pickabone

Couldn't have said it better myself

2007-04-10T16:56:00.000-05:00

He seemed off his game somewhat, and was perhaps trapped by a desire to seem reasonable on the issue, which Kerry exploited to the full.

Simply put, reason and conservative ideology don't mix.

More from the NYTimes

2007-04-10T16:22:00.000-05:00

What's wrong with this picture?

The John Hughes school of International Relations

2007-04-10T15:16:00.000-05:00

I simply don't understand this administration's theory of dealing with bad actors on the international stage. Negotiations, as they seem to see them, are a reward for good behavior. Leaving aside the question of what negotiations are required among allies (and 'good' actors), it seems to reflect a theory of International Relations drawn from high school popularity hierarchies. It's as if the US is the head cheerleader and Syria is the souzaphone player in the marching band and simply paying attention to him should make his heart go all a-flutter.

That said, there are situations in which opening negotiations with a party does validate that party's status. Such situations, however, are more along the lines of choosing sides between parties to a contestation over legitimate internal authority, or the recognition of sovereignty. Bashar Assad's regime may be illegitimate by liberal democratic standards, but I doubt anyone would erneastly contest the sovereignty of the nation of Syria, nor Assad's control over vital state resources such as its military.

It's an old saw, really, but you make peace with your enemies, not your friends.

Editing the NYTimes

2007-04-10T13:22:00.000-05:00

President Leaky Pants

2006-04-06T23:13:00.000-05:00

So, it turns out the prez may himself be a leaker of classified information. The pitch he'll make is as obvious as a high-arcing chicago-style softball: it wasn't classified once I leaked it because I have authority to de-classify material without review, without challenge. That may be so, but classification and de-classification are official acts, and as such require documentation. So, did the administration file the de-classification docs on the material the prez leaked? It's a simple question. If they didn't, it's still classified, and he broke the law. On a matter of war.

The Youngblood Rule of Politics

2006-04-05T16:51:00.000-05:00

Big fat kudos to Russ Feingold for standing on the right side of an issue that scares the stones out of most politicians.

Personally, I couldn't think of an easier decision to make than, as a citizen, to support gay marriage. I do see the political downside (ie, America has lots of people who don't want to lose that warm fuzzy feeling of superiority they get from being in a miserable loveless marriage). However, Atrios gets it right when he says we're already the party of the gays, so we might as well start acting like it. I call it the Youngblood Rule of Politics: if you're going to be perceived as supporting a just cause, you might as well actually support it. The terms comes from a really terrible 80s movie starring Rob Lowe as a minor league hockey-player. The love story in a nutshell:

Hockey Player meets Girl

Girl turns out to be Coach's Daughter

Hockey Player decides to keep it in his pants to avoid pissing off coach

Coach sees HP talking to girl

Coach benches HP

Hockey Player decides that since he's being punished for it anyway, he might as well get some.

A Lobbyist is Born

2006-04-03T22:17:00.000-05:00

Delay makes his move.

Easy Answers

2006-04-02T10:07:00.000-05:00

George Will, ever willing to show a little conservative leg now and then, asks this surprisingly easily answered question:

Are we sure the consequences of climate change -- remember, a thick sheet of ice once covered the Midwest -- must be bad?

This is meant to seem like a tricky question, inspiring all sorts of trade-off considerations about longer summers and shorter winters and such. In fact, the answer is that climate change would be a catastrophic human tragedy, not because we prefer warmer or cooler climates, but because world population patterns are based largely on regional weather patterns. Any substantial shift in these patterns will disrupt whatever balance exists between climate and population, causing widespread human suffering.

Taking No for an Answer

2006-03-31T10:01:00.000-06:00

This is probably the most unsurprising news I've read in a while. But despite the fact that this study upholds rational logic over superstition, the supporters of remote prayer won't be discouraged. That's, after all, a central tenet of faith: one must continue to believe in spite of the evidence. This quote demonstrates what happens when scientific processes are placed in the hands of people with non-scientific agendas:

The new study was rigorously designed to avoid problems like the ones that came up in the earlier studies. But experts said the study could not overcome perhaps the largest obstacle to prayer study: the unknown amount of prayer each person received from friends, families, and congregations around the world who pray daily for the sick and dying.

This is bullshit, pure and simple. If one assumes that the anonymous prayer cohort has an effect on the study, one must recognize that such prayers affect all subjects equally, thus washing itself out of the analysis. The prayer of family and friends should amount to a small margin of additional prayer for a given individual, compared with the numbers accumulated through participating congregations. Unless these objections are based on the presumption that the prayer of loved-ones is somehow worth more than the prayer of strangers, this uncontrolled independent variable should affect the data as nothing more than a bit of statistical noise. If one does assume that friends and family prayers are weighted more heavily, there's no reason to believe that the pattern of family prayer matches the pattern of remote prayer, which is demonstrated not to correlate with dependent outcome disparities, except to cause additional anxiety.

Actually, I'm a bit surprised that nobody mentioned one of the more common "proofs" of divine intervention: God works in mysterious ways. Mightn't He answer prayer with further suffering, offering His subject greater opportunity to demonstrate his grace? Just ask Job.

Eventually, I predict, the remote prayer argument will devolve into something along the lines of the following standard religion as mock science logic:

Assumption: God works in mysterious ways
Hypothesis: Thing A will occur in situation B
Observation: Thing A does not happen
Conclusion: Since A did not happen, we have a mystery, thus proving the existence and intervention of God.

Um, guys?

2006-03-14T23:28:00.000-06:00

Are Kurtz and Kaus really this ignorant? They're asking why polling organizations only compare their new polls to their own old polls, I think. But it's hard to be sure because it's such brain-dead basic reason: polls differ in their methodology. Therefore, two polls by different organizations that span the same time period may yield different results for reasons other than natural fluctuation within the margin of error. They really will reach for every last inch of lift to put under Dear Leader's shoes.

It's the Sex, Stupid

2006-03-05T13:03:00.000-06:00

Among the many problems I have with anti-choice activists, a couple things demonstrate the hypocrisy of their position.

The first has to do with the more radical element among them, those that bomb and support the bombing of abortion clinics. By engaging in such terrorism, they not only threaten the lives of providers and women excercising their legal rights, they also endanger the fetus whose life they claim to be protecting. If a pregnant woman is killed, so is her child. There is no legal argument that can absolve them of this. Even though the pregancy would be terminated regardless of the bombing, the bomber is culpable. It's the old riddle of who's at fault if you shoot a man on his way toward the pavement after he's jumped off the roof of a building. The legal answer: you are.

I'm reminded of the second by this Dibgy post. The argument that rape victims deserve exceptional consideration by anti-choice laws has significant emotional appeal. However, it makes no sense if you believe that abortion kills an innocent child. The fetus conceived in rape is morally indistinguishable from that conceived in consensual sex. Unless, of course, the moral question is directed at the pregnant woman. The "sodomized virgin rape exception" takes this a few steps further. Let's wonder for a moment whether if a prostitute were raped would she still be entitled to an abortion under the law. For some reason, I think certain people would say no.

So Much for Fly-Overs

2006-03-03T20:47:00.000-06:00

create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

via Pandagon

A Moment of Silliness

2006-02-26T10:22:00.000-06:00

Can I just say that part of me hopes that the story that brings down a preznit called "Dubya" is a deal known as "Dubai." Sorry.

Ports and Politics

2006-02-24T12:55:00.000-06:00

I have neither the time nor the information necessary to determine whether I think a UAE government run company's control over port management represents a real or imagined danger to the safety of our country. I do know that port security is woefully inadequate. On the one hand, the situation seems pretty bad as it is, regardless of who's running the show. On the other hand, I'd be much more comfortable with the deal if the security side of port management was in better shape.

What really tickles me is the conservative charge of racism against those who have spoken out against the deal. In their eyes, it seems, it's okay to invade, bomb, torture, and kill people for being Arab, but don't dare get in the way of big business.

Brooks' Fake Social Science

2006-02-19T09:23:00.000-06:00

Brooks apparantly is the kind of guy you don't want in a study group. Confident, outspoken, and wrong. Some great moments in fakery:

Once, not that long ago, economics was the queen of the social sciences. Human beings were assumed to be profit-maximizing creatures, trending toward reasonableness.

First things first: "reasonableness" has nothing to do with economic theory. This is the kind of misapprehension that Econ 101 teachers have to correct on the first day of class. Brooks fudges the terminology a bit: the word he's look for is "rational" and it specifically does not envoke notions of "reasonableness." Rather, it means that given the information available, people should make decisions based on calculated expected payoffs. Their calculations don't have to be reasonable in any way, they just have to be believed. Also, it should be noted that the responsible social scientist will never disregard the word "should" in the above formulation. Anyone employing the social theoretical aspects of economic theory for predictive purposes will soon learn why it's called the "dismal science." In the difference between the "should" and the "does" happen, we can learn something interesting about a culture, or about our own assumptions.

As societies grew richer and more modern, it was assumed, they would become more secular. As people became better educated, primitive passions like tribalism and nationalism would fade away and global institutions would rise to take their place.

Actually, this sounds a lot more like modernization theory than economic theory, with a tablespoon of globalization theory thrown in. It won't be terribly important to most people, but it's derived from a different body of literature than economics: more Max Weber and the "Iron Cage", less Adam Smith and the "Invisible Hand."

All of this has thrown a certain sort of materialistic vision into crisis. We now know that global economic and technological forces do not gradually erode local cultures and values. Instead, cultures and values shape economic development. Moreover, as people are empowered by greater wealth and education, cultural differences become more pronounced, not less, as different groups chase different visions of the good life, and react in aggressive ways to perceived slights to their cultural dignity.

I'm not sure which culture(s) Brooks is talking about, because he never really says. Let me go out on a limb here and say he's got some form of Middle Eastern / Arab / Muslim culture in mind. In this case, Brooks has really got the bush-colored glasses on. Let's just say that the major lessons of the last few years say nothing about cultural conflict arising out of mismatched conceptions of the good life. Sites of conflict have, for the most part, been plagued by poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment (except for Iraq, but you can't really blame local culture for that one, can you?). The Sudanese genocide isn't motivated by questions of middle class consumer priorities.

Economics, which assumes people are basically reasonable and respond straightforwardly to incentives, is no longer queen of the social sciences.

The events of the past years have thrown us back to the murky realms of theology, sociology, anthropology and history. Even economists know this, and are migrating to more behaviorialist and cultural approaches.

Again, "rational" not "reasonable" and it doesn't mean the same thing. There's something about his general approach that makes it seem like he's saying the world has changed, and economics no longer has the answers. I would say the world has kept on going and economics has simple proven to be woefully unprepared to explain social phenomena outside of consumer transactions. When people complain about the economic approach requiring a conversion of all utility into a common currency (usually dollars), economists simply responded that it's a requirement of the model. Personal sentimental benefits? Convert to dollars. Benefits to life and limb? Convert to dollars. Aesthetic enjoyment? Convert to dollars. That way, we can make trade-offs among essentially incommensurable payoffs.

Of course, the problem was always that the world is a murky, mysterious place. Any attempts to stuff it into a clean, concise model are going to come up short. Why do people prefer what they prefer? Why, when, and how do preferences change? How do decisions made in public view differ from those made in private? These are questions economics never was able to answer very well. If the softer social sciences seem murky to Mr. Brooks, that's because they better reflect the operation of society.

If the big contest of the 20th century was between planned and free market economies, the big questions of the next century will be understanding how cultures change and can be changed, how social and cultural capital can be nurtured and developed, how destructive cultural conflict can be turned to healthy cultural competition.

Leave it to Brooks to learn exactly the wrong lesson from all this. If he knew anything about anything, he'd realize that the 20th Century, the 19th Century, the 18th Century, and probably most modern centuries were all about how cultures changing. Cultural change is exactly what modernization is all about, and it hardly began with the Russian Revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall, or 9/11. What Brooks has in mind, however, is more about imperialism than anything else, dressed up with words like "nurture" to make it sound all kind and just.

Last, let me say that his last bit about "health cultural competition" is what always makes me queasy about free-marketeers. First, they propose a social order based on self-interested profit-maximizers in competition with one another over scarce resources. Then they try to cover up its crude brutality by calling it "healthy competition" or worse, "coopetition." Competition is just a nicer word for conflict. And when culture is on the line, there's a lot more at stake than getting the best bargain. What really bugs me about the current conservative movement is this: they created this world. Reagan and Milton Friedman and neo-liberal economic planners tried to spread free-market competition over the developing world like jam on toast. Now, they turn around and say that "cultures and values shape economic development." It's as if they're saying, "look what these primitive peoples did with my precious economic theories." From a scientific point of view, they're on the verge of the ultimate violation. They've developed their theories, set them to work in a political program, and discovered serious problems. Now, it seems that rather than revise or abandon their theories, neo-libs are trying to deploy "murkier" social sciences to figure out how to fix the data to fit their assumptions.

OMFG

2006-02-12T15:00:00.000-06:00

Dick Cheney just shot a man. Seriously, the Vice President of the United States shot a man. Ok, so it was an accident, but oh my f*cking g-d he actually put ~~a bullet~~ birdshot into someone. People have joked that Bush could be caught eating babies and still be called a "popular" president "in touch with American values." Here we have a situation where our Veep was irresponsible enough to injure an innocent man while hunting. Does reckless endangerment qualify as one of the High Crimes and Misdemeanors? How about assault with a deadly weapon?

Speculative Moral Equivalency

2006-02-03T20:16:00.000-06:00

I've often felt that the more bewildering accusations made by the right against the left could be explained by the idea that the accusers were simply mistaking a mirror for a window. The saw themselves but thought they were seeing us. It's an comprehensible cognitive phenomenon (though not a forgiveable one). You see something you don't understand and employ an interpretive template you find familiar, yourself.

However, this goes way way way too far. Tweety, now fully submerged in the pyscho-pathological stew of wingnuttery, sees left-wing counterparts to neo-fascist hatemongering racists in the recent spate of church-bombings. Though my projection hypothesis might give way to the notion that this might be Matthews latest interpretation of the ethic of media balance. If you assume moral equivalency between the right and the left, you must surely draw the conclusion that the latter is as populated as the former with homicidal terrorists.

It is simply time for Matthews to go.

Thesis Angst

2006-02-03T13:14:00.000-06:00

If I'm still in the proposal stage, and I've already gotten so fed up with the process that I no longer care about my topic, is that a bad sign?

More Tautologies

2006-02-02T12:35:00.000-06:00

Kevin makes an effort to rebut another claim about the necessity of Bush's domestic spy ring. What this really comes down to is quite simple. Bush's defenders claim that the FISA court is too strict in its interpretation of probably cause. Set aside for a moment the issue of what constitutes the proper remedy to the court's purported fickle stance. What's really happening here is yet another instance of Bush's defenders taking Dear Leader's actions as the normative standard. This of course, leaves us with a tautology. Bush, by definition, can do no wrong. It's a doctrine of Presidential Infalibility.

Of course, the real situation is clear. The FISA court has been consistently aquiescent of warrant requests for the entire span of its existence, until Bush started his domestic spying program. This means:
A. They've suddenly changed their standards and become fickle
B. They've maintained their standards and Bush is asking for too much
Hmmmm... tough call.

Thanks, Matt

2006-02-02T11:37:00.000-06:00

Matt's probably a lot smarter than me. Certainly smarter than I was at his tender age. However, this post really doesn't say all that much beside the following: there's a tension between low-cost energy, the environment, and the things we have to do to secure a fuel source. I suppose it's good to remind ourselves that our own goals can be in tension with one another, but that's like saying politics is all about conflict and power. Yeah, we know. If there weren't a tradeoff to be made among these three values, then the solution would be pretty easy to discover. In that case, the only argument against would be that we should have higher prices, dirtier air, and more dangerous foreign entaglements. Wait, come to think of it, that program sounds vaguely familiar.

Federalist, de Tocqueville, and Big Government

2006-02-01T18:13:00.000-06:00

I recently read the Federalist Papers and Democracy in America for the first time, and one thing struck me as ironic. These foundational texts of American democracy both identify protracted war as the surest way to increase the scope and power of the federal government. Do we think Republican political elites know this and are just being hypocrits (perish the thought)? Or do we think it's just a simple accident of history that the "limited government" party has become the perpetual war party? Or do we think that, despite Bush's recent statement that he aspires to open a think-tank dedicated to studying the works of our favorite French democratic theorist, maybe he really hasn't read all that much political philosophy?

Introductions

2006-02-01T17:40:00.000-06:00

I used to have a blog that I ran on my own self-managed server. I didn't really want to dedicate that much time to the technical upkeep, however, and after a while I realized that it had become inundated with porn-spam comments. So, I took it down and haven't blogged much for awhile. As such, I feel I should given anyone who happens (miraculously) upon this blog a small taste of where I stand on my central area of concern: politics.

Might as well start with recent events. I didn't watch the SOTU, mostly because I'm allergic to Bush, but also because I'm in grad school and every minute I spend not reading or working on my thesis is time and money wasted. I prefer to waste money and time by drinking, ideally in the company of others, but that's not a firm requirement.

So, I'll take one step further back and speak for just a moment on the Alito confirmation. We knew this would happen. All Bush had to do was nominate someone who was, well, a ~~judge~~ grownup and confirmation would be guaranteed. Yes, there was some hope for a filibuster, but let's face it. The guy's got another year until the next Senate class is sworn in and there was no real way to stall for that long. Some Democrats showed some spine. Some didn't. The timing was terrible, and the long-run consequences will be worse. In the end, Sandra Day O'Connor will be remembered for her moderation and centrism, but really she should be remembered for her most lasting gifts to the Nation: President Bush the Younger and Associate Supreme Court Justice Alito. For all her swing-voting, let us not forget her stated intentions to delay her retirement if Gore was elected. At least we know she'll be forced to watch as Justice Alito undermines the progress of real justice.

So, that's a decent place to start this blog, I guess. More later, maybe.

Times Select

2006-02-01T17:30:00.000-06:00

If the Times insists on publishing Sarah Vowell, I might just have to get a damn subscription.