Defending the Oxford Comma

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?

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

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

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

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.

Live-Blogging the Second Gary Johnson Debate

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?

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.