KrisKraus

First legally blind governor?

2008-03-14T19:32:00.000-04:00

I don't know why everyone is calling David Patterson New York's first legally blind governor when his immediate predecessor, Elliot Spitzer, was apparently also legally blind? Yeah I know, feel free to groan at that one.

2006-12-14T13:14:00.001-05:00

The Senate is now in danger of returning to the Republicans again.

Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson was taken to the hospital on Wednesday after becoming disoriented during a conference phone call with reporters. At first, he answered questions normally but then began to stutter. He paused, then continued stammering before appearing to recover and ending the call.

"The senator is recovering without complication," said Adm. John Eisold, the Capitol physician. "It is premature to determine whether further surgery will be required or to assess any long-term prognosis."

Eisold said doctors drained the blood that had accumulated in Johnson's brain and stopped continued bleeding.

Johnson's condition, also known as AVM, or arteriovenous malformation, causes arteries and veins to grow abnormally large and become tangled.

The condition is believed to affect about 300,000 Americans, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. The institute's Web site said only about 12 percent of the people with the condition experience symptoms, ranging in severity. It kills about 3,000 people a year.

The senator's wife, Barbara Johnson, said the family "is encouraged and optimistic."

In a statement from Johnson's office Thursday, she said her family was "grateful for the prayers and good wishes of friends, supporters and South Dakotans."

A person familiar with Johnson's situation said surgery began late Wednesday night and ended around 12:30 a.m. Thursday and that the next 24 to 48 hours would be critical in determining Johnson's condition. The person spoke on condition of anonymity out of respect for the senator's family.

If Johnson were forced to relinquish his seat, a replacement would be named by South Dakota's GOP Gov. Mike Rounds.

A Republican appointee would create a 50-50 tie, and allow the GOP to retain Senate control.

Damn, Putin is good.

2006-12-10T15:12:00.000-05:00

This is going to suck...

2006-12-05T03:17:00.001-05:00

Dear _____,
Do you belong to the New York Times? Check out their new initiative called Timespoints (The program is basically a way to earn points from the New York Times by linking all your credit card purchases to a New York Times-controlled account)

http://timespoints.nytimes.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/TCHomePageDisplay?storeId=10001&catalogId=10001

Another description here:

It's an interesting scheme, from a business perspective. The consumer benefits are obvious. From the NYTimes point of view, the benefit of gaining access to information about a customer's credit card purchases is ambiguous. Do you think it's demographic profiling for the newspaper itself? Do you think the NYTimes is attempting to make more informed pitches to its advertisers? Do you think it is actually selling consumer information to other companies? Is it a business loyalty program of some sort? Your new business education surely enables you to answer these questions and more...

Oh yeah, and I am becoming less busy by the end of this week and would enjoy having that in depth discussion we have not been able to have in a while,

Keeping you on your toes,
Adam

Follow up: paranoid analysis:

However, at the same time I see the potential for mischief here. Like what is to stop the Rewards Program from compiling a private database of ALL of my credit card purchases, and then

1) Selling it to interested buyers who will target me with unsolicited mail, phone calls, and spam of all sorts
2) Selling the information to those who may, at some point, have the incentive to blackmail me with disclosures of my purchases (that Hardcore Geriatrics 37 video being but one of my many incriminating purchases)

You are now an expert in business law, right (I think you took one class in that or something)? Does the law protect me?

The webpage itself is misleading:

"Q: Why is The Times doing this?
A: This program allows our readers to get more from The Times by doing the everyday things they already do - dining out, shopping online and staying at hotels. Our objective is to reward our loyal readers and further enhance the value of their relationship with The Times. We are providing members with a hassle-free way to save on their subscription and also an opportunity to save on some of our other offerings - exhibition-quality photographs, thought-provoking books from our journalists, historic pages and more."

So the Times has its customers best interests in mind and there is no gain to be accrued to its organization... Riiight.

I will post the reply on this site.

2006-12-05T03:10:00.000-05:00

Oh my God -

"Now available: the Facebook Firefox Toolbar. Keep up with your friends even when you're browsing other sites. "

Why don't you just ask me point blank if I will be a whore for Facebook.

2006-11-18T22:23:00.001-05:00

I actually paid attention to this election. The national results have been so completely analyzed that there is surely nothing new I can say. However, too little attention has been paid to the results that have taken place right here in Massachusetts. First, some background:

Our present governor, Mitt Romney, has actually accomplished very little. As everyone knows, he is just more interested in running for president than governing Massachusetts. Romney has cut funding for top Republican 'priorities,' like public safety and criminal justice, while espousing his superior conservative ethical bearing in stark relief to those wacky, degenerate Massachusetts people he oversees. Every once in a while, our governor pulls a 'John Kerry' and completely contradicts or reverses an earlier position on a contentious issue, but no one in Massachusetts notices or cares because his approval rating is close to 20 percent anyway. Or our governor will pull a 'George Bush,' which is the Massachusetts equivalent to bristling atop an aircraft carrier in a flight suit with obvious padding to make your crotch look huge. Here in Massachusetts, our governor struck a commanding pose in the Big Dig conference room emblazoned with pocket protector and holding a laser pointer. Wow, look at Romney - he's Atlas and Big Dig disaster relief all rolled into one! Sadly, though, the reality doesn't measure up.

When the Republicans announced that their nominee this election would be Romney's Lt. Governor Kerry Healey, naturally I had nothing to say...

Much more interesting were the Democratic primary candidates. During the primary campaign, the diversity of choices was magnificent and the policy differences among them veritable. At some point close to the middle, Deval Patrick arose as the inevitable nominee. This was interesting, because Patrick's plan and rhetoric were the vaguest of any candidate's. From the beginning, I was not inclined to take him very seriously. Nonetheless, it became clear that he had a kind of unstoppable momentum over and above the other two candidates, and resisting his train to the nomination was futile.

Why did Patrick beat Gabrielli and Reilly? He had the least concrete things to say. He wasn't an amazing speaker or very charismatic (despite what the die-hards said). His campaigning was not very outstanding either. His overall position on the political spectrum was pretty undistinguished. There can be many theories on how he went on to win, but I won't try to decide between them. I'll just list all the plausible ones that I can think of:

Patrick may have been a better politician. This is plausible, given that Reilly was prone to making blunders, and Gabrielli was, from his very outermost appearance to the core, not a politician at all. Not to hold anything against him: how many medical-school trained investment bankers do you know that would have much potential as a political candidate? Gabrielli, had he won (and if I were eligible, I would have voted for him), would have been a frighteningly efficient and probably very successful governor. Patrick, in his wisdom, kept his campaign vague, ESPECIALLY during the primary season, which must prove to have been a wise move given that entire campaign turned out to be so negative.

Patrick may have had a better product. And by product, I don't mean better SHELL. By that token, Healey would have won, since she has great hair.. Of course I mean product in the doctrinal sense. The message, which was, to be fair, perfectly loud and clear in all its vagueness, advertised a desire to govern by coalition rather than faction, by inclusion rather than division. This message, we may safely say, is during these times a badly needed balm at least, and redemption at its most.

It may have been Patrick's reputed charisma, whatever that is imputed to mean. Whether this came from his inspiring personal story or some exceptional personal quality, I don't really get. What I do know is that people reported finding it an integral and reinforcing part of his total message. Does charisma win elections? Sure. But it's hard to define, so let's instead move on to the next factor..

Patrick is black... This is not to take away from any other factor that led to his success this election, just as arguing that "Patrick is charismatic" is not in any way taken to imply that he offered a bad product. Since he is our state's first black governor, any analysis of his candidacy cannot ignore the fact of his race, just as the voters surely did not. Massachusetts is a leading - if not THE leading - progressive state. At the same time, Boston is STILL a racist place. I'm not going to go much further into supporting this claim other than to point out that race and class still correlate to a regretably close degree in Massachusetts, and, in effect, Boston is highly geographically segregated by race. And its a testimonial to the progressiveness of this state that voters overwhelmingly chose a black governor despite these baser ingrained tendencies.

Patrick was genuine and that's why he won. I just don't buy this one, not because I believe Deval is ungenuine (whatever that means in his case...) but because his Democratic opponent was absolutely genuine. Chris Gabrielli was way too much of a brainiac nerd and a policy freak to care for dissembling before the electorate. In other words, he was painfully genuine, which in his case translated to fully, clearly, and transparently lacking any charisma whatsoever, which I guess made it a liability in his case. The only other possibility is that Patrick was PERCEIVED to be genuine, which I guess was the case because his 'genuine' nature was consistently cited by supporters and commentators alike.

Of course, the foregoing analysis has been completely Patrick-centered. In reality, his opponents may have simply been worse. I mean, Reilly is undistinguished as Attorney General and definitely an insider in a political state that loves spending and behind the scenes brokering, thereby making him a risk. Gabrielli lived literally next to John Kerry, a fact that due to its symbolic significance made him automatically unfriendly and suspect to the powerful Southie-type lobby.

Lastly, the voters may have calculated that Patrick had the highest potential to beat the Republican Healey. What the idea may have been here, I can only speculate. Certainly he was different from Healey. And he did beat her.

Tomorrow I'll give my commentary on the campaign itself...

2006-10-06T00:04:00.002-04:00

The Foley thing, aside from being really sick, is just about the best example of bad karma that I have ever seen. Andrew Sullivan, the hands down go-to man in the case of a monstrous election-year Republican gay scandal involving a hypocritical closeted gay politician, abuse of power and church abuse (well, for any one of those, really), may well be enrapturing and ascending to the Creator at this very moment...

"The base of the GOP has been fed homophobia and gay-baiting for years now. It was partly how Rove won Ohio and the presidency. Gay-hating is integral to their machine. Now, the very homophobia these people stoked and used is suddenly turning back on them. Part of me is distressed that the GOP could lose not because of spending recklessness, corruption, torture, big government, pork, and a hideously botched war ... but because of a sex scandal which doesn't even have (so far as we know) any actual sex. But part of me also sees the karmic payback here. They rode this tiger; now it's turning on them. And it's dinner time."

"Three other pages describe Foley's online predation. The GOP is going to have to find another angle to deflect this. They've tried blaming the MSM; they've tried blaming Clinton; they've tried to turn all the victims into pranksters. It's been a worthy display. But in the end they may have to take ... responsibility. Remember that? It used to be a conservative value."

"The silent victims of the closet are not just the closeted gay men and women themselves. The pathology destroys marriages, wounds wives and husbands, traumatizes kids, breaks up families, leads to acting out, sexual abuse and dysfunction. The victims of homophobia are not just gay people. They are straight people as well. And the only way out is through.
If one good thing comes out of this Foley fiasco, I hope it is a clear sign that the closet and its pathologies must end. And only the institution of civil marriage for all can kill it off for good. Gay people desperately need institutions in which to express their love constructively and responsibly. We are just as human as anyone else."

Whichever Democrat invented this scandal is an absolute genius. Here's why:

Hypocrisy - Politicans are all hypocritical, we are taught. Yet contemporary Republicans are supposed to be an improvement on this stereotype; they are straightlaced and devout. Not so. We all know that being a flaming hypocrite is an equal opportunity employer, but I could not imagine a more, well, flaming, example of hypocrisy. Not only is this guy a Republican, not only was he completely in the closet and gay, he was 'chairman of the House caucus on missing and exploited children.' He sponsored a bill protecting children from exploitation. If you're a Congressman, does that make personally exploiting children better or worse?

Sex - Remember when the Republicans got all fake-bent out of shape that 'one of Bill Clinton's trysts with Monica took place in the oval office on...Christmas!' Imagine the excellent opportunities to turn this around: 'One of Representative Foley's internet chats with an underage boy on penises, naked asses, and masturbation took place... during an appropriations bill for IRAQ! The fact that naked asses takes priority over well-armored asses on our troops is an assault on our troops. And, he probably wants gays in the military: underage, gay prostitutes!'

Gay - Just the fact that the GOP is currently so homophobic and yet could be brought down by a gay scandal is quite poetic.

Grandstanding - Republicans arguably won the last couple elections by grandstanding on corruption of leadership and their intolerance to sex scandals. Now, considerable evidence that the leadership not only covered up a sex scandal, but looked the other way, makes this claim ridiculous.

This guy did EXACTLY what Clinton did, aside from having actual sex on the premises. Given that Clinton's scandal was such a winner for the Republicans, this is guaranteed to be a whopping loser for them. Moreover, it seems that he started stalking pages or whatever AFTER Clinton got caught in his sex scandal. It's almost as if Clinton's trangressions gave him the idea... Just a thought. But picture it: "While Republicans were busy shutting down our government and calling in a constitutional crisis over sex, Mark Foley was chatting with your teenager on AIM about penis size." "While Republicans were grandstanding about gays, Representative Foley was turning your kid gay." Ridiculous, I know, but this is the stuff that wins, is it not?

2006-09-10T14:59:00.001-04:00

Associated Press, bringing you the news you didn't know you already knew. These headlines are from today's (September 10th) 'Top Stories' section on Yahoo, presumably because the 'top' number of people already know them and therefore have nothing to gain from reading about them. The complete five listed stories as of 3:00 pm are:

Iran may consider enrichment suspension
Pope warns of tuning out Christianity
Rice: U.S. not entirely safe from attack
GIs hunt al-Qaida in Afghan mountains
U.S. military: Suicide cell in Kabul

Translation:
Iran can always change its mind on its own foreign policy
The pope promotes Christianity
The U.S. is not entirely safe; actually it will never be entirely safe
America is looking for America's "Number 1 wanted man"
Highly sophisticated army intelligence has determined that Afghanistan has a cell of suicide bombers

What is it, obvious day?

It's clear the AP is trying to outdo CNN at running news that people already know. But the AP will lose, because tomrrow CNN is running the entire day's coverage of 9/11, 2001, exactly as broadcast five years ago. You can't get more redundant than that, can you?

2006-06-11T23:56:00.001-04:00

____,

I emailed ___ the other day with the intention of provoking him into a blind rage whereby he has no choice but to play me and subsequently surrender to me in tennis. He told me that after all the practice he has been getting in India, he wishes to indulge instead in a match of shuttlecock. It's not what you're thinking you pervert! Shuttlecock is a game where you attempt to bat the cock around until it finds the other person's rough. If you're lucky you can find the cock right over their end, at which point you can really ram it home. Don't pervert this very distinguished aristocratic game with your filthy ideas.

Anyway, let me know you are alive, etc.

your friend,
Howard Hughes

p.s. I think all our pool playing finally came in handy the other day during a competitive family event.

2006-02-18T14:32:00.000-05:00

For how bad it is, the Bush Administration has actually achieved a lot. It's amazing to sit back and reflect on the number of systemic flaws they have duly exposed, without without any intent to do so. The way I look at these things, and I could be very wrong, the biggest problems right now are gross inefficiencies and corruption at the very highest levels of the government apparatus.

Things were not always this way. At one time, federal government had the integrity and the will to get things done, and the state governments and prior to those, the local ward systems, were filled with overwhelming special interests, corruption and stagnation. Not to say the latter has gotten notably better either (and ward systems don't exist anymore), yet under this administration, it is clear that federal government has veered disturbingly toward a kind of boss system as well.

It's pretty clear to me that the administration has been manufactured to make this as palatable on a federal scale as possible. Everyone's suspicion back in the pre-9/11 days that Bush couldn't possibly be in charge has turned out to look correct. Now we know more about how decisions - important decisions - are made in the Bush Whitehouse: An idea has been on the agenda for a while. When the opportunity is ripe, Bush gathers his closest advisers together for a relatively unextensive briefing / series of briefings. Not being a "details person," Bush accepts their briefings without looking any further into alternative views or other information, or intelligence or whatever. I can say that he doesn't look at alternatives because it is a fact the every high-level appointee in that administration has an agenda! With few exceptions, every single appointee has come in with an agenda that is plainly evident from even their surface histories. I have no idea who exactly, but many belong to the Federalist Society. Cheney has been a part of the same group of White House administrators who for over a decade have wanted a toppled Iraq with an American military and contractor presence. Rumsfeld is head-over-heels about the prospect of sleek and stealthy global American military dominance and capability. All these men's advisers and counsels and undersecretaries are in the same boat. I don't think the force of persuasion and coercion of these two groups should be underestimated. The rest of the appointees to the State Department and especially the Intelligence Agencies are either highly screened, or highly loyal. The ones who defect just literally leave, for whatever reason.

The facts have finally come to light that the pre-Iraq intelligence community was dealt with in three ways. The nuts and bolts officials who presented contravening information were literally funneled into oblivion, or if they refused to shut up, threatened or removed. Secondly, the higher-ups on the intelligence community who were ordained to communicated with the Departments were quite simply used. They were exploited to cherry-pick the "right" intelligence. Results-based intelligence inquiries were the norm, and when contrary evidence was presented despite this, it was discriminated against and ignored by the Administration. It's completely known that various department and vice-president officials of various strata said to intelligence officials "give me every piece of credible intelligence that supports this point." Thirdly, officials then pressured the intelligence community to adopt the Administration line, which worked. It's now known that the majority of the intelligence community was not convinced enough to share the Iraq-WMD link claim.

Proceduraly, the genius of this set-up is that it evades scrutiny. Bush is the head of state, and a kind of hard to ignore one at that, so people and the press naturally put their attention on that. Then, one scandal or another happens and the press immediately turns to a presidential press conference or the press spokesman or Laura Bush or whoever, which then proceed to categorically deny any knowledge, involvement, or culpability in the proceedings. The thing is, it may be true. But meanwhile, these various undertakers in the background, many of whom no one has even heard about, actually enforce the order and do the dirty-work. I think the Vice President's recent terse statement in response to the issue of executive leaks is telling in this repect. He said that the Vice President has the authority to de-classify classified information, which apropo the ongoing investigation, would include the identity of covert intelligence officials. Nevermind the fact that no one knew this, because it was signed into law by the President with little notice shortly into his first term. Or the fact that it is an unrestricted power, or that it embodies an ongoing mandate from the President without any oversight or two-way notification.

The Administration has been able to use existing intelligence agency codes and the absence of whistle-blower laws for intelligence officials to its advantage. These laws, which are designed to protect state secrets and information pertaining to national security interests, are now being used to enforce deep conformity to a narrow definition of these things, which is actually equivalent to the administration agenda, sanctioned by executive powers. Only now are we finally seeing a swelling in those willing to give an inside story. And as more are emboldened by their example, it will not be a pretty picture.

It is truly distrubing the degree to which the Adminstration uses and controls information. Their conduct with intelligence is only one example. They don't appear before the press, except in highly scripted events. Even then, they don't actually give any information. They claim executive privillege at every turn, from confirmation hearings, to indictments, to congressional hearings. The public doesn't get to know anything about national security threats, probably for legitimate reasons, but at the same time, vague warnings about that information are used to justify all sorts of things, from terror alerts to continued policies of war to controversial domestic programs such as warrantless wiretapping and indefinite detentions. Some even suggest that the warnings are used tactically. The wiretapping program is by definition another appropriation of information by the Adminstration, and whether it is legal or not will be eventually settled. Allegations that the program and other surveillance programs involve data-mining, the collection of large, encompassing amounts of information and then sifting through all of it according to certain ordained criteria, would be potentially even more of an information offense, because of the implication that acquisition at the first phase at least is non-specific. The known collaboration in this endeavor of telecom giants, and the majority of major search engines brings the picture of informational hegemony to Orwellian new heights. Finally, the creepy way they enforce a groupthink is a huge form of information control comparable to the others listed above.

However, in this way, the Administration may be prescient. I admit, I have no more acceptable alternative to managing national security in this information age. One way or another, presumably a way equivalent to the existing methods that can remain lawful will be found. In contrast, enemies are not encumbered by the same constitutional considerations, so the pressure will be steep. It also might be the case that the age of global, instantaneous media and information transmission has been ushered in, in which all future Administrations will be wise to conduct their own affairs in a much more secretive and controlled way. This does not involve breaking the law, of course, but it does involve disassembling some of the customs developed so far. This might include things like internal transparency, and much more aggressive use of info-ops. In the global age, any piece of the major media has the power to spoil an info campaign, so instead of being formally enslisted, the media has to be managed.

Next time, I will address the premise, which is how the Bush Administration has unintentionally revealed flaws in an accelerating fashion...

2006-02-13T22:14:00.002-05:00

A lot of talk has been devoted to the notion of the so-called "mainstream media," and how our current media does not live up to this supposed standard. But the understanding that the fact that something inhabits the mainstream discourse makes it newsworthy is flawed. It is indicative of the pathology currently suffered by the media: an obsession with the ratings or popularity of news, the stock price of the holding corporation, and the ability of the content to attract a desired "target audience" to the readership.

In all possible respects, the commercialization of news is a bad thing. First, it only encourages the public's sensationalist instinct. It doesn't logically follow that what people will most like to pay attention to, or pay attention to most immediately, is the same thing as what's important. Secondly, what the advertisers want is increasingly in contradiction to what solid, investigative reporting will entail. This is a consequence of increasing conflicts of interest between regard for the readership and the desire to obtain legislative and regulatory favors from the government, itself following from Big Money politics. Most ridiculous of all, a more mainstream media is sometimes interpreted to entail news practices that "keep up" with the prevailing state of knowledge in the country. I can't think of a more blatant reversal of the role of media than to suggest it ought to be more in touch with what people already believe.

I understand the objection that many will raise, that what is actually referred to as 'mainstream' is a location on the ideological spectrum. This complaint is common, in fact, however contradictory the various incarnations of it may be. Liberals complain that the media is more conservative than liberal, and that it certainly is not as liberal as it used to be. Conservatives, on the other hand, recite the refrain of "the liberal media" without end. Therefore, I don't believe this concept holds water. And if it did, would we want the media to be ideologically allied or ideologically determined in any way? From this light, the criticism seems more like a way to attempt to advance your particular viewpoint than a legitimate critique.

Let's list some of the times the media followed the mainstream line during the Bush tenure. After 9/11, for, oh...a good year and a half, the media publicized, parroted, and lionized everything said by any senior administration official. They let legislation get passed without any deference whatsoever to an opposition view. Did the overwhelming mainstream of Americans support bills like the Patriot Act unwaveringly? At the time yes, but that doesn't mean the dissent shouldn't have been covered. Now that people have changed their minds, we're hearing the dissenting views, 5 years after the fact. Nothing has changed. In fact a lot of the worst stuff was already passed in the first bill. In the Iraq build-up, the same pattern occured. It's not that there weren't PLENTY of contrary views to the assertion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was capable/willing to use them imminently. Many of the international intelligence agencies held this dissenting view and were ignored. Not to mention the wide section of the intelligence community represented by those who have spoken out and the U.N. inspectors. Yet basically no airtime was given to these parties.

2006-02-09T15:11:00.000-05:00

We've heard about the cartoons, seen the effects, probably even seen at least one of them. People are rioting from the West Bank to Pakistan. There are a lot of points to be made out of this series of events, most already tired out. People are billing this as the anticipated "clash of civilizations" or some sort of proof that such a clash is inevitable. I have to admit, I am tempted to see the situation that way. One is tempted to see the Arab street as a monolithic swath of would-be suicide bombers, throwing rocks at international peacekeepers all day. However, that is an overstatement. Essentially what you see here is an expression of the precept "the loudest are always the ones with the least to contribute." A moderate majority still exists. In fact, most muslims follow the line of contemporary Judeo-Christian teaching, and permit the portrayal of the prophet, even though in both Islam and Christianity, orthodoxy technically says this is forbidden. A similar situation exists in the West Bank, where a majority of the population would negotiate with Israel if given the opportunity. (Likewise, an overwhelming majority of Israelis would negotiate with the Palestinian government in exchange for peace. This may no longer be the case with the recently elected government, however.)

The problem is the generation being educated right now. Regime, militant, and zealot-controlled public education and media are the standard in the Arab world. An insane amount of the Palestinian population wants to grow up to become suicide bombers in part thanks to this effort, which institutionally praises self-sacrifice as the highest human calling. We are talking television media, the press, K through whatever they have there schooling, religious education, religious training, "investigative" government commissions and initiatives. All of these institutions can fairly be said to supply the people with a steady stream of unequivocal incitements. Iran just commenced an "independent government commission" to investigate the true history of the holocaust. This is despite the fact that the president has already prepossessed their conclusion.

This all ignores the fact that the Arab governments are extremely weak, including Iran (technically Persian, so kill me), Iraq Syria, Lebannon, Saudi Arabia and the PA (or whatever it's called now). That's a good thing, right, because that means the inherently good-natured people are going to rise up against their oppressive demagogue governments and establish moderate civil society that attends to the people's needs of employment, education, and civic institutions and allows them freedom to modernize or to practice Islam to whatever degree of strictness they want without lying to them. Well, it's not a coincidence that it's also one of Al Qaeda's explicit directives to topple the governments in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and probably all of Western Asia as well. Those who say it is not a clash of civilizations yet are correct. It is a war within Islam and the Muslim world, first. Through all these institutions which convey, and I know it sounds silly, little more than ideas, pan-Arab Islamist movements are attempting to unify the entire muslim world around a single goal of the revival of Islam through resistance to subversive forces like the West.

It is scary, but from the perspective of Arab muslims, the case is awfully compelling. First of all, you have no hope for the future, you might not have a job, you probably have a larger than nuclear family - to put it politely - you might be lacking basic human resources, and you're probably lacking access to meaningful civic institutions outside of your local mosque and mosque-sponsored school. Up until recently, you couldn't vote in many places, and when you do it may be a seriously qualified vote among a group of screened candidates or subject to election irregularities, or whatever. The government refuses to manage resources efficiently and manages the economy poorly. If you have any education in history, you probably know that Islam was once a great civilization and empire up until the Crusades. If you know modern history, you may know that the Middle East area has been divided and exploited for a century for strategic and economic motives, using a variety of tactics including geopolitical division, direct occupation, military and financial interference in internal politics, and reciprocal patronage with dictators who neglect their peoples. If you don't have the internet, and not many people do, the news you hear every day probably goes something like "Zionists / the West _________ (fill in the blank)" The prominent person in your area is probably a firebrand cleric who spreads even more insidious and inflammatory rhetoric. So you think, "Our governments neglect us, our states are continually played off against each other militarily to keep all of them weak, and the news (some of it truthful, but distorted) says that the West continues to attack us and plot to take our resources." Suddenly the group espousing a supra-state solution based around the shared heritage of Islam doesn't sound bad.

2006-02-07T19:35:00.000-05:00

My commentary on the Supreme court: Alito has been confirmed, Roberts breezed through, third spot pending. Now, Bush and the Federalists have 5 out of 9 Justices predisposed to rule in their favor on issues of importance to their aims. 4 out of 9 are proud Federalist society members (Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito), a group which promotes a radical view of executive power, congressional oversight, and foreign policy objectives. There are many more shadier beliefs originating with current or past members of the group, but no reason to necessarily associate them with any of the sitting justices.

The abortion issue is a sham. These selections had nothing to do with abortion, and the debate shouldn't focus on it. Roe versus Wade may stand, or it may not. It may be worn down to a point of impotence (no pun intended), as everyone was fearing when Alito's internal Reagan whitehouse documents were released, it may be revised, or it may be flatly overturned; or most likely it will be left alone in large part due to the principle of starae decisis and limits on its application will be imposed according to according to a narrower interpretation of other statutes and perhaps the Constitution also. The point is, you shouldn't care. The Administration doesn't choose Supreme Court nominees because they suspect they will overturn the right to an abortion. I'm sure they marginally care about abortion, but it's just meant to be manipulative. This is pretty much the same deal as "let us raise your taxes, and we'll stop boys from kissing." There is no hard evidence that either new Justice will commence rolling back civil rights or abortion or gender rights, despite what the stupid sensationalist media says. However, the evidence is clear as anything, in that both Justices talked about it extensively in their respective confirmation hearings, that both have extreme and reformative views of the nature and extent of government.

The evidence is all out in the open, and people just aren't paying attention to it. Remember Alito defending the point that the unitary executive is actually a misunderstood and not radical approach? There are doubtless many breeds of this "theory" - although it's not so much a theory as it is a movement. Some embody the sentiment of America's beloved president Nixon, right after he resigned, when he said "If the president does it, that means it's not illegal." (There's a reason he became a consultant on foreign policy and not the Constitution) Others suggest that the range of things the executive does is limited in some way, but once those boundaries are established, activities should be unhindered by Congressional oversight. This seemed to be the kind of view Alito was articulating, but who knows.

The next logical question to ask is, who sets those boundaries? Well, in the short-term the executive can do whatever it wants, short of impeachment or the unlikely creation of some kind of new investigative agency. Ultimately, anything can come before the courts, and they have the final word. So, assuming that the executive does everything in the distant expectation that it will ultimately be supervised by the Supreme Court, we can clearly say that a careful Executive does everything that he thinks the Supreme Court won't strike down. There are three years left in this Administration and the president and his staff already have a good idea of how at least four of Justices will rule on major hotbutton issues of government. Scalia, Alito, Thomas and (I think) Roberts, all believe in presidential signing statments, which essentially says they think the role of the Executive is not to execute the laws passed by Congress but to execute AS WELL AS interpret the laws passed by Congress. Then, all three (with Roberts being the perennial wildcard thus far) are proud "textualists" in their interpretation of Constitutional matters. They take literally that clause in the Constitution (whatever it says exactly...) that the Executive has unlimited power to protect the American people in wartime. Ok, so we are in a war on terror for until they say it's over, so I guess the president the president has unlimited authority and that settles the wire-tapping debate. Isn't textualism fun! Alito and Roberts' views on privacy are instructive. I believe it took Alito a few days and several hours of hectoring by Democratic senators before he acknowledged a Constitutional right to privacy. Roberts' answer I believe was something to the effect, "I believe there is a Constitutional right to be left alone." That's interesting, because one, neither is a very emphatic supporter of the right to privacy, and Roberts' answer reflects only a small part of the concept of privacy. Isn't that interesting given the new information on legally questionable undertakings of the Administration which is now being legally predicated on a generic grant for use of force against Al Qaeda.

Ultimately, the wiretapping program itself is not of great consequence to this issue. With the amount of overt attention and scrutiny alreayd being paid to this, it seems unlikely that it will go before the Supreme Court. I'm not a lawyer, but from my assessment it seems illegal. At any rate, the entire notion of Executive authority and control in foreign policy is being radically questioned. I'm greatly concerned by this, because as anyone knows foreign affairs is going to be THE KEY focalpoint for many years.

2005-11-30T13:18:00.000-05:00

"We want the United States to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with making sure elections take place ... and to protect us from any Israeli effort to sabotage the elections with assassination." -Spokesman for PLO

This is beyond inflammatory. On multiple levels, we can even say this is outright deplorable. Let me try to list then here.

First, and I think most Arabs will understand this far better than Americans, this statement appeals to very ingrained prejudices that Arabs in particular have about Israel, and its security forces. Without getting into the almost otherworldly internal propaganda machine that has reached a state of perfection virtually unparalleled in the civilized world, it should suffice to say that somehow or another many Arabs get the idea that Israel has almost supernatural powers to enact mischief. Moreover, that mischief always seems to take the form of something Arabs don't like. The current Egyptian president has publicly stated that Zionists are responsible for all terrorist acts committed around the world. It has become the rage to accuse the Mossad, external Israeli security, of assassinating the anti-Syrian Lebanese politician Hariri because "only Jews are cunning enough to pull something like that off." This is maintained in the face of U.N. resolution effectively amounting to an indictment of Syria for carrying out the attack, which presupposes the revelation of significant evidence in the Syrian government documents and records summoned by the body. Syria has the means, motive and evidence of involvement, yet Arab countries continue to propagate the weakest lies to their populations. An intelligent friend of mine still maintains that Israel is responsible. When asked what the motive could be, he provides an answer as mystical as the body of evidence supporting his view. Basically, they can do whatever they want, whenever they want, and for whatever reason they want, and we won't ever know why. On top of all this, the curricula of Palestinian schools, devised and funded by Hamas, teaches out of textbooks that repeat all of anti-semitism's ugliest myths: Jews kill babies for their blood, rape Muslim women, run a fascist political system like the Nazis, hold hegemonic power to disrupt world events which they exercise freely. If this seems too outrageous to be true, find a copy of the Hamas charter. Then find any news article where Hamas tries to tout its charitable activities like building hospitals, schools etc. It's not that big of a leap to connect the dots.

Second, forgive me for being blunt but the Palestinians are terrible at democracy. For decades they re-elected Arafat, who killed potential rivals, and the cycle repeated itself. First rule of democracy: killing your rivals is not considered an acceptable form of political competition. Of course, no Palestinian election has even been considered fair. You can't blame foreigners in advance for making your elections unfair when you can't even keep them fair yourselves.

What's perhaps most ironic about this comment is that Arabs use assassination as a political tool. There's one instance I can count of an Israeli using it, and that's the murder or Yitzhak Rabin. On the other hand, I can count many times Arabs have used it to exert their own political will. Egyptian president Sadat organized a successful surprise attack against Israel during the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, made territorial gains and forced concessions from Israel Now, when the war ended, Israel conceded the Sinai territory, which it had acquired in an earlier military conflict to Egypt in exchange for peace. After all this, Sadat became the first Arab president to make peace with Israel and to open diplomatic relations. This was not good enough for Arab rejectionists, and he was eventually assassinated. The first king of Jordan was assassinated by an Arab. Arafat walked away from the most generous unilateral offer ever by Israel in the 2000 accords without an iota of negotiation. No one knows the reason why, but one theory has it that he himself was fearing for his life at the hands of Palestinian rejectionists who publicly stated their intention to kill any leader who makes peace with Israel. This doesn't even count all the dissidents and potential political rivals who have been killed. I would like to hear one example of this occurring in Israel's history.

Lastly, I think this comment is manifestly made to exploit the contention arising from Israel's controversial practice of "targeted killings" that Israel is somehow carrying out assassinations and getting away with it. First of all, the targeted killings are reserved for militants. The real debate is over whether the alleged militants receive the proper due process, not whether this is some form of assassination. In this respect, Israel faces a similar debate to the one going on in the U.S. about indefinite military detentions. Note as well that the targeted individual is always reported as being a militant in the press, and moreover the source is usually Palestinian. Also, the targeted killings are precise. If the dead include some non-targeted individuals, much of the time these people have militant ties. For those innocent bystanders who are killed, the idea of ancillary or collateral damage in a military strike in a war against those who have publicly declared non-negotiable war on you is something the informal rules of war recognize, the UN has codified, and the international community should recognize as well.

2005-10-27T12:19:00.001-04:00

New Rule: The New York Times has to stop spinning stuff! Check out this grossly distorted headline: Miers Failed to Win Support of Key Senators and Conservatives. Why can't the Times just accept the White House talking points and leave it at that, like everyone else?

"Harriet Miers's decision demonstrates her deep respect for this essential aspect of the Constitutional separation of powers..." Mr. Bush said he would announce a new nominee "in a timely manner."

End of story. The Senate hasn't voted yet, so how could you ever claim she lacked support?

'Let's move on," said Republican Sen. Trent Lott (news, bio, voting record) of Mississippi. "In a month, who will remember the name Harriet Miers?"'
'Sen. Sam Brownback (news, bio, voting record), R-Kan., a potential 2008 presidential nominee who is courting conservative activists, said he had been "feeling less comfortable all along"'
'Another Republican moderate, Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota, said this week that he needed "to get a better feel for her intellectual capacity and judicial philosophy, core competence issues." He added, "I certainly go into this with concerns."'
'Senator David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican who opposes abortion rights...said he continued to question whether Ms. Miers had developed "a consistent, well-grounded, conservative judicial philosophy" and wanted "writings that predate the nomination" to clarify her views.'
'Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, called Republican sentiment toward Ms. Miers's nomination "a question mark."'
'Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a Judiciary Committee member, acknowledged that senators who had met with Ms. Miers were telling colleagues that they had been unimpressed. "She needs to step it up a notch," Mr. Graham said.'
'Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska... called Ms. Miers "an accomplished professional" but said of the Supreme Court: "We want an elite group of individuals. I'm not so sure I want my next-door neighbor, as much as I like him or her, to be on the Supreme Court because they're nice people."'
'Several groups like Concerned Women of America are calling for her withdrawal.
''We believe that far better qualified candidates were overlooked and that Miss Miers' record fails to answer our questions about her qualifications and constitutional philosophy,'' said Jan LaRue, the conservative group's chief counsel.'
'"I would like to see the nomination withdrawn. If I were in the Senate today I would vote against it," Buchanan said. "My guess is, she will not be confirmed, and she will be withdrawn."'
'The Weekly Standard, a bible for dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, on Sunday called the choice of Miers "at best an error, at worst a disaster" which should be reconsidered.'
'"I think it was appropriate. She was not -- I didn't think, a lot of people didn't think -- really qualified. I think we all have to have some sympathy for her because she was thrust into a position as a nominee she shouldn't have been put in, and as a result, got rather beaten up in the press and elsewhere," said Judge Robert Bork, failed 1987 Supreme Court nominee.'

Instead, The Times insists on peddling cheap rumors like "Coincidentally or not, Ms. Miers's withdrawal, ostensibly over the principle of separation of powers as it relates to White House papers, is the very scenario that some conservative commentators have suggested as a face-saving ploy for the nominee and the White House." If one were cynically deranged like Times reporters, one could even infer that Bush was so assured he would announce a new nominee "in a timely manner" because he had known Harriet Miers was going to resign, and perhaps fail from the beginning. And that makes me sick. Like the White House would ever use a Supreme Court nomination for political purposes... Just, look at how they gleefully report the remarks of that fake-Republican senator, Arlen Specter "...Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, remarking that Ms. Miers could benefit from a "crash course in constitutional law."

Look how they quote their own senator Charles Schumer "The selection process, said Mr. Schumer, should include discussions about potential nominees with the Senate. "One of the real reasons for this mistake was there was no real consultation," he said." Quit cherry-picking, Times. You might as well interview someone from the Times itself. Of course that's what he's going to say, but what about ultra-liberal Leahy and Majority Leader Reid, who said Miers was promising. You make me sick New York Times.

2005-10-27T04:23:00.000-04:00

New Rule: What the Middle-East conflict needs is a good comedian-statesman-diplomat-therapist, like a Henry Kissinger but with better empathy skills. And more comedic talent. All right, maybe he's a poor start.

Obviously the first thing on the agenda is to get the Israel issue solved. For one, although the U.N. is a hideously hypocritical, bordering on powerless entity, the conditions in the occupied territories have been declared a human rights violation about 537 times. At least a few of those sanctions are appropriate. I think the wall is a necessary measure, but it has cut off and dismembered numerous Palestinian (and Israeli) communities, through no reason other than the farther east the wall extends, the more security Israel has, and the happier Israel's territorial maximalists are. The IDF has done bad things, and this happens with any army. However, the objection is legitimate that army oversight in the territories is the real policy at issue here, not the behavior of the army in general. This is a complicated issue, because military occupation of the adjoining territories is arguably a necessary security policy when those territories have no centralized power capable of controlling and eliminating rogue and extremist terrorist organizations that would otherwise take over the area. Nonetheless, the effects of fifty years of occupation are undeniable. Like all other arab peoples, Palestinians have their own national identity and aspirations, which actually reached maturity in the 1960s with the newly minted Arafat and the PLO, before it assumed a non-negotiable stance. The inability of these aspirations to reach fruition in even the slightest extent is no doubt humiliating in itself. Poverty, which has much less to do with Israel than a non-existent infrastructure, also has its well known implications. And of course, no one likes to live under military occupation.

Don't get me wrong, the way the Israeli army conducts itself is incomparably better than the way an Arab army would if the situation was reversed. But the situation in the territories is becoming a worse and worse human rights problem, and a legitimate grievance, and I think even Israel's hardliners are realizing this. A solution to the problem is complex, but I think most mainstream people are currently putting their bets on a push for democracy and control in the Palestinian Authority, and a simultaneous disengagement from the West Bank. Of course, I am not counting on any of the West Bank settlements being relocated before or after then. And the wall will probably stay up for a while. But it's different when the Palestinians have their own sovereign nation. Then, instead of dividing its constituents, Israel is exerting its sovereign right to build a wall on its territory wherever it wants to, just like I have the right (well, when I own a piece of land) to erect a wall between me and my neighbor's house, as long as the nice part of the wall faces outward. (That's seriously the law. Check it out if you don't believe me...)

The Palestinian issue is a huge bugaboo and, I would argue, prohibitive barrier to any steps toward reconciliation between the West and the Arab world. We all know it's exploited disproportionately by leaders in Arab countries. For instance, just yesterday, Iran's hardliner president stated that Israel's existence was an affront to Islam, put in place by the West to oppress Islamic states. Of course, the speech concluded with saying that Israel must be wiped off the map, and any Islamic state that negotiates with it thus recognizing its existence is committing treason. The name of the conference was "A world without Zionism. You have to give extremist Islamists credit: they don't beat around the bush. Two summers ago, the Egyptian "media" made real press by asserting that all terrorist attacks around the world were perpetrated by Zionists. I'm not kidding about this. This is an even more ludicrous extension of the idea, also popular in Egypt for a time, that Israel perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, or less extremely, knew about it days before the fact and failed to notify the U.S. Of course, every one of these allegations is untrue. The establishment of Israel, which was in effect granted by the British, was hardly more divisive than the arbitary apportionment of nation-state boundaries in an area of the world that has always been ruled by single empires. This should go without saying but, Israel is not an affront to Islam, any more than Arab nations are an affront to Judaism. Both arguments can be made from each respective religion's holy book, and this is just silly. The allegation that Israel was involved in carrying out the 9/11 attacks is an insult to the intelligence of Arabs everywhere, because not one piece of evidence exists to my knowledge supporting this assertion. I am aware of the rumor that Israeli diplomats left the country at a time that suspiciously preceded the attacks. This is probably bullshit, but even if it were true, it hardly suggests Israel undertook the attacks in the face of massive evidence to the contrary.

After this is accomplished, the Middle East and a few western countries ought to enter some serious therapy to work out these issues with the mysterious entity known as "The West." What is "The West" and what did it do? Is the West the victors of WWI and particpants in the Sykes-Picot agreement? Or is the British, who were assigned the Mandate of the area under that agreement and it is fair to say are fully responsible for granting the state of Israel existence? Is the West the United States, which tacitly supported all of these historical steps, and is currently by far Israel's biggest financial and political supporter? Maybe if we could figure out what "The West" is, and what it did, we could take steps to act constructively about it.

There's more to say, but I'll have to say it later.

2005-10-25T17:07:00.001-04:00

New Rule: No more books on Bill Clinton, unless they're by Bill Clinton. I'm not even such a huge Bill Clinton fan. I support this simply because of the idiocy of the people who continue to write "first-hand account," insider, or "expert" exposes, 5 and 6 years after the fact. One autobiography and a couple biographies are really enough, aren't they?

Here's a great list just suggested to me on amazon.com, by JamesNYC248, "an impartial Canadian." First of all, at least get your username and description consistent... But enough ranting. Our impartial bi-citizen has compiled a fittingly impartial list; all 25 books are full-blown critiques of Clinton released within the last 3 years! The most obnoxious one I have seen is the most recent book, solemnly inspired by Clinton's recent 60 Minutes interview entitled, cleverly, "Because He Could."

"Because I could" is the explanation Bill Clinton finally gave for Monica Lewinsky. Because HE can, Dick Morris ridicules the man he advised for twenty years. I don't know if Clinton enjoyed himself, but Morris is certainly having fun. The writer's own voice enriches the experience, not because he's a master narrator, but because he sounds just like the smarty-pants you'd expect. We hear that Bill has a temper, and was only briefly poor. Morris tells how the president copied a typed speech by hand in order to get credit for it. (Everybody knew he didn't type.) The thought that Clinton might have copied out his entire 957-page memoir by hand in order to get credit for writing that gets Morris laughing so hard that he loses his place.

Let me attempt to translate sentence by sentence: Clinton's super-important advisor got the brilliant idea to write yet another book besmirching the former president from an interview on national television. Because he can makes lots of money doing it, Dick Morris ridicules the man he advised for probably not twenty full years. This book was a tedious and cold-blooded exercise in character assassination, but it sure was fun! Our writer is a self-promoting jackass who wants you to know he is really smart. He reveals things already admitted to directly by Clinton himself in his autobiography (it's unbelievable to me that someone promoting this book hasn't at least read the first 200 pages of the autobiography they are ostensibly rebutting). One time, the president cheated on a test! And, Dick Morris, who is smart in all other areas of life, has never heard of dictation for books, so Clinton must have not written his own biography either.

Perhaps I should sharpen this rule to: you can't write biographies if you're not a biographer. I'm must going to say one more thing about this. On the back cover, there is a series of false dichotomies. The first one is:

"the poor little boy from Hope...or the privileged fortunate son of Little rock, Yale, and Oxford, England?"

Are we to believe that it's impossible to be both poor and through hard work and ability win scholarships to Georgetown and then Yale and Oxford? Of course, I wouldn't waste the resources to read more than the front and back cover, so it could actually be a fine piece of work. (not)

Here's another interesting book written by a "non-partisan" military commander. On the cover, someone thought it would be really clever to photoshop what looks like a joint into Clinton's mouth. See he really is a tree-hugger, and that's why he endangered our military.

"This is certainly not the first anti-Clinton book, but it is different in that Patterson does not seem to have a political ax to grind. In fact, at times, he appears apologetic about having to write about his ex-commander in chief. Yet, in the end, this retired soldier felt his last act of service should be to share his experience with his country."

Hmm. Does the fact that Amazon explicitly pairs this book with "How Liberal Democrats Undercut Our Military," written by the same author, count as evidence to the contrary? Publishers Weekly summarizes:

In Patterson's account, Clinton emerges as a careless, disingenuous frat boy, mercilessly hen-pecked by the domineering Hillary, whose tirades leave him looking like a "beaten puppy." He presides over a chaotic administration focused on spin and fund-raising; he fondles an Air Force One stewardess and ogles Patterson's wife in the Oval Office; he loses the nuclear launch codes; and he cheats at golf-which Patterson views as "not just a peccadillo but symptomatic of the way he approached life." Patterson also asserts that Clinton "directly and severely harmed this nation's security." Clinton debilitated the military, Patterson claims, by downsizing it, trying to remove the ban on homosexuals and put women in combat roles, "gutting morale" with pay freezes and "rudderless" peace-keeping missions, and turning it into an "armed social services agency." Worst of all, Clinton was soft on terrorism and missed a chance to get bin Laden with cruise missiles. Patterson raises important issues, but he seems most often affronted by what he sees as Clinton's belief that he "was privileged to conduct himself at a much lower code of conduct than the men or women he would repeatedly order into harm's way."

One could similarly satirize this account by inserting the word "Bush" wherever Clinton appears, with 2 exceptions. Honestly, if someone gave me a copy of this account and told me it was about Bush, I wouldn't think twice. In fact, objectively, I think it describes him better. The real new rule should be: you can't criticize people for things you couldn't do yourself. Of course, this still leaves plenty of people to bring light to the sacred critical role of our democracy. In addition, facts are still facts, to be gathered and disseminated by all. It just means that editors from Vanity Fair, like master-bloviator Christopher Hitchens, are no longer qualified.

2005-10-25T02:26:00.000-04:00

Another three months, another update. I haven't had time to follow the latest supreme court nomination process all that closely, but I have some thoughts to get down nonetheless.

The last commentary I posted on Harriet Miers was literally an hour after the news was released. Since then, I have been able to appreciate a few different perspectives on the nomination. I have to admit, what made me most curious to consider some of the pro arguments was the fact that Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid along with Senator Leahy and some other Democrats openly and admittedly espouse optimism about this nominee, and admit they were intimately involved in the deliberative process with the President that ended up selecting her. Here is their stated rationale: We thought it would be good to have someone who was not another appeals court judge on the bench, who could bring a more pragmatic and real-life perspective to the overly groomed and often cloistered group elites that currently inhabits it. I found this curious.

For one, and I say this completely non-judgementally, I had never thought of this concept before. Obviously, from the beginning, because of the very nature of our democracy, regular-man roots often embodied in a populist philosophy was considered an asset in elected officials, particularly those in prominent positions such as the elected posts of the executive branch. This is because a sense of familiarity and sympathy can be a huge factor in gaining votes. However, it never occured to me that this could be an asset in the judicial branch. One, judges aren't elected, so the previous analysis doesn't apply. Two, judges don't don't represent or lead the people. They are specialists in a sense, and their expertise is to interpret the law. Considering factors such as background only seems to increase the legislative function of the judiciary, a trend the Republicans in particular professes they wish to reverse. That's like saying "we want someone with everyday experience on the Board of Governers at the Fed." She might know nothing about macroeconomics, but at least she knows what it's like to pay prime rate for a mortgage.

The second thing I found interesting is that Miers doesn't particularly possess the characteristics they are refering to. She has been touted as a private sector nominee. Yet she was Bush's personal attorney (that's real everyday experience), was appointed to the lottery commission by Bush, and subsequently to the city council. And of course, she comes fresh out of five years working in the pantheon of private sector jobs - the White House! First, she was chief secretary, and now she is White House Counsel. The extent of her private sector experience is working with a metropolitan law firm, which probably puts her into the same category as every other potential supreme court nominee.

The obvious conclusion is: 2 counts bullshit equals hidden agenda. It's possible that Democrats have finally been able to engage a level of political subterfuge superior to anything the Republicans were able to recognize. A resignation is obviously bad for Bush; a withdrawal is even worse. It would take some fairly astute political anticipation to predict that Miers would simultaneously worry harcore social conservatives because of her lack of a clear record supporting the causes they want, and intellectual conservatives that tend to inhabit the thinktanks because of her obviously inferior record of qualification and unimpressive intellectual profile. There is another possiblity. It is possible that some Democrats honestly thought Miers was the best possible pick, to which I would respond, what is their problem?

The mix of opinions on Miers is very strange. On the one hand, she's an easy objection to people who have either the legitimate concern or pretext to care about level of qualifications. Personally, I couldn't care less that she went to school in Texas, in contrast to the objections made by some. What concerns me is that throughout her considerably active career, she has never done anything even remotely remarkable or groundbreaking. All of the memos and documents being released from her public and private work show a diligent but completely pedestrian worker. More disturbing, her writen legal opinions and advice, dating back for more than 10 years, oftentimes do little more than summarize the original legal question, using a few legalistic words like "prudent" and "just" in the process. Intellectual conservatives in particular had hoped for an earth-shattering thinker and communictor, in the mold of Scalia, to further entrench the legitimacy and convincingness of the conservative legal and social agenda for generations to come. Universally, another valid concern is that she very well may not have any expertise in constitutional law. I'm not kidding about this. Nothing I have read or seen anywhere has convinced me otherwise. Bush staffers argue that she has learned while in the White House. Well that's great. I'm sure she has gotten a really complete and balanced education on constitutional law exclusively while working in the Bush White House. This is what makes the Supreme Court the Supreme Court, and not some state court; their final domain is the Constitution, not just statute. Not to mention, everyone agrees it takes several years for even the most seasoned legal minds to adjust to the job once seated. Even Stephen Breyer has admitted it took him many years to fully grasp the workings of the job, and he's known on the court as "the professor."

Then you have the social conservatives who are disappointed that Bush didn't have the balls to make a flagrantly political appointment of an avowed conservative political activist judge. Arguably, this is what Bush could have done if his political coalition was stronger and not undermined by the war in Iraq, the willingness of the mainstream to finally recognize his obvious and ongoing incompetence, and the pending criminal investigations of his two second in commands. Since the two pillars of the current Republican party are reform social conservatives and intellectual neoconservatives, we can see why mainstream Republicans are opposed to the nomination.

I personally am hoping that she is not withdrawn, so that the process can proceed to the confirmation hearing. From my perspective, no matter what happens this event is guaranteed to be entertaining. Though it's a reasonable assumption that Senators will accept a fair degree of line-drawing when it comes to personal views and/or views on specific issues, however not as permissively as during the Roberts hearing, they will surely be much more demanding when it comes to demonstrating her judicial philosophy and understanding. Contrasting with Roberts, who had a record in federal law, Miers is not even responding adequately to questions seeking to get a preliminary assessment of her legal perspectives. Charles Schumer noted after his meeting that she was unaware of some important legal precedents. Meanwhile, Patrick Leahy (her special advocate) and chairman Arlen Specter, who is probably the most judicious and moderate person in the senate), unequivocally stated that Miers' responses to the PRELIMINARY questionaire were "from inadequate to insulting." So if she is able to articulate her legal philosophy during the senate confirmation hearing, that will be interesting and educational for me because I currently have not even the remotest idea what it is. And if she doesn't articulate any legal philosophy during the hearing...well, that will be an entertaining spectacle at the very least. Honestly, I doubt it will get that far though. Of course, this brings up the interesting question of what was the reason, be it rationale or more manipulative purpose, for the nomination to begin with. I'll put down my thoughts on that when I have some more time.

2005-10-03T09:00:00.001-04:00

I was all for the Roberts nomination and confirmation. I think he could end up being the best chief Justice to serve in a long while. This last nomination is nothing short of absolutely hilarious though. I thought Dave Chappelle's Killing Them Softly was the funniest thing I've seen all week, but this tops that. All kidding aside, this is sad. I can't even talk about Miers' legal philosophy because she doesn't have one; she has never served as a judge! Everyone was always quick to point out in the Roberts nomination process that nothing he produced in his years as an advocate, be it lawyer, consultant, or aide, should be interpretted as evidence of his views. The exceptionality of client-advocate relations is a basic premise of the legal tradition, and its truth is undebatable. Yet not only do we have nothgin BUT a client-advocate record for this nominee, the record manages to raise lots of disturbing questions even with the client-advocate provision.

Ms. Miers was George W. Bush's personal attorney in Texas. Miers is currently president Bush's top legal aide as White House Counsel. She has served as a legal aide to his campaigns in the past. The extent of her public service has been serving one term on the Dallas City council. The best part is that as the White House counsel, Miers led the search for the nominee to replace O' Connor, consulting with senators from both sides to try to gather a list of names of possible candidates. Needless to say, I doubt that one of the senators floated the response "well how about you Ms. Miers?" So not only is this a complete stealth nominee, its kind of another example of Bush appointing someone who is an unabashed loyalist in the context of all the ongoing allegations of cronyism. Bill Maher's comedic gag "does Bush know more than 3 people?" has become a serious question.

It has been suggested that Miers is a trailblazer for women in the legal profession, and that this reflects on her level of qualification to serve on the Court. What you don't get from the catchy soundbite is this just means she was one in a first wave of female lawyers, and a part of the larger first wave of female professionals of the time, for that matter. That's commendable, but not relevant. Afterall, Clarence Thomas was a trailblazer of sorts as an African American in the judicial profession, and he still voted against upholding affirmative action.

This candidate is so obviously going to be blocked by the senate it's not worth wasting more time on it. The more pertinent question, and the one that would take a far more astute level of analysis, is what purpose does the nomination serve? I'm not qualified to comment, above giving my initial thoughts. It's possible that the quick blocking of this choice will serve as political leverage for the next, real Supreme Court nominee. We shall see.

2005-08-30T00:20:00.001-04:00

I was just browsing through the Times book review's archive, which I've always noted for it's self-indulgent and uninformative solliloquies posing as book reviews. But it's still hard to believe some of the stuff they print there sometimes. I'm beginning to feel more and more like this is a slanderous, petty, and borderline idiotic institution. For instance, the review of the latest Hillary Clinton biography:

Monica Lewinsky is fat. Bill Clinton has long been a member of the clean-plate society. Evelyn Lieberman, the former White House deputy chief of staff, is reputed to be ''a little overweight.'' Mrs. Clinton herself has long battled a tendency to beef up, but in perhaps the most astonishing revelation in the book, ''several of her Wellesley College classmates, who played sports with Hillary, described how she looked in a T-shirt and shorts,'' and according to them, ''she had a tiny waist, slim legs and ankles, and small buttocks.'' When coupled with the fact that the young Hillary Clinton was referred to by classmates as ''Sister Frigidaire,'' and by White House staff as ''the Big Girl,'' and that Hillary's tubby husband Bill gave a high-level position to Janet Reno, the implication is clear. Hillary Clinton does not merely view the world through the asexual, unmaternal, left-leaning eyes of a poorly groomed woman who was surrounded in her youth by manipulative pinkos who were playing for the other team. At some level, Hillary Clinton feels most comfortable in the company of fat people.
The obvious conclusion is that Hillary Clinton, in a ploy of Machiavellian subtlety, deliberately overcame her small buttocks and thin ankles and put on a few pounds in a cunning attempt to curry favor with fat voters. And in a nation that is looking increasingly chunky, this alone could insure her victory in the 2008 presidential elections.
Are there any other revelations in the book that are worthy of note? Yes...

You did not misread that; it is being seriously suggested that this insight is "worthy of note," however that's supposed to be taken. If 'worthy of note' means "off-base, trite and worthy of the interest of the tabloid community" then, well, I would have to agree. As much as I would love to have a great paper based out of New York to read every day, it is clear that this paper is filled with too many idling narcissists who have nothing important or useful to say. For the most part, the book review is really like a navel-gazing club consisting of people who have written stupid books themselves editorializing on the most recent stupid books of others.

Note: This doesn't apply to the actual reporting, which still is probably the best out there (not that I read very many newspapers). The problem there isn't in the quality of the reporting, it's in what they choose to report on. Most choices are absolutely transparent in respect to serving an agenda intended to promote and champion their version of "New York Values," whatever these are presumed to be at the moment. So it's a good news source, it's just an incomplete news scource.

The other trouble is, anyone can write a good article and still not include most of the facts. The Times is a master at this, the article on Israel cited a few paragraphs below being a perfect example. At any rate, none of this compares to their non-factual content: editorials, book reviews, etc. - which can be truly obnoxious.

Not to single out the Times. News media in general are on a steady decline. I for one find reading political editorials more painful than listening to the politicians themselves spin the realities and rail on each other. Investigative journalism (you know, where they actually visit places and find out things other networks haven't already covered) is fast becoming a wistful thing of the past. With the exception of maybe CNN, belonging to a side, with all the all the intellectual dishonesty and partisan acrimony this entails, has become the rule. I am aware of the argument that "Bush and his partisan cronies have caused this." I seriously doubt this. But even if it is true, it turns out that things are even more regretable than they seem. This is simply because even with all of its left-leaning tendencies intact, the news media have done a truly risible job of covering and printing the stories that could have fatally exposed Bush's failings. The press loved the Clinton fiasco, whoever goes down in the process be damned, but because the Bush White House is much better a covering up and containing incriminating information, we heard about the CIA outing scandal for about a week. I find it hard to believe that huge conglomerations and corporate ownership interests alone account for this phenomenon.

Update / rebuttal: But the Times does investigative work on the most important things, like when it tried to unseal private documents regarding nominee Judge Roberts' adoption records. This is so idiotic. What could the paper possibly think it could gain from this? 1) Not that I'm experienced in this matter, but I would guess that soliciting access to a non-incorporated individual's private records on a matter such as adoption is neither acceptable nor feasible. Regarding at least one of the personal attorneys for Roberts, "Sources familiar with the matter tell FOXNEWS that at least one lawyer turned the TIMES down flat, saying that any effort to pry into adoption case records, which are always sealed, would be reprehensible." 2) If the Times were able to obtain the documents without attracting public attention and censure, and was able to print the findings, the story itself would have been at best laughed at as a frivolous piece of wasted resources and at worst lambasted by its readers - although one never knows with these New Yorkers. 3) Normally, when a newspaper sanctions investigative inquiries into a topic of interest, it has certain findings of interest in mind. I'm finding it very difficult to infer what those findings are in such a case, which deals with the circumstances and motivations surrounding two adoptions.

2005-08-28T07:37:00.002-04:00

The New York Times shows how charming it can be with two gems in the Sunday Times. The first, without any repentence or apparent irony, deals with a prominent female novelist's (unrequitted!) love for every serial killer to come along in the last 25 years. The concluding paragraph does a wonderful job of speaking for itself so I'll just reprint that:

It has been more than 25 years since Gary Gilmore was executed after issuing his succinct last words, ''Let's do it.'' I had a crush on him from the moment he appeared on the scene for any number of reasons: his good looks; his soulful letters to his pretty girlfriend, Nicole; the wounded aura of defiance he carried with him. Even after reading everything ever written about him, from Norman Mailer's ''Executioner's Song,'' which glamorized him, to his brother Mikal's ''Shot in the Heart,'' which cut him down to pitiful and thuggish size, I think I'd still pick his photo out of a lineup of eligible men. What's a lady to do? Such is the unreasonable pull of pheromones, such are the crooked ways of love.

Charming!

The second article deals with America's two most beloved topics... Iraq and Reality TV, of course! The headline/plug reads "Reality Shows Thrive in Chaos: Reality TV has taken root with considerably greater ease in Iraq than American-style democracy." A few paragraphs later says "Reality TV could turn out to be the most durable Western import in Iraq." Take that neo-cons. Just in case you haven't taken the hint yet, a few lines down the author spells out the message: "'This is the only good thing we've acquired from the American occupation,' Majid al-Samarraie, the writer of "Materials and Labor," said as he watched the reconstruction of Ms. Ismail's home."

"I get chills thinking about this," said Ms. Ismail, whose father had died from injuries he suffered in the explosion, as she raced across the street in a blue robe toward a cameraman filming the laborers. "Words can't express how grateful I am."...True to the genre, "Materials and Labor" has a simple conceit at its heart - Al Sharqiya, an Iraqi satellite network, offers Baghdad residents the chance to have homes that were destroyed by the war rebuilt at no cost to them.

And to think someone once said reality TV doesn't have redeeming qualities.

Other spin-offs include a reality show that endeavors to travel around the country making good on completely unredeemable winning lottery tickets - because the state is bankrupt! There is a show that helps young couples marry without fear of getting stoned to death, or whatever. There's one that repairs bombing damage to homes, even if next week they have to return to the same location. There's even a Real-World-like living show where diverse people have to learn to deal with the tensions of living together in close quarters, except in Baghdad it's because no one is able to afford their own house. The possibilities for offensive reality-TV really are several times greater in a chaotic war-torn region. If Iraq becomes a theocracy, I can imagine the U.S. networks themselves will be salivating at the Syrian border, at which they too will probably cross seemlessly and with no supervision.

Disturbingly often when reading the Times, I have to double check the date just to make sure it isn't the April Fools issue.

2005-08-15T00:17:00.001-04:00

The people are Harvard are weighing in on yet another socially contentious issue with its pledge to provide $1 million dollars annually to a research project on the origins of life. Now, if only someone could get them to weigh in on that other thing about women and science. Oh wait, they started that! That reminds me, we haven't heard much from Lawrence Summers lately. For a guy who even as far as Harvard presidents go has a big ego, this is probably important. My guess is we won't be hearing any more "intellectually provocative questions" for a while.

The national issue being tapped into here is the debate between Evolution and Intelligent Design. As it stands, the debate is between two, basically idiotic, extremes. Intelligent design is the most flagrant and anti-rational version of a series of religiously-motivated "creationist theories." Nevertheless, some of the more in-between positions can be scientifically respectable in varying degrees. For instance, instead of challenging a far superior theory, why doesn't religiously-motivated science hone in on the actual points of weakness within the theory of evolution? Like the complete absence of an acceptable scientific explanation for the fundamental jump from inanimate to animate, inorganic to organic, the must occur in the origin of life. Actually, attempts at these questions have been made, and pretty compellingly in my opinion, fascinatingly enough, using the concept of entropy (statistical law that all things tend toward disorder). However, doing this concept justice is way beyond the bounds of these few paragraphs.

There are other in-between positions that are still religious. You have the more philosophical contention that, granted that the process of evolution is mechanistic and self-perpetuating, the philosophical CONTEXT a priori (logically) has no default reason to support this paradigm over another. To take one example, why should biological objects possess the property of reproduction in the first place? Is there anything about the original step from biologically inactive to biologically active that dictates biological entities should also reproduce? This might sound like a facile question, but I think on deeper thought it's actually somewhat profound. Another point is more physical, but equally valid; why is the world "set up" to be mechanistic in the first place? This position of course doesn't get at the origins of life per se, but it is equally applicable to it on physical grounds. For the practical observer, these questions seem petty, but from a philosophical perspective, and certainly a religious perspective, these questions truly are open books. Moreover, God may be infered into any of these unknowns to the same effect, and much less objectionably, as into the sweeping role of "creator of everything."

We know evolution takes place empirically. Manmade experiments on isolated islands prove it. However, it does not necessarily logically follow that evolution therefore must have caused all life. Smart questioning would focus on the weak spots of the theory, rather than presenting a complete alternative to evolution. Hopefully, this is what the Harvard project will seek to accomplish, rather than lining up two mutually exclusive theories in a contest of apples and oranges. Certainly, this would "do justice" to the public debate, but scientifically it is a disservice.

The fact that proponents of creationist theories choose to insert God into the first frame, as it were, instead of into the things that are legitimately unknown, tells me that this is not a war on evolution. This is a war on science: Any scientific progress constitutes an effacement of God's glory, or something to that effect. This thinking shows up ALL THE TIME. Let there be no doubt about it: the inverse exists as well. Lots of scientific people think that, "well, since we have a few basic laws, and know that they could hypothetically apply to and explain everything, therefore God has no role, no reason to exist, and therefore must not exist." This is materialist atheism, and it is equally ludicrous as creationism. Unfortunately, we live in a country where whenever debates ensue, they take place between extreme poles. And hopefully our educational institutions won't repeat this mistake.

2005-08-14T19:16:00.001-04:00

As usual, The New York Times has printed another strangely incomplete and misleading article on the Israel-Palestinian issue. The topic of this one is "Why Greater Israel Never Came to Be," coming on the cusp of the controversial initiative to dismantle all Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip.

For an article that promises to answer the question of why Greater Israel never came to be, it's curious, although not surprising, that this one leaves out the two most important factors behind the idea. The author asks two good rhetorical questions: "What possible future could the settlers have had? How could their presence have done the state of Israel any good?" And then he fails to answer them with any intellectual honesty. In doing so, the article reduces the rationale for Greater Israel to one factor of doubtful significance: population management. I think what is being said here is this: Greater Israel was conceived as a way to absorb overpopulation in Israel proper. If only more Jews had made the expected journey to Israel, these settlements would have been able to serve their purpose; since they haven't, they aren't necessary. Not only is this absurd, it's historically inaccurate and revisionist.

Let me address the absurd part first. Look at the claim numerically. Here's a useful source for the demographic facts. The area of Israel proper is just over 20,000 square kilometers. It has 6 million residents. The West Bank is just over 5,000 square kilometers. It has 2.5 million residents. That's 300 people per square km versus 500 people per square km. If the total number of residents of Israel were to double to include all of the world's Jews, the number would go up to 600 per square km. The point is, the addition of the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip to Israel proper, which collectively amount to about a 25% increase in land area, and contain almost all unarable, desert land, is not going to do much to solve any potential population problem. It doesn't make much sense to use a more populated territory to try to absorb population overflow. You could do this analysis with the Gaza strip, but then the numbers would be so ridiculously disproportionate that the argument wouldn't be effective.

Now let's address the historical inaccuracies. Yes, it might be true that at some point in Israel's early history, political leaders were seriously throwing around the idea of expanding Israel into ancient territories "Judea" and "Sumeria" as a way to ward off potential population problems down the road. Regardless, Judea and Sumeria (as distinct from its modern, more limited ancestor "Greater Israel") include modern Jordan, and also all of the Sinai Penninsula. Now, the Sinai Penninsula ALONE is larger than Israel proper, and the Jordanian territories are probably comparable. Second, once the leaders saw that the Jews of the world were not going to migrate to Israel, the rationale behind this factor becomes null. As the Times article puts it, "... the misery that (early) Zionists expected Jews elsewhere to suffer has not materialized." (Technically, Zionism was not founded on the concern of Jews being miserable, but rather that they would assimilate too much into their native cultures. Granted, the Holocaust changed thinking on this topic quite a bit, but nevertheless.) It's a fact that by 1970, Israel's leaders (and probably everyone) knew that the mass exodus was not going to occur.

Now look at the alternative factors we know played a role in the settlement movement because they still operate today. Actual Israelis know that the religious right has had a hugely disproportionate influence on Israeli politics from day one. There is a list of historical events attesting to that influence: reparations for the displaced Palestinians; a steady supply of willing volunteers to man the front lines of the original security-oriented kibutz network; the lions share of lobbying for settlements; a handful of civilian attacks in the territories; the assassination of Rabin. No one can deny that Greater Israel was, and arguably still is, a religious idea. For direct justification one only need look in the Old Testament.

From a practical perspective, a big incentive for promoting settlements in the territories is and always has been security. This may seem like a lame excuse, given that even all the settlements together won't take up very much territory. But Israel is only 12 miles wide at its narrowest of northern points, so in fact every little settlement in the West Bank does make a difference. Yet the goal has not only been expansion, but more important, buffering. From the earliest days, pioneers risked their lives on Israel's border-lying Kibutzim. Though the kibbutz concept is always painted as a peacful experiment in socialism, in fact the early border-lying kibbutz was actually a military entity, serving as a first line of defense and early-warning far before the concept of 'settlement' was put into practice. The same principle operates today in the occupation and settlement of the captured territories. Of course, the analysis applies equally to Gaza. Given that Gaza is a reality, it poses a security threat since Hamas practially runs the place. And this doesn't even count the tunnels and smuggling networks that we know exist between Gaza and Egypt, which supply the territory with a steady stream of armaments.

It's disappointing but completely predictable that, now that Israel is disengaging from Gaza, the Times has followed step and begun to cleanse the settlement movement of its unsavory historical and political aspects. It's also another blow for the intellectual integrity of the paper, but we already knew it didn't have much. Who wants to think that settlements were motivated in part by - Judaism's own biblical literalists? "You mean Judaism has fundamentalists too??" Score one for Arabs in the moral piety contest.

Perhaps more disturbing than the revisionism is the heavy emphasis the article puts on the fact that terrorism has worked. Unfortunately, this no joke. In fact, the whole second half of the article is devoted to making this very point.

"Of course terror has a role in the disengagement," said Michael Oren, a
senior fellow at the Shalem Institute, a conservative Jerusalem research group.
"It convinced us that Gaza was not worth holding onto and awakened us to the
demographic danger. It took two intifadas for a majority of Israelis to decide
that Gaza is not worth it."

A senior Israeli official who spent years closely associated with Likud
leaders, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the
topic, said that Israelis long had little respect for Palestinians as fighters,
but that had changed.

"The fact that hundreds of them are willing to blow themselves up is
significant," he said. "We didn't give them any credit before. In spite of our
being the strongest military power in the Middle East, we lost 1,200 people over
the last four years. It finally sank in to Sharon and the rest of the leadership
that these people were not giving up."

Some came to a similar conclusion much earlier. The Israeli left has been
calling for a withdrawal from Gaza for years, and even many on the right
believed settlement there to be futile and counterproductive. Mr. Kimche, the
former foreign ministry official, recalled that when Prime Minister Yitzhak
Shamir of the conservative Likud party was running against Yitzhak Rabin of
Labor in the early 1990's, several Shamir advisers told him: "Unless you
withdraw from Gaza, you're going to lose these elections." He did not withdraw;
he lost.

Mr. Rabin himself said that he decided to negotiate a withdrawal with the
Palestinians when he realized how unpopular military service in Gaza had become.

"He said privately - I heard him say it - that military reservists don't
want to serve in the occupied territories and while they are not formally
refusing they are finding excuses to stay away," Yoel Esteron, managing editor
of Yediot Aharonot, recalled. "That put a real burden on the army and it meant
we couldn't stay there forever."

This is the most destructive choice of all, and the Times is idiotic for printing it, especially since the paper ostensibly has a pro-Israel position. This could very well be new intellectual territory being forged here. They're pro-Israel, but they're pro-terrorism too. It's a happy medium! (P.S. They must really be into the Mossad) On the one hand they support an active democracy with a flourishing economy. On the other hand, they also support terrorists blowing up civilians as a means for political gain. Nothing incongruent about that.

2005-08-12T21:11:00.001-04:00

If there's one thing you can't help but notice these days its the preponderance of people commenting on gay issues. This makes sense, given the particulars of the enhancement of gay rights. Consider how civil rights struggles have been waged traditionally, -by marches, protests, publicity, etc. I think everyone can accept it's just a fact that the gay movement has a comparative liability on the first two counts. Gay rights marches aren't particularly effective. I don't know, something about the rainbow flags and the fake construction workers doesn't exactly scream "defiance!" Ok, so maybe it does. But I guess it's natural that you see a lot of the case for rights being made via the pen.

The problem is, and I say this in the most respectful way to the large majority of the gay population out there, most of the "gay columnists" out there are completely crazy. Like, can't even construct a coherent argument without interjecting a showtunes reference crazy. This is decidely unfortunate. It would be a little like the African American rights movements consisting entirely in the Black Power faction. It doesn't take a political genius to figure out that flaunting your otherness is not an effective way to gain an advantage in a wage for civil rights, which, let's face it, is what this is.

When gay people name sexual acts and the like for politicians, it has the effect of confirming all the politicians and religious zealouts' worst fears. Let's list them and see how are confirmed.

1) Gays are trying to turn everything gay.
2) Gays are trying to turn everyone gay.
3) Gays are flamboyantly, stereotypically, annoyingly ostentatiously homosexual.
4) Gays are sinful, lewd, and repugnant.
5) Gays don't keep their sexuality or personal lives to themselves.

This would be a little like taking all of the most slanderous turn-of-the-century stereotypes of African Americans, finding people who exemplify only these traits, and then having them lead the black civil rights marches in the mid 20th century. Like, I don't know, rounding up a bunch of large and physically intimidating black males, dressing them up as dumb looking slaves, and then having them rape a few white girls for good measure as an effective argument for civil rights. It's like the gay movement hasn't caught onto the idea of unobtrusive resistance yet. I don't know exactly why. How much time did it take the black community to come up with Martin Luther King (actually not a rhetorical question)?

If demonstrations and confrontation aren't they way gay Americans are going to make their case to mainstream America(na), and I would argue that it's not, then where ARE all the smart gay rights spokespersons (Sorry, Brian Ellner isn't one of them). One possibility is that they're working within the political system. I wouldn't know. I'm not involved in the gay rights movement, and I'm not especially political. The issue of marriage aside, the case for the further deprivation of gay rights is intellectually tenuous in my opinion, and the absence of eloquent voices coming from the other side is tantamount to surrender.

Should sexual orientation be included in every discrimination clause? Absolutely. Should privacy rights apply to relationships? Absolutely. Should sexual orientation itself be a privacy issue? You bet. Should equal civil benefits be awarded to gay couples as to straight couples? Aboulutely. Do gay people deserve marriage? This is a complicated question, confounded by the fact that marriage has traditionally been the domain of religious institutions. In a culture that demands the government stay out of citizen's private lives, it is hypocritical that "marriage rights" are being demanded with equal parity. So you've got multiple questions, like what grants the right to marry, and if this right is being denied to gays, what gives federal government the jurisdiction to intervene.

Bottomline assessment: Demanding marriage rights now seems to be jumping the gun. I like to think of myself as solidly gay rights, but provoking the marriage conflict now, especially on ambiguous constitutional grounds seems like a mistake. More on this topic in the future, and how this issue might be viewed according to the various judicial approaches...

Doesn't She Have Better Things To Do

2005-08-12T20:16:00.000-04:00

I couldn't help but notice the name at the end of this email to AndrewSullivan.com, reprinted in its entirety:

Dan: Too bad you missed “Once Upon a Mattress” in San Francisco last year. They took your casting suggestion and then some. Lea de Laria played the princess. As you know, she is huge, loud, funny, gay, and in my book a far better musical comedy performer than Rosie O’Donnell. With this formidable comic presence at its center, the show—which is pretty slight—turned into something really memorable. If you print this, please give credit to 42nd Street Moon, a mostly-amateur local company that does a great job reviving obscure musicals.
I always enjoy reading your column locally in the SF Weekly, even though I’m almost completely uninterested in the subject matter. You’re a great writer and a principled person, and I’m enjoying your blog very much. Barbara B.

I guess taste in entertainment is another area where I and "the senator from California" don't see eye to eye...

2005-08-12T18:07:00.000-04:00

I'm not tired enough to sleep, and not awake enough to be genuinely productive, so I figured I'd explain my perspective a bit more on the Supreme Court nomination issue. The last post on the Supreme Court may seem overly abstract in light of the real consequences of the issue at stake here, so I want to address some of the practical issues I think are in the balance here.

There's no question Roberts is not a bad guy, though the same can not be said for all justices. He's not going to inhabit the fringes of some outrageous and fanatical ideology, or act as a covert operative for any person or party. That is, he's clearly not an ideologue, and seems fairly independent intellectually.

On a practical level, the question at issue here is what direction will his appointment lead the country? All this is amplified by the fact that

1) Roberts himself is expected to be a swing vote on many key issues.

2) The administration that appointed him is the most ideological one in recent history.

This is in terms of both foreign and domestic policy. The whole concept of a faith-based initiative speaks for itself, I think. In other important respects, we see policies coming out of the White House that are simply not grounded in fact. The former party line "Global warming needs more study" is a perfect example. The fiscal policy of running huge deficits during a war while pushing through tax breaks is not endorsed by any economic camp known to man. The energy policy is completely hypocritical and irrational. The allegations officially made about factors relating to gay marriage and parenting are not based on reputable scientific evidence.

3) At any rate, the country is clearly at an ideological crossroads, questioning the entire New Deal style of government. This is applicable in terms of the "size of government," responsibilty of the government to provide social protections, and the continued progress of the civil rights movement and its various tributaries. In all of these repects, this nomination is a very key one, in that it may be a significant step in a process that reshapes the judiciary in a way that reflects the reforms going on in the other two branches.

This may end up being the case. Intellectually and practically, however, there are serious compelling reasons to reshape the structure of government away from federal authority on social issues. Philosophically, on the most contested social issues of the day, we are not dealing with issues posessing clear-cut answers or even clear-cut premises. Whatever your views on abortion rights, everyone has to admit it's ambiguous on which side of civil rights abortion falls. I certainly don't think that a couple day old embryo is human life. But the current public debate hasn't advanced beyond essentially a line-drawing argument, and I can't think of any better philosophical criteria with which to frame the issue. Nor has anyone else been able to, to my knowledge. Therefore the question of "the rights of the unborn fetus" is going to remain a live one for many people in the public discourse, regardless of how resolutely the other camp feels to the contrary. Yet abortion is clearly a women's rights issue as well. So whose rights are more important? Answering this question seems virtually impossible.

Or consider the gay marriage issue. It's not clear that marriage itself is a CIVIL right, although government does in effect legally sanction it in conjunction with religious institutions. To me the clause "equal protection of people under the law" doesn't apply, because the law doesn't sanctify marriages, it only determines benefits once they already exist. Someone else might read that phrase differently. Yet federally banning same-sex marriage doesn't protect rights either; it doesn't add, it only subtracts. Again we're left with the open ambiguous questions of "what counts as a right" and then "to whom do these rights apply." At either end, federal rights are unclear, and judicial minimalism is prudent.

In the formulation of Hillary Clinton, abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare." It's been argued that allowing some states to ban abortion will effectively eliminate the option of abortion for the poorest citizens in those states. I tend to think that such a policy would contribute more towards making abortion rare than making it prohibitive. A simple cost-benefit argument leads to this conclusion. Given the availability and cheapness of contraceptives, I don't think it's a stretch that people will respond to cost incentives in this case just as they would for any economic matter. More expensive abortions leads to people adjusting their behavior which leads to fewer abortions. Obviously, there will still be many people who incur the need for abortions despite their economic interest. Let there be no doubt about the fact that this is by no means a completely rational matter. Yet I see no reason why the above scenario would prohibit these people from having abortions.

Awarding federal rights on either of these issues is philosophically dubious, not to mention bound to be extremely controversial given the nationwide level of variance in views. On the practical end, relegating the issues to the states seems like a good solution, albeit most state legislatures are either corrupt, inept, or both.

It's clear the most powerful wing of the Republican party wants to do the same thing to the federal judiciary that it did 20 years earlier with the legislative branch: reduce its size. Ironically, the current president has reversed this trend in the legislative branch, but that's another topic.

There are a lot of reasons to support judicial minimalism. When the courts make a decision we can live with, we chalk up any discord vis-a-vis public opinion to the glorious independent function of the judiciary. When the courts make a decision we can't live with, we call it the action of "activist judges." To be honest, the term activist judge means next to nothing to me. Nonetheless, the term is not indicative of a healthy attitude and relationship to the judicial branch.

As critical as the judicial branch is to the American form of government, there's one thing I think everyone can agree on here: it is also the least democratic branch, although the other two branches are certainly still in the running in this peculiar race to the bottom. Think about it. An elected official has complete power to choose whoever the hell he or she wants, with in many cases no accountability to the electorate, to serve without term limits on a court making decisions according to no standard methodology, the only requirement being the vague "interpret the constitution." The Congress has veto power and the incentive of reelection to ensure accountabilty, but if they keep vetoing judges they inevitably become seen as "obstructionist," regardless of how good the reason or how consistent the rationale.

The judicial branch is an indispensible but also highly imperfect component of government. Any input of the judicial branch has two major drawbacks. Any decision is final, though theoretically overturnable. And the decision is so far removed from the participatory democratic process that it can be fairly characterized as undemocratic. Obviously, these are drawbacks to be avoided if given the option to resolve the issues in a more direct, democratic legislative manner. Hence, Judge Roberts' stated agenda to reduce the load on the federal judiciary is a welcome development to me.

2005-08-04T03:06:00.000-04:00

There's a great piece on the common phenomenon of so called conservative court appointees defecting once on the bench to support more liberal decisions. This is, needless to say, a pervasive phenomenon, if only based on the fact that a whole 3 out of the total 9 sitting supreme court justices have followed this pattern. Lots of people are trying to apply historical precedents to try to figure out if Roberts will follow in these justices' footsteps or not. While this is an interesting debate, I'm not inclined to participate - for two reasons. One, despite how often the pattern may repeat itself, I'm not sure historical precedent gives any insight into how any individual might turn out. Two, I don't think that even a worst-case scenario Roberts will be a terrible pick, so the general issue is more interesting to me.

The question posed by Slate gets at several interesting issues, I think. The one that comes to mind first is the issue of the politicization of judges, particularly on the Supreme Court. I can't imagine that the founders intended for judges to be political entities whatsoever. Granted, the system takes into account the fact that the executive privillege to appoint justices poses the possibility of the institution devolving into a political instrument. And I think this is a large part of the rationale for the senate confirmation process (though, I'm no constitutional scholar). It's not a bad bet that Judges are SUPPOSED to be apolitical; I doubt this theoretical point is disputed much. However, given the reality of the situation, I think the public debate on the political nature of judges concerns the following issues. One is how much unsupervised and autonomous power the president has in the appointment process. Questions about the extent of the confirmation criteria and procedure that should be employed by the senate address this issue. On one side you have people saying that the ability to appoint judges is merely another privilege that comes along with winning the election. In this view, the system is not acutely self-moderating at all. In fact, in the short term, it's pretty much totally unchecked and unilateral. But over several terms, the process is assumed to level out. These people tend to argue for a minimalist interpretation of the senate confirmation process, entailing something along the lines of vetting a candidate's suitability for the job in terms of dimensions such as temperment, civility, level of qualification, and background. Essentially it's intended to screen out candidates who are really not cut out for the job (although in reality, how many people who make it to the super-select pool of those who would be considered for the Supreme Court don't have the qualifications to be a competent and suited Justice - with the notable exception of Clarence Thomas, perhaps). So this argument doesn't really seem to hold water. The less strong version of the view would be perhaps that the confirmation is intended to screen out obvious ideologues, who may have the qualifications and experience required for the job, but are unfit in the sense that they will not judge each case individually on the merits, but rather according to a pre-conceived grand scheme of judicial imperatives.

I think this argument is more convincing and relevant to the issue of John Roberts. Leaders have managed to insert the phrase "judicial activist" into the mainstream discourse with astounding success. Without getting into whom the introduction of the concept serves, I think it's pretty clear that people are concerned about judges "legislating from the bench," and that such a practice really does occur. Without question, Roberts passes the ideologue test with flying colors. He writes all the time about the need for a more restrained and humble judiciary. He has never taken a known controversial stand on an important social issue in his life. He speaks regularly about the importance reintroducing careful interpretation of the law and due process in the courts. His revered expertise in all aspects of law supports the claim that he has a profound respect for the institution. This is not to say that he hasn't aided consistent political interests in the past, or consistently had political affiliations with Republican adminstrations. It's to say that ideology refers more to the process than the decision itself. On this count, in my opinion, George Bush's decision to appoint Roberts is one of the saner and most sober things he has done. Of course, this says nothing about what Roberts would decide in a hypothetical future case. What it says is that he will definitely not legislate from the bench, which at least is a good thing. You have to hand one thing to George Bush - he is consistent.

On the other side, people argue that the senate confirmation procedure is a political check on the executive appointing privilege. This makes some sense in theory, but it assumes of course that judges are political entities, both in the sense that presumably they are appointed as political instruments, and that they are selected on the basis of how likely they appear to be to uphold decisions of political importance to the supermajority of the senate. I'm not sure which of the two camps is correct, and, somewhat ironically, it requires the ruling of a jurist to determine which view is in fact constitutional. There is a less strong version of this view. In the words of more than one senator, "what someone thinks does matter." Setting aside whether or not this represents proper originalist protocol, which is almost entirely just an academic debate anyway, my question is if you do try to find out what the nominee thinks, where does that get you? First of all, to begin with the premise is very unlikely, since beyond anything provided by a paper trail, a nominee may easily conceal his or her views. Secondly, if the nominee hasn't been involved in deciding and setting legal precedents before, any information you get will be personal views, not judicial philosophy, and as such is distinctly less useful given that the nominee is a person who can separate personal beliefs from judicial approach. Lastly, even if you can get credible information on both personal and judicial views, judges change once on the bench. That's the whole point. And everyone knows this happens a lot.

Another issue brought up by all this is the notion of strict constructionism, which is necesarilly counteropposed to the idea of "legislating from the bench." Constructionists are certainly in vogue with Republicans right now, and the idea of constructionism is deceptively formidable intellectually. These constructionist judges are going to read the constitution as issued. Therefore, it's impossible that they could ever be inserting the interests of contemporary activist causes into their decisions. The idea is appealing on the surface.

However, there is a vexing issue lurking here, and that is why does strict constructionism always seem to lead to predictable "conservative" positions? In general, due to its strict adherence to originalist (and hence antique and often very provincial) concepts and ideals, constructionism deflates legislative authority. Inherently, legislation in its pure form is, one could say, neutral to the constitution, in the sense of written without especial regard for constitutional (not judicial) precedents. Therefore, since social changes, including civil rights, are inherently progressive in origin, they are also easiest to strike down vis a vis the originalist constitutional litmus test.

Prima facie, I see a huge practical problem with the constructionist doctrine. That is it essentially amounts to guesswork and speculation about what the founder fathers thought. Sure, constructionists put a lot of time and research into their decision-making. But in the end, it leads to an essentially unfalsifiable declaration, because no one KNOWS what the founders thought. And this is potentially very dangerous because it gives judges complete creative freedom, so to speak, which is patently at odds with the judicial function.

But the debate about the politicization of the courts goes beyond the selection process. Apparently, judges now are members of political parties, hold political views, and serve specific political interests. So-and-so is classified a "conservative judge," and then everyone acts surprised when they turn out to make decisions that please liberals. I'm not sure how true this is. To me, it's more indicative of a fallacy in the way people analyze judicial officials than that judges routinely abandon their political views on the bench. I mean, let's face it. Judges have to curry political favor to even get appointed, but that doesn't necesarily mean they are hardcore, committed, partisan ideologues in reality. Moreover, people seem to think that judges are incapable of holding personal views and judicial views separately. This is a strange contention. In fact, I would say that a judge who does NOT completely separate his personal from his judicial views is unprofessional and borderline not qualified. Therefore, this whole business of what does a nominee such as Roberts personally believe seems fundamentally misguided and a waste of time. There's a reason that so many slated "conservative" judges turn liberal: the ones who have a proper judicial profile value the responsibility of interpreting and enforcing the law as they see it above politics.

Slate provides a further possible factor for why judges change on the bench. Essentially, it states that once judges reach the Supreme Court, they begin to think more collectively, with regard to the other judges' opinions, and ultimately in terms of the final outcome of the case. The theory has it that the presence of at least 3 hardcore, unwavering conservative judges on the Supreme Court forces any new entrants to modify their decisions in order to counterbalance the consensus.

People are paying lots of attention to this confirmation process, and for good reason. A lot hangs in the balance in terms of civil rights, abortion, government protection programs, and the distribution of power among the different branches of government. Ultimately, the question to me is not whether Roberts is or will be conservative. There seems little doubt that he is, both politically and judicially. It is whether he will be a practical versus a "constructionist" conservative. Will he interpret according to a controversial though completely legitimate doctrine of judicial minimalism? Or will he adopt an activist stance cloaked behind the front of strict constructionism? I was greatly heartened by the statement he made during the district court confirmation hearing to the effect that he prefers to let the case dictate the judicial approach, rather than applying an all-encompassing judicial approach. Flexibility and willingness to change one's mind to me are antithetical to ideology.

Some people might wonder, "well what's the difference which way he arrives at decisions, as long as they're ultimately going to strip rights away from causes we care about?" Aside from the philosophical appeal of a judge adhering to due process, I think there are a few more concrete differences. Many people seem to have the idea that judges are, for lack of a better word, tools. In reality, every judge, even Scalia, takes their responsibility with solemn gravitas. Judges read thousands of pages a day, and that doesn't even count any deliberation. All of them are trying to do what they perceive to be legally right. Thus their legal philosophy or approach can be critically influential at unexpected moments. Also, if you think about the fact that the need to counterbalance a small group of judges who consistently end up deciding on one side of the issues necesarilly distorts the actual views of the other members, it's apparent why practical vs. constructionist conservativism represents a significant difference structurally speaking.

Stay tuned

2005-06-27T08:12:00.000-04:00

A few large posts of hopefully modest value coming soon...

Not Dead but

2005-05-25T02:36:00.000-04:00

I'm going to state what is already obvious by my posts: I'm posting rarely and may not at all for some time (who knows). Everything will remain up though, and occassionally something new may appear. By all means, peruse through the site. I will keep the current activities page up to date, however.

2005-05-15T03:16:00.000-04:00

It's good to see that Larry Summers is standing tall against the tide of reactionary poltical correctness wishing to stifile free inquiry on the important issue of discrimination in academia. I also want to cite this article, containing mostly direct quotes, which reiterates almost all the points I made earlier, so that people won't think I'm pulling claims out of thin air. And, it's also very well put. It should be an excellent rebuttal of Tim Burke's 'enforced numerical parity' suggestion.

Let me be clear. I believe deeply in free enterprise and competition without barriers to entry. I also believe that every person, be they male or female, should have the right to take positions, in all fields, on the sole basis of aptitude and competence for the task, be it business, religious leadership, or science.

In many countries, women are still not allowed to run for elected office. This is, needless to say, a terrible situation. Yet imagine if it was proposed that it be enforced that equal numbers of men and women were to occupy all standing political positions. This would subvert the democratic process entirely, and would be profoundly anti-democratic and anti-meritocratic. If the whole realm of human endeavor teaches us one thing, it is that free, meritocratic competition is the least worst of all systems invented by humans to date. There is no reason that the fundamental truth of this premise should be subverted for any special case.

The article:

Let me try to outline Summers' unusual approach to "underrepresentation." He tends to view people relativistically, employing that most useful of all conceptual tools for thinking about both the similarity and the diversity of human beings: the probability distribution (more roughly known as the bell-shaped curve).
In contrast, most intellectuals today think in absolute, black and white categories, and thus they get irrationally upset by mention of any facts they can denigrate as a "stereotype."...
As a bell curve aficionado, Summers noted a widely observed tendency: "It does appear that on many, many different human attributes -- height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability -- there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means … there is a difference in the standard deviation and variability of a male and a female population."
In other words, as any woman could testify, there are more stupid men than women; likewise, at least in math and spatial reasoning, there are more brilliant men than women.
Summers stated, "… if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. [In a normal bell curve, only one out of 44 individuals is that much above average.] And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean [or one out of 741]. But it's talking about people who are three and a half [one out of 4,299], four standard deviations above the mean [one in 31,574]
…"
At three standard deviations above average (the equivalent of a 145 IQ), there would be over seven males for every female. At four standard deviations (a stratospheric 160 IQ), there would be more than 30 men for each woman. This also implies, correctly, that there are a lot more retarded men than women, but they don't come up much for tenure at Harvard.

Also interesting:

Perhaps hoping that his toddler twin daughters would someday add their own Nobels to the family trove, Summers tried to socialize them away from traditional female roles by giving them trucks instead of dolls, but soon heard them saying, "Look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck." That's just a charming anecdote, but Summers also pointed out the same resilient sex differences were found in "100 different kibbutzes" in Israel despite the fervent multi-generation commitment of the leftist kibbutz movement to raising children in an environment of utter gender equality.
Summers also mentioned the insight of economist Gary Becker, the 1992 Nobel laureate, that competitive markets make meritocracy profitable. Yet, "one sees relatively little evidence," Summers went on, that any colleges were assembling "remarkable departments of high quality [women] at relatively limited cost simply by the act of their not discriminating," implying that bias was already mostly a thing of the past.

Ok, All done!

(Topic continued here and here.)

2005-05-07T22:01:00.000-04:00

Unlike most Americans, I haven't taken a side on the gay marriage / gay rights fiasco yet. I'm not ashamed to admit this. It seems to me that the answers to these issues rest on fundamental unanswered questions.

Briefly, my assessment of the progression of the gay rights movement goes something like this. Within the last few years, homosexual activist groups have become more assertive in pushing for reforms that, as they see it, will help remedy long-standing prejudices and inequalities towards gays. As is usually the case in such matters, the calls to reform crystallize around a rather narrow set of hot-button issues, such as gay marriage. Religious leaders and political leaders, for slightly different reasons, respond to the new burst of activism with dogged resistance. Religious leaders do so because religious dogma is inherently a rigid enterprise, and consequently is completely irrelevant to contemporary issues. Contemporary political leaders do so because the group currently in power is not above using any tactics to win and maintain power, including demagoguery designed to appeal to a small but powerful minority of religious suppoters. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Americans don't have nearly as strong opinions on the matter as the zealots, and so they either follow suit with the standard political narrative (gays will ruin the integrity of families and society, marriage is a sacred institution, homosexuality is a sinful choice...etc.) or remain quiet and drop out of the political equation altogether.

The actual injustices that are driving the discontent, however, are much more diffuse and multifold. Unconcealed intolerance in the South, hate crimes and the like, archaic sodomy laws, persistent workplace discrimination, the recent gay adoption laws, laughable media crusades, and a rising religious movement that preaches the uncompromising moral and religious wickedness of homosexuality are all perceived as evidence of general hostility towards gay people. The gay marriage issue is pretty much a red herring in my opinion. Unfortunately for the greater cause, the rashness of the most extreme gay reformers and the opportunism of politicians has put this at the forefront of the public consciousness of the gay rights issue.

The substitution of a kind of proxy debate in place of the real issues ultimately disadvantages the reform movement. Conservatives reflexively object to anything that entails a break with tradition, such as the redefinition of marriage. Consequently, gay rights reformers end up arguing defensively about the definitions of words and technicalities of institutional practices. Meanwhile, no progress is being made on the more important objective of addressing intolerance. The gay reform crowd should be 100 times more concerned with ending discrimination of all forms (the "right" to marry is awfully insignificant discrimination and mostly symbolic comparatively), ensuring that gays not be used as political scapegoats or vehicles for demagoguery, and protecting their political rights and equality under the law from the infringement of religious zealots. All that pleading for marriage will do is push conservatives' buttons.

It's mind-numbing how so many gay reformers refuse the seemingly self-evident path of least resistantce - working with the Democratic party to further their goals. Ideologically, Democrats are much more sympathetic to the cause. But this is because Democrats are completely inept. And even the gay movement knows it! Personally, I despise the current Democratic party for the very reason that it's ineffectual and unwilling to directly challenge (just complaining doesn't count) the republicans on any issues of importance. As an example, the "values debate" is what mobilized evangelical voters to show up in record numbers last election. Instead of declaring the values issue a lost cause, Democrats must assert the separation between church values and government values (insofar as government values even exist...) as a fundamental constitutional tenet, and then counter with a new commensense, civil definition of values. It wouldn't be that hard. All it would take is a prominent Democratic Senator going on television and saying "The Republicans have claimed a monopoly on values. In the process, they've defined values in a narrow and incomplete way. We respect their cultural values, and their right to assert them. But we believe true American values go beyond cultural matters to issues of foreign policy, executive accountability, fiscal responsibility, electoral reform, etc... and must respect the separation between religion and government." In contrast, presently we have chairman Howard Dean publicly announcing that the values debate is not one the Democratic party particularly wishes to engage in, nor one that it can win. And you have Barbara Boxer engaging in her weekly tirades of futile resistance on the senate floor. The current democratic modus operendi is so unconscionable to me it's almost unreal. Then again, I don't understand much about the way politics actually works. My dad's theory is that Democrats are abstaining on all of these issues so as to give them more punch when they address them come campaign time for the next house election cycle. I hope he's right. My own theory on why you see so many gay Republicans is that the relationship between gays and the Republican party is a little like the Stockholm Syndrome for political disenfranchisement. Your abuser is kind of an asshole, but at least he's the only one who has any power to do anything, so simple expedience dictates you side with him.

This debate is going to be dominated by demagogues screaming aburdities about the apocolyptic ramifications of things like gay marriage until reformers start soliciting solid factual information to change the currency of the debate from mysticism and scare tactics to fact and reality. Demagoguery always trumps reasonableness and moderation in an environment of ignorance.

I don't think it is inaccurate to assert that around the country, gays are currently treated with the same level of ignorance and intolerance that blacks were 60 years ago, or jews were intermittently throughout history. Discrimination is defined as the unequal treatment of people based on attributes that are functionally or otherwise not relevant to the situation at hand. The color of your skin...this is generally not relevant, no matter what the context. On the other hand, the differential treatment of people who possess criminal records IS permissible if the fact is relevant to the context. Yet, still, in some contexts, a criminal record is not relevant, such as in getting a job as a floor sweeper. In terms of the gay issue, we are sadly ignorant of the underlying facts that determine how this issue fits into the accepted paradigm for discrimination. Why can we still not agree on how much of being gay is a choice and how much of it is something that can't be helped? And the answer won't come from evangelicals (who have already set up conversion programs all throughout the country, with mixed results at best). It will come from hard factual science. On any given gay issue, people should demand to rationally specify how being gay is relevant to the issue, be it gay marriage, gays on the job, gays in the military, gays as teachers, etc. Does gay marriage solely constitute a breach of tradition, or does it have legitimate potential for adverse social effects? Of course, to an extent, the second question of relevance relates back to the first of choice in that in many cases the question of relevance hinges on the theory of propogation by example, which in turn depends on how homosexuality originates.

2005-04-19T13:32:00.000-04:00

I saw Bill Maher's show "Real Time" on HBO the other day. Generally it's a good show, and fairly engaging if not marginally informative on current political matters. His panel discussions are the meat of the show, consisting of three guests from different walks of life who discuss politics and current events with Maher himself as the moderator. The level of dissension among his guests can be considerable, and I'm always impressed with Maher's ability to keep the exchanges civil and hence the show watchable. Bill Maher is a liberal, and his audience is almost always uniformly liberal. So it's difficult for him to bring in the truly hardcore conservative guests. The usual situation is something like 2 liberals and one pseudo-conservative (someone at least willing to argue the opposite position). The episodes that include people of actual political clout and significance (politicians, policy wonks, chairspeople of various organizations, and even some pundits) as opposed to those with mere political opinions (entertainers, actors, most columnists etc.) are by far the more interesting ones. Of course, whenever the show does manage to bring on a bona fide conservative, things becomes really interesting.

This week's panel consisted of David Frum, the colleague of Richard Perle, one of the Dixie Chicks, and Wesley Clark. Stated briefly, I have never seen a poorer showing from anyone in any kind of conference or television forum than that of David Frum last week. His performance did much to solidify the notion that those in the neocon cabal are unrealistic, delusional, completely ideological and not grounded in fact, and even malign. Among his blunders were the assertion that ownership of assault weapons is a necessary right in modern-day america, and still in line with the original reasoning of the founding fathers; that gun permits shouldn't be screened by homeland security because guns would never be used by terrorists seeking to create destruction; that gays in the military hurt troop morale (a highly unpopular, though not totally rejected view), although they can and should still be used as translators and such; the inactivity of the U.S. in stopping the genocide in Sudan is due to domestic political resistance and not any input on the part of the administration; the Democrats' image problem with respect to military credibility is due entirely to intrinsic factors and not at all to the Republican's ongoing campaign to undermine it. The image created by these assertions is that of a sadly delusional, inaccurate, and disturbingly self-serving and partisan worldview. It's hard to believe that someone could be apparently that stupid, intellectually or politically, and be a contributing editor of the Weekly Standard and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. As a point of reference for all this, just consider that in comparison Richard Perle seems extremely likeable. Here's a concrete example, just to give you some perspectiv. To be fair, the excerpt is only part of the answer:

Q: I want to ask you a question about Russia...In the time that this administration has been developing a closer and better relationship with Russia, we've seen president Putin roll back democratic freedoms, free market policies now seem to be contested, and especially waging a very murderous and destructive war against a portion of his own citizenry, pushing some of them into Islamic extremism. I haven't seen this country addressing that problem with Russia. You were talking about a moral foreign policy...we should be addressing these questions of Russia.

A: ...I only wish that all of those brave european journalists who got so exercised when America transported captured Taliban prisoners by putting earmuffs on their ears would have some of the same vigilance about abuses of human rights, for the massive death and destruction that is going on in Chechnya. I mean, the earmuff problem is no doubt serious...

The thing is, on paper he's much more competent than he appeared to be on Real Time. He actually doesn't look bad. Granted, his book "The Right Man," which if you don't know it is the one that features the picture of George Bush in a flightsuit on the cover, is by virtue of that fact irredeemably lame in my view. (Apparently, good judgement has led someone to change the picture on the most recent printing.)

The thing is, if you can get beyond the neoconservative's arrogance and complete uni-partisan politics (which is not to say that such things should be overlooked), the truth is that the neoconservatives are paying attention to important things that democrats are just not talking about. Americans seem to like to live wistfully in their isolationist bubble, but I think all the evidence unmistakably points to the fact that there is a serious, widespread, and disturbingly accepted movement brewing in the middle east that is a direct threat to the United States. In several middle eastern countries, it is commonplace for Muslim clerics to append their call to prayer with speeches daily extolling the virtues of Jihad against the west. Given the fact that citizens of Arab nations are kept notoriously uneducated, this kind of uncomplicated message can be made enormously persuasive. The regimes who are supposedly our allies backhandedly fund these activities or are complicit in allowing them to take place.

The literalist interpretation of Islam seems to hold far more sway than in other religions. It's a fact that every religion has its fundamentalists. Every dogma is going to have its idiotic literalists. In the typical religion this is a fringe phenomenon. In Islam, particularly arab islam, the ideology of pre-historic islamofascist triumphalism is actually a threat in the sense of having the potential to become mainstream. Why this is, I'm not quite sure. Maybe it's deep Arab humiliation over failing to acheive its utopian Islamic empire in the 7th century. Maybe it's the widespread poverty and illiteracy of the modern arab people. Maybe the oil economy leads to the wrong people getting wealthy and powerful. Whatever the cause, it would be foolish to ignore this problem. Yet only one of our two august political parties has a strategy, a practical plan, to begin to address the problem in the middle east on any level.

On the other end of the political fence, the head of the democratic party, Howard Dean (a self-flagellatory appointment in my opinion, but anyway) said recently that as democratic president he would seek to involve the U.N. as a primary means to fight terrorism. I don't see how he actually believes that, other than because he thinks it will be popular somehow. Let's look at the facts. The U.N. is an institution founded 50 years ago for the purpose of enforcing international law and national boundaries among nation-states. I'm not going to use the word "antiquated" or "obsolete," because these are just buzzwords that don't convey any information. Nonetheless, I think it's clear that given that the contemporary U.N. manifestly does not have the political clout and power to even enforce within its own domain, i.e. the perpetration of aggressive acts by one nation against another or against itself, there is no reason to expect that it will be able to enforce and protect in a domain for which it is not at all structured. This is not to say that the U.N. should no longer exist, as some suggest (i.e. our intrepid U.N. ambassador appointee). It is to say that it simply does not have the logistical and intelligence capabilities to deal with shady, decentralized, amorphous and anational terrorist networks. Neither does the U.N. have the will to do so, I think all reasonable people can agree. After all, considering its global constituency, most of its member nations either do not face the same threat that has in the most clear terms been extended to the west, or they are directly involved in funding and supporting terrorism and/or the dissemination of anti-western ideologies themselves!

Does this make me bi-partisan? No! On the contrary, it makes me anti-bipartisan. Let me explain... I'm not a political science major, so I might not be able to cite the teachings of distinguished thinkers. But isn't it obvious to everyone that more parties equals less bickering? Staunch bipartisans gush of the merits of the two party system: "It brings everybody together under the same roof!" implying that it encourages moderation. In fact, the opposite is true. When the two parties disagree about something, it appears they need to emphasize their differences, so that one of them doesn't appear to be the party that is "giving in." The result of course is politically self-protective polarization at the expense of prudent policymaking. Whereas, with multiple parties, diagreement is inevitable, thus parties don't have to worry about defining themselves in opposition to some alternative strain. They are able to focus on effective polices without the constant specter of political death vis a vis smear campaigning.

In terms of game theory terminology, isn't it true that the dominant strategy in cynical politics is to define yourself as oppositely the other party as possible? Consider that there are three ways to win votes and support in politics. You can steal your opponent's supporters. You can rally a dormant portion of your own base. And you can convince independent, variable, or non-participating voters to come out and vote for you. Consider how the strategy of defining oneself oppositely the other party affects your goods. 1) Your opponent's supporters are rabidly partisan. Even if there are some moderate or equivocal ones, they have no reason to "switch horses" for a party who is professing to do essentially the same thing as what their party is already doing. 2) Your own base is rabidly partisan. The more it sees its party "challenging" the party in power, the more it will come out and support it. 3) Undecided voters are undecided for a reason, i.e. they don't find the available options compelling enough to come out in support of one side or another. It is foolish to think that if you come out with a similar message, replicating policies that are already being offered, you are going to change any of these people's minds.

If this is all true that the dominant strategy is to adopt the political alternative, then the more parties there are, the more moderate this dominant strategy will be. Why do we resist applying the same analysis to politics that we have already applied with such success and accuracy to economics?

Of course you cannot expect harmony of views in politics. If anything, a healthy democracy requires ample discord. Yet, harmony and moderation are worthy goals to strive for. It is a paradox, but the greater the number of parties, the greater the opportunity there is for discord, the more moderate the outcomes are.

Aside from the obvious incompetence it breeds, another one of the problems of the widespread, extreme polarization in American politics is that one whole half of the country inevitably thinks the other half is completely delusional and vice versa. This is simply a reflection of how different their worldviews are. Now, it's perfectly fine for a group of people to think that one half of the country is wrong, or even 99% of the country for that matter. But when people start thinking the other side is delusional...that's a recipe for disobedience and lack of cooperation.

In terms of protection of intellectual property, the current two party system is great! No one will ever dare steal any idea or stance from another party. But in terms of effective governance, it is seriously, seriously problematic.

2005-04-15T02:27:00.000-04:00

Good to see that Israel is finally taking a stand against it's own religious extremists.

I don't know any other way to describe this than simply awesome.

As to be expected, the controversy over the problem of innate sex differences rages on. I don't want to get involved in the nitty-gritty details of the data, or arguing over what people ought to be concluding from it, nor am I qualified to. As all reasonable people are (should be) saying, let the scientists do their work. Then, after the data is complete and fairly homogeneous, we can draw our conclusions as we wish. In his blog, respected academic Tim Burke agrees provisionally that people on either side claiming direct scientific refutation are a bit premature.

Let’s ignore the large body of research that casts doubt on or hugely complicates the working hypothesis that men are somehow adaptively better at science and mathematics. Let’s assume that Summers’ hypothesis is valid.

However, he then goes on suggest something incredibly naive.

Even in the best case scenario for this kind of conjecture, we’re only talking about tendencies, not gender-based absolutes. Meaning that even if Summers’ hypothesis actually is the best explanation for the imbalance in the sciences, this imbalance should pose no difficulty for Harvard should Harvard judge it desirable to have more women on its science faculty.
...Even if genetic or innate differences mean that no more than 15% of the top scientists and mathematicians are women, Harvard could pay whatever was necessary to recruit from that 15% and achieve a faculty which had a 50-50 balance of men and women.
...Even if you wanted to be generous to the argument that affirmative action goals result in declining standards, it only applies to the average institution, to institutions which are presumed to lack the clout or financial power to compete for scarce goods and which therefore are presumed to have to lower their standards in order to achieve diversity.

This is so embarassingly wrong. In fact, it seems to me the reverse is true. The top 15% of scientists is not a meaningful grouping. Yes, of course there is a statistical percentile of the top 15%, but this is not a monolithic group. The variance within the extreme percentiles is much higher. As anyone who has ever looked at a bell curve should notice, this is true for ANY reasonably natural distribution. However, in particular it is empirically true with respect to the measurement of intellectual abilities between sexes; look up the data yourself if you don't believe me. The top scientist in any given field can very easily be worth ten of the next best scientists put together; one Einstein is worth 50,000 R and D departments.

The flaw I see in the argument comes from the comparison of top research scientists to scarce goods. In economics, we assume that goods of any given type are identical, and can vary only in their quantity. The approximation may be ok when used to represent pools of unskilled labor. But this is simply not the case with matters of human talent: the closer approximation would be that each scientist is his or her own scarce good. No school has the liberty of being able to make choices on the basis of arbitrary or politically correct or playfully whimsical criteria without sacrificing quality in the process. But in fact, the top institutions have the most to lose by this process, since in their human resource pool, variance is greatest.

What's most offensive about this whole argument is the presumption that institutions of research ought to achieve "diversity." What is called for here is a 50-50 balance, and I assume this contention is not uncommon. Now, of course institutions ought to cultivate discrimination-free environments, and work to eliminate all structural inequalities for women working in academia. Yet, unless there is some a priori reason why we should have absolute numerical parity between genders in academia - and I can't think of one - this suggestion is just as offensive as suggesting a restrictive quota system for one particular gender. Both are completely arbitrary.

Of course, socially progressive readers will remark that setting up concrete, numerical criteria is a practical though crude way to change the social conditions responsible for the problem. Well, there are equal numbers of each sex, so why don't we just choose 50/50 as the goal? This is all very sensible, except this isn't at all the way reasonable people have settled these matters in the past. When social engineering is used to remedy historical discrimination, it very rarely takes the form of enforced numerical parity, or isomorphism or whatever. Imagine if various European countries that had been the sites of civil and professional anti-semitic discrimination for hundreds of years decided to remedy the situation by appointing Jews to government and professional posts according to the exact proportion of Jews living in those countries... As common knowledge has it, there would be far fewer Jews working in these positions than there are today, given a fairly discrimination-free environment. In another case, consider how our most socially conscious institutions of higher learning have responded to the injustices dealt to african americans throughout American history. In its most socially activist form, this means the awarding of extra admissions points for students from historically underepresented (read: discriminated against) ethnic groups. No one is suggesting we provision spots in colleges, jobs, government and baseball leagues according to the numerical representation of african americans in the population. What if someone complained there weren't enough white people in basketball (a valid observation), and proposed an enforced numerical quota to remedy the problem. I can tell you definitively that the quality of professional basketball would go way down. In all these cases, the inherent wisdom of competitive selection is thwarted.

Research science or private sector business is a competitive endeavor. We are not building a polity here. Equal representation in the usual democratic sense, so important for running governments, is effective and necessary because it ensures the will of all the people is represented in the decisions of the governing body. Research and jobs are not government, they do not make decisions for other people, they are selfish, utility maximizing endeavors. There is no moral or civil argument that equal representation as a goal is necessary. Many people may be confusing private and public ventures here, but the ways they are run are very different.

It seems to me a lot of feminists are trying to preempt the debate under the auspices of political offensiveness. The truth cannot be offensive! Ok, so maybe I can think of some cases where it can be. But we have to know the objective truth first, independently, before addressing the normative issue of what should be done. To my understanding, there is research out there addressing these very issues of the relative contributions of all kinds of factors to the current gender gap in natural sciences and engineering. However, the research is incredibly contradictory. No one knows what to make out of it. Worse yet, some of it appears to be clearly political propoganda masquerading as scientific research. The unspoken irony in the whole debate is that this is the natural sciences afterall....people are supposed to agree on things! Clearly the debate would benefit from more research.

Most of the Summers' critics take his remarks completely out of context. As his various detractors have it, he was explaining his own tenure decisions; he was speaking about women and men in general; he was stating his personal belief. Ok, Larry Summers is not the most tactful guy. This is a given. The first two suggestions don't make any sense, though. The conference where the infamous remarks were made was attended by representatives of a few elite science and engineering institutions to address the issue of the gender gap in their faculties. The relevant community here is a freak group of statistical deviants, not men and women in general. The comment itself, on innate gender differences, is a purely scientific question, and has nothing to do with what people ought to or will be doing about this issue. The professor who walked out of the talk explained she did so because Summers was stating his personal belief. He clearly wasn't, and the intention was to goad people to keep an open mind to all angles. Yet, even if that does represent his personal belief, who cares? Maybe that concerns the Harvard administration and tenure committees. Moreover, the issue addressed is scientific. No one's belief really matters. If Summers' was the head of a research group pledging scientific objectivity I would be concerned, but he's not: he's trying to get people to DO research.

From now on, I'm no longer going to say "I support Summers (or) / what he said." For one, I don't care about what his personal beliefs are or what ramifications this may have for his job. I also don't want to argue about a comment, which was probably delivered not very tactfully, which may have been ill-advised, and has subsequently been distorted by critics to hold all kinds of different meanings. What matters to me is how people approach the question brought up by all this controversy, and ultimately, the truth.

You Know What They Should Have...

2005-03-28T21:15:00.000-05:00

How many times have you been typing a paper or sending an email or whatever and had to stop because the right word, the one you know expresses your idea perfectly, is stuck on the tip of your tongue? I'm not a psychologist but isn't it true that people think of words in terms of concepts. How often do you forget a word but know what you want as a cross of two or more other words? Wouldn't it be useful if someone created a thesaurus that gave answers based on cross-referencing multiple word inputs? Like if I'm looking for the word that's a cross between "confusing" and "secret" I'll quickly find "cryptic." The way it is now, you'd have to wade through up 10 definitions for each word, with huge lists of synonyms corresponding to each definition; in total you could easily have to look through hundreds of words before you found the one you were looking for. These days, given the widespread use of computers and the wonders of the internets, it should not be hard at all to write a program with this function.

Abstinence Now! - for $15

2005-03-28T16:38:00.001-05:00

My friend Noah has brought to our attention an organization relevant to every young adult, be he male or female, gay or straight, muslim or buddhist, black or white. It's called the Abstinence Clearinghouse, and its purpose is to "serve as an association for the abstinence community." Absurdity abounds here. I'll list some of it.

The premise that the cause of abstinence is faciliated by a social network.
The "Abstinence Online Store," i.e. the assumption that abstinence propoganda is something that people will pay money for rather than something you will have to force down their throats
The very idea of "faith-based information" used in product blurbs

Peruse the site for the products. Here are some good ones

The Casualties of Kinsey booklet: "the truth about the founder of spiritual decay in America." Special introductory price timed for the release of the movie whose release it deeply regrets!

God's Gift to Women: "...Eric Ludy challenges you to forsake modern male mediocrity for Christ-built, warrior-poet manhood-manhood that will capture the heart of a woman and change the course of history." In other words, Eric Ludy challenges you to come up with four words that are more mutually contradictory than "Christ-built warrior-poet manhood."

'Keep It' Underwear: "Keep It Underwear aims to approach the serious subject of abstinence in a light-hearted way by letting teens show their statement of choice - even if it's just to themselves." Features cool and tactful "STOP!" signs right on the front.

The Princess And The Kiss: "Contains faith-based content. The Princess and the Kiss is a wonderful fairytale with beautiful illustrations that convey the message of purity with beautiful symbolism. Kit comes with the book, coloring book, crayon and tiara. " I guess everything people teach kids is basically indoctrination right, so why do we have to be so careful anymore? On the plus side, it claims to have faith-based "content" not "information."

2005-03-11T19:05:00.000-05:00

I met with a psychologist and professor I knew in high school the other day, and one of the topics that came up in conversation was the issue of trying to gender-neutralize standardized psychological tests. This is particularly an issue with politically-charged tests like the IQ test. I hadn't been aware this was done, but apparently standard IQ tests are constructed so that in no question does one gender show substantial better performance (although I'm not sure if it's anything of statistical significance or what). I forgot exactly what this procedure is called, something like "item-pairing." The thinking is that if you start with a large pool of questions which are purported to test for general intelligence, and some of these questions are answered correctly much more frequently by people of one gender, then those questions must be biased in some way so you reject them.

There are a lot of issues here. One preliminary question you might ask is who does this procedure help? I don't know the data, but my suspicion is that men probably score better on some types of questions, and women score better on other types of questions. Overall, men score slightly better on SAT tests, for instance, so one might infer that more of the questions showing a gender disparity favor men. This is obviously not necesarily true though, since men may just be showing stronger performance in general, but women may be the ones showing superior performance on certain types of questions. Therefore this protocol doesn't necesarilly serve a moderating function; it seems it could potentially exagerate already existing performance gaps.

The real question comes down to not what is the statistical basis for carrying out such a protocol, but what is the conceptual basis for doing so. Since you could always form arbitrary groups of people who perform differently on any given question, and argue that therefore the tests must be biased against them in some way. If you carried this scenario out to its logical conclusion, you would end in a situation where all individual variability in performance is banished - and this is obviously absurd. Of course, the argument will be made that genders are not an arbitrarily drawn group. But a group is only significant to the extent that it is correlated with other, confounding factors. The fact that members of a group perform worse on a certain question is not definite evidence that bias exists; it may just as well indicate that the question tests for something that members of that group are less able in.

The permissibility of this analysis depends on your fundamental philosophical view of what the test is testing. If you thought that there was a single quantity that all test questions were designed to measure, then it would be logical to only accept a test that has no significant variation across questions in the gender answering patterns, because presumably all questions are testing for the same quantity whose relationship with the genders should be static. Note that this doesn't necessarilly mean that the set point of correct responses should be 50-50; what if one gender really does have slightly more of the quantity that the tests measure? A "fair" test would take into account that that gender will invariantly score a given amount better on any question that validly measures that quantity. But in reality it's hard to know what this set point is without the input of a test, so you're back to square one. On the other hand, if you thought the test was measuring multiple discrete skills, you'd expect these would vary between genders. Hopefully, when it comes to IQ tests, political correctness isn't intervening and saying, "well let's just assume that men and women are absolutely the same cognitively, and therefore we'll reject any questions (or groups of questions) that show one gender performing better than the other as either ineffective or flawed" or holding some presumptuous, anti-scientific "intelligence is gender-neutral" dictum. This would be a good way to create a gender-equalized test in terms of scores, if that was your goal for some reason, but wouldn't necessarilly create gender impartial questions. Interestingly, the people who would would probably want to make each question as gender-neutral as possible would probably also tend to be the same people who adhere to the multiple intelligence theory of intelligence - which is logically inconsistent.

My general conclusion is that it seems really stupid to gender-neutralize a test based on rejecting individual questions that show a gender disparity. Probably a smarter way to do it would be to do a kind of latent variable analysis: that is consider GROUPS of questions that show a pattern of one gender answering more correctly, infer some kind of latent common cause, and try to identify (through non-statistical analysis) if it's due to something that the questions are TESTING or something about the way the questions are worded, expressed, or presented. You can't just summarilly reject any group of questions because they are answered more correctly by one gender before determining what the probable cause is, since it very well may indicate a difference in whatever the test is supposed to measure, rather than an unfair bias in the question.

2005-03-02T21:28:00.000-05:00

Here's an intereting little optimization problem that occured to me while working on a side job I have of labeling the contents of audio tapes. Basically, the job involves archiving cassette tapes that have multiple concerts or sets recorded on them. I have to record the time into the tape at which the next recorded set starts. The only way to accomplish this is to manually rewind / ff, and hit play. Most of the time there's at most one additional recording per 45 minute side. To simplify the problem, I assumed that this is the case.

If you are getting paid on a task basis, maximal efficiency is of utmost importance, especially if you are busy. In reality, I'm getting paid on an hourly basis, so I want to do the opposite, but I just as easily could get paid that way. The problem is then, how do you get the most tapes done in the least amount of time? In other words if the location of the beginning of the second set on the tape is completely unknown and random for all intents and purposes, what is the best method of hitting fast forward, play and rewind to use that will ensure you find the location of the beginning of the second set quickest?

It simplifies the problem somewhat to assume that the second set continues to play until the end of the tape, so that you're guaranteed to reach some point in the second set if you fast forward all the way to the end of the tape. Also, there may be different answers depending upon whether efficiency is gauged in terms of # of stops on the tape (or times you hit play) versus amount of time spent on the search. It also depends on how realistically you are going to model the actual time it takes to press buttons, reverse direction etc. I'm not absolutely sure there's an optimal strategy if the set placement on the tape is completely random. But I have some preliminary thoughts on at least creating a model that might lead to an answer:

It's good to fast forward not too far into the tape and hit a point where there is music recorded. This means the beginning of the set is between where you are (which is not too far), and where you started. It's equally good to fast forward far into the tape and hit a point where there isn't music recorded. This means the beginning of the tape is between where you are, and the end of the tape (which is not too far away). But, you're just as likely to find music recorded far into the tape than to not find music recorded not too far into the tape, so neither choice is more likely to pay off.
However, all other things being equal, if you choose to fast forward not too far into the tape, you have wasted less time. So the general algorithm is something like always choose to fast forward to the point not too far into the tape.
I can't prove that it's best, but it simplifies the problem a lot if you just assume that the initial move is to fast forward exactly half-way through the tape. If you do this, when you push play, then you are faced with two equally likely options:

1) You hear music

2) You do not hear music

As I said, I can't prove that this is the best fast forwarding / rewinding regime, but it seems equivalent to any other. Since if you initially fast-forward less than half-way into the tape, say 30% of the way, then if you happen to hear music, then you have effectively diminished the length on the tape you have to explore to 30% of the original length of the tape; however, assuming that the placement of the set on the tape is random, you have only a 30% chance of attaining this outcome, so the advantage seems to be nullified. After you fast-forward to where you are going to stop, you push play and listen for a period of time. To simplify the problem, I assumed you always listen for the same amount of time.

As suggested before, if you are to choose as your first move fast forwarding to exactly the half-way mark, then it logically follows that you would choose the same protocol as your second move. This follows from the fact that after your first move, you are logically faced with the same problem you are faced with on the first move: you are given a length of tape over which the beginning of a set of music is equally likely to appear. The only difference is that the movement can now take place in two directions: either backward or forward depending on whether you hear music or not. However this doesn't affect the amount of time you spend, so you don't need to take it into account. The pattern equally applies to the next step, and the next step, and so on. Therefore you can express the total time, which you want to optimize, in terms of time spent fast-forwarding/rewinding and spent listening to the tape. If "f" is the speed of fast-forwarding/rewinding, "w" is the length of the whole tape, and "d" is the standard displacement due to listening to the tape - which is also equal to the time spent listening to the tape, since the play function operates in real time...

T = (1/2(w/f) + d) + (1/4(w/f) + d) + (1/8(w/f) + d) + ...

The first parentheses indicates the time you spend searching and listening on the first attempt, the second parentheses expresses this for the second time, etc. I assume that the displacement on the tape, d, is negligible compared to the displacement traversed in fast-forwarding/rewinding. Of course, this is a worse and worse approximation with each round of fast-forwarding.

The total time T is just the sum from n=1 to n=N of [1/2^n(w/f)] + Nd, where N is the number of times you apply the protocol. However the sum doesn't continue infinitely. There comes a point where the displacement you fast-forward into the tape is less than the displacement into the tape that you pass by from listening to it, and at this point it will be useless to continue the cycle further, since you will have accounted for all the space on the tape. This occurs when d > 1/2^n(w/f) . If you solve for n you get n > log2(w/fd). Therefore, this is your upper limit to the sum, N. Stating the sum again

T = sum from n=1 to log2(w/fd) of [1/2^n(w/f)] + log2(w/fd)d

You can actually figure out that sum based on a simple formula. To spare you the tedium, unless I've made a mistake, the sum comes out to

T = w/f - d + log2(w/fd)d

At this point you can find the listening time, d, at which the total time, T, is lowest by solving a simple max/min problem. Once you take the derivative of T with respect to d and set it equal to 0, you can solve for d... You get

d = (w/f)/2^(1/ln2 + 1), which is somehow a pleasing answer. Unfortunately, this is a maximum, not a minimum. So this tells the optimal amount of time you would want to be listening if you wanted it to take as long as possible to find the spot in the tape. Basically it says if you reduce the total time it takes you to fast-forward through the entire side by a factor of 1/2^(ln2 + 1) you get the optimal time you should spend listening. The speed of the fast-forward mechanism will vary by tape recorder, but mine has a speed of 16 1/2 minutes tape displacement per minute. Therefore, working with my tape recorder, with a 45 minute-sided tape, I will optimally want to spend 3o seconds listening to the tape per round before I choose fast-forward or rewind. This is the protocol you would want to use if you were getting paid by the hour, as I am, and if you for some reason had to appear as if you were trying to complete the task as quickly as possible. However, it should be noted that in the real situation, this is only a local maximum, as one easy way to spend much more time is to just set d so that it exceeds w/f.

There is a minimum of the function for T, and it occurs when the time spent listening to the tape approaches 0. It's interesting that the value of the equation T = w/f - d + log2(w/fd)d in the limit where d --> 0 is T= w/f, which is the original time it takes to fast-forward through the entire tape. This constitues the maximum time you would spend searching for the spot in the tape if you were using the minimizing protocol. On my tape recorder, it takes 2 minutes and 45 seconds to fast-forward through an entire tape. This is probably the one actually useful result to come out of all this, since it seems intuitively obvious that you would want to minimize the time spent listening to the tape as much as possible if your goal was to find a spot on the tape the fastest. This is the protocol you would want to use if you are getting paid by the amount of work you get done.

Looking back, you can judge whether the "d is much less than w/2^n" approximation is a good one. Using the maximize protocol, you can go about 5 rounds before the distance you displace on the next fast-forward/rewind is comparable to the distance you displace listening to the tape. You can calculate that probability that 5 rounds will be sufficient to locate the spot on the tape. Since you always spend 30 seconds, the chance of finding it on the first blind attempt is 30/(45*60), on the second attempt, 30/1350...and the total sum of all these is somewhere around 30%. This is obviously not a very good approximation. A new model is clearly needed. Of course when d=0 the approximation is still good, so the minimize protocol is definitely good.

Pretty much the only valuable thing to come out of all this inquiry is the realization that your optimum minimize strategy is to listen for as little as possible. In fact I'm not sure if any of these results are even meanginful with all the approximations I made. Perhaps someone will come to another answer, or one that's based on fewer approximations?

2005-03-02T00:19:00.000-05:00

I am basically ignorant when it comes to analyzing politics. However, this gives me the right to toot my own horn when it looks like I do get something right. A while back I spewed my thoughts on the Iraq War, its motivations, and its implications. Briefly, the conclusion I came to was that the provided rationale for going to war (support of terrorism, WMD's, nuclear program, humanitarian concerns) was contrived and probably totally specious, and that the war would accomplish none of the stated primary goals of operation except remove Saddam Hussein from power. In fact, this is pretty much how it has worked out: there was no weapons programs, consequently there was no potential for the former regime to aid terrorists, and there has been little immediate progress against "the forces of terrorism" - in fact, it seems you would have to be deceiving yourself to say the current environment in Iraq hasn't attracted new jihadists to the area. I also said that I thought the main motivating reason behind the war was democratization. Democratization has two aspects:

1) Democratization of Iraq prope. This is desirable because a democratic Iraq is inevitably much friendlier to its neighbors and to U.S. interests than a dictatorship, especially one that is run by a sworn enemy. Accomplishing this objective at minimum is important because at the very least, it means that the U.S. has one less enemy and a sphere of influence in the middle east.

2) Democratization as an example for the greater Middle East. This is desirable for many reasons. One, the huge antagonistic force we are fighting at this point in time is Islamic totalitarianism, exemplified by bin Laden and his associates. Reasonable people may disagree about the extent two which these forces currently pose a threat to the United States, but it is undeniable that the ideology is extremely dangerous and antagonistic. Democracy necessarilly excludes Islamic totaliaranism and its success in the middle ease will be a huge blow to it. Second, an implicit belief of the Bush people seems to be that turning Arab countries into democracies will significantly lower the tension that characteristically plagues the area. Third, as before, other democracies are more likely to turn out regimes friendly to the U.S. and U.S. interests. This means more U.S. influence in a region that is vital to our economy.

Back in October I predicted that the democratization objectives of the war would turn out decidedly more positively than any other causes. With what's going on in Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian Authority, and to some extent Syria, it appears that my prediction was right. Of course the by all counts successful election in Iraq goes to this credit as well.

On the other hand, I said before that I am totally against the way all of this was carried out. One can say without cynicism that Administration cronies exploited the fear environment created by 9/11 to sell a distorted case for a war, and that is not acceptable. Presenting false intelligence and rationales to the American public, probably with the knowledgeable intent to deceive, is a terrible precedent to be setting - especially when the issue in question is something on the magnitude of a war. Further, word has it that the war itself was not particularly carefully or well-executed. I can't comment on this aspect; I'll let the reality speak for itself, and leave commenting on it to those with greater knowledge of miltary policy, or greater pretense to know about such things.

The dillemma I face is was any of this possible without the mendaciousness, deception, and strong-arm tactics with which this administration carried out this war? Is it really possible to say, "I like what is going on now, but I would have gone about it better"? The central question there is whether the country ever would have bought into a war based exclusively on subtle and long-term structural goals like democracy reform in the middle east. It's possible that the country would have bought into that rationale alone, but it would have required a much longer period of selling the war, which the administration just didn't have time for. Or it's possible that all the best political analysis said that the democracy pitch was a big loser. Ultimately, this war forces us to ask fundamental questions about the nature of the foreign policy process in our country. In theory, war is supposed to only be declared by Congress representative of the wishes of its constituents, whereas the President is only supposed to be able to suggest war to a critical Congress, and then choose when to carry it through once it has been passed. In reality there are all kinds of vaguely worded loopholes that allow for the use of force in "extenuating circumstances" and "matters of urgent national interest" and the like, and the War Powers Resolution which allows for the unmediated use of force for 60 days. In fact, a formal declaration of war has been resorted to on only 5 occassions in U.S. history. De facto, we have a situation where the president who is elected has unlimited control of military force, within reasonable constraints. We should be asking what role the public should play in foreign policy decisions, and how much accountability Congress should have to the public on these matters, which is currently very little. We should also be asking whether in matters of national interest in which the public is not informed is it OK for authorities to present a distorted case for a benign foreign policy action. Basically we have to clarify the precise role that the public, and presumably Congress which is supposed to represent them, is going to play in the formation of foreign policy decisions in the future.

Interesting Searches

2005-03-01T19:27:00.000-05:00

People are continuing to reach my blog through searches even though I haven't been updating. The first one involves, as unlikely as this may be, someone at Bank Of America musing about quote "Could the disparity eventually lead to the class conflict that Karl Marx and Max Weber predicted? " Apparently this person is quite conflicted. Way to go continuing to perpetuate disparities in wealth through your facilitation of the capitalist system and then agonizing over its philosophical consequences.

The second noteworthy search came someone wondering about "Immanuel Kant's views on gay marriage." I wasn't aware that the gay marriage debate extended back to the 18th century. Kind of reminds me of the title of one of Oren Cass's blog posts, "Shakespeare opposed the war in Iraq," but that one was supposed to be a joke.

Election Probabilities

2005-02-28T18:48:00.000-05:00

Here's a potentially interesting thought. How many undecided voters do you have going into an election? How many of those undecideds could just as easily have decided differently if they had been forced to decide on a different day? (Call their decisions indeterminate.) Then if you chose another random sample of their voting decisions (you technically shouldn't say "chose oppositely" because you don't know that either choice is equally likely) and tallied up the total votes, couldn't you easily get another election outcome, especially if the election was won on a close margin? How many elections could have "easily" gone the other direction due to the random choices of indeterminate undecided voters?

For The b(n)erds

2005-02-20T19:51:00.000-05:00

You know how when you get only one hit on google search (including any hidden results), the corresponding search phrase is refered to as a "googlewhack?"I hereby introduce the logical successor to the googlewhack, the "blogwhack."

Everyone who has a blog takes a pride in seeing their site come up on a search engine. When your site comes up high in the search results, especially when it is number one, it is especially rewarding. Since for the majority, the only conceivable way of attaining this status is for the search to turn out a single result, the "blogwhack" is a vital commodity for any blogger's self-esteem.

The blogwhack is any search phrase that lands the user at your site, and ONLY your site. I will leave it to the more nerdily-inclined to come up with a scoring system. I leave as a suggestion that it take into account, along the lines of the googlewhack, the 1) commoness of the individual words as measured by the number of search hits they produce individually, 2) the number of words (the fewer the better). In addition, I think it should somehow take into account context (not sure how).

New Format

2005-02-13T00:22:00.000-05:00

From now on, the format of my posting will be that short, succint, or topical posts will be posted with bold post headings, to indicate that they should be read as blog posts. Longer more involved posts, or posts on topics that are not typical to blogs will be posted without a heading, to indicate that they are to be read more as essays.

2005-02-12T21:49:00.001-05:00

Nicholas Kristof has written an editorial demonstrating, with scientific precision, why New York Times writers should not attempt to write about science. Actually, I would tell the paper to just stop trying to write on science altogether, and that there is no good reason for them to, but their science page can sometimes have impressive photos of other galaxies and things... Check out this sentence:

Genes that promote spirituality may do so in part by stimulating chemical messengers in the brain like dopamine, which can make people optimistic and sociable - and perhaps more likely to have children.

The sentence that follows it, however should really be read in the original print so that the full impact of its absurdity can be appreciated:

(Dopamine is very complex, but it appears linked to both spirituality and promiscuity, possibly explaining some church scandals.)[emphasis added]

The suggestion of the article, it seems to be, is that spirituality may be genetically determined.

One bit of evidence supporting a genetic basis for spirituality is that twins
separated at birth tend to have similar levels of spirituality, despite
their
different upbringings. And identical twins, who have the same DNA, are
about
twice as likely to share similar levels of spirituality as fraternal
twins.

Let me just give a quick version of my take on theories which assert the
genetic determination of high-order social and psychological phenomena, and
while it may be too ambitious for a simple blog entry, take it or leave it as it
is.

Genes code for simple things. In particular, every gene codes for a
specific protein which, when the gene is activated, is constructed in accordance
with the rules in the genetic code. This is true for every gene, no matter
what it codes for, no matter how complicated. Proteins have differing
target effects, and whatever their general effect on behavior is ascertained to
be, we ascribe that as the "function" of the gene. The key thing that must be
realized is that the things for which the manufactured protein has the most
direct effect, are the things for which we can say with most confidence that the
gene is "coding" for something. This is a simple matter of what we mean by
coding.

In popular parlance, it is said that such and such is a "gene
for autism" or a "gene for obesity." This is convenient usage, but it must not
be forgotten that what is really happening is that genes are coding for
proteins, which then have whatever effects they are going to have in the body.
It would be more correct to say that this gene codes for a protein which plays
as a factor in this bodily state. This may seem overly picky and unecessary,
when refering to things for which the route from the protein to the final bodily
effect observed is direct, such as simple physical traits. In many of these
cases, there can be isolated a single protein, and hence a single gene,
responsible for the observed phenomenon. For instance, blue eyes are the result
of a single pigment, whose production is moderated by a single gene (this result
is ficitious, but is provided for illustration). However, it is absolutely
essential to remember when dealing with complex and multifactorial traits the
true meaning of the process being refered to when one talks about this or that
gene.

Consider the factors that go into the creation of a complex
psychological and sociological phenomenon like spirituality. An astute response
to this challenge may be that the question is too broad, and that it only can be
answered in any partially satisfactory manner if some level of description is
specified. So consider the factors that go into the creation of this phenomenon
at the psychological or sociological level, the level most immediate to the
phenomenon of spirituality itself. For one, a person becomes spiritual if there
is a certain need in the person's life which can be fulfilled by spiritual
activity. A person may be seeking answers to large questions, may be seeking
comfort in some way, or may have the unfulfilled need for larger human
connections, all of which can be satisfied by spiritual life. Another factor is
the liking of the person for the spiritual experience in its worldly
incarnation. The person who is turned off by gatherings of large groups of
people which last for relatively long periods of time will tend not to gravitate
to going to church, and this may in turn influence their feelings towards
spirituality. Psychologically, you have many discrete, individually unrelated
factors which contribute to the making of spirituality. A person's ability for
abstract thought can predispose him to be able to understand the kind of
thinking that goes on in spiritual contexts, and conversely, a person who is not
able to grasp abstract thought can feel alienated from spiritual discourse, or
like it all appears meaningless so why bother. A person's sociability can
determine how willing he is to engage with large communities, which is a
prominent aspect of religious experience. Then on top of those you have social
factors, such as how able one is to get any of the aforementioned factors
fulfilled by activities other than religion. The need for meaning can be
fulfilled by finding an interesting field of study and engaging in that. The
need for social connection can be fulfilled by the presence of a close group of
good friends. If person finds fulfillment for a need via other outlets, that is
one less factor available to contribute to the development of spirituality.

In relating these first-order social and psychological factors, which
obviously are quite numerous by themselves, to the concept of the gene, the
chain of factors has to be continued into more and more basic levels of analysis
and causation. Hence, any given complex psychological factor such as, say,
sociability, can be reduced to its own set of more basic psychological factors,
such as disposition, extroversion, mood, conformism, etc. At some point,
presumably there is a threshold at which immaterial things such as psychological
and social considerations can begin to be reduced and attributed to material
things. Mood is reduced to the presence of certain neurotransmitters, activity
in certain parts of the brain, the presence of proper nutrient and energy
levels, the existence of certain hormones in the blood. The entire point of this
is to establish the role of causation of the genes. The chain continues for as
many levels as are necessary until the level of the encoded protein and its
function is reached, at which point it can be said meaningfully that a
particular gene takes is a factor.

The point is that for each additional
level in the chain of factors that can be attributed to a particular trait, the
causation becomes more indirect and more multifactorial, spread thinner over
more factors. For each additional level, the contribution of any given more
basic factor is less and less. This is not all to say that genes are not
determinative of behaviors. In theory, they are. It is to say that, even though
they may be determinative in the development of certain behaviors or traits,
their determinative influence becomes increasingly indirect and manifold.

There is a certain philosophical issue that becomes relevant here. The
postulation of free will, depending on at which level of causation it is
posited, becomes a large and perhaps fatally complicating factor. Say that the
causal chain of factors, from protein up to prayer, is interupted by the fact
that so and so specifically wants to become a religious person. Maybe
it became a goal because that person read about a scientific study in which
religious people are purported to live longer and be healthier. There is no way
of accounting for this action, by the very definition of free will! It occured
independently of any kind of material cause. In fact, free will seems to mean
that it occured independently of any conceivable law. Therefore if you believe
in free will, it's hard to see that you should believe in genetic determinism
for any other than the most basic traits.

It should be obvious what the
relation of this all to religion is. Religion, along with love and a few other
things, is probably just about the most inexplicable, complex, multifactorial
human phenomenon there is. It is just about the greatest stretch of any possible
thing to try to relate to genetic causes. There comes a point when it becomes
essentially meaningless to assert that something is genetically caused. However,
this doesn't prevent it from making for a fascinating and important and
wonder-inspiring editorial. "It turns out that our DNA may predispose humans
toward religious faith" is a fascinating, but ultimately empty statement, like
saying that DNA may predispose us to ride bicycles, or DNA predisposes us to
have friends. Of course DNA predisposes us to these things! In an important
sense, DNA predisposes us to do everything we do. But the farther away that
thing is in causation from the actual activity of DNA, which is creating
proteins, the less meaningful that statement becomes.

Blogged Her Hard

2005-02-12T17:06:00.000-05:00

There's a new entry into the growing niche-blog scene. My classmate Dave Gottlieb has started a blog that consists entirely of "momma jokes." But be careful: everything is copyrighted under intellectual property laws.

The Other Side Of The Academic-Freedom Coin

2005-02-10T01:50:00.000-05:00

In defending the right of Larry Summers to suggest that maybe there are innate differences in the cognitive strengths of men and women, I suppose that I am also beholden to defending the right of this guy, who is a tenured professor at the University of Colorado, to compare 9/11 victims to "Nazis."

In an essay, Churchill wrote that workers in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who ensured the smooth running of the Nazi system. Churchill also spoke of the "gallant sacrifices" of the "combat teams" that struck America.

It's cases like these that make the free speech issue really tough. On the one hand, people invoking the free speech clause usually do so under the assumption that their message is valid, and the truth is somehow being repressed. On the other hand, not everyone agrees on what constitues "valid" or "true," and so the right to free speech cannot be defined on these grounds. It seems that in order to function, the right to free speech must be absolute. Hence, when Noam Chomsky chooses to defend the French Holocaust Revisionist, he has every right to. (Actually, this case is a little more complicated, because Chomsky is actually defending someone else's right to free speech.) The repulsiveness or downright innaccuracy of the thing whose right to be publicized he is defending does not affect his right to defend it.

However, the way I see it, there is a countervailing factor here. And that is the force of public (or professional, or community opinion). Everyone has a right to say what they want, but complimentary to that, everyone else has a right, and even an obligation, to assign creedence as they see fit. The law does not dictate that people have to listen. This system strikes me as good because it allows for unfit statements or conclusions to be weeded out democratically, according to the opinion of the public, or the relevant community.

The problem here is that there is a distinct difference in the ability of communities of people to reach a consensus on the credibility or validity of a claim in the scientific communities versus the humanitarian communities. This is because scientific hypotheses are specifically constructed to be falsifiable, so that if they do not live up to a pre-agreed burden of proof, they are not considered as valid theories. Claims in the other half of academia, the humanities, are not subject to the same standards of rigor. Although something may not seem agreeable, perhaps to many people, there is no way to definitively say it is false. Anything conceivably can pass as "intellectually admissable." Hence there is potential for people to say many outlandish, offensive, or harmful things with no inborn mechanism by which the statement is automatically weeded out.

The real problem here is not that this professor is saying this, but that there are people listening. Ward Churchill is a tenured professor, and the chair of an entire department at a major university. Either he changed his modus opperendi dramatically since being hired, or some tenure committee made a really bad decision. Why are thousands of people attending his talks? The professor has the right to free speech, but this also means he has the right to take an extremely stupid comment back when he realizes how off-base it is. The fact that he's not, and he's standing by it, is extremely troubling. Even Larry Summers apologized for his remark. Our professor has pledged "I'm not backing up an inch."

Perhaps it is somewhat indicative of the current state of affairs in academia today that a scientist who suggests innate differences in the sexes might explain some factual data gets walked out on in disgust, and a tenured professor who compares the victims of a terror attack to genocidal exterminators is rewarded with audiences numbering into the thousands, and defended by the ACLU for his right to free speech.

Oren Cass must be beside himself on this one...

Attention - Public Service Announcement

2005-02-05T20:19:00.000-05:00

I don't know what to say in response to that last entry, except for the fact that absolutely no one reads my blog so the message is bound to be wasted, and that the cause might be better served by reporting it to the Better Business Bureau.

Sad to see that Jung won't be blogging for a while. This makes blogging less fun for me, and I'm inclined to take a break until the summer as well. Note, though, that I'm exercising the proper courtesy here in clearly indicating that there won't be much updating going on in the next few months, so as to minimize inconvenience. It seems to me that standards of etiquette are hugely underappreciated in the blog world, and in the computer world in general. How hard is it to leave a short post so people will know you won't be posting for a while and not to check your blog? A partial explanation for this phenomenon is the anonymity factor. That is, the presence of standards of etiquette is inversely related to the degree anonymity. If you wanted to further the ethical analysis, you could draw the conclusion that this shows that etiquette - which is supposed to be an impersonal imperative - is actually very much dependent on personal factors.

But Adam, readers of this blog will undoubtably retort, you're an incredibly rude person online. This is true. I am guilty of impersonating other people, typing in annoying fonts, sending cryptic messages and generally annoying people at times. I am well aware that there are numerous people who treat me with much affection in real life who refuse to talk to me online for this very reason. Hopefully this is something that will go away with maturity, or with getting beyond seeing AIM as an inherently ironic medium. (Interesting side question: would I respond a similar way to the introduction of the telephone if I was alive for that era?)

I guess it would be appropriate to leave with a series of links to blogs that I read on a regular basis, in case anyone should land at my blog, looking for something to do.
http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1/
http://oxblog.blogspot.com/
http://www.andrewsullivan.com/ (sometimes)
http://yglesias.typepad.com/
http://athameblade.blogspot.com/
http://dfmoore.mu.nu/
http://www.orencass.com
http://www.amherst.edu/~dmgottlieb/

PC-Patrol, PC-Patrol

2005-01-20T21:50:00.001-05:00

Everyone on the college circuit has been hearing about Lawrence Summers' recent controversial remark on innate differences in the sexes. The exact incident and statement are hard to reconstruct, but we can make a reasonable estimate as to what transpired. Summers was giving a speech at a meeting of economists adjourned for the purpose of researching issues relevant to women and minorities in science and engineering and, according to event organizers, "was asked to be provocative." He was invited to speak as a scientist and economist, not as a Harvard official. Therefore, his words are correctly interpreted as being stated within the interest of science by a scientist. In this light, you can do a fairly good job of reconstructing what was said and in what context. According to cnn.com, Summers suggested that "innate differences between the sexes could help explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers...[and] also questioned how great a role discrimination plays in keeping female scientists and engineers from advancing at elite universities." Additionally (all from CNN) he also cited the "possible factor that he cited was mothers' reluctance or inability to work 80-hour weeks."

The thing is, no one knows what the cause is. It's a hypothesis, stated by a scientist, at a conference of scientists, to discuss science. Although I'm personally inclined to disagree, lots of people speculate that it may be true, and no one has done enough research on it yet, so is it wrong to suggest that this area of scientific research be explored? Physical differences exist between men and women in the body, is it so unreasonable to suggest that they exist in the brain as well?

The reaction from inflamed PC patrollers is predictably absurd. "It is so upsetting that all these brilliant young women (at Harvard) are being led by a man who views them this way," says Nancy Hopkins of MIT.

Summers' own explanation is perfectly explanatory. From CNN:

I apologize for any adverse impact ... on our common efforts to make steady progress in this critical area.

I suppose the offended people would prefer that researchers not make progress in this area. But what makes this different from people trying to stop stem cell research for religious or political reasons? In this case I'm going to have to come down and say Summers did the honorable thing of putting his being a scientist before his being a University president in a politically-hypersensitive culture. I personally am extremely happy to see that someone like Summers as the head of a prominent university, because hopefully his example of putting fact before political correctness will make college culture a less annoying and unendurable thing for future generations of college students.

Update: Noted Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker (via Andrew Sullivan) says "First, let’s be clear what the hypothesis is—every one of Summers’ critics has misunderstood it. The hypothesis is, first, that the statistical distributions of men’s and women’s quantitative and spatial abilities are not identical—that the average for men may be a bit higher than the average for women, and that the variance for men might be a bit higher than the variance for women...Second, the hypothesis is that differences in abilities might be one out of several factors that explain differences in the statistical representation of men and women in various professions...Look, the truth cannot be offensive. Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but how would we ever find out whether it is wrong if it is “offensive” even to consider it? People who storm out of a meeting at the mention of a hypothesis, or declare it taboo or offensive without providing arguments or evidence, don’t get the concept of a university or free inquiry." With the additional great line, "Good grief, shouldn’t everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That’s the difference between a university and a madrassa."

Second Update: Here's a really interesting link to a "Ph.D" blogger who humbly has chosen to remain anonymous. "Well, I've got news for you, Larry. My son, whose father took him to see the first X-Prize launch, calls SpaceShipOne the 'Mama Plane' and the 'Baby Plane.' So I think maybe a little more research needs to be done on this topic before your darling daughter--who I'm sure was raised in a completely non-sexist environment (not)--can really serve as definitive proof that girls can't do math and science. Dumbass."

Reader Feedback

2005-01-20T18:45:00.000-05:00

I got an interesting comment on my quick post on the gay marriage debate and I've been meaning to respond to it. It comes from a self-proclaimed evangelical who agrees with my speculation that the religious majority opposing gay marriage and other issues of interest to the gay community are doing so out of animus to the concept of homosexuality:

First, I think you are accurate when you suggest that a lot of people react to any advancement of the "gay rights" agenda out of sheer animus. I am an evangelical Christian, unashamed to say so, but it grieves me when I see this kind of thinking. I supported, for instance, President Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell"--unlike most of my evangelical friends, because to me it hit the right balance: why should homosexuals not be allowed to serve in the military if a structure is put into place whereby military readiness will not be compromised thereby? If you are homosexual, but no one knows it, it's hard to see how the military is compromised, such as studies have suggested it might be in the event this were known.
...
I think that evangelicals have lost credibility by opposing anything/everything that might in some way benefit homosexuals; I for one do not think that that is right or wise.

I can actually think of reasons why having even undisclosed homosexuals in the armed forces could compromise operational effectiveness. If part of the idea of keeping women out of the armed forces is to eliminate the distractions that come with the presence of romantic relationships among the soldiers (and I think this is a good reason) then the same can be said for homosexuals in the military. But I guess the "don't ask don't tell" policy presumes that the sexuality of the soldiers will be subsumed enough in service-type situations that the issue of any kind of relationships among soldiers, heterosexual or homosexual, will be non-existent.

The reader brings up the common issue of legislating morality, as it is called. He writes,

Further, I don't think it ought to be illegal for people to engage in homosexual sex. The fact that I consider it immoral doesn't mean it ought to be against the law. There are many things that are NOT immoral that are illegal (driving on the left side of the road) and others that are clearly wrong (lying to your boss) which shouldn't land you in court. Most evangelicals are against removing laws that prohibit homosexual sex, but I am not.

This brings to mind that there are possibly two ways that something can be "immoral." Something can be immoral on a personal level. Thus I may see someone as immoral because he eats dairy products with bacon, doesn't shower, and doesn't believe in a god. Usually, immorality in this way seems to derive from failure to live up to some kind of pre-conceived standard of personal behavior or criteria for the Good life. It lies in the individual failing to live up to a code of good behavior usually designed to ensure individual well-being. Then something can be immoral on a social level. Murder, theft and basically any kind of crime fall under this category. In this case the thing is immoral, or perhaps you could loosely translate as "bad," because of the way it is harmful to other people. Looked at this way, social immorality can be seen as a coercive social construct designed to ensure optimal social conditions.

What kind of morality should we legislate, if any? My gut feeling is that only morality that is based in social well-being is the kind of morality we should legislate. Without a doubt, many thinkers have mulled this very question over for ages. Perhaps Jung can give us a primer on the various philosophical attempts to answer this question.

Even using the assumption that morality of social consequence is the only thing we should ever legislate, the issue of gay marriage is not settled. My guess is that a good number of people who support legislation like the Marriage Ammendment do so not out of policy considerations or legal prudence, but rather as a moral reaction to homosexuality. Others, however, have genuine concerns about the social byproducts of something like gay marriage. A libertarian point of view would say that whatever people choose to do in the privacy of their own bedroom is free game, because as long as there is active consent involved it doesn't hurt anyone or anything else. A more institutional thinker can find ways in which gay marriage can affect the integrity of our society overall, whether it's via homosexuals seducing other people into their sinful lifestyle, contributing to the demise of family structure and familial values, or lowering the assessment of the human race in the eyes of God...any number of things. Conservative blogger and outspoken advocate for gay issues Andrew Sullivan has framed his entire argument for gay marriage around the issue of systemic social effects, and how instituionalizing gay marriage would actually be beneficial. He argues that instituting gay marriage will encourage the gay couples out there to be more monogamous and form stabler family structures, and that the lack of ability to marry is currently a big obstacle in the way of stability, family values, and moral values for the gay community. I tend to think that he's right, and that marriage would help to ameliorate some of the socially troublesome aspects of the gay community.

Other people foresee that the opposite would occur, and that legalizing gay marriage would diminish the strength of the institution of marriage. In one way or another, all these arguments seem to boil down to something about demeaning the fundamental sacredness of the covenant of marriage. If gays are allowed to marry, the argument goes, people will find the bond of marriage less sacred, and will be less willing to enter into marriage themselves, thus undermining the whole purpose of the institution. Of course for some people, homosexuality is fundamentally unsanctified. It's an unholy and depraved social phenomenon and its existence is an intrinsic social problem, end of story. If you suppose this, then it's inevitable that you would oppose legalization of gay anything, and I think the comment I received confirms that this is a very real rationale for a substantial portion of the country.

People can debate whether or not there is a personal moral failing in homosexuality, but of course this shouldn't dictate legislation. These matters are for good reason left to the religious institutions and the individual to decide. The Declaration of Independence says that every man should be free to pursue happiness, as long as he is not hurting anyone else. In philosophical terms, this means to me that government powers in the United States are intended to be limited to those issues with direct social ramifications. That is, I can't use the law against someone because they are a "bad person" but only because they have done something bad, in the sense of done something socially harmful. In practice, will this result in an any less moral world? Are we losing the opportunity to uphold morality? I don't think so. I mean, if someone is really a bad person, any social circle they encounter will shun them, the teachings of their religion and religious figures will attempt to correct them...there are plenty of ways for misguided people to "get the message" other than through government mandate.

Adam's House Of Whiskey And Jass Music

2005-01-19T23:23:00.001-05:00

It's been a long time since I updated - I know. Fear not loyal readers - this blog is still alive and kicking. So vacation is over. We're back in the school grind once again, which is interesting if you own a blog because of all the random hits coming in from frenzied students on some random last-minute academic search. Apparently, I've now become an information source (so all appropriations of information contained within this site must be formally cited) on turn-of-the century psychologists (i.e. William James, Boris Sidis) along with some "Continental" (not sure if that's the correct terminology...) philosophers thanks to Jung (i.e. Arendt, Hegel, Locke). I've also learned that misspelling commonly misspelled words is an extremely good way to find a niche as a struggling blogger, since search engines don't correct spelling automatically in their searches, only suggest alternattive spellings (I'll probably get ten additional hits for that misspelling alone.)

I've gotten into listening to jazz again (jass - it's authentic Creole, and it will score you some bonus hits -- pub ), and might begin to play it again somewhat seriously, which means playing with the express goal of getting better, not just to have fun. I took out a whole bunch of jazz CD's from the public library to blatantly illegally burn them onto my computer. Which reminds me of the following public service announcement: libraries are quite amazing and everyone should use them instead of bookstores. But back to the message. I picked up some Dizzy Gillespie big band, Dave Brubeck, and Wynton Marsalis. Anyone who knows anything about my personal opinions knows that picking up a Wynton ( how about 'Winton' - there's no standard spelling for "Wynton" anyway -- pub) Marsalis CD strongly violates my musical ethic, because Wynton is an undeniably annoying person, at least when he's speaking, and his personal sense of self-worth far exceeds his actual worth - in my opinion.

Among some of the more annoying things he has done was his work as the main musician interviewee and designated "creative consultant" for the PBS Ken Burns Jazz series, which ended up biasing the whole thing towards a) black people b) people who have never experimented with electronic instruments c) himself. Let's be fair. Black people should obviously get the large majority of the coverage in a documentary on the origin of jazz, since their cultural contribution is undoubtedly more than fifty percent of the art form. However, many whites made great contributions to jazz, including George Gershwin, Bill Evans, and Chick Corea (who may actually be Hispanic), although these greats were hardly mentioned. The project was essentially a statement on black oppression and slavery, which is a good and important message to emphasize in a development on the origins of jazz, but not as much as they did. On many occasions, jazz was referred to as "great black music," or something to that effect. This would not be notable in any way if it were not for the fact that this kind of thinking is entirely consistent with Marsalis's very outspoken opinion on jazz as an ethnically exclusive music.

Marsalis has cast himself as the protector and guardian of pure jazz, which is floundering amid all the experimentation with unholy forms of music and white people. On numerous occasions he has said that only black people can play jazz. He routinely regards himself and possibly also his brothers as the greatest hope jazz has to stay alive in this terrible age of crisis. He disregards entire branches of development in jazz as illegitimate. He espouses the rigid idea that anyone who takes jazz out of the mainstream idiom is desanctifying the art form. Hence his personal and professional vendetta against Herbie Hancock, the far superior musician and artist, and him getting less than a minute coverage in the documentary. The great thing though though is that, despite his tendency to deviate from orthodox jazz at times, at the end of the day Herbie Hancock is the one who has written scores of enduring jazz standards. Wynton is a good musician but he has contributed absolutely zero to the art form creatively. In fact, even his albums are virtual recyclings of other musicians' arrangements of various songs.

The truth is he really has become, more than many other superior musicians, the face and voice of contemporary jazz, and he has filled the role quite effectively. At first glance it seems odd that someone with only modest contributions to jazz at best has arrived as it's most prominent public figure. But there are a few reasons I can think of for why this is:

The first explanation comes from an observation that I've made repeatedly over time while playing with jazz musicians: as a breed, jazz musicians are seriously inarticulate. I have no idea why this is true, but I swear it is. Wynton is highly verbal, articulate, and erudite, so he fills the void for spokesmen left in jazz quite nicely.

The second is that good musicians would rather spend their time working on their art than talking about it. I'm sure he still gets some playing in there, but it's true that Marsalis has become a virtual professional spokesman for jazz. Other musicians either have different priorities or don't see that as the role of being a musician.

The third explanation is that jazz has deteriorated in some sense to the point where so little is going on creatively that a guy who talks a lot about how great jazz used to be becomes really appealing.

One other major thing that Wynton has going in his favor is his family legacy. His father and several siblings are all respectable musicians and jazz figures in their own right. His brother the saxophonist Branford is at least as good a musician and almost as well-known. From this and similar cases I can conclude that either our country is degenerating into a type of aristocracy or people are just really fascinated with eminent families. Regardless, in the same way that the Bush family has become kind of a symbol of the ruling elite, the Marsalis family has become the symbol of traditional jazz.

As a fairly bizarre aside, has anyone ever noticed how artists are always in the most unnatural poses on the cover of albums? It's like, they're either wearing absurdly reflective glasses and staring out into the distance in some direction, or looking at the camera with their arms in the most contorted, unnatural position or something. If I ever made an album, I would just be staring right into the camera and smiling. Incredibly dorky, yes. But it's not nearly as strange as most of the other album covers out there if you think about it.

Anyway, I say all this because I took out a few of Wyton's latest CD's, and can admit for the first time that he is really good. He does virtually nothing original, and basically writes no good songs, but his technical and musical skill on the trumpet are considerable. His music is probably the best example of what good contemporary jazz that hasn't changed style or done anything innovative in the last forty years should sound like. There's something about straightforward jazz with no frills that's easy on the ears and appealing, and I think I would like to play more that way in the future. He definitely has something to teach about how to play so it's listenable.

Super Bowl Champs!

2005-01-16T19:58:00.000-05:00

I know I'm three weeks early but that's the point. This way I get to take credit for correctly predicting that the Patriots will in fact be Super Bowl Champs.

Note: My personal affiliations and geographic location have nothing to do with my prediction. Absolutely nothing.

Not Self-Promotion

2005-01-05T20:07:00.000-05:00

I'm on a kick of promoting HBO lately. If you don't get HBO, you can probably still download a fair number of these shows from somewhere.

If you watch any TV this year, make it "Da Ali G Show." Why? Because of lines like this:

"People has been reading books for millions of year. But did you know that, thanks to new techmology, they is now able to write them as well?"

"Is you so against abortion because you yourself were aborted?"

"Does you know how much money the film 'Lord of the Rings' has made? Literally, thousands of dollars."

"I is going to write president Bush's autobiography."

"Ain't fur coats the way out of the ghetto for some aminals?"

"So how many times is aminals really sick and how many times is they just faking it so them can get a day off work?

Let's Talk About Sex

2005-01-05T13:05:00.000-05:00

I want to make this blog about more than just theory, and lately there has been a lot of it, so. I want to keep this blog accessible to the masses ("the masses" don't read your blog yet -- pub). More to the point, this post is a shameless attempt to get more girls to read and be interested in this blog. If you're a girl and reading, then this is your day (thanks to reader Jennifer [who is too cool to get her own blog] for her expert input on this subject). Even guys know about the show "Sex and the City." Even if you haven't watched it, chances are you are subjected to quotes from it on a fairly regular basis courtesy of your female friends who happen to be really big fans. I've watched the show. Not in a weird, "I'm obsessed with it" kind of way, just a few times out of curiosity. I mean, I don't like the show. I find it offensive, it's completely geared towards women, the morals it promotes are horrible, it does a better job objectifying men than Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition does objectifying women. All the guys are tools. The only things that are purported to matter are the stereotypical things a female would care about: how "successful" he is, is he an "eligible bachelor," does he have a big d*ng. It plays shamelessly to all kinds of stereotypes. But still, it's such a cultural phenomenon that you have to give it credit and wonder how it got to be so successful. Obviously I'm going to be getting most of this stuff wrong but...There a few things I can think of that account for this show's catastrophic success:

It engages girl viewers with their sexual selves through its storylines telling of the sexual adventures of the main women characters, and as such is highly liberating. The premise of the show, which is women empowering themselves by having sex, offers a big escape from the usual stigma that says that for women to be interested in sex, they have to be slutty. This is the "why women like to watch it" theory.

Alternatively, it gives men a window into women's sexual lives. This is the "why men might like to watch it" theory. On a purely sexual level, as a piece of...I don't know the word, pornography, erotic arts...the show is pretty pathetic. If you get the show at all, then that means you get HBO, which means that you might as well get Skinemax, which would be much better if that's what you're interested in. And its not as if the characters are "real," so no one's getting a voyeuristic kick out of it. But there is good reason to think that if so many women follow the show so religiously, how far from the truth in terms of the female psyche can it be?

It's a good show. And by this I don't mean to say I like it. I mean to say it's well-written, well-cast, well-acted, well-shot. I'm no literature major, but I would be so bold as to say the characters seem well developed. The characters' parts are written very plausibly and realistically. The characters visibly go through changes on screen. The four different types of person embodied in the characters do a good job of representing the variety of female "types" out there. The acting is good. Personally, I think the Samantha character is hilarious. The actresses have a great on screen rapport.

The message: it seems to be: "at the end of the day, your friends are who will be most important." Kind of the opposite of the "bros before hoes" doctrine. It's a very sweet message. That is all I have to say about that.

It is somehow culturally very apposite at this point in time. I don't live in the big city so I don't know, but are good men hard to find in the city? Are gorgeous, successful women endlessly cycling through one-night stands? Have the women in New York City become so cynical romantically that they are going around indulging in meaningless and excessive sex with multiple partners on a (weekly) basis? If true, then perhaps I should reconsider my living arrangements. If partially true, then it would have great resonance with people out there if you made a show about it.

Any girls out there who would like to share their thoughts / feeling /experiences feel free to chime in. (No Jung, you don't count).

How To Succeed In Getting A Really Good Workout Without Even Trying

2004-12-29T02:48:00.000-05:00

Interesting experience today. So I decided to go cross-country skiing up in a local forest right around the time it was starting to get dark, around 4:00 or so (bad idea -- pub). Halfway along the trail, to my surprise, I saw another person walking on the trail a few hundred feet ahead of me. Now at this point I was becoming a little cautious because he might have been someone sketchy, and it is kind of strange to see someone just walking alone in the snow in the woods. But I hopefully assumed that it was just some old guy going out for a stroll or something.

But not only was he a sketchy townie type (long hair, unshaven, hunting jacket, crazy expression in his eyes), but he was also carrying a clearly real and presumably loaded gun. I was more than a little concerned, for one because this isn't hunting season, so I just nervously asked him what he was hunting, and he told me he was looking for coyotes, but didn't expect to find any. Then he reassured me that he "wouldn't shoot [me]. Or anyone else for that matter." Not exactly the most comforting reassurance. But I was just as civil as I could be and then hauled ass with this potentially psychotic guy carrying a loaded gun at my back. Needless to say, it was a great workout getting to a place where the trail split so I could get out of there.

On a more serious note though, being alone with your back to someone you don't entirely trust holding a loaded gun gave me a taste, however minute, of what it's like for these soldiers in Iraq who are faced with the prospect that the guy next to them on the street could be an enemy who's going to shoot them or blow them up. It's a tough situation to be in and I respect all those who are putting themselves in harm's way to serve.

Insecurity (RE: More Philosophy)

2004-12-28T11:22:00.000-05:00

Adam raises a good point. Style can sometimes be unnecessarily obstruse and convoluted even if the words must necessarily be so.

But while it is sometimes a matter of intellectual pretension, it may also be the case that the philosopher doesn't know how to write. And as I understand it, it was not that Kant was intellectually pretentious, but he was just a terrible terrible writer. In fact, the philosopher who can write is usually referred to as a poet.

And other times, the obscurity of style is purposefully used as a pedagogical mechanism. When we read something that is obscure and difficult to understand we are faced with two options: we can either give up or think hard about what it could mean like the riddles or puzzles we used to solve in elementary school. Think is the key word, however, for without thinking, such difficult texts will remain forever difficult. And like I said before, this is when an excellent teacher is absolutely vital. I will try to demonstrate what I mean in a later post, though I also have reservations about my ability to explain these things clearly.

In response to the comments posted, and I hope I am understanding the disagreement:

Yes, Adam does have a point in that the categorical imperative can more or less be watered down to "The Golden Rule." However, jbarcelona (THANKS FOR READING OUR BLOG!) also makes a good point in that within the philosophical discourse of Kant's age and within the language utilized in that age, the re-interpreted, re-arranged conception of "The Golden Rule" (i.e. the Categorical Imperative) is an appropriate one.

But this borrowing of ideas in such ways and essentially re-wording them is a common practice. For example, the first philosopher that comes to mind is Nietzsche and his concept of "slave morality." What is often left neglected is that this concept of "slave morality" is also an idea initially proposed by Callicles, a pre-Socratic philosopher who proposed the idea that "law" was merely the instrument of those in power. (Actually, now that I think about it, this idea was borrowed by such thinkers as Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim as well perhaps unwittingly from Callicles.) Even Nietzsche's concept of the "child" in the three metamorphoses of the spirit was inspired by Heraclitus' observation that the world is a child playing a game.

I believe that the purpose of such "re-emergences," as I like to call them, is to re-apply the wisdom at an age and a language that seems most appropriate to the circumstances at hand. There is a common belief that, I think Kant may have articulated before in one of his critical projects, all wisdom and knowledge is just out there, waiting to be plucked and re-interpreted. It's just a matter of us finding it.

But let me get to the heart of the tension within this debate between pretentious philosophers and indolent readers that I feel can be summarized in one word: insecurity.

There is, on one hand...
the insecurity of the philosopher who is unsure of his/her aptitude and must demonstrate it through a impractical esoterism, and is thus capable of saying to himself: "I am better than all of you who cannot understand my writing." In my humble opinion, the philosophers who tend to think this way have their legacy dissolved much more quickly than others. (I think Hume is a prime example of this shrewd arrogance.)

There is, on the other...
The insecurity of the reader who is unsure of his/her aptitude and must compensate for his/her inability to understand philosophical texts by dismissing said text as pretentious. Perhaps what may going through this reader's mind is: "I am unsure of who I am. I can't understand this book. But I don't want people to think I'm stupid because I can't understand it. So how do I justify my inability to understand it? I know! Label it as pretentious, which is a plausible observation, and there, problem solved!"

I'd also like to stress that this is one way of seeing the two extremes at work in this debate. Such extremes rest on each side's tendency to maintain their sense of pride and self-esteem by comparing themselves with others or having it depend on the opinions of others.

If you'd like a clear example on what I mean, read some of the posts on the message board for the movie Waking Life (fantastic movie!) on www.imdb.com: particularly the post entitled "How to be 'too smart' for Waking Life."This movie is very often dismissed as pretentious without serious consideration for the innumerable ideas expressed within it. With respect to the presentation, the ideas, the concept, and the dialogue (though often it's really a monologue), this is quite simply the one of the top three movies I've EVER seen. If you're interested, the director, Richard Linklater, for whom I have tremendous respect and admiration, also did the Before Sunrise and Before Sunset series that has won so much critical acclaim.

Here's An Answer

2004-12-27T01:46:00.000-05:00

Apparently the top-grossing Christmas Day film of all time is "Meet the Fockers" (which I in fact also went to see on Christmas Day; review unavailable). In typical journalistic fashion, Msnbc offers a few possible explanation for why this is.

"'Meet the Fockers' succeeded in part because of an aggressive ad campaign..."
"[it coincided with] the release of the DVD of the original 'Meet the Parents...'"
"[it features] the return of Streisand to the big screen after an eight-year absence..."
"It captured the clash between families, which resonates at the holidays..."

However, I believe there is a simpler explanation. "Meet the Fockers" was about the clash of families from two different religious backgrounds, and Ben Stiller's whole family was jewish. Seeing that Jews compose the major component of the market for going to the movies on Christmas Day, I think that this fact is the most obvious explanation for why the movie grossed so highly. And it is clear that releasing "Meet the Fockers" on Christmas day was quite a smart move on the part of the movie's producers.

More Philosophy

2004-12-25T01:45:00.000-05:00

I want to do a post clarifying what I said earlier about the intellectual arcaneness and sometimes outright obfuscation that is found in many so-called "academic" or "intellectual" pieces of writing, notably philosophy. I also want to resond to what Jung said: "It's nearly impossible to make any progress in thinking while trying to make everything accessible and clear," and "it's just that it's unbearably stifling to the process of thinking to explain the history behind every word they use before they use it."

First of all, the problem with many so called "intellectual" works is not so much that the authors don't explain the full relevant history of every word used, or for that matter that they do explain the history of words they use, or that they write words in shorthand for concepts that have been elaborated much more thoroughly elsewhere. The problem is using strange words or phrasings that no one but a few philosophers or scholars of philosophy would know or care to know, writing in interminable run-on sentences, using semicolons every few lines. Let's face it. Philosophy is often written in a very obscure style that's just plain hard to read.

But Jung argues that such presentation is necessary, given the nature of the task and subject. Fair enough. I can evaluate that claim on its face. There are two reasons why I could see this would be true. One is that the concepts are so abstract and difficult that attaining a solid grasp of them is impossible. The second is that the concepts are so abstract and difficult that even when understood, expressing them in consise and simple form is impossible - that is, something is lost conceptually in the translation. The first case is plausible. No one "knows" what justice is. People can only speculate about it, or when trying to define it, conceive it in the most vague and abstract terms. But it still isn't clear to me that the kind of obscurity you see in philosophy comes from a fundamental fuzziness about the underlying ideas. The second case seems to me to be a case of plain pretension. It's saying "Oh, look at me. I'm so smart that ordinary language can't even do justice to the exquisite, subtle complexity of my thoughts." It's a well known fact that entire schools of philosophy developed the habit of writing in abstruse prose as a kind of badge of intellectual heft. On the other hand, plenty of good philosophers wrote simply and clearly. William James is one. Nietzsche is another. I think it's only honest to face the fact that for all its merits, philosophy has a problem, and that problem is elitism and intellectual obscurantism.

I can already hear the counterargument saying that philosophy needs its own jargon because it is a specialized subject dealing with specialized issues. I think it's important to make a distinction between jargon and pseudo-jargon. It's true that in proper discursive fields, terminology is inevitable. New terminology is necessary to represent and communicate unique ideas. Some fields really are so distinct from anything else that they require their own whole new language to facilitate communication. A good example is something like, say, the hard sciences. There is no colloquial correlate to "vector" or "proton." Hence the new word is created to serve a fundamental purpose. Then there are other branches of learning that seem to like to define things that have already been defined because they want to be a science too! To take psychology as an quite fertile example: did you take care of your conatative self today? Conatative happens to be nothing more than the psychological word for "emotional," so why do we need it? I don't know. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, but I can't think of them, probably because they're insubstantial.

To relate this to philosophy, take Kant's "Categorical Imperative," for example. Would anything have been lost if he had simply called it the "Golden Rule," especially considering that the very idea of the Golden Rule existed long before Kant came into existence? Feel free to argue with me on this, but I'm going to venture nothing would be different. For every philosopher I'm sure there are multiple examples similar to this one. I'm not faulting Kant, or philosophy for being this way, and here's what I wanted to clarify about my other post. We look to philosophy for great intellectual acheivements, and as such, we expect philosophy to be highly intellectually charged and formidable pieces of work. Philosophy provides the intellectual world the equivalent of the fine arts. In addition to what they say, we appreciate great works of philosophy simply because they are great and they exist. They are intellectual showpieces, or momuments of human acheivement. Asking philosophy to write in layman's terms would be like asking an orchestral composer to write a symphony for kazoos. For this reason, I can appreciate philosophy for what it is: sometimes profound, most of the time just inspiring. Like fine art, philosophy takes a certain highbrow approach that will require you to rise up to its level. There's nothing wrong with a highbrow approach, and some of these works of philosopher are great masterpieces. But just don't go thinking that every piece of philosophy has the most profound, useful, thoughtful answers of anything in the world. And don't be fooled into thinking that expositions of thought need to be written in an obscure, inaccesible fashion.

Just A Thought On An Ongoing Debate

2004-12-23T02:38:00.000-05:00

Just a quick thought that may have something to add to the ongoing debate on gay rights. This thought just went through my head, so for what it's worth, I'm going to take a minute to write it down here.

Let me begin by saying I honestly don't know what I think the right answer is to many of the current debates involving gay rights, i.e. legalized marriage, civil unions etc.

But I wonder how many people opposing any measures that would afford civil gains for homosexuals and homosexual couples oppose it out of a kind of reflexive sense of justice. What I mean is the kind of thing where somebody has done something wrong, and you don't want to do anything that would benefit or make life more pleasant for them. Opposing something because it benefits a party you deem as reprehensible is sound ethics, in principle. As an example, most people would be against providing convicted criminals with lavish and luxurious living arrangements, and are repulsed whenever stories to that effect are exposed, because criminals don't deserve these things. I, for one, am against providing convicted criminals with comforts and luxuries such as golf courses and TVs in their cells, not for fiscal reasons, but because I think criminals don't deserve to live as comfortable a life in prison as they would be living in the real world had they not been convicted of a crime.

Some people, and a fairly substantial number I would assume, oppose the advancement of certain gay rights causes on the basis of law, policy, or principle (although the latter is hard to define). All these considerations are valid and should be freely debated. On the other hand, how many people oppose gay rights causes because they oppose homosexuality and see any kind of concession as capitulation to it? There's something wrong with this position in my mind. It scares me that there may be a real religious (or perhaps just profoundly ethically driven) majority that opposes all these gay rights causes simply because they feel it in keeping with just principles of punishing (or at least discouraging) a vice.

When Bush was asked if he thought homosexuality was a choice in the third debate he answered that he didn't know. I thought this was a great answer, because I myself don't know the answer, and I don't think anyone knows the answer. But here's the thing, if no one can say whether it's a choice or not, how can you at the same time definitively say it is wrong? This may seem unclear, but let me make a parallel to an aspect of our criminal justice system. If someone is accused of a crime, they are generally considered culpable UNLESS they can prove that their actions were not a choice. This can be established under many guises. They may have been acting in self-defense, and hence it was not a choice but a matter of live or death. They may have been insane at the time and not able to make choices. They may have been acting out of passion, and the criminal justice system is significantly less harsh in dealing with these criminals.

If homosexuality ISN'T a choice, that it is something that someone is either born with, fated to develop, in their makeup etc., then all (or at least some major) arguments that it is wrong lose their foundation, and this in turn invalidates any opposition to gay rights causes that is based on the rationale of vice punishment. Moreover, it's important to realize that a fundamental function of retributive policies is that they are coercive. That is, someone who is likely to experience negative consequences for doing something is less likely to choose to do that thing. Yet if homosexuality is fundamentally not a choice, a retributive policy, or perhaps put a little more mildly, a policy that makes being homosexual less attractive, will not prevent people from becoming homosexuals. That is, it won't work.

This doesn't settle the debates. As I said before, there are legal, social, and religious factors and arguments that have a legitimate place in the debate, and should not be discounted. I myself am not fully decided on many of the issues yet. But I think this analysis might have something to contribute

Knowledge and Wisdom

2004-12-19T10:51:00.000-05:00

The relation between my defense of the merely apparent theoretical esoterism and pre-mature judgments is such that I feel there are times when we too easily place a label on things merely to have a justification for thoughtless dismissal. It's a similar case when someone says chess is "too hard." He shoves the set under his bed, forgets about it, and justifies his laziness with this label he's slapped on to it. I consider that the same kind of pre-mature judgment that occurs without thought and without consideration when it comes to the abstract and often difficult world of thought. Or when one is suspicious of African-American men who wear certain brands and styles of clothing. Or when people assume conservatives are thoughtless and liberals are pretentious. The world is full of baseless and potentially dangerous assumptions, and while this may seem far-fetched, this kind of pre-mature judgmentalism is no different than the kind of perspective adopted by the most notorious tyrants of our age.

I think, technically yes, philosophy is about the pursuit of knowledge. Heidegger once beautifully put it that "Philosophy is the guardian of science." However, the word guardian is a mis-translation in whatever work this quote appears in. The more appropriate word is custodian. Philosophy = the custodian of science. Or to euphemize it a bit, philosophy is the paragon of rational discourse that seeks to restabilize and cement the foundations of western science. But there are significant flaws to this way of thinking. And this is exactly why I used the words 'thought,' 'thinking,' and 'theory' in my lastest post.

So what exactly is the distinction between thought, etc. and philosophy? The way of thinking I am referring to is generally labeled as continental philosophy (for many reasons, one of which is that scholars who engage in this category of thinking tend to be from France and Germany). Rather than the pursuit of knowledge, it is the pursuit of wisdom. It is not the construction of an idealist system in which the entire world can be explained and picked apart, as Hegel is quite famous for in his dialectic. It is about engaging in a discourse of humanity and existence, but with some highly important presuppositions that distinguish it from philosophy: (This is how I see the field. all continental philosophers would automatically agree with what I'm saying. In fact, I would count on their disagreement.)

1. Reason is the tool of man. While it proves successful, before and now, we must recognize that because it is the very tool of man, it is branded with an indelible mortality such that the truth of its essential equivocation and uncertainty will reveal itself to us when we are at the height of our hubris. That is, when man truly and fully believes in the grasp he has on the world, the subversive chaos over which man has built his skyscrapers, technology, and medicine will re-emerge and show itself to us.

Philosophy, on the other hand, continues to have faith in the power of man to build a world of knowledge through reason in the pursuit of truth.

2. The world is chaos or "I know nothing." This is more or less the only accepted fact concerning the world of thought today. To claim otherwise is to be a tyrant and to be considered thoughtless. (Interestingly enough, the dichotomy and tension between the Question and the Answer underlies a lot of what Plato has to say about politics in The Republic. May more on that later) Heraclitus, Socrates, Nietzsche, and many others have said, and I'm paraphrasing this, that the deepest thought inevitably yields the eventual uncertainty of all things.

Philosophy, on the other hand, continues to believe in truth, an immutable certainty to be sought out through reason.

3. The activity of thinking itself is the greatest weapon that man has in his question for ethics. A real ethics. One that does not concern normative judgments dictating how to live one's life, but the question of how the subject is able to cope with that which is utterly irreducible and unknowable, otherwise known as, the other. Hannah Arendt is famous for the phrase, "the banality of evil." What did she mean by this? That the mere activity of THINKING seemed to differentiate, in her view of the trials at Eichmann, what is evil and what is good.

Philosophy, on the other hand, view reason and logic as the fundamental activity. Their criticism of thought or mere contemplation, is its inability to bring others into the discourse.

"Knowlege is Power," the power would declare proudly in the walls of 4th grade classrooms.

And in a strange way, the posters are right. Knowledge is power, but is power necessarily a good thing? Power is what we're after, which is something Nietzsche would very much agree with. To know is to comprehend, to conceptualize, to categorize. The word 'categorize' comes from the Greek 'categainon' which is the word for prosecutor in a trial. More literally the word means 'to accuse.') This is exactly what knowledge does. To claim to know, and to accuse the object of knowledge to be what we see it to be. That, my friend, is a rock. That, my friend, is bipolar disorder. That, my friend, is abortion and it is wrong. Is that not empowering ourselves by overpowering our objects? And are we not foolish in believing in these labels and categories we place on the world so wholeheartedly and without any degree of skepticism or uncertainty?

What if that rock turns out to be a dried out piece of dog shit? What if this is someone whose passion about life is mistaken for bipolarity? What if that person who is having an abortion is a victim of rape?

My contention is simply this: To forget the essence of a rational pursuit of knowledge is to forget those who live and breathe outside of it.

Being Abstract Isn't A Problem

2004-12-19T02:08:00.000-05:00

A pretty strong defense of the humanities, particularly philosophy, and the way it conducts itself intellectually coming from Jung's end of the line. I assume this is a semi-response to what I wrote earlier about the scourge of academic esotericism in the humanities.

The case of philosophy is a particularly interesting example to use, and an important one to consider. In a way, I've always seen great works of philosophy (many of which I have read at least partially!) as almost like works of art. The phraseology, presentation and packaging become an inseperable part of what gives the work merit. It's not so much what has been said, or what has been painted, but how it's done that makes the work noteworthy. This is not to discredit philosophy's merit as a legitimate field of intellectual inquiry. Almost any great work of philosophy (although I may have spoken too soon) teaches us something; that is they add to the net knowledge in the world. At the same time though, many thinkers and ideas have the capability of adding to our net knowledge, yet only the ones that have a certain elegance of presenetation catch our attention and make a mark on intellectual history.

This phenomenon is not unique to philosophy or even the humanities. Science, which we hold up as the pinnacle of objectivism and dispassionate precision, follows a similar course. For instance, the particulars of observation predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity had already been observed and noted in mathematically precise form by some of his contemporaries. Scientists already knew, for instance, about the relativistic effects of length contraction and time dilation well before relativity came into being per se. What distinguished relativity was that it explained all these phenomena through a synthesis derived from simple postulates. It was the way Einstein thought about it and expressed it that made it unique and noteworthy. It has a certain elegance that endowed upon it its breakthrough status.

When looked at in this light, there is a very good reason why great intellectual milestones should be intellectually consummate works - and by this I mean intellectually complete and pleasing in and of themselves. That is because they're serving as intellectual reference points. It's similar to the reason why the Mona Lisa has to be well-painted, in addition to however artistically revolutionary or significant it may be; if it were not then it could not serve as an example of great art, no matter how aristically innovative or monumental. It would quickly be replaced by another perhaps less monumental painting of higher contingent quality. These works of philosophy and intellectual history are serving their highest calling, I would argue, not when they are being assimilated by eager students on a literal basis of who said what when, and who disagreed with him and what did he think, but when they are serving as foundation and inspiration for further questioning. Of course only the ideas not the presentation should matter to this end but, here's my point: in order to gain that stature as an intellectual momument that survives through the ages to become an intellectual reference point, something has to be formidable, complete, and inspirational enough on its own accord. And this requires that something live up to a certain high "intellectual" standard, in addition to whatever conceptual value it has.

When I wrote about the use of obscure terminology or presentation in the humanities, I was actually thinking of the kind of disciplinary departments you would find at the nearest university. Interestingly, even though philosophy is a prime violator of being obscure and inaccessible, I don't take issue with this, for the reasons mentioned above. Disciplinary departments, on the other hand, can rarely realistically be said to be in service to a higher intellectual calling than whatever their manifest purpose is; most academic papers will not turn into reknowned or even known works. All the more reason, then, to make them as transparent and widely communicable as possible. Instead, departments often go the other way, and write papers that instead of illuminating the issue being dealt with in light of the questions and interests of the larger society - which it should be serving - only speaks to the marginal interest and questions of someone who is in that field.

Jung perhaps unwittingly gets at why I think things like philosophy have the right, or even the necessity, of using subtle and arcane language when he notes, "And with a language that depends so much on the history of western tradition, a lot of the ideas encapsulated in certain words ... are merely assumed by the writer when playing around with them." These works are extending a long intellectual lineage, complete with its own currency of ideas and language. The paper produced by your local political science professor has no such excuse for being arcane and remote. Needless to say, the world would be a greatly improved place if academics in fields that are in the least bit applied would write for the consumption of anyone who could possibly benefit from their expertise.

I'm still not quite clear though what all this has to do with judging people. Maybe Jung can clear that up in a subsequent post.

Whoa...

2004-12-19T01:48:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of NY Times

Check out the new bridge in France! Connecting two mountains over a valley, it is the tallest bridge in the world and is being hailed as an architectural gem.

Yeah, it's real purty.

On (Permanent) Vacation

2004-12-18T01:28:00.000-05:00

Here's a quick thought. One of the good things about being by a computer late at night is that you get to have first dibs on the soap-opera that is the New York Times editorial page. But today the editorial page is telling me that David Brooks, who of all the columnists has the greatest potential to produce something entertaining, is on vacation. Two questions: what exactly is Mr. Brooks doing that necessitates taking a vacation? Writing a 300 word column twice a week? Second, what exactly is Mr. Brooks doing on his vacation that prevents him from writing and turning in a 300 word column? It might be that either he has to be in his office to produce his column for some reason (which is kind of strange), or that he spends so much time on his column that it would seriously cut into his vacation time to produce it (which is kind of pathetic). I guess all that defending your "conservative" viewpoint can get pretty tiring after a while...

"Oh, You're Just Being Abstract"

2004-12-15T17:04:00.000-05:00

A pet peeve of mine, and one of very few: labeling a.k.a. pre-mature judgments.

I hate judging people. You have to go through all this effort of making ridiculous deductions about the person you're judging with a minimal amount of information. And after you're done, it basically comes down to whether or not you're better than the person. If you are, then hey, life is good. If not, ah, shit, well, I have to justify why I'm not as good, lie to myself and others about it, or actually try and become better than that person. I've gone two sentences into describing this experience and I already feel nauseous.

What's particularly annoying is when people dismiss something they don't understand as intellectual, pretentious, or too abstract. This is especially the case with philosophy and even more so with continental philosophy. I can see why some people may find the language difficult, but to label it as pretentious and then brush it aside is just plain inconsiderate and thoughtless.

In its defense, I'd like to say that the language has a very specific purpose in its apparent esoterism. In philosophy, at least the kind I read, the books are describing the barely discernible nuances and subtleties of every day existence. They're filling in the cracks where mere perception falls short and where categories and schemas have no jurisdiction. And with a language that depends so much on the history of western tradition, a lot of the ideas encapsulated in certain words such as truth, justice, freedom, reason, etc. are merely assumed by the writer when playing around with them.

It's nearly impossible to make any progress in thinking while trying to make everything accessible and clear. I mean, you guys don't see this, but I've got a ton of drafts on my computer and my notebooks with grand theories of man, history, existence, etc. That one post on "The Fear of Chaos" took me a good 5 hours to write and try to organize. And I still don't think it's perfectly clear.

So it's not that these "abstract" thinkers feel good about being unable to be understood or they are insecure and need to feel better than everyone else by using a unique language, it's just that it's unbearably stifling to the process of thinking to explain the history behind every word they use before they use it. This is not to say there aren't those who unnecessarily use big snooty words to fit themselves into the contemporary and transient definition of what an academic should sound like.

One notable exception, in the pretentious or purposeful esoteric sense, are the types of thinkers referred to as Straussians (followers of Leo Strauss). Their philosophy is built around that kind of esoterism and arrogance.

Another notable exception, in the clear and unambiguous sense, is Hannah Arendt. She is both jaw-droppingly insightful and very lucid. There are many times where she does actually go through the history of western philosophy to explain her points.

One sentence from the books of thinkers like Plato, Nietzsche, or Arendt, when thought about and considered very very carefully, often times encapsulate all the wisdom from Aesop's fables, the Bible, etc. Here are some personal favorites:

"God is dead." - Nietzsche (concerns the modern dilemma)
"Ethics precedies ontology." - Levinas (an important insight concerning, in my interpretation, the dangers of totalitarianism)
"Self-awareness is when you realize that you are a dream figure in another person's dream." - Speed Levitch (not an official thinker, but this quote kicks ass)

There are others, and many famous ones that I consider to be severely misinterpreted, but you get the point. Someday, I hope to reveal how dense and deep some of these sentences are by hashing a particular quote. Two of my favorite professors were absolutely wonderful at this. The only one at Amherst College who is especially good at this is Prof. Mehta. His batting average is not high, but man, when he is on fire, he is ON FIRE.

So I urge you not to dismiss abstract thinkers merely because of the difficulty. If you're willing to think and think hard about what they are trying to say, it has the capacity to illuminate the world for you in more ways than you can possibly imagine.

Don't Say I Didn't Warn You

2004-12-12T04:40:00.000-05:00

People who know me know I'm not a big literary analysis type, and even less a poetry type. But I just started getting back into Billy Joel and, for the sake of promoting my own personal tastes, which let's face it is what a blog is for right, I want to share my excitement while engaging in a very crude and possibly incorrect lyrical analysis during the next few days.

I've always felt that if something needs to be said, then the most effective way to communicate it is in plain language. I'm still not big on indirect forms of communication, but some songs are just good. Now that I've been personally introduced to good singer-songwriter music through the music of my friend Dan and this new Billy Joel phase, I'm beginning to see that a good song is good because of the way it encapsulates a state of mind, and so almost comes to form its own little temporary world that the listener can enter into. This I feel is how the best vocal music comes about, across a wide range of genres, and it is notably missing in today's pop vocal music.

I've never given much creedence to interpretive or lyrical analysis and it's a skill I'd like to develop some more, this blog being the appropriate place to do it. So expect me to post some song lyrics and a few comments on why I think they're so good relatively soon.

On topic, there's a song lyric-style op-ed today by Maureen Dowd, so why don't I start with some commentating on that:

On the first day of Christmas,
my Rummy sent to me
a Saddam pigeon in a palm tree...

That's the beginning. There are ten more verses...you get the idea. Now this would be terribly cute if it weren't for that fact that - and maybe I'm wrong on this... it sucks. Oh well.

Rest In Peace

2004-12-10T16:47:00.000-05:00

I was deeply saddened to hear today that David Brudnoy, host of the David Brudnoy Show on WBZ radio, died yesterday. I was personally a big listener on his program, and loved every minute of it. He was the most humane, intelligent, candid talk show host out there. I was also greately impressed by the strength with which he faced and battled his HIV infection and cancer. I hope this won't be too insufficient a tribute to a fine man.

101 Ways of Rumsfeld

2004-12-08T23:18:00.000-05:00

If anyone's ever seen the "Rumsfeld Fighting Techniques" comedy site you'll know what I'm talking about; I think this photo, taken from today's Times, would make a worthy addition:

Of course the official name is up for debate, but I like "Demolition Lobster!"

Procrastinating With Fake Polls

2004-12-08T18:04:00.000-05:00

It's finals time, and as everyone knows, it can be stressful. A student health awareness packet I picked up off the street told me that doing things that I enjoy can be helping in relieving stress. For me, one of those things is shooting ideas off the top of my head. In an earlier post, I left as an intellectual exercise to the reader coming up with a list of poll questions as intellectually bankrupt as possible. I'm going to take a shot at coming up with my own here; the reader is warned they will be of varying degrees of funniness.

Where is Osama Bin Laden right now, Pakistan or Afganistan?

follow-up poll next day: Where is Osama Bin Laden right now, Saudi Arabia or Iran?

In your opinion, according to Barry Bonds' doctors, is Barry Bonds taking steroids, yes or no?

In your opinion, according to Barry Bonds' conscience, is Barry Bonds taking steroids, yes or no?

In your opinion, is the universe expanding, yes or no?

Is it your opinion that evolution is true, yes or no?

In your opinion, does the hypotenuse of a right triangle squared equal the first leg squared plus the second leg squared, yes or no?

Is Osama Bin Laden responsible for the 9/11 attacks, or not?

In your opinion, does George Bush give a crap about political opinion polls?

Anyone reading this should leave their own suggestions in the comments section.

Jay Greenberg a.k.a. BlueJay

2004-12-04T19:55:00.000-05:00

This past Sunday, 60 minutes did a program on a 12-year musical prodigy named Jay Greenberg. He has already written 5 symphonies and is currently in his third year at Julliard studying composition. Normally, I brush aside any stories about "kid geniuses" because frankly, there are so many of them and most never pan out. But this kid is the real deal.

You can read the CBS transcript for yourself:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/24/60minutes/main657713.shtml

Quick note: What they don't show in the transcript is that as he's using his music program to write his compositions, he's typing REALLY fast. How fast? About as fast as you would type out an AIM message to your buddy, if not faster. And anyone who has composed before knows how fast that is.

Some of you may think, yeah, they say he can write all these symphonies, but are they any good? Well, here's a link to a recording of one of his orchestral pieces entitled "Overture to 9/11" inspired by, you guessed it, the events of 9/11.

http://www.fromthetop.org/radio/performers.cfm?pid=1586

Personally, I can't wait to see how this kid pans out because the music, independent of the composer, is quite remarkable.

And that's all I've got to say about that.

The Fear of Chaos

2004-12-04T19:17:00.000-05:00

"I also assume that as men and women of liberal education you are not limited to the narrow interests of one particular subject, to the exclusion of all else. I assume that you are especially interested in the development of personality as a whole, the true aim of education. I also assume that you realize that what is requisite is not some more routine, not more desiccated, quasi-scientific methods of educational psychology, not the sawdust of college-pseudogogics and philistine, normal school-training, but more light on the problems of life."
- Boris Sidis

This is from Adam's last post and I have to say I wholeheartedly agree what Sidis is saying here (I'm assuming this is from Boris Sidis). Some of what he said led me to think about some other things relating to theory. I ask that if you read this, please give it as generous a reading as possible.

1.
During my senior year of high school, I almost exclusively applied to liberal arts colleges for this very reason. I believed that while universities prepare you for a career, the liberal arts prepares you for life. While this is certainly arguable, there is a question that nags me after reading Adam's post. Why is it that 100 years after the publication of Sidis' essay, there still remains a significant gap between what we've long sinced understood education should be and what education is today? But more importantly, what does this discrepancy say about the kind of society we live in? What does Sidis' essay imply about who we are as human beings?

Let's start with the Enlightenment. This is the period of history when man discovered the extent to which the human gift of reason could be implemented to understand and control the physical world, spearheaded by the French philosopher, Rene Descartes.

For those of you unfamiliar with Descartes, here's a crash course. Descartes realized one day that many of the things he perceives is deceptive, e.g. a stick in water looks like its bent, etc. What about this apple lying on the table there? How can we be 100% sure that this apple is not some illusion created by a sadistic demon hiding the real world from us? Everything is not what it appears to be, so of what can we be absolutely certain? So, Descartes began doubting everything, trying to excavate the first principle of knowledge. Here's what he came up with:

I doubt. Doubt is a form of thought. Eureka! I think; therefore I am or I exist. (Otherwise referred to as the Cogito)

What many don't know about Descartes was that before he discovered this kernel of absolute certainty, he suffered severe depression and anxiety amidst his struggle to find it. That is, he could not and would not believe that the world was ultimately unknowable and his reaction of the world as uncertain and chaotic was of fear.

Hannah Arendt argues that just as Descartes was afraid of the world as chaos, man feared the chaos of the world and placed upon himself the task to build a world of his own, a world that he could be absolutely certain of, to be free from the anxiety of chaos, using only the tiny chisel of reason. This is an incredibly interesting claim. She essentially is saying that the world we live in, the world of cell-phones, automobiles, computers, Internet, PDAs, social structure, morality, politics, is a world built out of fear. Fear is the reaction to the immanent chaos and uncertainty of nature (presupposing the generally understood Heraclitean insight, catapulted by Nietzsche, that the world is essentially chaos).

Enter the sciences and the rise of technology.

The persistence of reason, man's personal rubber stamp on existence, was a highly succesful project as science was able to help us understand the physical world. We no longer had to be afraid for we had found a way to be certain. Meanwhile technology harnessed that understanding to control and master these natural forces for our specific purposes.

Yay for us! We escaped our state of anxiety and fear, found a weapon against the chaos of nature! And not only that, we learned how to harness nature's power to our uses! Men, give yourself a pat on the back! We did one helluva job. You should be proud of yourselves.

And so with the increasing success of science and technology, man's pride also began to swell immeasurably. And with pride, there was arrogance. And with arrogance, we took things too far. Wayyyy too far.

2.
Descartes had unknowingly produced a kind of egocentrism within the consciousness of modern man. The discovery of "I think; therefore I am" in no way adequately accounts for the other person in human existence. In creating a childish mindset of "I am the center of my universe and everything revolves around me," reason encourages this attitude by making it appear as though I can also control and have power over that which is all around me.

Sidis makes a similar observation about such a mentality: "We are stock-blind to our own barbarities; we do not realize the enormities of our life and consider our age and country as civilized and enlightened. We censure the faults of other societies, but do not notice our own."

Psychology, and Kant before psychology even became a field, explains that the mind has the natural tendency to schematize perceptions and concepts as to make the cognitive process more efficient. Through the repeated use of these mental shortcuts, man gradually begins to mistake reality for the shortcuts, categories, or schemas. Truth is mistaken for a mental shortcut.

Take, for example, taxonomy. Yes, most organisms fit neatly into the categories we've created for them, but there are always exceptions. "But my categories have to be right!" says the arrogant egocentric rational man. What do we do with these exceptions? Do we ignore them? Do we change them? Or do we eradicate them?

3.
Where does education come into play in all this?

Well, Sidis seems to complain that "Our children learn by rote and are guided by routine." But why is this so? Routine is a byproduct of the fact that our society encourages specialization. Specialization has been discovered to maximized productivity, which is always a plus in a capitalist society. Maximizing productivty leads to money. Money leads to power. Power leads to a sense of security and certainty. Certainty keeps us from thinking about the immanent chaos that is our existence.

Interestingly enough, Sidis also points out in his essay, "A Study of the Mob," that "Wherever we find uniforminty of life, there we invariably meet with mobs; where the environment is montonous, there men are trained by their very mode of life to be good subjects for social hypnotization, for mobs. And not only are they thus prepared for hypnotization, they are frequently hypnotized by the monotous environment itself; they require only a hero to obey, to become a mob."

It's a scary thought, but this combination of rational arrogance, misconceiving schema as truth, metaphysical egocentrism, and a montonous environment can have apocalyptic consequences.

The prime consequence: Hitler and the Rise of Nazism

Hitler, "the hero," saw the Final Solution as his grand schema/truth and Jews as the exception.

So in summary:

1. World is chaos. Descartes no like. Descartes afraid.
2. Descartes discovers "I think; therefore I am."
3. The human capacity to reason is used as means to build a world for man and by man so that there is no possibility of uncertainty.
4. The success of reason creates a strong kind of arrogance in man's powers.
5. The Cartesian discovery unknowingly imbeds an egocentrism in the modern consciousness.
6. Capitalism induces a hypnotism increasing the susceptibility of individuals to mob activity.
7. Combine 4, 5, and 6 together with the mistake of equating category with truth, and you produce something as abominable as the Holocaust.

Of course, you don't have to take my word for it. The above is more or less a partial conglomeration of what I've been reading in the tradition of social and political theory. I wouldn't want you to mistake theory for truth either. But if you're interested in this kind of thinking, here's a list of readings relevant to what I've been discussing:

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
---------------, Responsibility and Judgment
---------------, Eichmann in Jerusalem
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment
Karl Marx, The German Ideology & On the Jewish Question
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Rene Descartes, Meditations

Finally Telling It Like It Is

2004-12-04T03:22:00.000-05:00

I'm officially off-duty on this blog, but let me just peek my head in and make note of something that bears repeating. Timothy Burke, an academic, writes "The same forces that help academics to produce knowledge and scholarship are the forces which produce unwholesome close-mindedness and inbred self-satisfied attitudes." Ah, so refreshing to finally hear someone say it. And an academic no less.

He gives a bit of a justification for specialization in academia, though in my view this misses the point:

If tomorrow I persuaded my colleagues that the next job that opened in the humanities in Swarthmore should not be dedicated to any particular discipline or research specialization, but thrown open to the most interesting, fertile intellect we could recruit, I would be persuading my colleagues to join in an impractical catastrophe that would involve trying to winnow a field of 25,000 applicants down to a single person.

The real reason I would argue is that there's so much knowledge out there that specializing is simply a matter of efficiency. But the question reveals something important by the way it is phrased. The idea of awarding an academic position on the basis of having an interesting, fertile intellect is posed as a sort of absurd hypothetical. This is very revealing. Because it's true, in many institutions of higher education, positions aren't filled on the basis of intellect at all but rather on the basis of who is best able to supply the desired specialized credentials, or who fits the narrow, often arbitrarilly drawn disciplinary mold best. I'm not saying humanist scholars shouldn't specialize. That's like saying we shouldn't have specialized professionals in our economy - this of course would be hugely inefficient. I'm saying that if you choose to fill positions based on who can best specialize, you're going to get...a bunch of people who can only communicate with specialists.

The peer review that instructs me to come inside a canon so that I can be understood by an audience of comparable specialists quickly becomes the peer review that cracks the whip to force me inside a political orthodoxy.

More accurately, I would say, it's the peer review that demands that any piece of new knowledge or research produced by academics be so arcane and provincial that only another specialist in the same sub-sub-pseudo-discipline would be capable of understanding it or caring about it, and which would brand anything else as "unscholarly" or "queer." This problem of overspecialization and provincialism is particular to the humanities. I'm not saying the science academy isn't quite specialized these days either - it is. The difference is that scientists need to specialize because only a few people are capable of understanding the work (due to issues including aptitude, differences in scientific terminology / methods that are necesitated by the wide variations among scientific domains) whereas humanities academics specialize because they want to feel like only a few people can understand their work. In other words, science basically has an excuse for when it is accountable to only itself because of the considerable learning curve associated with acquiring the fundamentals of most modern scientific specialties. Moreoever, even the most arcane science becomes relevant whenever its findings contribute to the betterment of our society, technologically, medically, or ecologically (which is often) - REGARDLESS of how arcane the actual science involved may be. Can arcane humanities disciplines claim any kind of similar contribution? If the mainstream of humanities academia wants to contribute anything meaningful to society it out to rethink its entire orientation and consider producing ideas, concepts or analyses of general - not just academic -value, social, intellectual or moral.

It's An Old Book But It Still Applies

2004-11-20T21:59:00.000-05:00

I've been reading this book online recently written by a pyschologist in the early 1900's. It's a devastating review of the whole system of education of the time, but I think some of it still applies today. Here are some passages of interest, but really you should read the whole thing.

There are a lot of passages of general insight:

WE are stock-blind to our own barbarities; we do not realize the enormities of our life and consider our age and country as civilized and enlightened. We censure the faults of other societies, but do not notice our own. Thus Lecky, in describing Roman society, says: "The gladiatorial games form indeed the one feature which to a modern mind is most inconceivable in its atrocity. That not only men, but women, man advanced period of civilization,―men and women who not only professed, but very frequently acted upon a high code of morals―should have made the carnage of men their habitual amusement, that all this should have continued for centuries with scarcely a protest, is one of the most startling facts in moral history. It is, however, perfectly normal, while it opens out fields of ethical inquiry of a very deep, though painful, character."

Interesting to think about... Another interesting insight which relates the education of individuals to the previously accumulated progress of the species actually touches on the view I came up with and wrote about in an earlier post about culture:

The well known biogenetic law may, with some modifications, be applied to mental life. The development of the individual is an abbreviated reproduction of the evolution of the species. Briefly put: Ontogenesis is an epitome of Phylogenesis. This biogenetic law holds true in the domain of education. The stored-up experiences of the race are condensed, foreshortened, and recapitulated in the child's life history.

A good point on the fear of elitism which currently exists in our schools, thereby branding gifted programs as politically incorrect, while at the same time putting huge allocations of funds away for special education programs:

In levelling education to mediocrity we imagine that we uphold the democratic spirit of our institutions. Our American sensibilities a-re shocked when the president of one of our leading colleges dares to recommend to his college that it should cease catering to the average student.

There's also lots of great, admirably ascerbic alarmist rhetoric:

I ASSUME that as liberal men and women you have no use for the process of cramming and stuffing of college-geese and mentally indolent, morally obtuse and religiously "cultured" prigs and philistines.
...
The savage compresses the skull of the infant, while we flatten the brain and cramp the mind of our young generation.
...
We trust our unfortunate youth to the Procrustean bed of the mentally obtuse, hidebound pedagogue. We desiccate, sterilize, petrify and embalm our youth in keeping with the rules of our Egyptian code and in accordance with the Confucian regulations of our school-clerks and college mandarins. Our children learn by rote and are guided by routine.
...
We piously sacrifice our tender children and the flower of our youth to the greedy, industrial Moloch of a military, despotic, rapacious plutocracy.

I'm pretty sure that the situation is not as bad in most places today as the one he describes. Still I have to admit to finding a lot of truth in what he writes.

Not long ago we were informed by one of those successful college-mandarins, lionized by office-clerks, superintendents and tradesmen, that he could measure education by the foot-rule! Our Regents are supposed to raise the level of education by a vicious system of examination and coaching, a system which Professor James, in a private conversation with me, has aptly characterized as "idiotic."
Our schools brand their pupils by a system of marks, while our foremost colleges measure the knowledge and education of their students by the number of "points" passed. The student may pass either in Logic or Blacksmithing. It does not matter which, provided he makes up a certain number of "points"!

Now, obviously it's very difficult to think of a practical alternative to running schools by giving examinations, awarding grades, and counting credits...But I've always felt the system is imperfect because it does nothing to encourage initiative in learning, aside from whatever advantage having initiative in learning could confer in the way of earning good grades. What's rewarded is not how well you can apply what you know in an original way, which is in reality what leads to productivity outside of the classroom setting, school being quite unique in the context of larger life in rewarding narrow learning and memorization. The system probably needs to be structured as it is for practical reasons, but the saving grace is when individual teachers work independently to inspire students to see the world of inquiry and original application associated with what they're teaching beyond the books, assignments and pedagogy. There are a lot of good, inspiring people with an understanding of the individual aspect of learning at the teaching level. Or at least I've been fortunate to have encountered many throughout my education.

I have to say I pretty much totally agree with the following description of the purpose of education, provided at the very beginning:

I also assume that as men and women of liberal education you are not limited to the narrow interests of one particular subject, to the exclusion of all else. I assume that you are especially interested in the development of personality as a whole, the true aim of education. I also assume that you realize that what is requisite is not some more routine, not more desiccated, quasi-scientific methods of educational psychology, not the sawdust of college-pseudogogics and philistine, normal school-training, but more light on the problems of life.

Indeed. I don't know why it's so hard to find a coherent statement to that effect (ok, maybe not as ascerbic...) put out by the leading educational institutions or educational authorities of the day.

Listen! Buy!

2004-11-20T01:46:00.000-05:00

I would like to direct my readers to a new album put out by my friend Dan. If I had to compare it to anything I would compare it to Stevie Wonder, but you should listen to the samples yourself. I would be surprised if anyone who likes music doesn't like this album.

What Kind Of Equality?

2004-11-18T23:58:00.000-05:00

Swarthmore professor Tim Burke asks the important question "what kind of equality?" There is equality in the sense of equal opportunity, which may of course end up resulting in actual economic inequalities, or a reduction of the distance between rich and poor, or a more absolute rigid egalitarianism.

Disregarding the normative natural right justification as pseudo-religious and just generally unsound, there are still reasons why inequality is desirable. I would never wish for absolute equality. As I said before, a certain amount of inequality provides positive incentives for risk-taking and provides a healthy social outlet for the expression of ambition and competitive urges.

However, I think that common sense tells us that the effect is subject to highly diminishing returns. Someone ought to do a real psychological study testing the effect of different levels of incentive on effort, ambition and productivity. But without even having access to the study, I think it's clear what the results would be, and why they would turn out that way. Productivity can't be a linear function of incentive. For one, the conclusion is preposterous because it presumes that the workers have unlimited capacity to work harder as wealth disparities grow ever greater. Is this realistic? Does the average worker even have the ability to produce at 5, 10 or greater times an observed baseline level, which would represent the ratio of highest to average wealth roughly? If resources are in fact limited, not only would there be an upper ceiling beyond which a person simply cannot respond with increased productivity, the productivity function will almost certainly have diminishing returns. This is not a matter of incentive, it's a matter of resources - psychological or economic. Consider the following thought experiment:

Assume that x times the disparity in wealth equals x times the incentive - though in reality it's probably less. Psychologically, how would you expect someone with limited resources working relativity close to capacity to respond to a doubling of the (internal) incentive? I think the intuitive answer is that it would take into account how close to capacity the person is. That is, the response will be to increase their utilization of resources by some fixed fraction of their remaining resources.

To put it a little more formally, say M is the maximum level of resources, or the total reserve of resources. Presumably people start working at a reasonable fraction of their total capacity, say B. Then, the total increase in resource utilization corresponding to a doubling of incentive is f(M-B) where f is some fixed fraction. Any value of f could correspond to a given multiplication in the incentive; I guess you could say it reflects the sensitivity of a person in responding to incentives. The next doubling of incentive will result in f(1-f)(M-B), the next f(M-B - f(1-f)(M-B) - f(M-B)) = f(1- f(1-f) - f)(M-B) = f(1-f)^2(M-B). Or, for n doublings of incentive, the marginal contribution to productivity will be f(1-f)^n(M-B), which gets very small very quickly.

Perhaps you don't like this model because you think that how people respond to incentives does not depend on how close to their maximum working capacity they are. This is a psychologically plausible position. Then you have a situation where people exhaust their resources, presumably after a short period of time. The practical implications of this are that there will be a definite ceiling beyond which increases in incentives do not lead to any corresponding increase in productivity. If this is the case, beyond this point there wouldn't be any utilitity, in terms of motivation, in having greater inequality of wealth at all. In the first case, there would be greatly diminishing reason to promote greater inequality of wealth as it gets higher. Either way it seems like a losing policy.

This seems to mean that great differences in wealth have no motivational function; the motivational rationale for economic inequalities becomes null very quickly. So this would lead me to believe that some degree of inequality is beneficial, but only in small amounts.

Equality of opportunity is a harder thing to work out on its own. People who have more resources naturally are going to have an advantage over people with less resources in a capitalist system. There are actually a whole bunch of "scientific" justifications for supporting policies that perpetuate economic advantages through families. Suffice it to say that I think they're all bad, in both senses. So I think equality of opportunity is something we should strive for. The answer to me seems to be that in keeping actual inequality to a minimum, the playing field of opportunity will stay level also. Radicalization of starting points, aside from being prohibitively impractical, would probably not even be desirable, because it probably would lead to a situation little different from the current one. This is not to say that we are doing a perfect job ensuring equal opportunity, just that an equal opportunity scheme would also probably lead to great inequalities if left untempered.

Manifesto Continued

2004-11-18T13:03:00.000-05:00

I know you've been anxiously awaiting the rest of my manifesto loyal readers. Here it is, in all it's humble glory:

Partisanship should be the means not an end. What do I mean by this? Generally, the more people consider themselves beholden to a particular party, the more the members of the party adhere to a kind of groupthink which is governed by the rules of mob psychology rather than rationality. I know that sounds rather alarmist but let me explain. When there is absolute conformity, conditions become especially conducive to autocracy. When conformity is a given, arbitrary forces or a single influential leader can sway entire bodies of followers whichever way and they will not dissent. Entire well-developed and respectable nations have made disastrous choices this way because of singular allegiance to a bad idea in the name of country, ideology, even science. The genius of the constitution is that it allowed free speech and dissent to flourish so that autocracy, whenever and wherever it may appear, can be freely dissented. On the other hand, there's nothing systematic about fascism (total conformity) that necessitates an autocrat, yet ever major instance of fascism in history has been accompanied by a dictatorship, which should tell you something.

If you believe in the wisdom of self-correcting systems you naturally think this prospect is terrible. The real value of partisanship, as it was actually explained to me by one of my peers, is in enhancing one's personal political influence through coalition-building. If you're willing to support multifold agendas within a party, it's more likely that the ones you care about will come through also. Compromise is going to have to happen at some point, whether it's at the individual or the group level. As far as I'm concerned, this is the origin of good partisanship.

I've been thinking a little more on the inequalities of wealth thing, and another argument that could be made for it occured to me. That is, it is a natural right for me to make more money than you; it is the natural right of every person to make as much money as they want and are able to even if it means making much more than the next guy.

Natural rights are always very fuzzy concepts. For instance, couldn't the case just as persuasively be made that it is everyone's natural right to be treated as an equal? There are various religious / ethical lines of thought that could justify including some form of equality as a natural right. On the other hand there are solid philosophical and scientific underpinnings to claiming that the opposite is a natural right - or perhaps it could be put a bit more neutrally, a natural law. Any scientific findings that support the conclusion that there are differences among people in terms of abilities are absolutely devastating to the natural law case for equality, and there is very much such evidence. People differ in terms of aptitude, and even in a non-economic setting, inequalities in ability, status, hierarchy are going to exist. Furthermore, the theory of evolution is predicated on the existence of inequalities. The fit flourish while the unfit are selected out, and the result is a net good, considered from the perspective of the species as a whole, taking this as the assumed operative unit. So there is much in nature that reflects an unegalitarian scheme.

But here's why I'm not convinced by this argument: for every argument that humans should do something or be allowed to do something because it is natural, there is a corresponding argument of a very different nature, that humans should not behave a certain way, or conduct affairs a certain way, because it is primitive and is fit for the brutes, not a species as elevated and refined as humanity. And the second argument is always equally compelling. For instance, would anyone argue that humans should strive to govern in the same way as a pack of wolves? Should instant violent retribution without due justice process be allowed because it is exhibited in various species of beasts? Everyone would argue that these things shouldn't be permitted precisely because they are characteristic of the lower animals.

When it comes down to it, the natural right and negative natural right arguments seem so evenly weighted that I'm inclined to ignore the rationale altogether and say the categorization of natural is inconsequential to how things should be. And I think this makes sense for any rational person. It essentially involves a leap of faith to make the jump from a descriptive scheme to a normative arugment. Who's to say that just because something occurs naturally, that means it should be. There is no logical connection there, only a faith in an falsely santified entity that can be refered to as Nature. Blind faith isn't how rational people should make decisions.

Welcome Jung!

2004-11-13T23:01:00.000-05:00

I'll be taking a break for a month so because I have both schoolwork and planning-related issues and don't want to be tempted to procrastinate as much. But taking over for me will be Jung, who I'm sure has an interesting perspective on lots of topics. I may post a thing or two after this, but enjoy the break and expect me to be back at the end of the semester.

If A Tree Falls In A Forest...

2004-11-13T21:08:00.000-05:00

...does an arbitrageur care? Or something like that. I've been big on the academic-style posts lately, and this post is no exception. Today's topic is economics. Here's a question from the MA exam in economics given at George Mason University:

You can't take it with you. A private owner of a natural resource, like a forest, therefore, will want to clear-cut the forest before he dies in order to maximize his consumption stream (assume the owner has no children or other bequest motive). True or False. Explain.

A George Mason professor provides the answer as follows:

False. The owner can sell the forest. As a result, the owner of a forest has an incentive to continue to seed it even if seeds planted today won't produce trees until after the owner is dead. The same idea applies to any long-lived productive asset. I think this insight is very beautiful. It's precisely the fact that the forest is owned that gives the owner an incentive to take into account how other people value the forest.
The basic logic doesn't require perfect competition or fully efficient markets but if these assumptions do hold then the private owner will choose investment decisions exactly as would a "social planner."

I think I understand why the author chose a natural resource like a forest to illustrate the principle he was trying to get across (because it's tragic when forests are cut down! [pub -- he's expressing his sincere feelings here]), but I don't think it's the best choice of example for this question.

But first, there's an interesting aside to this question that I want to ask: does the logic imply that the forest will always be reseeded in the interests of enhancing its value to the next owner, or will it eventually be cut down by one of its owners? This has important consequences because no one likes it when forests are destroyed! (pub -- better - much more convincing.) I think the answer is that the forest will eventually be clear-cut by an owner, or in other words, there exists a circumstance in which the owner has incentive to clear-cut the forest rather than maintain it. Here's why I think this is:

The essential insight of the answer is that the value of the forest to the owner equals its value on the market (or to the highest bidder among future owners of the forest). Since future owners will be able to produce much more profit out of the forest over the course of their lives than an owner near the end of his life will, it will be worth more to them than to the owner, and thus the owner has an incentive to maintain the forest rather than harvest it for his own profit. Normally, the productive potential of the forest to a future owner will be greater than the actual saleable value of the forest to the current owner who has limited time left in which to transform the forest's product into profits.

But say that its value on the market is declining because, say, the demand for houses has decreased (there will be a natural delay between a decline in the demand for wood and a decline in the value of the forest because of imperfect information and the time it takes information to be transmitted). If the rate of decline in the value of the product of the forest is sufficiently great, and is expected to stay that level for the lifetime of the next generation of owners, the profit to be derived from harvesting the entire forest right now will be greater than the potential profitability of the forest to the future owner (or arbitrageurs or series of arbitrageurs, etc.) This makes sense because:

1) It takes time for the purchase to be completed and for the forest to change owners, time during which the value of the forest will further decline.

2) A steadily declining value for the forest takes away a major incentive for purchasing it: that is purchasing it for its continued profitability over an extended period of time.

Put another way, if the forest's greatest value is projected to be the value of its produce right now, why would anyone want to purchase it?

Such an answer assumes that long-term information is not perfect, which is a realistic assumption for the real world I think. If long-term information were perfect (long-term meaning for the purposes of this problem: knowledge of the future value of the forest beyond the lifespan of a single owner), then arbitrageurs would be willing to buy the forest in the intermediate term, even when the price is declining rapidly, with the aim of selling the forest back to forest industry people when demand for wood goes back up. I'm assuming that this is not possible, so that when the profitability of having a forest goes down, people assume that it's going to be down for the forseeable future, and are unwilling to pay higher for it than its current profit potential. Is this a reasonable assumption? I'm not sure, but I would think that 40 years or so is a reasonable span of time beyond which future demand for a product and market conditions would not be predictable.

So all this would suggest that, in the cold world of profit-maximizing forest owners, the will come a time when every forest is leveled. It's interesting to note that the forest is clear-cut when demand for wood goes down. Just something to think about...

Now back to the original reason for the post: I wanted to take issue with the professor's assertion that "the private owner will choose investment decisions exactly as would a 'social planner'." As I said before, I can understand why the creator of the question chose a forest as the asset, but in particular with a forest, I think, the market outcome will not be the same as the socially optimal outcome.

If the asset was, say, a stock of tree seedlings, and the choice was between preserving them and using them to spawn more tree seedlings, and selling them to nurseries, then it's true that the investment decisions of the owner will coincide exactly with what a social planner would do. But a forest is different because one of the principal benefits of the forest, recreation, is enjoyed by people who are not in the market for purchasing forests. Thus a large part of the social utility of forests is not represented by the price of the forest. I suppose you could construct a reality in which private owners of the forest also charge admission to individuals, but that's a stretch. Thus, the behavior of owners of the forest will only represent the interests of other potential-owners of the forest, which is a small segment of the people who have a use for the forest. Additionally, a forest has environmental value, which will be ignored by the decisions of profit-driven owners. So I don't think the market for forests is a particularly good example of socially-optimal market outcomes.

Ok, enough of this post. It's time for me to do real academics.

A Farewell Manifesto

2004-11-12T15:20:00.000-05:00

Well, that's it, the political season is over. And while it may not have ended how I would have preferred, rest assured that I will not continue to fight. That's right. Now that the election is over I will most probably post much less frequently on political matters, if you can even consider my very undeft attempts at political analysis to have been worthwhile in the first place. I'm generally much less involved than I should be when it comes to politics, and while I believe it is every citizen's duty to participate when the time comes and maintain a minimum level of knowledgeableness in order to participate intelligently, it really seems that there are so many differing sources of information out there that it would require a person to either devote a substantial portion of their time to wading through all of them, or be especially interested in it, neither of which I am willing to do. One of the incentives for starting a blog for the election cycle was that it would force me to follow my first voting-age presidential race more closely and chronicle my thoughts along the way. It was a learning experience for me, and it was good. But I don't know how much more I have to say on politics, and I'd like to post more about other stuff that interests me. As a kind of closing manifesto though, I'd like to lay out the things I do have strong personal beliefs about politically:

Large concentrations of wealth are bad. I know this is economic, not political, but still our economic policies are set in large part via a political process. I'm sure none of the reasons I can provide in supporting this position are original, since the matter has been argued for centuries by political theorists and intellectuals far more learned than I. But, at the risk of being superfluous, I'll state why I think this is the case.

I actually think it's easier to see why this is bad by starting with the justifications given for why they are good. The first, and probably predominant argument is that distributions of wealth are determined by markets and markets must not be tampered with. Some people with a religious-type adherence to the free market are not likely to have big problems with large differences in wealth, because they see the large differences in wealth as somehow the natural product of the free market. But one need only look to trusts and natural monopolies to see that sometimes intervention in free markets is more efficient than no intervention. Additionally, reverence for a system, however ingenious and perhaps philosophically pleasing, should never supersede honest analysis of all of its consequences, good and bad. Capitalism may be the best economic system ever invented, but that doesn't mean some of its consequences aren't undesirable and would be better if they were corrected.

Of course a necessary premise of capitalism is the profit-incentive or self-interest, which cannot exist without inequalities of wealth. In the real world, inequalities in wealth provide positive incentives for risk-taking, innovation, and entrepreneurship, all of which are essential to a well-functioning economy. Conversely, lack of possibility for inequalities in wealth led to the failure of communism on the massive scale. However, as I understand the argument, as a justification for the existence of larger inequalities of wealth, the profit-incentive argument must assume that there are constant or even increasing returns to greater and greater levels of inequality. This to me seems patently false. Does the typical middle-class person respond with 5 times the risk-taking, or, put another way, do 5 times as many middle-class people decide to take risks when the average income of the top 10% is increased by 5 times? It's true that this doesn't take into account certain macroeconomics multiplying effects that might translate to a greater than 1:1 contribution to the total economy for each unit of additional capital. Still, my argument is that there has to be a certain point where the marginal contribution to positive incentives of an increase in the income disparity is negligible. On a practical level, is a $50,000-earning member of the middle class considerably more motivated to take certain risks if he is able to earn $2,000,000 rather than $1,000,000?

There's an assertion that the rich invest (save) proportionally more money than non-rich citizens. I don't have any data on this, and can't find any on a quick search. Maybe someone who has some knowledge regarding this can leave a comment about it. Take it as true that the rich do re-invest a higher portion of their income than the non-rich. On the one hand, they're reinvesting it, so while it does briefly go through their hands and they receive the interest on the investment, they're really just acting as a proxy to distribute capital wherever it's going to go. On the other hand, they're investing in the most profitable ventures which will probably belong to other rich people who already have the substantial capital needed to cover the considerable overhead cost of a highly productive venture. So it's not clear how much this extra investment would "give back" to the population. Of course my knowledge of economics is pretty elementary and there very well could be a flaw somewhere.

There are obvious reasons why greater equality (not absolute equality) is good including reduced social tension, preservation of upward mobility, and an abundance of philosophical / ethical inquiry defending it as an inherent good that I can't possibly begin to address here. Historically, the existence of classes possessing fixed, differing levels of status has led to conflict and revolution. One of the things that has made America great and probably revolution-free is the lack of a class-system, which, wherever it existed in Europe, was subsequently overthrown in favor of democratic, capitalist systems. While today there is no danger of anything resembling a formal class system re-appearing, policies should be constructed so as to mitigate possibility of the formation of a de facto economic class division. I believe in policies formed with this aim in mind.

There are more things I feel strongly about, but since I'm tired of this post they will have to wait to future posts.

Update: Discussion continued here.

How To Be Less Narcissistic 101

2004-11-09T21:41:00.000-05:00

When I started this blog I assumed it would provide my friends and family with an entertaining and hopefully interesting read, and maybe the occassional google user with the for some reason much sought after 1st-person perspective on politics or current events - and maybe even some information. But I never expected to be providing self-help information. But if you do a search on Google for "How to be less narcissistic" I come up on top, even over the thousands of websites that actually address this issue (out of a list of almost 150,000!). Ironically, the better an authority I become on being less narcissistic, the more narcissistic I become. But hopefully the guy in search of that info has gleaned some wisdom from this blog.

Update: I've been bumped to number six. Aw, Shucks.

Pet Peeves

2004-11-08T22:00:00.000-05:00

A pet peeve of mine is when people conflate opinion with fact. For instance, can I have an opinion on whether the explosives in Iraq disappeared before or after fighting began? No. The explosives were either there or they weren't. I can present evidence why one of them is the case, but I can't have an opinion on it. Now, can I have an opinion on whether Bush is a good president? Yes. This seems to be a question that is a matter of opinion.

I absolutely hate when people write editorials about facts, essentially making an assertion that something unknown is or is not the case, and then retreats from the duty of rigorously defending their case under the auspices of it just being their opinion. You know this kind of maneuver. Don't get me wrong. There isn't anything wrong with including facts for the purpose of supporting your opinion, or making an entire editorial a list of facts if that's what you want to do, but you can't opine on a fact. At this point, my relationship with editorials, specifically the kind you find written in major newspapers, is like the relationship you have with a bad soap opera series. You don't have any respect for the content, but you keep coming back week after week out of some sick fascination with the fact that they just keep going.

Msnbc doesn't seem to share my opinion (pop quiz: is it proper to call this an opinion?) about opinions and hence proliferates fundamentally flawed onlines polls asking things like "Will the Iraq elections take place in January?" What!? What's the point of doing a survey on that? Does anyone know what will happen in January? Does anyone have any useful information that could lead to a useful prediction?

I would classify this as soliciting an opinion in the place of what is, in fact, a fact. Philosophically speaking, whether elections will take place in January is a fact, although it could be categorized in the proper sense as a "future fact" that is not presently evident. (I believe you can categorize it this way without assuming any kind of determinism.) But what the survey is asking for, I would argue, is an opinion, because:

1) No one knows what will happen at a future date. The best anyone can do is to make sound factually-based predictions. Unless you are operating under the assumption of a very strong determinism, which would say that it is possible to know what is going to happen in the future by surveying conditions at a given point in time, it cannot be said that a prediction of any future event is "a fact."

2) Even if strong determinism were assumed, respondents to online polls are absolutely ignorant of anything factually relevant to the issue being polled. Therefore, even if there were factual basis for a certain answer, people's answers are not likely to reflect it.

Thus these online polls are guilty of opining on facts, which to me is a capital intellectual sin. This is eclipsed only by my second pet peeve: people posting academic work (or college entrance essays (!?)) on their personal websites. It might be entertaining to come up with other equally irrelevant poll questions; I'll leave that as an intellectual exercise to the reader.

The Other Side

2004-11-04T22:58:00.000-05:00

Worthwhile for seeing how a long-time Bush supporter is seeing things around this time if nothing else:

See, it's kind of cute, like watching a goldfish swim into the side of his bowl over and over again.

Bush Was Re-elected Plus Girls And Math

2004-11-04T11:59:00.000-05:00

Ok, I've got a ton of work to do, which means...I've got to update this biznotch. For some reason, whenever I have the most work to do I'm at my most independently creative. For me it kind of functions as a reason to never quite have all my work done. Then again, another result of never having your work done is that you're slightly pre-occupied all the time, which is unavoidable no matter how flippant an attitude you may have.

Ok, most importantly, the results of the election. Bush was marginally elected by a very divided electorate. Which is fine. Compromise is what makes democracy work. Although on an intellectual level I like the idea of a multi-party parliamentary system better. However I don't have enough political knowledge back that up with substantive arguments, other than that it ensures the government more closely represents the will of the people. But in America it's winner take all. So when Kerry called Bush to formally concede the presidency and congratulate him, he made a point of mentioning how divided the country was, and how he thought that was a bad thing, which I think we all can agree on. And I think Bush agreed, which is good.

So then Bush goes and releases this 6 point plan for his domestic agenda:

Continuing to raise accountability standards in public schools.
Upholding "our deepest values and family and faith.”
Halving the record $413 billion deficit.
Expanding health care coverage.
Seeking a constitutional ban on gay marriage.
Moving “this goodhearted nation toward a culture of life,” a reference to the abortion issue.

Ok, well the first point calls a giant federal program, something liberals can relate to. And I honestly don't know the liberal / conservative breakdown on supporting the "No Child Left Behind" program. I do know that it's generally recognized to be a big failure, one reason being that it is massively underfunded, and I can't imagine liberals feeling feeling any differently. And what does the second point mean? Not even in policy terms, but as a statement? How do you uphold family (other than issuing a constitutional ammendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, which is already covered by point 5)? Then there's the last two points which address the two most divisive domestic issues. I honestly am surprised that the consitutional ban on gay marriage is in there again. I really thought it was intended to energize the base for the election and was not a heartfelt policy. I do like halving the deficit though because of how lofty and ambitious it is.

So this does seem like a hard agenda to unify people on but we'll see.

The second thing I've been thinking about is girls and math. Nothing lewd or anything. Specifically, you know the common wisdom that girls are not as good at math as boys. Well there are two issues, whether that's fundamentally true, and then if so, why it's true. On the first point, I tend to believe that to the extent that being good at math equates with performing in math, girls are not as good, but in the sense of raw potential, I don't think there's a difference. It think the first point is undebatable, that girls' performance is not as high. There are many reasons put forth to explain this. Some have it that this is a social phenomenon. This argument has it that girls are just not encouraged to be good at math, so few become good at it. This may explain why some girls who are good at math are just as good as boys who are good at math, but the overall distribution is shifted much more toward the not good end. Some allege it has something to do with visual-spatial skills. The predicates of this argument have merit: men do have superior visual-spatial abilities. There's an evolutionary reason for this. If you buy into the story that long ago men were hunters who navigated and traveled and women were gatherers who traveled shorter distances, it makes sense that men would be selected for spatial and directional abilities, and that if these traits are in fact sex-linked, they would be propogated along to their male ancestors. The problem I see with this argument is that the assumed link between spatial abilities and math not clear. For instance, does it take spatial ability to understand algebra or calculus? The answer isn't clear to me. Granted that many of math's most useful applications are physical, but men could just be more drawn to physical things which seems an easier and more direct answer than they somehow use their spatial inclinations to be good at math. According to the simpler is more likely to be correct law, I support the former view.

This is slightly off-topic, but there's a fascinating theory for why more often men show exceptionally high ability in things like math that demand a high IQ. According to the general theory, some of the alleles that are important for intelligence are X-linked, meaning that they only appear on the X chromosome. For those who need brushing up on their biology, males have both an X and a Y chromosome, and females have two X chromosomes. Therefore male descendents of males get their Y chromosome from their father and their X from their mother, and female descendants get an X chromosome from each parent.

There is a strong and a weak version of this theory. The strong version of an X-linked intelligence trait theory would have it that genes encoding for high intelligence only occur on the X chromosome, meaning that they are only transmitted to a male through the mother, which can be considered disproved since if it were true, pedigrees of smart families would show a clear X-linked pattern, which would be quite evident and vindicate the theory conclusively. But there is a weaker form of the X-linked theory that makes more sense. Imagine if X chromosome alleles had proportionally more importance in determining intelligence. Then any mutation or natural variation that should happen to occur in the single X chromosome of a male would automatically be manifested. Of course the probability of a single fluke occurence is greater than the probability of two coincident fluke occurences, so for this reason there would be more variability in male intelligence than in female intelligence, where the actual expression of the X chromosome trait is somehow a combination of two inherited X alleles. The prediction of greater variability is exactly consistent with the established observation that there are more male mentally retarded people, and more male creative geniuses, but the mean intellectual ability for the sexes is the same. From an evolutionary perspective, if intelligence is assumed to be an adaptive trait, then it makes sense why the most transparent variability of the trait occurs in the more easily "selected" sex. (Whereas the man can be selected at the tip of a hat, thousands of times over in the course of a year, a female can, theoretically, only be selected once every nine months or so.)

Of course this doesn't seem to offer explanation for the higher apparent mean math ability in men. But I have a personal view, although it might be mundane compared to the alternatives. Men like competition, especially the type where if someone wins someone else loses. It just goes along with our competitive nature, which can also probably be explained as some sort of evolutionary thing. The thing that distinguishes math and, to a slightly lesser extent, science from other forms of intellectual discourse is that there is a right answer and a wrong answer. English is self-evidently vague and, to me, relativistic. Even with something like language, in which women are purported to be more adept, there isn't one correct way to say something, there are multiple ways of saying it, within the constraints of proper grammar. Math dovetails nicely with guys' desire to be right about stuff. To be the one person who gets the solution to a problem while everyone else is in sheepish ingorance is kind of appealing for dominance-loving creatures, though admittedly this isn't an admirable trait. One corollary of this theory would be you'd find more guys interested in things like trivia. And it's true that there are more guys on shows like Jeopardy than girls.

All right, now that I've got that out of my system maybe I'll get something done...

K.I.S.S.

2004-11-01T20:33:00.000-05:00

People tell me I don't do enough personal entries (you don't do any -- pub), and this is a blog after all, so here you go. What follows is the rapid-fire unraveling of my brain.

Readers of this blog will likely know that I occasionally have exhibited symptoms of disillusionment and apathy towards school. However, I feel that some degree of questioning things and questioning your path is healthy by the time one reaches college age. College, unlike high school, is a choice. You choose which college to attend, you choose what field of knowledge to pursue, you choose what classes to take. Many people choose to go to college over doing other financially lucrative things (albeit very few). Therefore I'm not concerned that I'm questioning the point of what I'm doing. So I've been thinking about the purpose of school lately, not in a social or institutional sense, but in the sense of what use it serves the student. For most all professions, you have to go through lots of school if you want to be succeessful. So school is a kind of have-to, which is fine with me. It sure beats going to work at some menial deathly boring that you have to work years at in order to even have the chance of advancing to something more interesting. It also tops a system where good jobs are awarded according to connections, family origin, reciprocal favors or worse. So I'm not complaining about it. But does it give you something else? Is it reasonable to expect school to provide other kinds of fulfillment than just social advancement? Or is it most reasonable to just try to make it as pleasant as possible a step in the larger rat race of which it is a part?

Other than there are three things I can identify that school gives us:

1) School teaches you knowledge. Going to school provides you with a unique opportunity in your life in which you can focus exclusively on enriching your knowledge. Therefore one should look at school as a convenient time in which to pursue what fascinates you.

This is all well and good. If you're interested in a science and your school has a decent science program then the classroom format can be valuable in faciliating the process of learning your subject. Many sciences are hard, and for most students the learning process is aided by the rigor and scrutiny provided by regular problem sets. If you're at a university, then you have to the advantage of being at the frontier of knowledge where new knowledge is being created daily. That clearly presents an educational advantage over just reading books, if nothing else because the newest knowledge hasn't found its way into books yet. At the very least it's inspiring and makes one want to explore knowledge to be in such an environment.

If you're interested in humanities, the concept of knowledge is defined a little differently. Whereas most science course end up presenting a fairly standardized curriculum across different schools, humanities courses that deal with similar topics are more variable; it's harder to say what it means to be a properly educated English major, or even U.S. history major for that matter, than a physics major. Although, even for an English major there is a core group of works that are considered neccessary to be familiar with in order for one to be considered well educated. Now, assuming that the contents of this group is common knowledge, it's a little less clear to me what one gains from reading these works as part of a course syllabus as opposed to on one's own, since understanding or grasping the material doesn't require the same kind of repetition and rigor that a difficult scientific concept would. But I can already hear the response that the knowledge you derive from an English course, for instance, isn't contained within the pages of the book, it comes from the interpretation of what's in the book. And to that end, the more interpretations the better. Hence, the discussion aspect of a literature course is essential to the knowledge derived from the course. Another argument might be that the wisdom derived from literature derives from the way it is to be understood in relation to life, and thus more it is discussed, the more insights it can provide.

All in all, I'm not sure how much greater an advantage for acquiring new knowledge school offers a motivated and capable person. The resources are out there, now more accessible than ever, and if one is motivated enough to seek them out and assemble them sensibly, and capable enough to learn and understand without the oversight of teachers, I'm convinced one can get just as good an education without college. Where school does present an advantage is in providing that structure and incentive, and providing a pedagogical structure. The pardox is that the people I know who are truly expert in the field they are studying - that is, those who have the most to gain from school - are also the ones who are most self-directed, and with the most self-derived interest, and thus most likely to do well for themselves without the guidance of school. What school provides for people who have the interest, the means, and the will to succeed in an area of life, or an area of inquiry, is still unclear to me. Still, you do get four years to just learn things and recognition for having done it. That's worth something.

2. School is a challenge, specifically a challenge for your intellect.

This is only appealing to a particular type of person. But it's probably true that most high acheivers got there in part because they enjoy flexing their intellectual muscle. Most (not all) people would prefer a challenging job to an unchallenging job. People like challenge. There's an inherent joy in testing the limits of one's capabilities. If you perform well, you get to feel good about yourself and that you are a smart person. There's a certain wrestling with things mentally that school provides, and although it's not as dramatic as say the lone scientist deriving on his own the fundamental formula of nature, or solving a hitherto unsolved problem, it still feels good to feel yourself making intellectual progress.

3. Doing well in school is a way to prove yourself to those who would want to hire you or otherwise evaluate you.

Now the one that everybody cares about. It would be hugely inefficient to introduce inexperienced workers directly into the labor force without first being evaluated in a neutral medium like school and placed accordingly. While the system does have its flaws, things that school measures like discipline, intelligence, dedication are highly correlative with traits that result in success in the workplace. As such, the better you do in school, the more you prove that you would be capable of doing whatever you want to do after school. For types who are always concerned about the next step, this is a highly motivating reason to do well and work hard in school, even if they're not particularly interested in the course material.

There are many different values and purposes to school, and often I find it hard to understand how they're packed together in the same institution. I definitely have a difficult time balancing these objectives, usually because I focus too narrowly on one of them, and try to make the whole thing into something it isn't. I think that if you honor only one of them, you're not going to be successful: If you see it as only an education and have any semblance of independence of thought you're going to be frustrated when school requirements and pedagogy conflict with your personal educational aspirations. If you see it as just a mental challenge then you'll come out not having learned anything useful to take into the next stage. If you regard it as just a prelude to your future career you'll find the work more tedious and pointless than other people who are fascinated by the subject matter and will possibly burn out. Of course, I'm sure I'm missing some other equally important purposes of school but I want to keep this short and these are just my immediate thoughts.

Good Old Sensationalism

2004-10-29T19:54:00.000-04:00

Seeing as my role as blogger is to correct the excesses and misapprehensions of the press (yeah right -- pub), I'm going to take a stab at this sensationalist title, which was frankly long overdue and we all knew was coming when word of this Bin Laden tape got out.

Here we have this headline from Msnbc that says, quite frighteningly, "Neither Bush nor Kerry can protect U.S., he says." That sounds like a presage of an attack or something, right? Well, if you read the actual statement it was excerpted from, the message is totally different: “...your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al-Qaida. Your security is in your own hands.” By comparison the real message is much less sinister. It's almost kind of... empowering, but more on that later...

That being said, there are a few things worth noting about this tape. First, it's a rather undire message to be coming from the world's most wanted man. I mean, all his other tapes said things like "you will be attacked everywhere" and so on. Why would this one clearly not try to inspire the usual fear of his network's awesome capability to do harm to the United States and its interests?

In general, there are many good reasons, as a terrorist, to try to come off as frightening. For one it helps to accomplish your political agenda, whatever it may be. Given that terrorists, by definition, use fear as a means to accomplish a certain end, usually political, it would seem that part of the terrorist method would be to extend the fear as much as possible through the most efficient means possible. Now, no one can succeed at manipulating outcomes if they go on tape with their masks and AK-47s threatening to chop the head off of a voodoo doll representing the U.S., or something; you need to be able to back up your threats with credible evidence that you can cause damage. But, once you have already established yourself as a credible threat, what has, to put it in economic terms, the greater marginal return to marginal cost? Planning and executing another 20 year-long operation to blow up major skyscrapers within the United States, or appearing on TV with your guns behind you and making the threat, either explicitly or implicitly, that more attacks are possible or are already on the way? Now, the latter option is much cheaper (costing approximately 30 cents, assuming the guns are fake), and probably almost as effective at engendering fear as an actual attack, at least until it's overused.

But the second reason terrorists would want to appear intimidating is that it helps the network organizationally. Terrorist networks like Al Qaeda do not have the luxury of instituting a draft when membership gets low. They rely on there being a pool of people who want to join the network because they are impressed with the its effectiveness, power, intimidatingness, success, message or whatever. In order to inspire the proper jihad spirit in prospective recruits, the network must appear impressive, directed and formidable, and the only way to do that in today's global environment is to advertise it via these tapes that are sent to international news networks and played all over the world. So there are at least two really good reasons why Al Qaeda would want to appear on the offensive and intimidating, especially in these videos. So why do they not come off as intimidating in this latest video. I have a theory, but it's just a theory. Here it is:

The question of whether or not Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups wish to influence the election has been the topic of much speculation. Some say they want Kerry, some contend they want Bush, and it ususally depends on which side you're on. There are approximately equivalent, and stupid, reasons given in defense of each view: the terrorists want to see Kerry because he is weak and wishy-washy and terrorists love a flip-flopper (it makes all their terrorizing rewarding)! Or, equivalently, they want to see Bush win because he will almost certainly be more inflammatory to the Islamic world, which will help stoke the fire of dissension and anger that provides their organizations with an abundant flow of new recruits. Both of these assumptions seem farcical. Sometimes the argument is extended to "Osama bin Laden wants Kerry, therefore vote for Bush," which is when I usually tune out. After all, the rightly extolled idea of not letting terrorists influence domestic political events means it is equally reprehensible to vote based on which candidate a terrorist would allegedly not want.

The line of reasoning that says that whoever the terrorists want must be inherently against our interest assumes that we are living in a zero-sum world with the terrorists. I'm not so sure this is true. Setting aside the legitimate point that it is morally reprehensible to concede anything to terrorists (this is a kind of retribution argument), I'm not so sure it's correct to say that because the terrorists want something, that means its bad for us. Now, let me make clear what I mean: Insofar as the terrorists are unconditionally committed to our destruction this is obviously a zero-sum game. Similarly, insofar as terrorists are committed to the Islamist vision of a world-wide Islamic theocratic utopia, thereby making it impossible for the United States to exist, our interests are completely opposed. Sadly, I'm not a scholar in these things so I don't know to what extent terrorists are unequivocally committed to these goals. But when it comes to certain discrete demands made by terrorists, which are often also widespread throughout the muslim world, I'm not so sure how much the outcome is either they win or we win. For instance, one of Al Qaeda's big grievances is to ensure the rights of the Palestinians in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It's in our long-term best interest to be even-handed in the peace process, because the idea that we're not is poisonous when spread through the muslim world in particular. Some may argue that radical muslim clerics are going to preach in their maddrassas that the U.S. is partial and evil either way, but why don't we take a legitimate critique away from them? Why not at least have the objective facts on our side that we are doing our best to broker a deal with both sides' interests taken equally into account? Why not give the rest of the world reason to alienate these demagogues for what they are, hate-spewing liars? Or take Al Qaeda's demand that America remove troops from Saudi Arabia. While it may have some strategic value for us to have troops stationed there, it's their land, and if they don't want troops stationed on it for religious or nationalistic regions then that's their call. We may have lost a minor strategic asset, but it's worth the cost of pissing off hundreds of thousands or millions of muslims. Given the choice between keeping troops in Saudi Arabia or taking them out, I'd say taking them out is the correct policy. It has to be a very minor asset. So what I'm trying to say is that just because terrorists would want something doesn't necessarilly make it a bad policy. Therefore, the fact that a terrorist prefers a candidate should not make that candidate a bad choice.

But back to the tape...say for some reason Osama bin Laden did prefer one candidate, and did wish to influence the election in his favor...who would he likely favor? Of all the arguments for each side, which I won't list here and with which I am only vaguely familiar, the ones I find most compelling on the whole are the ones pointing to Kerry. Admittedly, this assumption is the weakest part of my argument and I can't defend it very well. But take for demonstration's sake that he would prefer Kerry; then the question is, if he desired to influence the elections toward Kerry, how would he go about effecting that outcome?

Speculators have long feared a similar situation here to what happened in Spain four days before their presidential election. But an attack isn't going to work, because it has already happened once, and the American people are prepared for it. The first time is sudden and everybody is confused and acting on emotions, but the event has been analyzed enough and people have been educated enough that, if the American people were to change who they elected based on a terrorist strike, they would be aware that they were capitulating to terrorism, and I doubt that's something the American people would accept. Plus, I'm not so sure the American people are capable like the Spaniards of being intimidated into changing their vote by a clearly manipulative attack. Secondly, if anything, a terrorist strike could only help Bush. Remember how Americans unified around the president when the first terrorist attacks happened...why wouldn't the same thing happen again if there was another terrorist attack? There would be arguments for both sides, and an infinite chain of reverse and counter-reverse psychological inference would ensue, but regardless of the real motivation, the perceived target of the attack would be Bush. He's the incumbent for one, and any attack perpetrated while he is in office is an attack on his country under his watch, regardless of how close election day is. So people would either resist being manipulated altogether or if anything further rally around Bush.

If you were trying to sway the election towards Kerry, I think it's safe to say that you would try as hard as possible to avoid the appearance that you were trying to intimidate into a particular result. Bush officials, who have greater prominence than Kerry's officials and thus greater sway, would use an attack as an opportunity to say "Look, they're trying to intimidate you, they're trying to manipulate your decisions. Don't let them. (Vote for George W. Bush)." Since if he tries to blow up people into submission or comes off in any was as trying to influence the outcome it's likely to either not work or backfire in this way, the only way Osama could influence the election for Kerry, it strikes me, is to make an indirect statement about George Bush's policies, and remind the public of George Bush's failures, without seeming to be trying to influence the election. And who better to remind the public of Bush's primary failures than Osama Bin Laden himself. It then also makes sense why this was the first tape in many years in which Osama Bin Laden appears in person, as if to add extra emphasis to the fact that he's still alive.

Really the whole tape is a criticism of Bush or his policies. I'll post a few of the relevant excerpts below:

"...the main reasons” for the Sept. 11 attacks “are still existing to repeat what happened before.”
...
“Do not play with our security, and spontaneously you will secure yourself.”
...
“We never thought that the high commander of the U.S. armies would leave 50,000 of his citizens in both towers to face the horrors by themselves when they most needed him because it seemed to distract his attention from listening to the girl telling him about her goat butting,” he says, referring to Bush’s decision to wait more than seven minutes after being informed of the attacks before leaving an elementary room classroom in Florida where a student was reading a story called “The Pet Goat.”
“It appeared to him that a little girl’s talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God.”

It's possible, however, that as most informed people agree bin Laden would not prefer either candidate over the other, because his visions are so extreme that nothing short of a complete Islamic revolution would satisfy them. This is certainly possible, but what would the purpose of releasing a tape right before election day be then?

Update: Everyone seems to concur that the release of this tape helps Bush. Fine, but if that's true, that means that if you take for granted
a) Osama does everything for a reason and knows what he's doing
b) the (mostly GOP) acknowledgements that the release of this tape helps Bush
then you conclude that Osama prefers Bush to Kerry, which is an interesting twist given the whole GOP "Osama prefers Kerry" demagoguery thing.

Report Your Conscience

2004-10-24T17:51:00.000-04:00

For those of you who are considering voting for Ralph Nader this election, this may be of interest. Other will probably disregard it. HOWEVER, let me just first say that I personally would not vote for Nader because the number of votes he gets doesn't affect his ability to be heard, except perhaps in a negative light if he again sways a close election. However, the question of whether or not Ralph should be allowed to run is one I think everyone, except the most rabid liberal intelligentsia types, can agree on. Of course he has the right to run, and everyone has the right to vote for him! The more interesting and I think overlooked question is should he be given fair and commensurate coverage despite the unviability of his candidacy. Currently he is not, seeing as I have yet to see one serious piece of coverage of Ralph's platform, what he stands for, and his reasons for running produced by the mainstream media (note that I don't read many news sources very frequently though), and no one of any prominence seems to have a problem with this fact. This, to my mind, is very unfortunate. A visit to his site will show you, he's a serious man (Ok, this isn't serious, though it is quite amusing) with a serious message. Whereas George Bush is a not serious man who has a message, and John Kerry is a serious man who doesn't have a message.

In terms of substance, he has by far the most substantial platform of the three major candidates to draw on, with the most well-developed policies and most attention given to real solutions. Now, I should say at this point that I know many of his solutions aren't viable in the context of Washington and domestic politics. But that's not the point because, although a running candidate would never say such a thing, I think it's pretty clear that Nader is running a kind of campaign of osmosis, not to become the president.

Let's face it: at this point in history both major parties are pitifully poor at entertaining real solutions to real problems, or holding any kind of a discussion that could lead to better solutions to real problems. Both are too busy trying to discredit the other party while making sure they don't appear "un-American," or other things that could open them up to attack. Here's a perfect example from CNN of the kind of things that substitute for constructive discourse. It's not their fault, that's just what the voting public responds to, and each party wants to win. The current two-party status quo is a little like the prisoner's dilemma: both parties, trying to protect their rear-ends, choose an action that leads to a collectively less desirable outcome. The Democrats would prefer to talk about the orgins of Islamic extremism and how maybe a purely military policy doesn't address some of the factors causing it, or maybe how our unconditional support for Israel's current policies (which in itself I find an understandable and probably correct stance) without much offered in the way of explanation might not help the cause of winning over the hearts and minds of the next generation of Arab and Muslim leaders. But they can't, because when there's an element of fear at play in the issue, the Republicans can call them on it and paint them as the weaker party, and they will lose. Likewise, through some obscene distortion in reality, if the Republicans were to adopt such a stance, the Democrats would have just as much an incentive to exploit it for their own political gain. Further, if Kerry wanted to talk about things other than winning wars, the Republicans would accuse him of not being serious about terrorism, so he devotes an entire convention to talking about winning the war in Iraq which, admittedly is important, but is it really worth the entire convention? The end result is that in trying to make sure they win, the two parties create an outcome that is unduly focused on topics relevant to the fears of the American people. That's why I'm so much in favor of PUBLICIZING a candidacy like Nader's that has no chance of winning. There are plenty of ideas out there that make lots of sense but would otherwise never be introduced into the political arena because it is not in either party's interest to do so.

Third-parties are generally useful. With the status quo of campaigning, air-time is the great commodity for politicians, and it is available in limited quantities. Because there's too little exposure time and too much bickering, whenever a politician gets the chance to present himself and communicate something to the American people, he's going to use the time to cover his highest-priority issues, which will usually be defending his record and attacking the other guy's record, because there is a greater immediate return to time expended. The reality of politics is it seems if one side makes an accusation, the other side HAS to respond, or else they lose the exchange by default. Therefore, the more mudslinging there is, the more answering to mudslinging there is and the less time there is to bring up potentially more important issues. A third-party is immune to mudslinging because it has nothing to lose, and therefore won't have to subjugate political substance to expediency.

What's the point of this rant (I find myself asking that a lot)? I guess it's that there's nothing wrong with not voting for Nader, and there's nothing wrong with educating people about the possible consequences of voting for Nader, but there is something wrong with the complete lack of coverage he gets.

Fair and Fairly Unbalanced

2004-10-17T03:33:00.000-04:00

So then there's this feature which explores political bias at The Times. The conclusion they come to: it's debatable, apparently. While I may often agree with the Times' position on political issues, I do not agree with the Times' position on its position on political issues. The contributor they have arguing for the "The Times does not have a liberal bias" side spends the entire article detailing all of the ways in which the paper could, but doesn't, scewer the Bush administration and its members, as an apparent implication that The Times is not nearly as liberally biased as it could be.

The way I see it, the question of does political bias exist has a few possible readings. One is asking, is there a political agenda? In the case of an operation like The Times, that's a very hard thing to specify. How do you measure it, by whether a political agenda is evidenced in the mission statement? Do you add up the political agendas of its workers, and take the corporate agenda to be the aggregate? Do you measure the political activity of its owners and its biggest funders? You clearly can't measure people's internal motivations.

The second interpretation is asking if something resides on one side of a posited political center point. The problem with this question is, say you could determine a political center empirically (I assume that the notion of an a priori political center point is meaningless). What use does that have? Sure, it will tell you, statistically, where one member of a population falls in relation to the entire population in respect to political affiliation. But in order for it to follow that the reltionship is meaningul, it must be assumed that there is some inherent wisdom in the political choices of the masses. What makes that true? What makes the average view intrinsically correct or significant. So in this sense, asking if something is biased is statistically, and perhaps socially, meaningful, but politically not meaningful.

A third reading of biased is, does the paper give fair coverage to both sides? This is a little harder to define. Fair coverage doesn't neccessarily mean equal coverage. If there is more evidence for Kerry's assertion A than Bush's assertion B, then a fair treatment of the matter would give more evidence for A than for B. Likewise, if X has more evidence than Y of being true, it's fairer to make a bigger deal out of X than of Y; that's simply a reflection of the party's confidence in its truth. Therefore, if Bush has much more credible damning evidence against him, then it is not biased for a paper to come down much harder on him.

So I don't know if I have a point in all this rambling. Is The Times biased or not? Well I do think it's curious that this article was printed on the same day as the editorial titled "John Kerry for President."In my mind that's a pretty clear answer. The Times is saying it's biased, there couldn't be any clearer answer than that.

Bush Is A Freaky Jesus Nutcase

2004-10-17T02:53:00.000-04:00

Or so says Maureen Dowd in her columnm today, which I'll say a few things about. The topic of Dowd's editorial is religion, and I give her credit for not trying to delve into the depths of a major political figure's psyche for almost three quarters of a column. But then she starts going psychoanalytical, this time with Bush:

..."this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do." He continued: "This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them."
The president's certitude - the idea that he can see into people's souls and that God tells him what is right, then W. tells us if he feels like it - is disturbing. It equates disagreeing with him to disagreeing with Him.

The first thing is, I object strongly to the idea that Bush believes he is under a mandate from God. I think that is wacky. He might be religious, or even religiously-motivated, but arguing that he thinks he is God's earthly conduit - that's just ridiculous. There is no evidence that he thinks this, and if he does, then he has been smart enough to hide it really really well, and has done a perfect job. He makes occasional references to God blessing this, or God gives us that, but that's a common way of speaking, and it's something that's commonly said to invoke the idea of a Higher Being, all-inclusively. And John Kerry does the same thing, just listen to the debates! Does Bush feel he's on God's side? Probably. Does he try to do the things that he thinks God would think is right? Probably. Is he motivated by his faith and religion? I'm sure. Are some people going to support him and his policies simply because of his religious beliefs? Yes. But none of this bothers me because it is his personal prerogative to believe what he believes in, and other people's prerogative to support him for whatever reason. Many, many people of strong private faith operate this way, and there's no problem with that. It's just their way of approaching the world, and it doesn't mean they're going to impose their faith on other people, or think they believe they are receiving direct messages from God. When Bush starts refering to the Christian God or Jesus in his speeches, or starts talking about his divine mandate, then I'll start getting concerned.

The second thing about that quote is, Bush's approach to terror is an awfully weird example to use as evidence of Bush's alleged divine decree. Of all the potential issues out there to take a resolute stand on, that's the one that would least require the help of divine enlightenment. It doesn't take religious conviction to know that it's right to oppose ruthless terrorists who are committed to harming America and who will stop at nothing to do so. Even John Kerry has taken a firm stand on it: "I will hunt down and kill the terrorists wherever they are." Moreover, it's not some religious insight that informs Bush that terrorists "can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision." It's because that's the way they are. It doesn't take a prophet to figure that out. I haven't heard many calls to try to negotiate with terrorists before, but this has got to have the best argument of all of them - only a religious nut would believe that terrorists are motivated by a sinister, uncompromising agenda that is not amenable to reasonable negotiation.

The Times Gets Me Thinking

2004-10-17T02:04:00.000-04:00

Lots of big surprises in the New York Times today. The Times has officially come out with the fact that they support John Kerry (over George Bush) for this election. Well at least I can sleep easier now that the suspense is over!

But this got me thinking. Really, it seems to me the only way to change anyone's mind about the Bush administration through persuasion is for it to come from a non-liberal. The whining from the left started the day this president took office, and has droned incessantly and unrelenting ever since. No amount of whining, no matter how fundamentally correct or well-corroborated with facts, will make one iota of difference coming from an established left-wing media outlet or a prominent liberal. It will just blend into the constant drone of very vocal Bush hatred that everyone has come to expect from these sources. The only way people's minds will be changed by persuasion is if someone who has not yet taken sides, or is not affiliated with the left, comes forward with a strong criticism of Bush. At this point for all people who genuinely, vocally do not like Bush it's like the boy who cried wolf: Bush could do the most terrible things imaginable and the anti-Bush crowd's whining wouldn't rise any higher than its current fever pitch. And no one would notice anything out of the ordinary. That's why I was so happy about the Democratic Convention. They realized that they weren't going to get anywhere complaining about Bush, that people were already tuning out. People already know where Democrats stand on George W. Bush.

http://links4krisk@blogspot.com

Pop-ups

2004-10-16T22:57:00.000-04:00

You know all those pop-ups that try to get you to buy something or visit some website by using various attention-getting ploys, like shooting the ducks? What's with the ones now that show a picture of the president and say "Should he be reelected?" (sorry, no link available [no one links to a pop-up -- pub]). Half the country doesn't even vote, so why on earth would you expect a pop-up to generate interest on that question?

Kerry's Comment

2004-10-15T13:05:00.000-04:00

Everyone's in a tizzy about the comment Kerry made about Dick Cheney's daughter. As Msnbc notes, "Mary Cheney finds herself in eye of political storm" (kudos to Msnbc though for the excellent metaphor... Everyone around her is making a big commotion, but she herself is silent [and probably doesn't even care]. See, she's like the eye of a storm...)" Let me give my honest, dispassionate view.

It was completely unnecessary, not in the sense of uncalled for or inappropriate, although some people are charging these things. It was unnecessary to any point Kerry was visibly trying to make. Like, if he was trying to bring things down to a personal level, to make a point that way, then it would have made some sense, because Cheney's daughter is common currency in the sense that she represents a well-known example of a homosexual child living in an all-heterosexual family. Or if he was trying to praise the Cheneys for their support for their daughter and wanted to extrapolate out from that some message about how we should handle gay rights issues in this country, then it would make some sense to mention her also. He could even mention her to argue that the vice president is terrible and insensitive toward homosexuals (which doesn't seem to be the case) therefore arguing he's somehow unfit for office, and though people would disagree, it would at least be a valid invocation of another politician's personal life.

The most coherent explanation I have heard so far, because it is really a stretch to associate the remark with any specific point, goes along the lines of that Kerry was trying to put a human face on the abstract issue of sexuality in America. If he was doing that, he could have done a much better job of it, by following with something like "And so none of us is removed from this issue. Gay people are in all of our families." I don't really buy the interpretation that the entire objective was just to bring up that Cheney had a gay daughter. First of all, how many people don't already know that his daughter is gay...probably a very small number. Second, what would possibly be the politically advantageous effect of just bringing up the fact that Cheney's daughter is gay? Was he hoping to turn off the homophobic demographic to Bush's ticket? Was he trying to embarass the vice president by insinuation that he supported anti-gay policies despite his daughter. Trying to arouse emotion against Bush's proposed marriage ammendment?

Of course this is all taking the remark out of context which is that Kerry was answering the question "Do you think homosexuality is a choice?" Assuming that politicians actually do answer questions (which is a pretty bad assumption -- pub), then Kerry was somehow answering whether he thinks homosexuality is a choice. To that end, the only relevance I can see is that he was trying to support his answer of no..."Of course not, would any rational person choose to be gay in a family like that?" But that would be pretty terrible. Kerry himself is explaining it as an attempt to praise the Cheneys for the way they dealt with their daughter being a lesbian, which is pretty laughable because he didn't mention the Cheneys at all.

Bush Campaign Gears Up For Major Offensive

2004-10-12T22:55:00.000-04:00

Has anyone noticed that the offensives in Iraq seem to be kicking up around this time? Why might this be? Let's see what happens when the Bush administration launches a major offensive in Iraq:

Soldiers die
The news gives it coverage
It's possible that they retake important holdouts, kill important insurgents, or accomplish other important strategic goals

How do these weigh on the Bush administration's interests?

Does the Bush administration want soldiers to die? Obviously not. But - hypothetically speaking - given the choice of having soldiers die now or three months ago, which would the Bush administration prefer? Well, if the deaths occur now, it's all over the TV around election time. That's bad. But if they occured all throughout the summer, that would add up to a lot of deaths around election time. That's bad. And if they had occured earlier, John Kerry could also have been able to use them against Bush in his campaign speeches and in debates. That's also bad.

The news gives it coverage? That's good. At least the Bush administration is doing everything it can to secure peace and liberty for the Iraqi people!

The army takes strategic positions? That's good. The tide is turning, we've got momentum. We're making progress. Victory is ours!

So, purely hypothetically, the Bush administration would prefer to wage risky offensives in Iraq just around this time, while not doing everything that's maybe militarilly called for earlier. I wonder if that tells us anything about what's going on now?

I should note that this illustrates the thing I dislike most about this administration: the way all of its daily behavior is about politics. It's true that Bush has made some independent choices, but when it comes to his administration's daily behavior it seems that politics outweighs every other consideration.

A Self-fulfilling Prophecy

2004-10-11T14:28:00.000-04:00

Of all the things that have been said recently and during the debates on Iraq (the world is better without Saddam; he was a threat; it was a diversion...) there's one thing that president Bush says that always strikes me:

"If we stop fighting the terrorists in Iraq, they would be free to plot and plan attacks elsewhere, in America and other free nations," he said. "... If we wilt or leave, America's security will be much worse off."

Now on the surface, that seems like a reasonable case for staying the course in Iraq. But then I thought: is that a helpful thing for him to say? Isn't there something self-condemning about that fact?After all, were there terrorists plotting and planning attacks from Iraqi soil 2 years ago? Was that even a justification for going to war? And, if it's true that terrorists can now use Iraq as a planning base, or at least that there is now the danger of that happening, what has changed since two years ago? Now it is one of the main justifications for continuing the effort there. I don't see that as a very positive reflection of the Iraq plan and / or its execution.

I understand the view that the war has drawn terrorists from their hide-outs and into combat, the "fight them here so we don't have to fight them later" mentality. But in order to be valid, this view assumes that the insurgents are composed of all long-standing jihadists. The facts on the ground suggest that the insurgency is composed of these types, but also new jihadist recruits, along with Baathists, militant nationalists, and various other fanatical types unassociated with the jihadist movements.

Recently I've taken a step back and asked myself, is Iraq a necessary or effective part of the larger "War on Terror?" Here are my thoughts:

Looked at in terms of immediate state-sponsored terrorism, the answer is no, on two counts... 1) Iraq did not sponsor terrorists that directly affect us, and though it may be belied by the misnomer "war on terror," the reality is that the war is more narrowly directed at those who would use terror against us (2) Iraq did not have potential to aid enemy terrorists (except maybe monetarily), since it did not possess weapons of mass destruction, although it may have had potential to have potential to aid enemy terrorists ([and possibly also intent] this is where the justification for the war gets thin).

Looked at in terms of larger-scale and longer term reformative objectives, the Iraq war may have been an effective step in the "war on terror." It is pretty clear that a flourishing Arab democracy in the middle east would be an ideological blow to the creed of Islamic totalitarianism, which is known to feed terrorist recruitment. It's also arguable that a quick and successful strike on an antagonist country could set a valuable example for future countries who would consider sponsoring or aiding terrorism. However, the "Saddam was a terrorist" or "Saddam used terror as a tactic too" or "Saddam was a tyrant, which is basically like being a terrorist" pseudo-associative justification for the war is a rather distorted exploitation of the premise of "the war on terror." Of course, there are all sorts of reasons why the Iraq war could be prosecuted that have nothing to do with the war on terror, and frankly, I think these were more at play.

My personal take is that the neocons who tend to dominate Bush's foreign policy had their eyes on Iraq ever since the first Gulf War. If you go back and read some of their documents, you see that global preeminence was always a major goal of the neocons, and they saw control of the middle east as crucial to this end. Moreover, invading Iraq was a policy they pushed starting in the early nineties. For one the middle east largely was and still is highly undemocratic, and democratic states are easier to deal with than non-democratic states, and are more predictable in their foreign policy. Second, the middle east is the main source of the world's oil, which gives it control over the world economy, a control that pragmatic global dominance types see as too vital to be left up to the whim of countries increasingly antagonistic to the U.S. And third, Saddam was an aggressor who of all the middle east nations was the one who most overtly threatened the United States; whether he had the capability to carry out any threats is a separate issue. Also, being a proven aggressor towards other countries in the middle east, he had the potential of conquering other countries in the middles east and becoming the regional hegemon - which would make America's efforts at regional dominance significantly more difficult than if there were multiple, mutually competitive states.

And of course, Iraq was by far the most acceptable target for regime change in the middle east because of its record of international aggression, human rights abuses, international recalcitrance, and UN violations. Truly, the opportunity presented by Iraq for fulfilling the neocon vision was too good to be true: a large, secular Arab state with a dictator with a record of human rights abuses as president. If you combine this with the fact that the current president was the son of the president who led the first global coalition against Iraq during the Gulf War, and that 9/11 happened, pushing the country toward a defensive mode, then it seems practically inevitable that the Iraq War should occur.

I should make clear that I don't think the U.S. had imperial ambitions in Iraq, just the desire to change the regime to something remotely democratic, which would inevitably be much friendlier to the U.S. and less likely to dominate the entire region and thus hold a monopoly on the most important natural resource in the world. It's sad to say, but I think the entire terrorism rationale for invading Iraq is just political opportunism, and nothing more. This doesn't necessarily make it a bad choice though, just something that the American public was not ready to support on the basis of its real rationale.

If this analysis is correct, the natural implication is that the Bush administration was in fact not totally honest with the American people. But that's entirely consistent with they way they've operated in every aspect thus far. Executive privilege is sacred, loyalty and secrecy are most highly valued traits, the public is remarkably irrelevant to decision-making and kept remarkably in the dark about the debate and factors that go into making important decisions. Even in the presidential debates, the administration has permeated a "we know best" attitude and shown incredibly little tolerance for dissent.

So do I think the Iraq war was a good idea? Personally I view the whole thing as a trial in aggressive nation-building, the outcome of which will probably dictate U.S. foreign policy toward other countries which, for whatever reason, might warrant regime change in the future. Assuming that regime change is going to be a more useful tactic in the future, especially when dealing with state-sponsored terrorism, it's good that the method was tested out on Iraq where there were also independent factors that made regime change appropriate. On the other hand, the world is not America's test-tube, and I think this is made pretty clear by the unexpected level of resistance being encountered in Iraq now. I'm also against the way the Bush administration clearly was not forthright with the American people about the reasons for going to war, alternatively giving contradictory, absurd, or invalidated reasons for why it was important to go into Iraq. So I guess I'm for it in principle, but against the way it was conveyed and sold to the American people, the way the administration used 9/11 disproportionately to justify it, and the hasty way it was executed. That probably puts me closer to John Kerry's position on the war, for better or for worse. A more honest presentation, which probably would have meant that the whole process would have been slower, and that 9/11 couldn't have been used as the proximate cause, would have served the whole endeavor better I think.