unions was three weeks of demonstrations, illegal obstruction of the legislative process, and an unprecedented flood of death threats and obscene phone calls.

Clearly, these people sincerely believe that they have rights that people in the private sector do not have. Why?

I mean this seriously as a question. I am struggling to understand. In my moral universe, the income of the government worker is more, not less, ethically dubious than that of a private worker. If you are flipping burgers in the private sector, every penny of your income comes from people who like your burgers enough to pay for them. They are glad to do so. In government work, every penny is extracted by force from somebody like the burger-flipper, someone who produces goods and services sold in the marketplace. How can anybody think this is a right, let alone collective bargaining for more money to be collected by force?

Part of the reason, obviously, is that these indignant government workers do not see things this way at all. They are simply "workers," and their public sector union is simply "a union." Thus the reasonable sympathy that people feel for the producers of goods and services is extended -- fallaciously, I say -- to them.

Another reason is the one suggested by Louis C. K. in the above video: people just naturally tend to think that whatever the have right now, regardless of where it came from or how obtained, is a "right." Also fallacious, of course, but understandable. I get it.

But there must be more to it than that. Haven't we learned in the last year or so, that government workers feel more entitled than others? After all, starting about 3 or 4 years ago, families in the private sector started to behave as if family members would be laid off or cut back. And they were, and they did the best with it that they could. When private sector workers lose economic ground they do not scream, demonstrate, or riot.

I can think of two special factors at work here. One is the law. Here is a fact that will amaze government workers: People in the private sector do not generally feel that they have a right to their own jobs. One main reason is that, legally, they don't. Most of them can be fired at any time and without cause. It's called "employment at will." Government work is not like that. Those people do have "rights". It's a different culture, and I suppose it leads to a mindset of entitlement.

The other factor is the profound difference between markets and taxation. The burger-flippers of the world know very well that their income is paid by the customers, and if the customers stop liking their burgers, there will be no money to pay them. Period. They will have to go, and there is no use whining about it. The insecurity of their income stream is brought to mind every day.

The opposite is true of government workers. Their income, being collected by force according to rigid rules, seems absolutely secure. There is no reason to think about it at all. And so they don't. Thus the effect of the Louis C. K. principle is enhanced, squared, cubed. If whatever I have at the moment is a right, then whatever I can't fail to have must be an absolute right, a human right, a natural right!

This, too, is an illusion. Government money is indeed less insecure than private money, but it is not absolutely secure. In bad times, tax money dries up and belts must tighten. This however comes as a profound shock to many government workers. Hence the indignation and the explosions we have seen.

This anyway is the best explanation I have come up with so far.

[Special note in response to the hate mail I am likely to get for writing the above: I myself am a government worker. So if you think that I am saying that government workers are bad people, or that the never do fine work and provide essential services, then all I can say is take a deep breath and read this post again.]

R & R

2011-03-17T00:49:00.006-05:00

For sheer entertainment value, surely one of the greatest pieces of music. Okay, it's not exactly profound, but it is inspiring. And here you see it performed in Notre Dame de Paris (which is also the title of a novel by Victor Hugo). Pretty cool! J. C. Casadesus directing.

School is Prison

2011-03-15T11:00:00.002-05:00

I found this on Youtube, posted by someone who calls him/herself RjWeapon. Speaks for itself.

When I was a student at Lottie Grunsky Grammar School back in the fifties, I often noticed a chain-link fence topped topped with barbed wire separating the school grounds from the sidewalk on E. Harding Way. At the time I thought the barbed wire was there to keep bad guys from climbing the fence to perform unspeakable enormities on our tender little bodies. Years later I realized that, of course, it was there to keep us in.

I was slow, but I did catch on eventually.

Disaster

2011-03-11T23:44:00.003-06:00

My thoughts go out to the people of Japan. Nature is beautiful, but brutal and indifferent.

Civilization is good.

"Cruelty is a part of nature, but it is the one thing that seems unnatural to us."

-- Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)

(Reuters photo.)

Is the Government "Broke"?

2011-03-08T12:18:00.000-06:00

Screaming debates now raging about fiscal matters raise an interesting question: are the various governments in the US - federal, state, local - broke? Underlying this is a deeper conceptual question: does a concept like "broke" even apply to governments?

As to the idea that the US is indeed broke, the New York Times has said:

It’s all obfuscating nonsense, of course, a scare tactic employed for political ends. A country with a deficit is not necessarily any more “broke” than a family with a mortgage or a college loan.

Admittedly, the mere fact that the feds have a "mortgage" amounting to approximately $14 trillion in debt does not, independently of any context whatsoever, mean that they are broke. But of course, neither does any other single number. You need at least two numbers to figure that out. But the deficit does involve two numbers. Why aren't they the right ones? A family that spends more than it takes in, that is going into debt just to meet living expenses would be "broke."

In finance, solvency is the fact that current assets are sufficient to meet current liabilities. If you are going further into debt to meet those liabilities, you are broke. (This simple point is well made by Bill Anderson here.)

What are these people thinking? Probably something like what Michael Moore is thinking in the video below: there is a lot of money out there that the government has not taken yet. In the memorable words of Cuffy Meigs, "There's plenty of pickings left" (Atlas Shrugged, 1st ed., p. 947). The government is not broke until there is nothing left for it to take.

That means, they are thinking, that governments can't go "broke." This may be true, but in that case their fallacy is in concluding that governments are eternally solvent.

"Solvent" only applies in the context of property rights: you are solvent if your assets are sufficient. The fact that I have assets that you haven't taken from me is irrelevant. Of course, you can't take my assets, whereas the government can. Should we therefore think of my assets as the government's assets?

The truth of the matter is that governments are radically different phenomena from private organizations and have to be understood with radically different ideas. If governments can't be broke, they can't be solvent either. Neither idea applies. We need different ideas.

In a way, we already do think of governments as being radically different: we naturally tend to think of them as magically immune to the shocks of destiny, unlike every other organization on Earth. Governments mean absolute safety and security.

We are now waking up to the fact that they do not. They are not different in that way.

The powers to tax and to inflate the money supply are indeed financial wild cards the government can play whenever it wants, but they are not magic. Even the Meigs-Moore theory has to admit that there is an absolute limit to what the government can take: the surplus above the producers' survival level is all that is available for taking. But long before it reaches that fatal level, government will face horrific consequences.

What governments are now doing is bringing these consequences closer and making them worse. This is the fundamental, undeniable fact of the day, and talk about not being broke only covers it up.

Who is Charlie Sheen and Why is He Exploding Before Our Eyes?

2011-03-02T09:12:00.011-06:00

I once shocked Noel Carroll by telling him that I never, ever watch a movie just because I like some actor in it. Apparently, even Noel, one of the most brilliant film theorists around today, suffers from the delusion that actors are artists.

I think of them as sock puppets that certain artists -- writers and directors -- use to express their passions, their ideals, and their visions. It is true enough that the great actors -- Garbo, James Dean, the early John Barrymore -- are also brilliant at expressing passions and ideals, but they are the exceptions. And look at Sheen's IMDB page. Take away the movie sequels, the voicework, the TV sitcom, and there isn't much left. This is not Barrymore we are looking at here. This is an ordinary person -- but with one huge, fatal difference.

I've always been a freak-fancier myself and before I became a professor had more than my share of insane friends. (Professors aren't allowed to be insane.) Watching Sheen's interviews this week brought back a lot of old memories. They are not pleasant memories. We are seeing a sight I have seen before: a human mind disintegrating before our eyes.

If Sheen had a boss who terrifies him and $10,000 in credit card debt, he would be in better shape than he is. Unfortunately for him, he has infinite amounts of everything. There are no hard constraints on his behavior. He has all the ordinary appetites and urges, and for all practical purposes an unlimited capacity to satisfy them. So instead of merely disintegrating, he is exploding.

I think this is why so many highly successful actors have such screwed up lives. They are ordinary people, with no more wisdom and insight than most have, but with no constraints on their behavior. Most actors -- the ones who are not hugely successful -- are not like that at all. But their life-circumstances are like yours and mine and not like Sheen's. They have to get along with others. They have to figure out how to pay their bills and taxes. We are always under a certain amount of pressure to figure out what the right thing to do is and do it. The pressure is so constant that we don't usually even notice it -- until we see a life in which it is virtually absent, such as Sheen's.

Note also that, compared to other lines of work that involve rare skills and talents, acting requires very little self-discipline and self-control. If you have a basic knack for it, it is a very easily-acquired skill. Learning to play the violin, or mastering calculus, are incomparably more arduous. Even professional violinists must spend many lonely hours, week in and week out, in front of a music stand, developing and maintaining their skills. Actors don't have to do that. If actors learn self-discipline, it probably won't be from the "work" they do.

I think what is happening to Sheen is sad, and that the proper reaction is not laughter or even anger, but pity.

How Much do Wisconsin Teachers "Really" Contribute to Their Benefits Package?

2011-02-27T21:23:00.007-06:00

One of our graduate students brought these two articles to the attention of her Facebook friends (which includes me) yesterday: this one in the Wall Street Journal and this one in the web site tax.com. The WSJ tells a rather hair-raising story about what a large contribution the state government and school districts are paying into the pension plans and medical insurance of public school teachers. In some cases the teacher's own contribution is zero. The Tax.com article claims that in every case the teachers own contribution is actually 100%! How, my young FF wondered, can there be such wild disagreement about a plain matter of fact?

Good question! I think the answer is that there is really no substantive disagreement here at all. They are simply describing exactly the same facts in different ways. The Tax.com author, David Cay Johnston, maintains that medical insurance and pension contributions from the government are really from the worker. The reasoning seems to be this: "Wages" properly refers to everything you are given in compensation for your work. Since the state and the districts give the teachers these benefits as compensation for work, they are really part of the worker's wages. Therefore the worker's contribution to their benefits packages from their wages is not 4% or 8% but 100%. They already contribute it all!

This is of course nothing but word-magic.

In one way, though, it is simply not true. If it were actually true that compensation with benefits is actually equivalent to compensation with pay, then it would also be true that, if the teachers were given no benefits at all, they would be getting its full value in pay. That would mean that the Milwaukee teachers being discussed in the above video would be getting an average of $100,000 a year in cold, hard cash for 9 months of work. That of course is absurd. Taxpayers in the private sector are slow to anger and their anger has usually has little effect, but they would never sit down for that.

It makes a difference, probably a big one, that about half of Wisconsin teacher compensation is concealed in the form of perqs rather than pay. I means that it does not show up on transparency web sites like this one. It means that workers in the private sector -- about half of whom have no pensions at all -- cannot accurately assess how much they have to work in order to support these people.

(HT to Molly Gardner.)

The Libertarian Penumbra

2011-02-26T10:14:00.012-06:00

Bryan Caplan introduced a useful concept: the libertarian penumbra, or ideas and attitudes libertarians tend to share even though they have little to do with liberty.

Bryan's examples:

Most libertarians accept the validity of IQ testing. A perfectly good libertarian could reject IQ tests as "culturally biased," but few do.

Libertarians have favorable views of home schooling - even though conventional private schooling is equally consistent with libertarian principles.

Libertarianism implies opposition to government population control, but it doesn't imply another view common among libertarians: that population growth has major economic benefits because people are "the ultimate resource." Notice: A statist who took this idea seriously could easily argue for government intervention to raise the birth rate.

Here is Will Wilkinson's list:

1. Crackpot theories of money/macro. A tendency to overlook the problem of demand shocks.
2. Global warming denial. (But skepticism about Gore-type solutions is fine.)
3. Overlooking the importance of having a “civic-minded” culture, such as you observe in Denmark.
4. Distrust of democracy.
5. Overlooking the importance of private non-profit enterprises.
6. Making the perfect be the enemy of the “much better.”
7. Confusing individualism with libertarianism.
8. Seeing history through middle class white male eyes.
9. Too much nostalgia for the past, and for the future. Right now was once the future, and will soon be the past.
10. I can’t think of anything else, but all lists should have ten items.

I would add a couple of others:

1. A tendency to think believe in "negative liberty" (not being interfered with) rather than "positive liberty" (being able to actually do what you would like to do) even though if negative liberty did not increase positive liberty it would have little or no value.

2. Belief in conspiracy theories. Pearl Harbor, the JFK assassination, 9/11 and God know what else were inside jobs. As I have pointed out before, the psychology of conspiracy theories is actually profoundly freedom-unfriendly. The two most influential conspiracy theories of the twentieth century were Nazism (it's all a Jewish plot!) and Communism (it's all a capitalism plot!). On the other hand, the logic of the case for free markets is the opposite of a conspiracy theory: it argues that things that look like they are the product of human intention actually are not. Gas prices do not rise in times of shortage just because speculators behind the scenes are pulling strings to screw the consumers. (Hat-tip to the late Robert Nozick for this point.)

Two things I would consider taking off the above lists:

1. Homeschooling boosterism makes sense to me. If one parent was going to stay home anyway, it is a lot cheaper than private schooling and hence more within the reach of everybody. Also, for various reasons, private schooling is not that different from public. The obnoxious ideas that contaminate the latter are actually worse in private schools: eg., fanatical diversity-worship, environmentalism practiced with the fervency and sanctimony of a religious faith. Unless your private school offers something that is simply not allowed in public schools (eg., the Montessori method, or religious indoctrination) your private school is probably a huge, tragic waste of money.

2. Why on Earth does Will think distrust of democracy is irrelevant to liberty?

Update in response to a question in the comment section: I can see two sorts of motivations for the unnecessary and in some cases silly beliefs in the above lists:

1. A false notion that the belief is supportive of liberty. Libertarian conspiracy theories always have governments doing evil things. I would point out though that they also show them doing evil with super-human efficiency, bringing about only the evil effects that they fiendishly intend, never bringing about counter-productive unforeseen side-effects, and always brilliantly concealing virtually every visible trace of their fiendish plots. This of course is grossly inconsistent with libertarianism.

2. As Bryan says, there is also a sort of contrarian, iconoclastic mind-set at work here. If the intellectual elites say everything is racist, then by God we're going to say nothing is racist. If they say a) global warming is real, b) it is human-caused, c) they have a human-caused solution ready for deployment, and d) said deployment will be worth the cost -- then by God we will deny (a) through (d), not just (c) and (d). That'll show them!!

Signs at the Wisconsin Union Protests

2011-02-20T19:38:00.018-06:00

Deborah, my better half, went to the protest in Madison yesterday and collected some pictures of signs there. Everyone was quite nice about letting her photograph them. I hope they won't mind my putting them here! (All pictures have been cropped so as not to show faces.)

Some of them were rather complicated and hard to follow. It seems to me that Tea Party signs are generally more pithy. (Click to enlarge.)

Relevance to the collective bargaining issue was not always immediately apparent.

A number of signs compared Gov. Walker to Hitler. This gentleman, to his credit, was thoughtful enough to ask Deborah, "Is this offensive?" "Very," she said, "I'm Jewish." He replied, "I'm sorry." The apology seemed to be sincere.

I have to say, also, that this one is more literate than the average Hitler comparison.

I think democracy looks more like that election in November that you people lost.

This one is pretty obscure, at least to me. Is Mississippi one of the 26 states that do not allow collective bargaining by government workers? Is that what this sign is about?

The taxpayers will be so glad to hear that the deficit does not exist! (In case you are wondering what the heck this is about, see this article. Hat-tip to economist Steve Horwitz.)

That was fun. Thanks Deborah!

Wisconsin PS Teachers Underpaid?

2011-02-19T16:40:00.004-06:00

The public schools in my town, Oregon WI, have been closed three days in a row, as teachers falsely call in sick to protest a threat to their right to collectively bargain over how much the taxpayers will have to pay them.

How has the status quo worked out for the K-12 teachers of Wisconsin? The above video suggests: pretty well for them, not so well for those who pay them.

Public Service Employee Unions are Different

2011-02-16T13:29:00.012-06:00

Last night as I was entering the Madison College building to go to orchestra rehearsal I saw bus after bus, paid for by voluminous union money, unloading scores of union members with professionally printed signs to launch this protest against Gov. Walker's just-begun attempt to force state workers to accept reductions in pay and perqs. His plan is to strip most state employees of some of their collective bargaining rights, on the theory that this is what has so far blocked them from having to accept their share of the reductions that workers in the private sector have had to suffer.

In the angry comments on the plan, you could hardly guess that the downtrodden "workers" being discussed are government workers, and that the "unions" are public service unions only. However, they are, and it is very important to realize that.

We are not talking about the proletariat here. We are talking about people who have the power to tax: something the rest of us do not have.

If Walker were trying to break the back of private sector unions, I would agree that this is an atrocity of Hitlerian proportions. (Come to think of it, crushing the private sector unions is exactly what the Führer did, soon after taking office.) But I think private sector unions and public sector unions are completely different animals: economically, ethically, and politically different.

There is a powerful rationale for having private sector unions. Suppose you work in a competitive market, and you persuade your employer to raise your salary significantly. Your boss is competing with people who did not incur that particular expense. That is a reason, maybe a good one, for the employer not to give you the raise. If all the workers in your company bargain as one, that blunts this reason considerably. If all in your industry do -- so much the better! Now your boss will not have to compete against people who did not incur this expense.

Great! The discipline of competitive markets exerts a downward pressure on all business expenses, including employee salaries. Unions are anti-competitive devices, instruments of monopoly power, and thus highly attractive to those who believe that their bargaining position in a competitive market is weak.

With government employees this argument is completely lacking. You employer does not compete in the market. To give you more money, all they need do is take some more from the taxpayers, either present taxpayers or - better yet - future ones. (If they are a nation-state, they can just print it up!) People have often commented that public and private unions behave very differently. Private sector unions, they say, are adversarial, while public sector unions are "collusive."

Obviously, if you combine this with collective bargaining, you can get some inequitable distributions of benefits and burdens. For three years now, UW professors have endured a 3% cut in pay. Meanwhile, the K-12 teachers in the same community have experienced merely a lack of pay increases. Why the difference? The public school teachers are unionized and the professors are not. Why should the the K-12 teachers not experience their fair share of the pain? The private sector workers who must work to support them with their tax dollars are suffering losses, in some cases devastating ones. Government workers should not be a privileged aristocracy.

If to achieve this end we need to strip them in many cases of the "right" to collective bargaining, then so be it.
_________________
Update: Here Jonah Goldberg argues that the real reason for public sector unions is not, and never was, based on considerations of justice or fairness: The actual reason is purely political. See also this.

The Ethics of Taxation

2011-02-13T15:00:00.002-06:00

This is Mitch Daniels, the Gov. of Indiana, addressing CPAC yesterday. (Sorry, I can't find an embeddable video. Here is a non-embeddable one with good sound quality.) One part of his speech I liked very much is this:

We believe it wrong ever to take a dollar from a free citizen without a very necessary public purpose, because each such taking diminishes the freedom to spend that dollar as its owner would prefer. When we do find it necessary, we feel a profound duty to use that dollar as carefully and effectively as possible, else we should never have taken it at all.

This strikes me as the most lucid sort of ethical common sense. When you tax someone, you are coercively taking from then money that they have earned. You should only tax someone for a purpose sufficiently weighty to justify that sort of coercive taking.

Here's another rule that seems obviously true to me: you should only go to war for a reason sufficiently weighty to justify mass killing. More than that: it has to be so important that it justifies actions that you know in advance will kill large numbers of innocent civilians, people who plainly do not deserve violent death.

We can disagree on how weighty a purpose would have to be to justify mass coercion and killing, but it seems undeniable that such actions are morally evil if they do not measure up to these obvious standards, however we might spell these standards out in detail.

It also seems undeniable that, however they are spelled out, these standards are very stringent. If adopted and acted on consistently, there would be few taxes and very, very few wars.

Peace through Coke!

2011-02-08T12:09:00.006-06:00

This was my favorite of yesterday's Superbowl commercials. Maybe I'm just a a sucker for the message of peace and understanding through sugary soft drinks.

I also loved the surrealist juxtaposition of Napoleonic-era uniforms and the obvious radio tower in the near background. Also the volcanic cinder cone in the distance.

Also, there's the music! As economist David R. Henderson pointed out to me on Facebook, the majestic music track is the Sarabande from the Harpsichord Suite #11 in D Minor by Handel. Old George Frederick sure know his way around a minor key!

Stanley Kubrick used this piece for the main titles in Barry Lyndon. I think it also appears in a fatal dueling scene later in the picture.

When is a Compromise a Betrayal?

2011-02-02T14:01:00.005-06:00

What a fine first speech in the Senate from Rand Paul! He addresses an important issue: When is compromising a good thing and when is it bad? I think "compromise" generally refers to two very different things. There really should be two different words here.

Suppose I am trying to sell my car. I'm asking $1,000. I am offered $700. That's too little. I would rather keep the car. It's worth more than $700 to me. I say, "Will you compromise at $850?" Sometimes "compromise" means accepting something that's "good enough" when you were hoping for something great.

On the other hand, suppose that the issue is whether to support the institution of slavery, which you know (or should know) to be wrong. If you do, your compromise will achieve a result you think is better on the whole than if you don't: you enhance your chances of becoming president, perhaps, or you diminish the chances of a civil war somewhat. But you achieve these supposedly good results by means of supporting a violation of human rights. I would say you have to forgo this opportunity to achieve those results. In this case, compromise means compromising on basic principles.

Bottom line: Compromise between better and worse, not between right and wrong.

Given his principles, Sen. Paul is making a perfectly good application of this idea. In his view, spending is the cause of the current problem. In his terms, to compromise between cutting spending and raising taxes would be a compromise between right and wrong.

Happy Ayn Rand's Birthday Everybody!

2011-02-02T13:30:00.003-06:00

This clip is from "Love Letters," a film she wrote for Hal Wallis (dir. William Dieterle, 1945). She didn't write the original story, but selected it from several that were offered her. The theme: "you cannot live a lie."

My favorite Rand quote: "Those who fight for the future live in it today."

[Hat-tip to Michael Richard Brown for this clip.]

U. of Minn.: Obama SOTU at Early Eighth Grade Level

2011-01-30T16:14:00.016-06:00

Average Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level for Orally Delivered State of the Union Addresses by Presidents Since FDR

Rank	President	Words per sentence	Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level
1	Kennedy	23.8	12.0
2	Eisenhower	20.5	11.9
3	Nixon	23.5	11.5
4	Roosevelt	24.3	11.4
5	Ford	19.3	11.2
6	Carter	19.7	10.8
7	Truman	18.9	10.5
8	Johnson	20.3	10.4
8	Bush 43	19.0	10.4
10	Reagan	19.6	10.3
11	Clinton	19.0	9.5
12	Bush 41	17.4	8.6
13	Obama	16.7	8.5

Data compiled by Smart Politics.

This article, on the University of Minnesota's Smart Politics web site (it is aptly named, BTW), is very interesting. It rates all of the orally delivered State of the Union addresses, going back to the beginning of the New Deal, as if they were texts that school children read. The grade level of Obama's two SOTU speeches is grade 8.5. That of last Wednesday's speech is a stultifying 8.1, the lowest yet. That's right,when if comes to giving SOTU speeches that make few demands on your gray matter, he is probably the all-time champ.

I find this puzzling, for two reasons.

One has to do the fact that this is pretty much the way his speeches have always impressed me. (See this, and this.) Why, then, do people (eg., Sarah Palin) keep saying that Obama's speaking manner is "professorial"? I don't get it at all. I'm a prof myself and have known hundreds of them, and I have never known one who talks anything like him. We see here one very simple reason for that. There is no subject taught in any college I know of that can be taught with an eighth grade vocabulary.

The other thing is this. Look at the chart again. Notice there is a pattern: a certain rough tendency for the level to drop over time. The last 5 presidents are also the bottom five. Why?

A typical answer, given in the above article, is that people's "attention spans are getting shorter" -- a trend that for a long time was blamed on TV, later on the internet. This has always sounded like BS to me. What is an attention span, anyway? If it means anything, shouldn't it mean that people are less and less willing to sit through long speeches? And yet the SOTU speeches are not getting shorter. If anything, they are stretching out. According to this site, the two champions of long-windedness since the days of LBJ are Bill Clinton and -- guess who? -- Barack Obama.

Besides, this explanation blames the audience. Doesn't it make more sense to blame the politicians and their writers? After all, they are the ones producing these increasingly idiotic speeches.

Over the years, it seems to me, political speeches in general have been less and less aimed at contributing in some serious way to a discussion of important issues. Politicians seem to think, for whatever reason, that the way they talk represents their most effective way to compete for votes and for voter approval. But why? Why is competition driving them toward the bottom? I really don't know.

Three more random observations:

1. Though I speak of a rough historical trend here, I have to say it is far from uniform. Notice that the high point in this list is JFK -- who, historically, comes somewhere in the middle. I think this means that you can't explain this entirely on the basis of some kind of historical determinism. I think it also means that, though you can't blame Obama for the trend, you can blame him for carrying it to a new low.

2. Contrary to what many would predict, Republicans do not pitch their words to a more stupid audience than Democrats do. George W. Bush spoke at a tenth grade level. In other words, students who have just managed to understand Obama would have to study two more years to grasp the wisdom of Dubya.

3. Maybe "trend" is not the right word for the historical pattern at all. It's not clear there is any historical trend in the above chart before Reagan. Rather, Reagan seems to represent a break with the past and herald of stupidity yet to come. One reason this is interesting: this happens well after the advent of TV, but before the internet. Something else is going on here.

[A few comments on this post may be found here.]

(Hat tip for the link to Michael Richard Brown.)

Is the Right Starting to Get It Right?

2011-01-27T21:05:00.003-06:00

Jack Hunter and Justin Raimondo have a take on things that is very hopeful for those of us who love both freedom and peace. I hope they are right.

The Climate of Hate Theory Explained

2011-01-23T12:53:00.008-06:00

As everyone knows, when Sarah Palin put her "targeted districts" map on a web site, there instantly were complaints that this "violent image" was an incitement to bloodshed and could actually cause it to happen. And yet, when the Democratic Leadership Council in 2004 published a very similar map with exactly the same theme (see below), we heard not a peep of protest. Why the difference?

Obviously there are a number of reasons, but surely one of them is this: The only people who would say that about you would be your critics, and the critics of the DLC -- conservatives, radical libertarians, Marxists, racialists, etc., etc. -- don't think this way, but a certain group of critics of Palin -- namely left liberals -- do.

What way is that? This of course is the climate of hate theory, as I have called it. (See also this.) I think this theory, which seems so silly to a lot of non-liberals -- is firmly embedded in the following features of the left-liberal view of the world:

1. Liberalism is based on the a strong desire to improve the world by means that are now within our reach. (It is both idealistic and optimistic.)

2. This means that the changes must be piecemeal: huge, systemic, revolutionary changes are not currently within our reach. (Thus they are committed to thinking that the problems of the world are not deeply rooted. This makes left-liberalism seem shallow to people who hold the opposite assumption, including Marxists, conservatives, racialists, and some radical libertarians.)

3. It also means that the causes of the world's problems must be subject to human control.

Believe it or not, I think 1-3 can explain the seeming obsession that so many left-liberals have with controlling the way others use words and other symbols (an urge that includes so-called "political correctness").

Here is one example of how these basic assumptions play out in terms of policies and practices:

Since everyone is equal, there is no reason why African Americans should be so much poorer than others are -- except that others keep discriminating against them. Why do they do that? Because they have bad ideas and attitudes. Where to they get these bad ideas and attitudes? From each other. How? By means of the things they say to each other. Through bad speech, they plant bad ideas in each others' brains. Institutional racism is a complex web, but it includes a choke-point that is subject to manipulation and control: speech, bad speech.

The climate of hate theory is simply a corollary: It just identifies one of the most obvious ways in which bad speech causes problems in the world. The fact that it is rooted in the way it is can easily explain features of the theory that seem anomalous to outsiders:

a. Though it sounds like a causal, empirical theory, they never give any evidence for it. Where are the studies correlating hateful speech with violence? That is like asking "where are the studies showing that the physical universe exists?" This theory is very close to their fundamental assumptions about how the world works. For a several reasons, people don't generally feel compelled to give evidence for such assumptions. For one thing, they seem far too obvious to need evidence.

b. The theory is only applied to right-wing speech, never to liberal, socialist, Marxist, feminist, or environmentalist speech, no matter how hateful or intemperate it might seem. It is of course a theoretical possibility such progressive speech could cause some violence, but we don't focus on that possibility because such speech is progressive: it is part of the solution, while right-wing speech is part of the problem. It is just the sort of speech that causes so much of the trouble in the world. The talk of "over-heated rhetoric," as if it only occurs on the right, does make sense, but only if you see it from inside the left-liberal world-view.

c. Though the theory often takes the form of dire warnings about bad things that are about to happen, the people who warn us about these things never seem to be genuinely frightened. Their tone seems scolding, not fearful. These dire predictions are not spontaneous expressions of emotion. They are attempts to make the world better. If we can just shame right-wingers into toning down their speech, progressive speech would have more effect and the world will eventually be cured of some of its serious troubles.

This is the best I'm able to do, so far, in understanding this curious phenomenon: the over-heated right-wing rhetoric theory.